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ReFIREment unlocked

Well, I did it. Last night I sold off the remaining majority of my BadgerDAO LP, and completed funding of my USDC retirement funds. I actually overfunded it by 14% to be honest, which will actually pay my mortgage for the next five or six months. The funds, which equate to my current annual salary, will be deposited into a variety of yield farming opportunities, and should fund my expenses for the next eighteen months or so. Having this vault of funds set aside will allow me to quit my current day job so that I can focus on crypto full time. If things go well, I won’t need to rely on the USDC funds at all, but will be able to live off of the rest of my crypto holdings through investing, trading, or ideally, launching my own products.

Now that this runway has been fully funded, I need to wrap up my risk assessment of the various staking pools and start deploying funds. I’m almost settled on the safest tranche of funds, the A tranche, and will probably move the first allocation of funds into the Yearn 3crv pool after I finish writing this up. The only question remaining is whether I will allocate all of the tranche funds into one project, or if I want to split it into two. It’s the difference between managing three or six allocations.

Once I have the A tranche deployed I can move my attention to the B and C tranches. I’ll probably require much more time to make these decisions. I’ll probably do some DeFi Safety assessments on some of the newer projects before I fund them. Or, I may reserve the ‘extra’ funds for aping into new launch projects. Decisions, decisions.

As I wrote yesterday, there is a lot of other things going on, and managing these investments is going to be a full time job, at least in the beginning. Staying on top of DeFi and everything going on is a time sink, this really is a amazing industry to be in.

I finally made the decision to sell my Badger LP after looking at the charts last night. I’d been monitoring the USD and BTC pairs, and had some S/R lines I’d drawn on the chart. I told myself that I would wait for it to break both charts to sell, and just got tired of waiting. It’d been falling against BTC pretty steadily for some time, and frankly it was just too much mental energy watching it twice a day. I still retain a modest share of bBadger, as well as staked Digg and Digg LP. I’ll probably hold that and wait for Badger to release CLAWS and their other products. It really is a wonderful community, and I made a lot of money with them, but my goals have shifted.

Last note: Last evening I attended a crypto meetup event. It was outdoors at the house of someone I met on Discord, and there were about seven of us in all, a few friends and several other people I’d met online over the last year. Most of us hadn’t been to an event in well over a year. It was good to chat with others, enjoy some food and talk crypto. I loved it, and had a great time. To think that in a month or two from now I’ll be able to hang out with people without worrying about wearing a mask. I can’t wait.

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Galaxy brain

My head is everywhere this morning. Yesterday I finally got a wire through to an exchange, so I’ve got one-tenth of my IRA on exchanges right now, only a fraction of that is actually in my wallet. I think I may be going a bit mad. I need to put a capital allocation plan together pronto, as my mind is racing as to what to do with the funds.

My original intention was to allocate a 40/40/20 deployment to BTC/ETH/DPI, but I also was looking at deploying some funds to the MUG TokenSet. However, I’ve since become occupied with USDC yield projects, stablecoin projects, Uniswap sniping, and now, some Curve clone on BSC called EPS.

My life is being overrun with spreadsheets. And I’m getting a bit of choice paralysis as well, trying to figure out what to do, and what to focus on first. I don’t know if it’s my hangover, but my head is spinning with possibility. There’s so much I need to do, everything is moving so fast, and keeping myself centered is taking all of my energy. Trying to maintain a house and be a husband and father is almost enough as it is, but yet I have this, tearing my thoughts away. I feel slightly crazy.

  1. Retirement runway: I have just over half a year’s salary in USDC right now that is not deployed. I finished evaluating Curve pools yesterday and have figured out the safest option available, the 3pool. Getting the highest APYs will require staking an equivalent dollar amount of CRV tokens for up to four years. Earning Curve might have advantages, but autocompounding via the Yearn vault with the higher rate might might be a better allocation, even with the increased risk. Once I’ve deployed the first half of the low risk A tranche I can start looking for the other A candidate.
  2. IRA funds: I’ve got another spreadsheet to do on this one, and probably a separate Cointracking account to keep tabs on it. 40/40/20 BTC/ETH/DPI seems like a decent start, but I can’t get DPI on exchanges, so we’ll have to start with a 40/60 BTC/ETH as I start making purchases. I even considered 50/50 BTC/wBTC for staking opportunities on Ethereum, but those seems to be far and few between besides LP farming, which would put me at risk for IL. I’ll have to do some more consideration as to whether this is worth it or not. Since it’s going to take weeks and months to move funds out of my brokerage account, I’ll have to be careful with over trading this account and burning a lot of gas. And I may wind up allocating a portion of funds to other plays using a two percent risk allocation, but I have to look at the math on that.
  3. Uniswap sniping: I had mixed results from my initial snipes, losing almost an ETH on some counterfeit projects, but my later plays have actually put me in the black. I have a 4x with LABS and a couple 2xs with a couple others, and if my math is right I’m actually up half an Eth right now. I’m working on a Python program to alert me to new pools, I’m hoping this will give me a heads up on any IDOs or other launches that flew under my radar. Once I can ID the legit token contract address, I can either try to snipe the projects as soon as the liquidity is provided, or alternatively, wait for the initial froth to subside and pick them up later.

I’ve got another idea right now, leveraging the power of my friends in my Signal group. Some sort of crowdsourced project list, so we can do research together and try to find projects. Maybe we can even do some sort of pooled investment fund. TokenSets would be nice, but I think that may be overcomplicating things at the moment.

For now though, I’ve got to go outside and do yard work. Spring is here, and that means it’s time to cut the grass. And for me to sweat off this hangover.

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Morning pages

Missus and I have managed to “Atomic Habits” ourselves this week, so I feel pretty well balanced. I’ve been getting into a bit of a swing: wake up, meditate, drink tea and write; the day is pretty busy, then after the kids go to bed, I code, then off to bed at ten, read for an hour, and out. It’s a good routine if I can keep from interrupting it.

I get my first COVID shot today. I’m actually kind of impressed that I was offered it so quickly, I figured it would be May before I did, but I registered with my state weeks ago and got the invitation and confirmed my appointment for this afternoon.

My dad came by for several hours yesterday while he got his truck worked on. I finally convinced him to take a Lyft over here and he hung out. I put him through the ringer with the kids, I made him take them to the park and had him help Younger with her reading practice. I think it was good for all of us. I ran him through updates in the family business, mainly about cash reserves and trying to explain our BadgerDAO holdings. I told him about PoolTogether since he’s a lotto guy, but I don’t think he really got it.

I’ve completed two of the outstanding projects that I have left for work. At some point while we were on the phone my coworker asked me about bitcoin. We’ve talked about it many times before, but I don’t like working with him so we don’t really converse. Anyways I opened the firehose on him and told him what I’ve really been doing the past few months, as well as my retirement plans. He’s got bitcoin, but I don’t think he’s been staking through the bear market. I told him we could talk more about it later, but I doubt I’ll want to keep in touch with him in any capacity after I leave.

With these projects nearing completion and my cash reserves more than half full, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I need to finish working on my retirement announcement this weekend and get it released before the end of the month so that there’s no turning back. I want to spend the second half of 2021 just working on my on project, helping out with other projects where I can, and basically be able to focus on managing the house and helping Elder get started with her self-directed education.

I sat down to work on my new coding project and decided to get my butt in TDD mode before I got any further with it. It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten. Just trying to get pytest working took me a half hour it seemed, and I had problems working through things properly. I did manage to get it working, and started on the process of trying to properly mock out API calls to Alchemy so I don’t overuse my call allotment running tests. Even though I got my degree last year, I still don’t feel like much of a programmer. I’ve got one program I wrote that I use every day, my value averaging program that buys stocks in my IRA brokerage, but I haven’t touched the code in probably two years. It’s very fragile. I never completed the Ether Auction either, the smart contract code should be code complete but I got hung up on a front end library and never went any further.

I spend so much of my day staring at charts and checking things in spreadsheets that I just kind of ignored the programming part of things. I’ve never been as proficient at it as I’ve wanted, never able to build a complete program that I’ve been proud of and willing to release unto the wild, so to speak. It’s a craft, and I am not at the point that I am a very good coding craftsman. I’ll have to work on that.

Cutting myself loose from the MSP space is going to be a great change for me. I’ve got a lot to learn in DeFi and Ethereum, and all these other L1 and L2s that are coming out will ensure that I’ll be busy as hell for the foreseeable future. We just got to get through this bull run. It’s hard to work when you’re making money hand over foot. Maybe I’ll get used to it, or maybe it’s going to take a downturn and another extended bear cycle to get me properly motivated.

Maybe, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to stay properly motivated working for myself this time.

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Uniswap sniper bot design notes

So I started testing out some ideas last night.

I had heard mentioned that some people are using the Brownie Ethereum testing package to interact with DeFi, which I thought was fascinating, so I’d been meaning to take a look. I’ve got a bit of experience working with Hardhat, but I’ve been working with Python and was looking forward to doing more work with it. One of the fascinating things I read was that you can specify an external contract address and it will download the verified source code from Etherscan for it.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time watching the Uniswap factory to catch new LPs going up. I caught a lot of scam tokens going up and blew through half an Eth chasing after new projects. There’s a lot of bot activity, and I really need to figure out how to make my own. Asynchronous programming is something that’s been giving me trouble, and I need to figure it out.

My plan is to build a bot that can watch the blockchain (and mempool) for these new Uniswap pool creation events. The events return the component pair addresses, so these tokens must be looked up as well to get the data. My vetting process while watching Merv.Tech’s new Uni page has been to lookup the token address on Etherscan to get the token symbol, then use their token lookup page for the same symbol to see if the token is legit. There are a lot of scams out there. By this point I can usually tell whether a project is legit or not. The trick is automating this as much as possible.

I had about a 50% hit rate after randomly throwing money at new pools. There were a lot that were straight fakes and rugs, and I may have stumbled across one or two that weren’t proper ERC20s and had some kind of mechanism to prevent selling. For a short-term sniping opportunity, the key is getting in as soon as the pool is launched, so actually watching the mempool for these type of transactions is going to give a bit of an edge.

I was able to put together short script that can call the Alchemy API and get the on-chain event logs. Now I have to figure out how to turn it into a websocket that can watch it in real time. That will be something that I’ve never done before. An async function watching a websocket. If I can get that to just log the events, then the next step will be doing the token lookups. I’m not sure if Alchemy is the best place to do that, as Etherscan has a API that can make sure we’re looking at a legit token.

Coingecko might be a good place to check as well.

One user story that we could build out would be to dump the token description and website details into our Discord server, just so we could keep an eye on it. Of course eventually we would want it to execute trades on it’s own. Even further, if I could find a way to scope new token creations from blockchain directly or from Etherscan, Coingecko or Dextools, we might be able to find and vet targets more easily.

Exciting times.

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Derisking II: Halfway there

The de-risking continues. Badger dropped just enough past the last major support lines last night that I felt compelled to pull a quarter of my funds out. I completely liquidated my Sushi LP, keeping the wBTC but converting the Badger to USDC via Binance. I spent a lot of gas. I haven’t even added it up: unstake bSLP, withdraw SLP (twice, as vfat mis-calculated the gas,) approve SLP on Sushiswap, withdraw liquidity, send Badger to Binance, trade Badger for tether, trade tether for USDC, withdraw USDC to wallet. My god, what a mess. Here’s hoping I can get the cost basis right on that one.

I’m not really sure what’s precipitating the selloff, maybe it’s people like me who are just profit-taking. There’s a lot of bBadger moving to Pancakeswap on BinanceChain, but that doesn’t require selling Badger, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m still keeping an eye on things. BTC is up today, which means that Badger is falling against BTC, but as long as it can hold in USD here I may hold on. If not, I’ll have to dump the remaining Badger LP. That belongs to commingled pool of funds that belongs to the “family business”, so I’d have to split the wBTC proceeds with them — USDC profits would be held for taxes and “management” fees.

I’m feeling pretty good about it even considering the heights from which it’s fallen, down about twenty percent overall, based on my eyeball figures, which mainly consists of a series of daily screenshots saved in a notebook. I’m now just over halfway to my retirement goal. I started going over the Curve vaults yesterday, trying to put some sort of risk matrix together based on the underlying tokens. I’m thinking some linear algebraic matrix to weigh each token might work, but I have no idea how I’d even lay something out like that in Excel. I’m probably overthinking it way to much as well.

I might as well just pick a Yearn vault and call it a day, but my brain is locked on the problem and won’t let go. The reporting end of it is probably what I’m going to be focusing on most. Once deployed, how to I monitor the funds that I have and the interest being generated? How do the web front ends for Curve and Badger work, and how can I build my own dashboards to track performance over time? Can I do something with TheGraph, or do I need to use web3 to write to a database or spreadsheet? Figuring out how to do that would be a valuable skill.

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De-risking

I’ve written about IDEX here on several occasions. Yesterday, I sold my entire stash.

It’s probably most telling that despite owning their tokens, I never once used the market. On-chain exchanges are gas heavy and slow, and IDEX never got anywhere near their goal of being a fully decentralized product. They had on-chain orderbook nodes, which I ran (at a loss) for about a year. They finally got rid of that a few months ago in favor of a lightweight staking node. The truth is though, despite having about ten times the minimum stake requirement, I never got more than a few dollars in ETH rewards. The tokens did accumulate, but despite everything going on in the markets I felt like my money was better put to use elsewhere. Time will tell.

So I’m currently sitting at a little over one third of my “retirement fund”. I’ve still got over two months left to get the other two thirds. It’s going to involve some hard decisions. The majority of my funds are locked up in Badger DAO, so I’ve got to figure out how I want to pull funds from there. It’s going to be a difficult decision, although I did wake up this morning ready to pull the trigger after this latest dump. I’m still up significantly, but don’t want to risk losing capital.

So it’s quite fortuitous that I ran across this Badger Improvement Proposal on putting the USDC treasury to use. Basically, it would have eighteen months of runway set aside (with a growth multiplier, at that,) and the rest of the funds would be put to use. The author, Mason, proposed a three tiered tranche system, based on risk ratings, which would rate the various USDC vaults and projects, such as Curve, Yearn, Maker, as well as riskier ones like Float and Dollar protocol.

I thought it was a brilliant solution to the problem that I’m not facing. How to preserve funds in a stablecoin while still maintaining yield and returns. I immediately copied the spreadsheet and put my numbers in it.

As you can see, allocation 1 and 3 provide nearly identical returns with less risk. I’m actually quite comfortable with allocation 4, but decided to go with 1 to be conservative. Another Bager commented that no more than 40% of any tranche should go to one project, but after some consideration of gas costs, I think it would be too much trouble to need to manage nine positions compared to six, so we’ll say that no more than half of a position should be deployed in any one vault.

The risk rating of each project is going to take some though. I’ll need to do some research to see if anyone has put a framework together already that I can build off of. For example, there are about a dozen or more Curve vaults with various stablecoin assets and returns up to forty percent. Some have one, three or four underlying tokens such as DAI, USDC, USDT, as well as other newcomers like USDP, GUSD and so forth. Each one will need some sort of risk rating. Then we have Yearn vaults which build on top of those Curve pools. Could a Yearn vault still be “safer” than one of the newer Curve vaults? How to we rate the Yearn V2 vaults versus V1?

Then there’s the matter of these newer projects like Vesper, Float Protocol, Fei, and Dollar Protocol. Those are going to require serious consideration. Normally I’m willing to stake funds in practically any single-asset vault for liquidity mining, but when you’re talking about an elastic rebasing token or sienorage token things are a bit different.

As of right now, I’ve got funds staked in the Curve USDP vault, considered tranche B (med. risk) by Mason, and I’ve got enough ready to stake for one of my tranche A low risk vaults. I’m leaning toward the yCRV vault with 34% APY. I’ve also been checking out these other projects closely to assess risk.

More research will be done.

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Aping New Uniswap Pools

I had a bit of a brainstorm earlier today.

Uniswap’s factory contract emits a pairCreated event whenever a new pool is established, so it’s fairly trivial to find the pool and purchase tokens right after the pool is launched, potentially before the project has even announced it. Dark Forest indeed. I’ve been watching a few of these to watch what happens after during these post event launches, and trying to figure out a way to build a bot that can exploit these launches.

Here’s one such transaction.

You can see here that someone is seeding a Uniswap pool with 1 ETH and 441 billion of these KONG tokens.

So a word about KONG. All I can find about it is kongdefi.finance. Just a basic website. No social anywhere, nothing on Twitter other than a single tweet mentioning it, and a reply back to that has failed to garner a response yet.

Anyways, looking at the actual contract log event:

The first Hex value returned is the address of the Uniswap pair, and you can paste it into the Uni search box or into the address bar to find it. Just remove the leading zeroes and add ‘0x’ to it. So you can see the KONG-ETH pair here. You can also watch the chart on DexTools as well.

I did a bit of digging into the contract code and the holders to try and evaluate the likelihood of a rugpull. The contract creator made 1 trillion tokens, burned less than half of them, then deposited about eighty percent of what’s left into the Uni pool with the single ETH. They’re still holding about five percent of the supply. Much of the Uni LP tokens seem to have been put into a token lock contract, but not all of them.

I threw a little bit of ETH at KONG just for kicks, and saw my funds go up about double, so I threw five times that at it, hoping it would do the same, but there was a dump and it’s been chopping around since then. One of the first buyers got in for 0.4ETH and was able to sell less than half the position back for over seven ETH. Not bad for an hours work. They’ve sold another smaller portion off again. What a profit.

I aped into another token again, a few minutes ago, with disastrous results. I basically turned 0.1ETH into 0.003 in about twenty minutes. No website, no Coingecko listing, probably just someone taking advantage of idiots like me, trying to play the DarkForest game.

Some backtesting is going to be needed. There’s probably dozens of LPs created each day, so spraying and praying probably isn’t going to be the best option. These low liquidity pools are probably all scams, so it’s probably best to stay away from them. I’ll have to spend some time looking over the higher value pools and figuring out which projects are quality.

I’ve been brainstorming on how to automate this process. There’s a Uniswap Token Listing bot on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that it’s slow to catch things. There may be a way to do it using Nansen, if I can afford the monthly fee, but I can probably build something myself using Python and Alchemy. Catch the events, figure out what tokens they are, look up Coingecko to find the website, then set an alert if there’s a match. I might even be able to deploy funds if those criteria are met.

More research is needed, but I’ll probably experiment with a few more of these over the next couple days to see if it’s a viable strategy.

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Sixty thousand

In three weeks, the price of bitcoin has gone from fifty-eight thousand dollars on February 21st, down to forty-three a week later, and has now breached sixty on some exchanges.

I hope you bought the dip, friend.

Yesterday was hectic for me. Bossmang decided that he wanted to do a router and UPS installation the day before, which would have been a simple task, but quickly turned into a panic job. I had forgotten that we had scheduled a visit to the passport office to get passports updated or issued for everyone. So while I’m on the phone trying to coordinate new IPs and remote router configuration with him, the kids are screaming at each other while I try to get them to make lunch. On top of that, Friday was supposed to be my “public announcement” of my retirement, but by the time I got back and finished up the day, it was too late to get it out by my original 4PM Friday deadline. I did manage a thousand words or so, a nice start.

Yesterday was beautiful, the weather reached seventy and sunny. It got hot in the house, but rather than put on the AC I just opened all the windows before bed. Friday evening was tame, we let the girls have their friends over for TV and pajama party. I actually wound up going to bed at a decent hour, read a chapter of Shantaram and When Money Dies before passing out. I woke up this morning with cool air coming in the window along with the sounds of birds chirping, so I got out of bed very early and checked the price. Retirement is back on.

I’m still no closer to figuring out how to pay off the mortgage. I’m hoping it will be an easier decision in the next few weeks. For now, I’ve got about twenty pounds of pork sitting on the counter, waiting for me to fire up the smoker. Today will be chill, nothing to do but cook and write, and plan for the future.

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Exit plan, revised

I spoke to a wealth management expert yesterday. It was an interesting conversation, to say the least. They had reached out to me via LinkedIn because we share the same alma mater, and I figured it was good timing, given my current interest in wealth management, and generational businesses.

They were actually fairly familiar with crypto, they had a background in information systems. He had heard of DeFi, but I think I lost him explaining that and when the subject turned to the work we were doing with MUG token. He wasn’t judgy at all, either.

We spoke for about an hour, I asked him to describe his professional career, and then I launched into my story of running a business (into the ground) in my mid-twenties, and getting started in investing shortly there after. I got into spec mining in 2014, bought ETH when it was pennies, then cashed out my brokerage account for crypto during the 2017 run, and watched my modest four-figure stack turn into six figures over that winter. The sudden success caught me by surprise, and, lacking an exit strategy, I held all the way down through the 2018 correction till my holdings were only 80% of what they had peaked by the start of 2019.

I spent the next two years continuing to invest in bitcoin, and doing spec mining and basically learning everything I could about the industry, and positioning my investments within my IRA among crypto-related equities like $GBTC, $MARA and $RIOT. Q420 was a blast.

As the bitcoin bull-market resumed in the latter half of 2020, crypto-related equities actually outperformed BTC by an order of magnitude. So while my crypto portfolio gained 10x, my IRA actually outperformed BTC, despite GBTC and the others only representing a modest portion of my original cost basis.

I talked about the FIRE movement, and how we came up with out magic number using the four percent rule. That, my new friend understand. I told him basically how we had set our FIRE by 2024 plan last year, (halving to halving), and how we were already hit our goal in one year. Well, almost.

We’re close, but not close enough for me to just call it quits and cash out. The difference between this cycle and the last is that we have plenty of lending platform that can provide a significant yield income on crypto and stablecoin deposits. Obviously there’s no telling how long it will last, but if things keep up we may have to rewrite the four percent rule to the twenty percent rule.

My wife has put some qualifications on my upcoming so-called retirement: no debt. So I’ve got to pay off our mortgage if I want to avoid separation. The question is, how to go about that? I’ve already decided that I’ll need a significant cash cushion, equal to a years salary, and I’ve started taking claimed profits from my highest generating project and selling that to stable coins. That’s not gonna get me all the way there, so I’m looking to liquidate some of my smaller, more speculative assets that have done well to cash as well. That may get me closer, but my plan is really dependent on a run to six-figure BTC — and beyond. Somewhere between $100-120k should do the trick.

I told my new acquantaince that if I can double my IRA, I’d have enough money to pay the income tax, early withdrawal penalty, pay off the mortgage, and still have enough left over to provide interest income to satisfy our new, lower magic number. More than half of our monthly expenses are our mortgage, so paying this off would lower our capital requirements significantly.

They pointed out a couple points that I had misunderstood. First off, I was under the impression that any pre-retirement distribution from an IRA would cause the entire IRA to be considered as income. He corrected me, that only the distribution itself would be, the rest of the IRA would be still be protected. He also pointed out that selling my long-term BTC holdings would only be taxed at fifteen percent, instead of the forty percent that an early IRA withdrawal would cost.

I’ve been running the numbers back and forth all day, trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do. I am more emotionally attached to the bitcoin I own, I’ve got a hodler’s mentality and have been telling myself that I’ll never sell them — although that’s not quite true. Right now my moving target, (3.6*200-day moving average) is around $87k and rising, so it may be a while before we get there.

Thankfully, I don’t have to make any decisions right now. I’ll just keep taking profits on the smaller positions and yield generating protocols every week or so, and revisit where we’re at in a month.

And here we are now, with BTC edging $80k and toying with new ATH. Things are looking very nice indeed.

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Swimming in Liquidity Pools

So the big news this weekend in crypto was the launch of the Big Data Protocol’s liquidity mining program. The project quickly locked up six billion dollars in it’s BDPMaster contract, causing concern for some. Sam Bankman-Fried’s Almeada Research apparently threw in one billion on their own. I gave myself a minor panic attack as I pulled liquidity from several pools and projects to ape in, burning about five hundred dollars in gas as I exited positions that were earning a measly sixty percent interest.

The project itself is a bit underwhelming to me, it’s founded by an existing data provider company, basically they’re using the tokens to provide access to their feeds. They’re actually using two tokens, $BDP, which is the utility token, and $bALPHA, which is a subscription token that one can burn for access to the data sets. BDP is earned by staking one of twelve assets (wBTC, wETH, USDC, Tether, et al,) for up to a week, at which point no more BDP tokens will be minted for at least two months. The bALPHA tokens are released by staking BDP and bALPHA LP tokens, and those two pools were still pumping quadruple digit APYs three days after launch.

Despite my excitement yesterday, I feel like I was probably late to the party, and that ultimately it will wind up a bit like treading water, a lot of physical activity that gets you nowhere. The worst part is that I am pretty sure I read about the BDP launch some time ago, but wasn’t really interested in it. I just FOMOed in because of all the excitement. I’ll be lucky to earn my gas fees back, and I honestly deserve to get rugged or lose my capital over this.

I’ve forced myself to write before I access any of my wallets. Younger woke me up before dawn this morning and I laid in the dark in that in between sleep state thinking about this, and knew that I needed to write about it. I’m forcing myself to write five hundred words before I allow myself to check my charts and wallets. My CoinTracking is probably going to have at least thirty transactions from yesterday. Sometimes I am a fool. The GasNow plugin in my web browser is mocking me: gas is only eighty, don’t you want to check? Oops, now its ninety, everyone is waking up. You better check your IL and get out why you still can.

I dreamed about changing my LinkedIn profile to cryptoanalyst. Nansen.AI posted a tweet that their hot contracts feature alerted their pro subscribers to activity on the BDPMaster contract Friday night. I imagine having that information could have paid for the $1500/month subscription fee. I signed up for a trial. The basic service has some interesting features, such as address alerts, which an address for tokens or transfers or, most importantly new contract deployments. I imagine this would be very useful for watching star developers like Cronje or Banteg, or Uniswap factories to see when a new LP gets created. I can only begin to imagine. I had been looking at a GlassNode subscription a few days ago to get access to their current data sets, and the number of metrics that they have there are just staggering. Their cost is much cheaper than Nansen, that’s for sure.

I’ve already got a Messari subscription, and it’s not doing that much for me, to be honest, but it’s a business expense, so I justify it along with the 2021 CoinTracking subscription. I still have a day job, and projects to do that not interest me in the slightest anymore. I figure if I can just survive this market for a few more months without doing anything stupid (a big if!) then I just might make it.

My BadgerDAO holdings are giving me some pause, since most of my positions are tied up in LP or staking there. DIGG, which I had started to hoard, is hemorrhaging, but Badger, which I’d been selling, is holding. Go figure. I’m hoping DIGG will start moving once BTC makes a new ATH, but it looks like my previous prediction about it catching the peg with BTC’s price was either naive or will take a lot longer than I predicted.

So for now, I’m going to take a deep breath, slow my thrashing, and try to tread water for a little while longer while I assess my surroundings.