It’s been a long month since our last all-time-high post. I’ve been waking up with anticipation every morning for the last week or so as BTC has wavered around the sixty-thousand range, but I saw the Trading View alert that I had set on my phone recently and was elated. Just yesterday I wrote a post titled On your marks… and it looks like it was right on time.
The current 200-day moving average is $31960, and can be seen as the blue line in the chart below. My “sell” target is 3.6x this number, which is currently about $115,000. The vertical yellow dotted line is my retirement date. I’ve been tracking the 3.6x number based off of the 2017 blow off top, which hit 3.8x of that number. The BTC price, expressed as a multiple of the 200-d MA, is known as the Mayer Multiple, and I’ve written about it numerous times in these pages. It’s basically my strategy to prevent me from making the same mistake I made in 2017-18, which was not taking profits. Since this is a moving target, I’m not sure whether we’ll ever hit it. We would have to have a very fast climb to some 2x our current price, maybe in a week, two at most. And I’m skeptical that we’ll see something like that this cycle. Maybe I’m losing hope, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how crazy 2017 was.
Already there’s been talk about this being a cycle top. There’s been some fuss about the Pi cycle indicator, but most on-chain metrics aren’t showing any indication of a top. GlassNode and TheBlock are two such subscription services that are going to be critical to watch in the coming weeks and months. They are both good sources of on-chain graphs, charts, and research. I just have to figure out which one to go with first.
I’ve got about 45 days left until my retirement date. I’ve told Missus that I’d pay off the mortgage, but I’m really hoping I can convince her otherwise. While I can technically afford it, the opportunity cost at this point in the cycle is just too great. We’ll see how the next few weeks play out, but I’m hoping a more gradual payoff is in order instead of a large lump sum. I might reconsider this if we do break $100,000 by June, which I think is possible, but my current feeling is that we’ll need at least one more pullback before we breach it well. I’m guessing somewhere between $86,000-94,000.
Cryptoequities are looking good this morning, most are already up between 5-8% in premarket: CAN, RIOT, BTBT, MARA, NCTY, GBTC and Voyager are leading. I’m going to be trimming these considerably in the coming weeks as I continue moving funds to my checkbook IRA, but I have some other positions that I’m going to trim first. Even winners like Paypal, Apple and Netflix are losers when compared to crypto plays, and while I’ve been holding these for years, it’s time to let them go.
Coinbase and Binance seem to be dominating the news, the former as their direct listing hits the markets this Wednesday, and the latter because of the insane growth of their token due to the success of Binance Smart Chain. I spent some more time on BSC yesterday, aping into various yield farms, and I’m definitely rueing the day that I sold my BNB tokens at seventeen dollars.
The success of BSC has eased a lot of the congestion on Ethereum, gas was sub-100 all weekend, and even now. That’s making it a lot more feasible to manage positions, even considering ETH is at an ATH against USD. (ETH-BTC, on the other hand…)
I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my wBTC. I’ve got positions in Vesper and Klondike, but the APY isn’t such that it’s worth a substantial investment for me right now. And I sure am not going to risk it by trading it for anything right now. I still think we’re on the cusp of a breakout, and I’m not risking anything between now and June 1. The yPBTC vault on Yearn is at 25% APY right now, but I’m not trying to get stuck in any V1 vaults right now.
Many are saying that the Coinbase IPO is going to set off the next leg off the BTC rally, but I’m holding a little bit of fiat in reserve in case it goes the other way. I do think we could see a massive rally this month, but I’m just holding tight for right now and will buy any dips that come up.
As far as equities go, I’m going to sell off a bit of my GBTC today and put in a rollover request. Transfers are taking several weeks, so I think I’ll put in a large transfer request now and wait for the acknowledgement to sell off my positions. I’ve got a few losers that I want to get rid of today, just in case I do want to buy some Coinbase stock. Not really, though, I think I’m going to hold off from buying anything in equities for the foreseeable future, and that includes the value averaging protocol that I’ve been running for the last year or two. I think my idea is just to transfer out any money in my TradIRA over a certain amount, and move that over to my checkbook IRA month by month. We’ll see how far that gets us by June.
I’ve got a busy day ahead of me. I’ve got some cleanup to do following my day off last Friday, and I’m starting my new documentation project for SetProtocol. Time to go.
I wound up getting a lot more done yesterday that I figured I would, considering how the day started off. I exited the rest of my Badger DIGG LP, put some wBTC to work in KLON and Vesper pools instead. I doubled up my Alchemix position and spent some time mulling over the Liquitiy pools.
I’ve been in Badger since mid-January, and it’s probably my trade of the year. I went in hard, a little at first, then YOLO a couple days after. It paid off remarkably well and has basically funded most of my retirement stablecoin fund. I’d been hoping for a turnaround with DIGG, their rebasing token that’s supposed to follow the price of BTC, but it’s been a loss. I’d exited my BADGER LPs a few weeks ago, but had been holding out hope for some kind of turnaround. My patience was reached yesterday, so I pulled the rest and sold it for wBTC. I still retain a moonbag of both Badger and DIGG, but it’s a fraction of the value that I held during the height of my position a back in late February. I spent several hours trying to compute stake for the family business, and basically figured out that I had enough wBTC left over to give everyone their original stake back. It’s not quite fair on the surface, considering the gains that we’ve managed to pull off, but the primary goal right now is to compute shares and separate these funds out from the rest of my wallet. I still haven’t figured out the most economical way to do it, but a DaoHaus/Moloch DAO tied to a Gnosis Safe might be the best way to do that. More to come.
Liquity has been on my radar for a bit. I came across it via an Epicenter pod, and I gave it a listen despite the fact that I’ve never used a collateralized debt vault like Maker. From my understanding, these protocols are primarily used for leveraging oneself, and I’ve never felt comfortable with the risk involved in doing something like that. Still, Liquity seemed interesting. I spent a good bit of time reading over this Jon Wu thread on it, and mulling over how I would position myself. I have a sizable stack in Index Coop’s ETH 2x FLI token, so this might be an alternative, especially if ETH goes sideways for a while and the FLI fees start eating into my position. Of course I’d probably want to farm their governance token. I never made it that far into opening a trove yet, but it’s on my mind.
Finding places to put your wBTC to work in DeFi is a bit of a challenge. Yields are very low unless you’re willing to put it to use as LP. I’m not willing to risk it these days, but I did finally take a small LP on KLON. I’d been involved in the launch and staked some wBTC in pool 1 for a bit, but wasn’t terribly keen on the project or willing to risk taking a chance on their kBTC coin. Algo stablecoins are hard, and I feared losing the peg. It’s been holding up, and after watching what’s going on with DIGG and FEI, I’ve come to the conclusion that the chance of a cataclysmic failure of the kBTC is fairly low. It probably would have happened by now. kBTC actually spends more time over the peg than under it, so I went ahead and staked the kBTC-wBTC pool. That 230% APY, even if it is paid in KlonX, is probably the best deal around right now. Since I’m not apeing into anything, I also went and spread some funds back on Vesper. The APYs are more in line with the rest of DeFi, about five or eight percent, but they’re boosting it 30% with VSP rewards, which can be compounded. I’m still on the hunt for other opportunities that don’t seem sketchy or overly risky.
And yes, I did go and double up my Alchemix position, buying more ALCX this time instead of increasing my debt position. I noticed that the debt’s maturation slipped a few months, back to January of 2023, so I’m going to keep monitoring it and see how it looks by June 1. I don’t foresee a scenario that allows me to pay off the mortgage using Alchemix, but I will probably be able to do it for my student loans in September. I just don’t think I would be able to come up with sufficient liquidity for an overcollateralized loan. And the risk on such a new protocol is just way too high. I might potentially be able to swing it if I used IRA funds, but the tax ramifications of that would be even greater than just paying off the debt straightforward.
3. Generate alUSD loan 4. Swap alUSD -> USDC 5. USDC -> bank account 6. Improve the life of you and those around you 7. alUSD loan pays itself off 8. At the bottom, swap DAI -> $ETH 9 Repeat
— DavidHoffman.eth/acc🦇🔊 (@TrustlessState) April 3, 2021
Last note, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with $MUG. It’s been doing well, breaking $350 and holding $300 right now. There just isn’t any need for it right now. Index Coop launched their Metaverse product, MVI, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to provide liquidity for it other than a small Honeyswap pool on xDAI. A friend recommended that I setup wBTC and ETH pools for it over there, and let the bots go to town arbitraging the pools. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, but at least it’s something. I haven’t even done any fund management since I launched it, not one trade despite some noticeable churn in the top 10. The MVI set holds about fifteen positions right now, compared to ten in MUG. I could just sell off all the positions in MUG and buy MVI with it and call it a day, but I supposed I’ll just wait for now.
Yesterday’s trip out with Missus was fantastic. We spent all day at an amusement park without the kids. I had bought food and wine sampler tickets for the two of us, so we walked around the park eating and drinking all day. The weather was fantastic, it actually started raining toward the afternoon around the time we needed to be leaving anyways. We passed through a monsoon on the way home, and continued our party well into the morning. I’ve been lazing around the house and have already decided that I’m not going to be productive at all today.
ETH hit a new ATH and BTC is back up above $60k. There doesn’t seem to be much of a catalyst but I’m not complaining. My FLI position is doing nicely, but so much of my funds are locked up in yield farms right now, I’m not really exposed to anything else that’s doing remarkably well.
I’ll probably spend some time on BSC when I finally drag my ass upstairs to my workstation. I found a list of new pools that I’ll probably ape into, my experiments so far have been going well, so I may extend my activities a bit more and see how things go. I’m probably going to add to my ALCX position as well on the ETH side. I’m not going to be adding any fiat to my positions for the foreseeable future, I’ve got to pay for yesterday’s adventure, as well as the Miami tickets, and by the time June 1 rolls around I won’t have any fresh fiat rolling in at all. So I’ve got to be real tight with funds and get my but in gear.
I’m taking a day off with my wife to have a date. We’re splitting the kids, Elder is going to her grandmother’s, Younger to the neighbors, and heading out to an amusement park for a food festival. It will be much fun, and much needed. Before COVID we had season passes for the park and brought the kids three or four times. I never once got to ride one of the big coasters, Missus never got to see a single performance show, so we’ll be taking turns today. I hope the weather holds up, it’s going to be cloudy all day.
We also booked tickets to Bitcoin2021 in Miami. Airfare was free thanks to some credit card rewards. We didn’t have enough points for the hotel room, but that should be a business expense, as is the tickets themselves. June will be exciting: I “retire” June 1, we spend three nights in Miami, (again no kids!) and then fly back in time for my birthday the following Monday. I am so stoked. Afterparty here we come!
There’s not a lot I want to cover today. I put some money into the Opolis genesis launch, and spent some more time on BSC chasing insane APYs on random projects on Beefy.Finance and elsewhere. It’s all pocket money right now, but there’s some serious TVL locked up in BSC right now. I think it’s probably the catalyst behind the BTC price stagnating around $58k for the last few weeks. I’m only playing with pocket change right now, these are likely test runs before I start increasing my stake. Eight percent daily returns is nothing to shake a stick at, especially as gas fees are practically non-existent. Most of them are likely scams and ponzis, just forks of forks that don’t bring any actual value to the space, still there’s money to be made if you can avoid the dumps and rugs. It’s all about risk management, basically.
I also staked some funds in Alchemix yesterday. This one really excites me. I finally understand it and why it’s important, and I’m really hoping that it does well. And I can understand why the traditional finance types are losing their minds over it. At its core it’s a standard staking contract, generating yield of off the Yearn yDAI vault. Once deposited, you’re allowed to borrow up to 50% of what you’ve staked, a loan against the future yield off the funds that you’ve staked. That’s right, the vault earnings pay back the debt. I put in $2500 DAI, took out $1250 in alUSD, (which I staked), and the current maturation date of the loan is sometime around November 2022.
Now this may seem trivial, but it seems fairly revolutionary to me. It’s iterative in the sense that they’re taking Maker’s CDP and putting the underlying assets to work, but I don’t know if this kind of loan against future earnings exists anywhere in the TradFi space, but I think it opens up a huge possibility for crypto, especially once they open up BTC and ETH vaults. They’ve basically built up another way to prevent people from selling their BTC. I’ve probably made this point several times before, but it bears repeating:
In earlier market cycles traders would try to swing trade their BTC, trying to time the top of the market cycle, hodl and accumulate during the bear market. We’ve known things are different this time around because of centralized lending platforms like BlockFi that allow you to take 9% interest USD loans against your BTC. This never made sense to me, as I’ve got good credit and have debt in the 3-4% range right now. From a capital gains perspective, it might make sense for others, but it’s never been compelling to me. On the contrary, I’ve felt a better solution is to lend USDC for the eight (or forty) percent gain, and use that as income. But I do have a lot of debt that I want to pay off this cycle.
I’ve been vacillating between selling crypto or cashing out my IRA to pay off my mortgage, I’m not going to rehash that as well other than to say that I’d really like BTC at $120,000 for me to justify the former. I’d much rather take the extra tax hit, to be honest. But Alchemix flips this around a bit. Now I don’t expect yields on wrapped BTC to remain anywhere near the rates we’re getting for stablecoins right now, the demand just isn’t there. The Yearn crvHBTC vault is getting over 10%, but wBTC is only half of that right now. I expect that long term, I would expect them even lower.
If you look at it as an alternative to my current mortgage or student loans though, the choice seems rather clear, and it’s why I want Alchemix to succeed. Let’s use my student loan debt for example. I’ve got over $60k in debts that come due in September. The ten-year payment plan is something like $600/month. Let’s assume that Alchemix has opened up a wBTC vault that’s getting that five percent. I stake two wBTC, take my $60,000 and pay off the debt. Using the five percent compound interest, the debt should be paid off, or mature, in about eight years, and I get my deposit back.
Now, this isn’t even taking into account the BTC price action. I haven’t heard the details as how Alchemix is going to deal with debt to value, i.e. if they’re going to be subject to forced liquidations like with Maker, but on the flip side, if BTC does continue to have another cycle or two left in it, say to $500k or $1m, then a conservative estimate on debt repayment could be less than half that time.
Now I’m not about to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars of BTC into Alchemix as soon as they open the vault, there’s a lot more due diligence needed to see how, and if things are going to work. Still, it’s making me think, a lot, about the possibilities of both my own debt repayment, and about capital allocation in the future. Again, what Alchemix is doing might already have analogs in the TradFi world, but it’s a novel concept to me. I think much of the pushback I’ve been seeing from the critics has more to do with the yields than the mechanics.
Still, it gives me a option to preserve my Bitcoin wealth and pay off my current debt. It also gives people with significant crypto wealth an option for raising money to buy homes, fund education or other endeavors.
First off, I met with the team from Opolis, a member owned payroll and benefits organization for independent workers. They’re really focused on independent contractors and digital nomads, but they’re also open to non-crypto types as well. It was refreshing talking to them, as John and Josh had are, how you say, somewhat politically aligned with me. The project spawned out of ETH Denver a few years ago, and apparently Colorado is turning into a bit of a progressive crypto powerhouse. They came to my attention through a BadgerDAO proposals, you can read some of the details there. Even though I’m not really in need of Opolis’s services right now — we still have health insurance through Missus’s government job — I was still interested in supporting their genesis launch. Unfortunately for me, their minimum raise is $50,000, way over my current risk preference.
That’s where the DAO comes in. Josh set up a pool for investors that wanted to get in on the Opolis launch, and he did it on chain using DAOHAUS, which is a front-end for MolochDAO, a grant making platform. Beware of the rabbit-hole that is Meditations on Moloch, and read more about DAOHAUS here. I got really excited about the possibilities with this, cause it seems like the platform I’ve been searching for in order to make Hombrew.Finance into a proper DAO. They have contracts deployed on xDAI, so it’s cheap to use, but I still have questions to sort out about how proposals are executed. For the most part it looks like it relies on externally owned address, EOAs, but Josh told me that there were bots that can perform trades or execute strategies coming soon. It’s going to require some thought about what the strategic goals are before deploying, since cross-chain interoperability between xDAI and ETH mainnet is going to be a consideration.
Just confirmed the wire transfer from my bank, almost three weeks since I requested the rollover from my TradFi IRA. Funds should be on the exchange in an hour or two.
I managed to get a second tranche of funds onto an exchange yesterday, it was really good timing with the market dump yesterday. (Still no idea what that was about, maybe dollar strength?) I managed not to spend all of it, but bought a lot of BTC, some ETH, DOT, and put a lot into DAI and USDC. DAI will probably be going to Alchemix or Opolis, USDC will probably be going to wBTC and into the Bancor pool. I really wanted to get my hands on some SOL, but it’s at an ATH so I’ll probably wait for a pullback.
My second meeting of the day was with Alex from Set Protocol. We’ve been chatting for a few months. He gave me a grant to launch my first Set, which is how we launched $MUG, and I’ve been trying to help out with support in their Discord for a few weeks. They desperately need some updates to their documentation, so we talked about a plan and came up with a deal. I’ll work with him over the next three months to refresh their documentation, and I’ll get paid in ETH. It’s a perfect deal for me, a short-term limited engagement that should only take a few hours a day of my time. I can’t wait to get started.
We’ve been hosting office hours in the Hombrew Discord, it’s basically just me and a few others hanging out and chatting about things from 9-10PM. It’s a nice way to decompress and discus projects and whatever else is going on. I’m not sure whether we’re going to continue doing it every day, but it’s nice to be able to hang out with people and just shoot the breeze. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.
I’m actually sitting in the passenger seat of my car right now, parked at the park while the kids play. I got a late start this morning after watching half of The Matrix with Elder last night, and didn’t even bother signing on to work this AM other than sending a message on Teams. It’s a beautiful day, and I got invited to bring the kids out, so I’m basically blowing off work today.
Writing comes first now. Well, meditation comes first, and writing comes after. That’s basically the deal I’ve struck with myself, to keep myself disciplined. It’s creating a record, both for myself and public accountability. I suppose it’s going to be how I stay sane over this next phase in my career, or retirement or whatever else you want to call it. Hopefully it’ll keep me from making stupid decisions with large amounts of money. I’m playing for keeps, now, in a way that I hadn’t before, and it’s exciting and fearsome all at the same time. No one’s going to catch me if I fall.
Wrapping up work, updates on FEI, Coinbase, BasketDAO, Alchemix
I’ve wrapped up what is hopefully my last project at work. I have a few more open trouble tickets that I need to get done, but I should be mostly clear from here on out through June 1. I’m not aware of any open opportunity that my boss has that might give me substantial more work to do in the next 60 days, so I’m getting in the the mindset that I want to be in for my post-work phase.
My wife asks why I would want to quit, when I’m making a comfortable salary and basically working less than three hours a day. That’s just it, comfortable I told her. I really couldn’t explain it. I used to have a joke that I’d repeat often: I love my job, I just hate the work. It’s been backward for a long time, I love work, I just hate my job. My wife would counter that everyone does.
I’m probably picking the worst time to do this. The nightmare scenario right now is that the market tanks, my stablecoin farms have a black swan and next thing I know I’m going to be crawling back to work at the worst time. I’m hope I’m taking the right steps. I’m doing what I think is right, and I think I have a plan that will sustain my family for the future.
I started a writeup on the stablecoin yield tranching yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve done any writing outside of these daily morning blogs since I started writing my personal update, my euphemism for my resignation letter. I put down fifteen hundred words yesterday, and didn’t even get down half of what I wanted to say. Much of it is probably rambling and needs editing, it’s not like I’m Alexander Hamilton, drafting this stuff in my head before I start writing. We’ll pick it up later today and finish the draft. It’s going up as a page, instead of a blog post, which should make it easier to keep up with, since I’ll be updating it over the next couple months to track progress.
I saw a tweet that said the worst thing you could do right now is start a fund. It’s beyond stressful and gets really bad during a bear market. I think they’re probably right. Everyone thinks that they’re a genius during a bull market, and my hubris is my worst fear right now. I see it reflected in my mother’s expression when I told her that I that I was retiring. I have got to have a solid plan.
FEI seems to have imploded. I escaped any significant loss, I put two percent of my available IRA funds toward it, about $1200, knowing that it had a high risk of failure. I figured the upside on FEI was limited, but the upside TRIBE if they succeeded would be much higher. An asymmetric bet, as they call it. I’m still holding, I don’t have any hope of a quick turnaround on this one, but we’ll see what the team — and the community decides to do.
1 FEI = $0.136, @rleshner is down 80% from his bullish buying price. I think one takeaway is big names mean nothing. pic.twitter.com/xGiwKqUUON
The Coinbase ($COIN) IPO seems to be all over my feed. Their recent filings have come out and the speculation here is that it’s good for the crypto market in general. One it will legitimize the space, since the betting markets are putting it somewhere around $150B in valuation. I’m not going anywhere near this one, just watching my Voyager holdings in the event that I need to dump a part of my position. There’s also the hypothesis that a lot of Coinbase insiders are going to be dumping their shares on the market and putting the proceeds into Bitcoin, so I’m hopeful that it might kickstart the next phase upward.
BasketDAO ($BASK) is another project I don’t think I’ve mentioned here. I saw their TVL jump on DeFiLlama, they were offering LP mining for DPI tokens, so I went ahead and aped in. They basically redeemed the DPI for the underlying components and converted them to the yield bearing versions of the tokens, and call it BDPI. Now why didn’t I think of that? My BDPI automatically staked, and is still earning 300% APY via BASK tokens. There’s currently 800% APY on the BASK-ETH APY, even though the IL is fierce. For now, my game is figuring out whether the gas to claim and stake is worth the risk. But let me say also, the Sushiswap analytics page is beautiful.
I’m getting a better feel for all these games over on BSC, and put some funds into several pools, mainly to satisfy my urge to do something. Trading is ultimately a game of waiting, and all of the funds that I’m bringing over from my IRA could ultimately spell doom for me if I’m not careful. But these low-gas chains like BSC and xDAI ultimately give me a chance to test out various strategies on claiming and staking, so it’ll be interesting to see how they play out.
Finally, the most fascinating project to me right now is Alchemix. It’s caused some controversy among TradFi types, here’s the gist. You deposit funds, (DAI, for now) into their vault, and it’s put to use by their strategies, earning yield and boosts, &c… You can take up to 50% out of your staked capital in their arUSD, and sell it for dollars or whatever. You’re basically taking a pre-payment on the future yield, as you never have to pay it back. The yield generated by your deposit is used to pay back your debt. Of course the controversial part of this is the yields generated, but that’s not really the point here. If this works, long term, it is going to change the market significantly. They’re opening ETH and wBTC farms soon, and that will be a remarkable evolution in the space. Instead of staking BTC as collateral and taking a 9% loan with BlockFi if you need cash, you can stake BTC with Alchemix, take the cash for that house or business, and let the loan pay itself off.
Imagine the ramifications. Family fortunes could potentially be put to work this way. Instead of spending your ever-appreciating BTC on a house, you could lock it up for a period of time, get the fiat that you need, and later get back your appreciated BTC. Whether that would be a few months or something more akin to a fifteen or thirty year loan remains to be seen, but the ramifications are going to huge. If it works. I’ll probably take more time to look this over today after I do some more writing.
BSC degeneracy, BTC/ETH, and Carter Thomas returns
I spent more time yesterday messing around on BSC. I threw another 2 BNB across the bridge so I could go farm the highest APY pools on Beefy. I can’t bring myself to get involved with gambling projects, even if it is 3.4 quadrillion APY. I threw some funds at Blizzard.Money (BLZD-BNB), and Nerve.Fi, both in the NRV-BNB pool on Pancake and the NRV-BUSD. I don’t know what I expect to do with all these small positions, other than test the waters before I go and do something truly degenerative with my funds. Most of these projects are clones of each other for the most part. I can’t really tell the difference between them for the most part. I’m not sure whether I fear a rug as much as I do a IL at this point, but I wanted to get on here and get it out of my system for the most part.
I’ve got another block of funds that have made their way from my traditional IRA. Now I’m got to wait for an ACH transfer so before I can wire the money over to my exchange, it will almost double the amount I have available in my crypto wallet, and since I’m calculating my position size off of a two percent capital risk, I’ll be able to take larger position sizes. I’m still working off of a 40/40/20 BTC/ETH/DPI allocation. Half of my ETH position (out of current available funds) went into FLI, and that seems to be going well with ETH over $2100. I have half my allocation in DPI that went straight into BasketDAO, and I’ve put some low risk allocations into eRSDL, API3, and a FEI Genesis TRIBE preswap that I’m sitting on.
There’s so much going on right now, we’re going to see a ton of launches next week, so the 15th is going to be nuts. Cryptotwitter and the various Discord and Telegram groups are keeping me busy. Plus Elder is on spring break this week, so that’s shifting the dynamic around here a little bit. And I’m closing out projects at Zombie, LLC, doing about an hour of work in the AM to keep things moving along.
Bitcoin seems to have become a stablecoin the past week or two, and there’s a huge sense of tension on my networks. The general feeling is of pressure building up, that once the lid gets blown off $60k that we’re going to see a $10k daily candle or something. Rumors are circulating that Walmart is stacking, and there’s so much good news floating around that I’m amazed BTC has just been flatlining for the last several days. My personal opinion is that it’s just altcoins going crazy, with a lot of volatility. The altcoin market cap has gone up a significantly, I read it was due to more coins being added to CMC, so the dip in BTC dominance probably doesn’t mean what most observers thinks it means. On chain indicators are still very strong, so strong in fact that some people think we are very early in this bull cycle.
I still think ETH will outperform. The news coming out about EIP1556 and the ETH1<>Beacon chain merge is looking like ETH is going to melt faces. That said, I do have plans to take positions in more of these L1/L2s. I have positions in RUNE, AVAX, DOT, and ATOM which I want to expand and experiment with, and I’ve been procrastinating on getting SOL. (I had a trade position, but it got stopped out.) It is very hard to get access to most of these as a US citizen; I have to use a French VPN endpoint to get access to exchanges were they are located, and it’s sad that I don’t have access to some of the futures and perpetual swaps that FTX has on their international exchange. It’s sad really, but that’s where the money is.
I’ve got some positions that I need to check on this morning. I’m going to let the BSC pools sit for a few days, but BasketDAO has apparently migrated DPI to BDPI, so I need to check on that. Then it’s time to get the kiddos up and get ready to assume my position at my desk for business time.
One last personal note, I had an interview with the Lattice1 team yesterday about taking on their technical support manager role. It went well, they’re impressed with both my support background and knowledge of the Ethereum stack, and I think they have a great team and great product. I think the main question I have to answer for myself is whether I want to go straight back into full-time-employment after I’ve been building up my reFIREment in my head. I don’t think it’s a hell ya at this point for me right now, but I think once Missus goes back to work and Younger goes to Kindergarten it’ll be easier to manage. I’ve got other open opportunities as well, one with SetProtocol and another I might be able to leverage with a new startup team that’s launching. Still, nothing beats the dream off working for myself, starting my own company or organization. Homebrew is going to take some time to get going, and I know if I take a FTE roll that it’s probably never going to happen. There’s no rush right now, so I’m taking my time. I feel like I’m in a very good position in life, and I don’t need to do anything I don’t want to right now.
With that said, I was very pleased to have been alerted to this latest video from Carter Thomas. Carter did daily podcasts during the 2017/18 cycle, and my videos were my daily dose during those days. He quit producing content for a variety of reasons, but dropped this video last week. Its about ninety minutes long, and I watched the whole thing last night. It’s a huge dose of common sense that will help people survive this cycle, and I encourage everyone to watch it.
So we’ve been trying to figure out how to get MUG into the hands of more people. It’s not the best-performing NFT TokenSet out there, but without any liquidity besides myself and a few people we’ve distributed it to, I haven’t really had the drive to manage it or issue more tokens. I had a chat with a new friend of mine who manages the Layer 2 Index tokenset, and he told me how he’s been using Honeyswap on xDAI chain to provide liquidity for the LTI token. For weeks, I’ve been mulling over whether to put an LP on Uniswap, but gas fees have really been turning me off the idea. So I went ahead and put a MUG-DAI pair up on Honeyswap yesterday.
xDAI is much easier to get onto than BSC — no VPN needed — but I haven’t explored the space very much. I know about a couple projects over there, mainly Colony, which is a DAO as a service project that I’d looked at previously. Now that I’m starting to understand some of this cross-chain swapping and bridging, I’ve got a lot more exploring to do. I don’t get the sense that there’s as much scammy-ness going on xDAI like there is on BSC, but we’ll see where the opportunity is, and I’ll probably have to start taking a closer look at Matic or Polygon or whatever it’s called next.
There’s a lot of stuff going on with these other L1s right now. RUNE is really taking off, literally, they’re getting ready to do some big launch, and price action on their token is booming as well. I’m really frustrated with this one though, since I don’t have time to delve into it as much as I want. I bought a small amount of tokens some weeks ago, but then had to move them once Binance flagged my account as US-based. When they gave me 14-days to claim my funds, I wound up sending my RUNE over to TrustWallet. I didn’t realize it was a Binance Chain address. So I spent last night trying to move BNB from BSC to Binance CEX, now I’ve got to figure out how to swap it to the actual RUNE network using their bridge, and move my BNB back to BSC so that I can continue being a degen.
Speaking of which, I did wind up putting about $140 worth of COMOS-BNB into the Comos.Finance LP yesterday. To give you a sense of the amount of due diligence I did on this one, I was calling it COSMOS for for two days until someone pointed out that there’s no ‘s’ in the middle.
For about $800 worth of ETH one can can get on BSC and really go to town on some of these projects. It’s almost like going back in time six months or more to when ETH was $200 and gas was only 10 gwei. It’s quite refreshing, but probably even more Wild West than Ethereum right now. We’ll see how things play out over the next six months. Several projects I’ve seen are locking rewards or vesting them, which should slow down much of the dumps, but it also means that getting in a few weeks late might force you to watch your funds evaporate in slow motion, if things go south.
On a personal note, I’ve got two projects interviews today. It seems funny that I’m announcing my retirement from work and now opening up to the prospect of taking on another job. One’s short-term, and the other seems like a more long-term play. I don’t know how I feel about a long commitment right now, but we’ll see how it goes and who knows, maybe it’ll work out.
The A and B pools should take care of themselves for the rest of the month, but I’ll have to keep an eye on the C tranche. ForceDAO is liquidity mining (I got airdrop, also), the Ellipsis.Finance needs daily or weekly management to claim and vest rewards, and Integral is LP mining and hopefully actually launching soon. They’re supposed to be adding single-asset LP staking, and will hopefully go live with the actual trade module at some point very soon.
A Tweet turned me on to DeFiLlama yesterday, and looking at the TVL trends I noticed BasketDAO. 400% APY on DPI token, so I went ahead and aped in using my blockchainman.eth wallet, and, since I was planning on buying some DPI in my IRA wallet, I went ahead and purchased and staked that as well. They plan on building out an interest bearing DPI token for their first product, so that might be interesting.
I decided to put some IRA funds into Ellipsis. I went with LP staking, since the 3pool funds that I used for the stablecoin fund are only getting 100% APY and the LP tokens are an order of magnitude higher. I’m sure this can’t end well, but the EPS rewards vest over several weeks, and require one to take a 50% penalty to withdrawal early. On top of that, or after that, I should say, one can lock your EPS tokens for three months while earning 1000% APY. I’m sure none of this is going to end well, so I went with a very small allocation, risk wise. There doesn’t seem to be much activity in the actual swap pool itself, at all, so I don’t know what the chance of success will be. BSC is a mess of farm pools, it’s absolutely insane.
The Fei.Money Genesis event ended yesterday. There was a lot of discussion about it, since the launch went off with a billion dollars in TVL and ended so far off the peg. It’s currently at $0.97. I opted for the TRIBE preswap, and that didn’t go too well, so I’ll be holding on to see what happens. The mint bonus has increased to six percent, so it may get to the peg very soon. We shall see.
Happy Easter everyone! We’re hosting family in a few hours, so I’ve got to get a move on this morning. Enjoy!
