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Building the Nebuchadnezzar

Dreams you can’t remember but keep searching for an answer

I’m not sure exactly why I’ve been having problems with my sleep schedule lately, waking up at 3AM in the morning has never been my thing, and I’m not particularly enjoying it. It doesn’t help that I get woke up by Younger, or that the cats like to stampede through the house, making me think that we’re getting robbed and spiking my adrenaline. I’ve always been a light sleeper, even since I was a teen. I could never sleep as long as my mom and dad were awake, and I could hear them watching TV or talking and getting ready for bed. I suppose that this is one of the reasons that I’ve always gravitated toward being a night owl. I’ve heard that some people with ADHD tend to be night owls as well, getting most of their work done in the hours when everyone else is quiet. It certainly works for me in the morning.

As my tinnitus has gotten worse over the years, I’ve taken to keeping a fan on, and more recently a noise machine. My wife has convinced me to start making a habit of going to bed at 10PM, and I’ll read a book on my iPad or dead trees for a bit before going to bed. Sometimes I’ll take a melatonin, but I’m wary about over using them because of the tolerance, and because of the fact that lately when I take them I wake up at three in the morning and can’t go back to sleep.

I am one of those people who seem to get by with less sleep than most people. Certainly less than my wife, who would be happy to sleep twelve hours a day if circumstances permitted. I think it’s one of the reasons that our relationship has worked so well over the years. She liked to sleep, and I got to stay up late playing video games. At least before the kids came along, anyways.

So this morning I woke up from a dream — something about an alien invasion and trying to fight back against the oppressors. We were on the run and came to a dead end in a canyon. We were trapped — and I woke up. I tried to go back to sleep but then the cats knocked something over or made a noise, maybe it actually came from outside, but a part of my brain yelled HOME INVASION THEY’RE COMING FOR YOUR CRYPTO and then my adrenaline spiked and started running though response scenarios.

Meditation has been helpful in quieting things down, but most of the time I fail to fall asleep, so I lay in bed, until there’s some thought that won’t let go and I finally give up. Of course this morning it was related to the dao proposal that I’ve been working on for two days now, trying to come up with a proper incentive scheme to incentivise early participation. So I got up, boiled water for my tea, medidated, had some ideas, gave sleep one more shot on the couch and now I’m up for the day. It is twenty after six. Such is my life these days.

So I’m very close to finishing the dao proposal. I have some more writing to do, then I’ll be ready for some more community feedback. Yesterday I spoke to a computer science student in Singapore. They “manage equities” for their family and said they were looking at a minimum investment of fifty thousand dollars. We talked for an hour, and I was able to secure a promise to move forward with the broad plan that I described. So I just need to finish writing out those broad strokes so that I can give everyone a day to join before the sale launches.

All this work with DaoHaus on xDAI and with the Gnosis safes has really given me some great ideas. Even beyond the NFT sale, this may be a great way to organize the family business. xDAI would mean that the wallets would be easy to manage, share wise, and I could just run everything from a Gnosis safe. I could setup my dad and brother as owners and we could just have a one of three multisig on it. Might work out beautifully, depending on gas costs. Might get a bit more complicated later on when we start , but I think it’s the solution that I’ve been looking for.

Side note, I ran across this firm, Korporatio, that sets up offshore entities in Panama and other locales. The created entities are managed through on Ethereum through an interface that looks strikingly like DaoHaus. Too expensive for me to consider right now though.

I’m going to be very happy with myself after the NFT dao is launched. I’m still excited about Star Atlas itself, my conversation with the student from Singapore touched on Solana a bit. Since the game will run on Solana, and most of the game’s underlying infrastructure will be publically accessible, it means that we’ll be able to write our own programs to interface with it. It’ll be like hacking into the Matrix from onboard the Nebuchadnezzar. We should be able to access the game’s API and manage things from outside of the official game client. Fun. I was skimming the docs for Solana yesterday, and it looks like it’s going to be a long road to that one.

From what I can tell, there are so far no dao projects active on Solana, so hacking together something that resembles MolochDao looks like it’s going to be our first goal if we are going to bring SAIA Dao to fruition.

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Space Corp, continued

Today is already halfway over and I’m just now sitting down to write. Things are a blur. I’ve been focused primarily on engineering the dao and NFT token purchasing process for the Space Atlas launch. It’s been somewhat exhausting trying to get people on-board with the idea, like herding cats, as they say. I’ve spent most of this morning dealing with a Quickbooks upgrade for a client and trying to get my kids to stop arguing and actually get their chores done. I feel like the day is slipping away from me.

I’m hoping that I can finish a general proposal by tonight, which would give us about 24 hours before the first NFT goes on sale. I think the broad outline is there, I’ve just got a lot of details to put together, including

I had to liquidate a bunch of stocks in my IRA to get ready for this next transfer to my checkbook IRA. It’s a bit painful as my portfolio is down 25% percent since last week. Still, I sold off a half dozen positions, basically all my smaller positions and anything that wasn’t crypto related. I’ll have to deal with that later, but hopefully I can move things fast enough to get in on this BTC dip.

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Space Corp

Decentralized Autonomous Corporations in Space Atlas

TL;DR: Read the DAO NFT Pool proposal here.

So yesterday we wrote about airplane crashes, now we move to space ships. Yesterday I became aware of Star Atlas, a new space-themed MMO that is launching soon. It’s like EVE: Online, or Star Citizen, but it incorporates blockchain mechanics and will run on the Solana ecosystem.

I’ve been a gamer for decades, and I’ve always loved space fighters, going all the way back to XWing vs. TIE Fighter and Wing Commander. I spent years playing EVE, but it was a huge time suck. I made a personal decision to scale back my gaming activities some time ago, as I figured that I wanted to spend more time playing the game of life. I still enjoy the occasional causal game, but I purposefully stay away from AAA open ended games, especially MMOs. I’ll admit that my personal and professional life has benefited from this decision tremendously. I treat investing and crypto as a game these days, running up my score via trading and yield farming. It’s much more lucrative than playing in imaginary worlds, and was one of the main reasons that I shied away from games like Elite Dangerous. Spending an hour of my day flying a trade mission across a dozen systems just did not seem like a productive, let alone enjoyable, use of my time.

This Tweet came across my TL yesterday and took up most of my day. The game is still in production so I read through the whitepaper and was seriously impressed. It seems to be iterating on all of the latest and greatest games of the last couple years: EVE, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and No Man’s Sky, among others. It incorporates much of the game play mechanics that you would expect from these games, but then merges with with blockchain tech: in-game currencies, governance tokens, NFTs, and a defi ecosystem that includes lending, AMM and yield farming. As you can expect, I am very excited to see how this plays out.

The game is launching in several phases, the first will be the Galactic Asset Offering (GAO) in which in-game assets will be sold as NFTs on Opensea. Mining, staking and yield farming will be available during this time, but the assets won’t be playable until phase two, when an MVP browser based mini-game will be available. The target is July. There will another phase, a shipyard-configuration module before the final pre-sale before launch. There’s no ETA on when that will launch, as far as I know.

Prior to the GAO will be this ReBirth: Genesis NFT sale. It’s fascinating. They’re going to sell a series of thirteen meta-posters, each one available per week. The price for each series will go up, and they’re divided into tiers that will unlock certain rewards or in-game bonuses. On top of that, anyone collecting all thirteen NFTs will be able to claim a special fourteenth NFT. Details are the NFT rewards are light right now, but I can imagine they’ll be sufficient for the investment.

Obviously, I’m not willing to spend $524,000 on a series of NFTs, but I assumed that there was some group that was. I had read about a DAO that had bought an NFT for $5.4 million, so I went looking to see who was actively fundraising to pool resources.

I popped on the Star Atlas Discord and quickly found a guild named Interstellar Alliance, and found a dao/pool discussion already ongoing. No one was putting any serious proposals together, so of course I went to work and started writing.

The general idea is to use a DaoHaus/MolochDao guild to pool resources. Stake in the DAO –shares — will be proportional to investment. Ultimately, the goal is to purchase all thirteen NFTs to earn the last one. From there the dao can vote on what gets done with them afterward. This could be a speculative play, to sell the collection off or to farm rewards that come from them. The collection can be bundled and tokenized in a way that they can become tradable, or the assets can eventually be bridged over to Solana for use in game. Those details will have to be worked out later, as I’m primarily focused on putting together something that can be done in a trustless manner. There’s been much interest in the proposal, and we already have 19 pledges for a minimum total of over $39,000. We still have a ways to go, but we have enough interest to move forward. I think there will be enough excitement once things start moving that we’ll have no problem finding full funding. For now I’m focused on Kovan testing to make sure that I understand the gas costs needed to operate DaoHaus and Gnosis, and working out additional details with the community.

This project really fascinates me. It bridges daos and smart contracts, speculative investing, community management, and opens up an opportunity to learn how to dev on Solana, (and learn Rust). I’m going to be digging into this over the coming weeks to see whether operating or being a part of one of these in-game DACs could actually become a viable career. Imagine, playing a video game and making enough real-money revenue to live off of. It sounds like the future.

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Airplane crashes

Yesterday was Younger’s “board meeting”. I took her out for cheeseburgers and milkshake, which we ate at the park next to a peacock, (yes, really,) then to Cold Stone for ice cream, then to her Momos’, then the dollar store so she could by a bunch of candy and cheap toys. She really loved it.

After I had a nap I spent the afternoon watching videos and talks about airplane crashes. Yes really.

I came across this Gitcoin bounty via Twitter, it’s funded by RAI, (like DAI but for ETH,) and they want someone to create a smart contract that manages a CDP and a Yearn strategy.

Following after that are a couple example contracts to help get people started. It points to the eth-brownie Yearn strategy mix, which I’ve looked at before, but haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet. I really want to figure out how to build one of these, so that I can automate something of my own. I’m hoping I’ll be able to dig into this stuff at some point soon. I don’t have any illusions about being able to get something done before next month, but I want desperately to figure out how this stuff works. I get the basic idea behind it, but for some reason I think it’s critical for me to be able to understand this from a technical level.

I am trying to stay somewhat focused, so I spent some more time trying to figure out how to use Brownie to manage my own positions. I was poking around in vfat.tools and their Github, trying to figure out how it works. For those that aren’t familiar, vfat has a number of yield farms available through it. It connects to a user’s wallet, inventories their deposits and the pool’s APY, and gives back a report on how much they’re earning. I’m trying to figure out how it works. There are several dozen pools listed there, and they’ve got several side chains listed there, and I thought it might be a good source of alpha, so I put a notification on any new pull requests so I can check out what’s going on. They recently added AVAX pools, and I may have to spend more time poking around on it. I’ve got a few hundred in AVAX tokens, so might as well put them to use while the going is hot.

Off to it.

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Get Bent

Yesterday was a very productive day. I finished my four-thousand word piece on stablecoin yield farming and published it. It was also our monthly cleaning day here at the house, so the fam spent four hours cleaning the house. I spent most of it cleaning all of the windows; I don’t think it’s been done since we moved here five years ago. Then everyone relaxed. I played video games with Elder and watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time. Then this morning, I woke up, bent over to pick up my shorts off the floor and pulled my lower back. What a way to start the morning.

I finally managed to pull myself together and go through my morning routine: brew tea, meditate while it cools, and put in my daily post. I consider it an act of personal fortitude that I was able to sit upright for twenty minutes, but I think part of meditation as an exercise is building tolerance for pain. I actually felt much better when it was over.

Since yesterday was cleaning day, that means today is a “board meeting” with one of the girls. This will be my first time with Younger. She just wants to go to her Momo’s house to see Luna the dog, go get hamburgers and spend her allowance money on junk food at the dollar store. The kid knows what she likes.

Last night also saw a huge selloff, BTFD. There was some debate as to whether it was related to some power blackout in China that brought a lot of hashrate offline. There was also some FUD about the US Treasury department bring money laundering charges against some exchange operators.

Not much else to talk about right now, time to go spend some time with my daughter.

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BCM reFIREment Fund

person holding leafed plant

Upending the FIRE game through DeFi stablecoin yield farming

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a broad term that refers to projects on Ethereum and other smart contract platforms that are rebuilding the world’s financial infrastructure on the blockchain. While it is certainly risky, the rewards are currently beyond anything available within traditional finance. Just look at your “savings” account. The amount of yield currently available among DeFi projects can put financial independence within reach for many people. Here, I take a deep dive on how I positioned myself for reFIREment, and allocated an emergency fund that will hopefully pay for itself and allow me to live my dreams.

I won’t get into the details of fiat on-ramps or using the Ethereum network, nor do I endorse blindly following my any of my positions. Black swan exploits and rug-pulls are still a huge risk, and my purpose here is to discuss the analysis and decision-making process that I went through in order to mitigate some of that risk. I hope you find it useful.

Continue reading “BCM reFIREment Fund”
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COVID Dairies: Day 398

Nanobots feel great!

Well here I am, all bright and shiny after yesterday’s sleep-deprivation. I went to bed at ten last night and slept like a corpse. And I’m none too worse for wear with my second Pfizer COVID vaccine either. I had been expecting to be a miserable wretch today, but I don’t feel bad at all besides a soreness in my arm. I think the two spicy chicken burritos that I had for lunch yesterday did me more damage. I did eat some garbage yesterday.

It’s hard to fathom that we’ve been dealing with COVID for over a year now. I went back through the blog archives just now and this time last year we had been under lockdown for a month already, and the household was in the midst of battling some sort of infection. My doctor eventually diagnosed me with bronchitis, but I still suspect we may have had COVID. One of our neighbors worked at the local hospital, and their child and Younger passed around some soft of respiratory ailment. I got antibody tests eventually, which were negative, but I was well past the six month antibody detection.

And that six-month period tells me that we’ll be dealing with COVID in a semi-permanent way, probably getting booster shots every year or so from here on out. I don’t understand what some are concerned about, I get a flu shot every year, COVID’s precautions have pretty much wiped that out.

I think we’re fortunate here in the US. Despite how badly we handled the pandemic, America has actually been handling the vaccine rollout very well. Seems we’re the only ones that can really get our hands on it. My brother in Germany tells me that they don’t expect to have it any time soon, and I just read Ontario is putting restrictions back in place. Apparently India is on fire right now. (I just finished reading Shantaram a few days ago, I can’t even imagine COVID raging through Bombay’s slums.

We’ll probably be wearing masks for some time, although I’m wondering how things will be by the time I get to Miami in June. I think it’ll be safe to assume that anyone who wants one will be able to get one by the end of May, so I think it’ll be safe to assume that anyone who isn’t wearing a mask and hasn’t been vaccinated by June is just a self-centered asshole.

I’m not sure how our international travel plans are going to look. Things are too far out to really speculate about that right now. A lot will depend on finances. I’d still like to get out of the country, but we’ll have to see how things look post-retirement.

Despite my sleep-deprived state yesterday, I did manage to attempt some coding work. I was looking over Banteg’s feil-proposal yesterday and trying to wrap my head around it. Somehow they figured out how to exploit Fei Protocol’s MCV, and would have been able to redeem FEI for $1.90. I don’t think they ever went through with it, but it’s still useful to see how to set up scripts in eth-brownie. I’m not sure I get it yet, but I think the attack tricks the MCV to allow the rugman to disable the burn mechanism, maybe even reverse it.

I’m still trying to get my tooling squared away. I managed to figure out my issue with pyenv and pipenv (can’t run --python x.x.x against the active pyenv version) and managed to import and query the Vesper.Finance vWBTC vault. I think my first step is building some soft of vfat.tools that will give me a readout of my current vault positions, and give me a daily/weekly/annually estimation of payouts. I’m not sure how well brownie is suited for continuous async scripting –bots, in other words — so I may have to go back and revisit JS node at some point.

But first, I’ve got writing to do. I am very close to being done with my stablecoin yield farming piece, that’s my priority beyond playing with the kids and getting the house clean. Then I can start working on the SetProtocol docs.

It’s a beautiful day.

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More insomnia

I woke up at 3AM this morning, cold, and have spent the last four hours trying to sleep or trying to do something. I got out of bed and did some reading and coding, went back to bed, moved beds, made tea, meditated, went back to sleep. My brain is a mess, it can’t stop thinking about crypto.

I’m very close to finishing my report on my stablecoin yield farming. It’s over three thousand words now, and I’ve still got more to write. Another hour ought to do it, and maybe another to pare it down and edit. I hope to have it done tonight, then I’ll be free to start working on the project for SetProtocol.

I get my second Pfizer shot today at 3PM, so who knows whether I’ll be in any shape to get work done after that though. I’ll probably just plop my ass on the couch and watch Korra with the girls.

I came to the conclusion that I’ve spread my positions too thin. I was going through my bookmarks on BSC and couldn’t figure out why I was missing some coins. Apparently I had missed a migration on Blizzard.Finance, and had to go through several steps to withdrawal LP, convert it and restake it. And at some point yesterday I heard LINK was at an ATH, and remembered that I’ve got several thousand dollars worth locked up on Mushrooms.Finance that I can’t even pull cause I’m out of gas. Whoops. But the main concern is that I’ve got wallets and funds scattered all over the place, and I don’t even remember where half of it is at. Zapper is good and all, but it’s still missing a good portion of what I have. And if something should happen to me then missus is going to be in a load of trouble. I’m not even sure she can unlock the hardware wallets. She’s definitely going to need help figuring out what I have locked away.

So I went through and started another spreadsheet to try to get an accurate number of what assets I actually have available. I came up with about thirty percent more than what Zapper is accounting for: Bancor, Mushroom, Ellipsis, mStable, ForceDAO, Integral, and MUG, as well as the Honeyswap LP on xDAI. It’s good to have an accurate count, but keeping all these things up to date is proving cumbersome. I have got to figure out how to do it on chain.

I’m still fascinated by the prospect of using eth-brownie as a DeFi management tool. I really need to figure out how to automate my operations in DeFi, and I’ve been really held back with some of the things I want to do as I haven’t figured out how to interact with contracts. I really want to figure out how Yearn vaults work, mainly how their strategies are set. And looking at some of the things these devs are doing just blow me away, I really want to do more. Harvesting and restaking operations on my various BSC farms is probably the first thing I would focus on since it’s just repetitive. I was trying to experiment with some of these ideas this morning, but my tools are all jacked up. Issues with Pyenv/Pipenv and Brownie in my IDE. More stuff for me to work out later, I suppose.

I’m happy that by brain is focusing on these things in my sleep now. I woke up scheming of ways that I can leverage lending platforms to farm more effectively, and dreaming about smart contract cross-chain compatibility. I’ve got ideas, but I’ve got a lot more research to do. I don’t think this would be happening if I wasn’t closing the door on Zombie, LLC, and the last twenty years of my career. It’s exciting. I told a couple clients that I was retiring, they probably think I’m crazy when I start telling them to buy Bitcoin. It’s not me, it’s the rest of the world that is.

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Morning notes

I had a blast of activity yesterday after signing off, so let’s get right to it.

First off, the Aave launch on Polygon. Pure insanity. They are really pushing hard to get liquidity. Here’s the chart from this AM. First off, pay attention to the second number under the deposit APY and borrow APR. You’re getting rewards on both ends. I used the Matic bridge to send over some MATIC and wBTC, then deposited the wBTC. Then I went ahead and withdrew about a third of my collateral in USDT, making sure I was in no danger of liquidation. Then, for good measure, I hopped over to Quickswap and deposited some LP in the USDC-USDT pair.

The borrow rates have gone up quite a bit since I went to sleep, so I might need to repay my loan, but I’m still getting a 15% spread on the borrow. I should easily be able to swap the MATIC rewards to cover that spread and still be left with a pretty penny.

MUG news: My new friend DeFiAnt, who manages the LTI Token Set, brought my attention to a possible opportunity to earn liquidity fees on AMMs by setting up multicoin LPs. In this case he created LTI pools on Honeyswap for ETH, wBTC, and xDAI pairs. Then he let the arbitrage bots go to work. So far he’s accumulated about $1500 in fees doing this, so I spent an hour last night bridging funds and setting up ETH and wBTC pools. The reporting on these fees has been very wonky, but I’m going to wait a week or two and see what happens. I spent almost $200 in gas fees doing the bridging, but setting up the pools on xDAI, like MATIC, is insanely cheap. All the MUG pools are here.

I know there’s a lot of launches going on today, I haven’t been keeping up as well as I should have, I think I may have spread myself a little too thin right now. I’ve got funds spread out everywhere, and I’m in a position where I really don’t have a way to keep track of everything. Zapper’s pretty good, but it doesn’t track half of the stuff that I’ve got funds in, so I’m going to have to put something together to make sure I don’t lose track of what I’m doing.

I have got to get my stablecoin farming piece finished today so that I can move on and start working on the SetProtocol docs. I’m already several days behind launching that. Time to roll.

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Sixty four thousand

So the day has pretty much been a waste. Stayed up to late last night and paid the price. It’s four in the afternoon and I’m just now writing; that should tell you all you need to know about how today has gone. Blew off work.

The big news was undoubtedly the Coinbase listing. It took so long to actually start trading, I took a nap after I got tired of hitting refresh on my brokerage account, waiting. I put in a $300 bid with 2% of my portfolio thinking that it was going to debut at $250. It launched at $333, traded up to $430 and back down to $310 at one point, so my order expired. The rest of my portfolio got crushed. I was down about 10% today. Even bitcoin is back at $62k. Absolutely brutal.

So yesterday, besides doing my regular farming activities on BSC, I also took advantage of a special deal with Zerion and Index Coop and bought some DPI for 5% back in $INDEX. Today, Aave launched on Polygon, so I transferred some wBTC over there for a 30% APY paid out in $MATIC tokens. I also bought some Balancer tokens after reading this:

Rune’s AsgarDEX has also launched, so I’ll be taking a look at that to see if it’s something that I can do with my actual BTC. I’d like to put some of it to work if possible, instead of just letting it sit around in a hardware wallet somewhere. I’ll be doing more research on this later.