Crypto exposure in equities markets

Introduction to cryptoassets for traditional investors

Sometime in the past few weeks, after Microstrategy and Square announced that they were holding $BTC as a treasury asset, someone put together BitcoinTreasuries.com as a way to track other public and private companies that have exposure.

Earlier today I checked the list and noticed a new name on the list, Bit Digital ($BTBT), which lead to a conversation on Twitter which I felt needed explanation beyond the two hundred and eighty character limit. So this post is squarely aimed at traditional equities investors who are trying to understand crypto and the industries around it.

Getting started

First off, if you want to understand Bitcoin, I recommend The Bitcoin Standard (affilliate link). I’m not the biggest fan of the author, but the book does a good job of explaining things despite the tone. The Nakamoto Institute has a crash-course as well that is probably handy, although I haven’t read the entire collection.

Other resources that I’ve found helpful in the past includes: Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond and the HashPower series by Invest Like The Best’s Patrick Oshaughnessy. Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast is a great source of current news about what’s going on in the space. And one of the best minds in the space is Andreas Anotonopolis, who has written numerous books on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The current recommendation that I would give to investors coming into the space is to convert between one and five percent of your current net worth directly in BTC. Dollar cost averaging is perhaps the best strategy to use instead of a lump purchase, due to bitcoin’s volatility. Coinbase and Gemini are two fiat on-ramps that I recommend, but there are more springing up all over the place, RobinHood, Square, and now Paypal. If you plan on investing more than a couple hundred dollars, however, you’ll want to invest in a hardware wallet and use an on-ramp that will let you withdraw your coins to your own wallet. There’s a lot to cover here, more than I have time for today in this post.

In general, most OG crypto people follow the maxim “not your keys, not your coins”. The entire premise around bitcoin is that of self-sovereignty, and entrusting your funds to a custodial entity, such as onramps or exchanges, goes against this ethos. That said, there are places where it can’t be avoided.

Crypto exposure in equity markets

While I have been building up my crypto positions over the past few years, I also have a larger IRA that I’ve carried over from 401Ks accumulated over two decades in traditional corporate jobs. (I cashed out my traditional brokerage account for BTC last cycle.) So I’ve spent the last couple months trying to find exposure to crypto markets, where I can take advantage of tax deductible deposits and tax-free capital gains.

Grayscale

The most direct exposure to crypto in the equities space for US investors is via Grayscale Investment’s Digital Trusts, mainly the Bitcoin ($GBTC) and Ethereum ($ETHE), and to a lesser extent, the Digital Large Cap fund ($GDLC), which is a basket of BTC, ETHE, and a couple other alts. I do not recommend the Ethereum Classic trust ($ETCG), and the other single-asset funds are not available through standard broker accounts yet.

Until there is a straight bitcoin-derived ETF, which may be a long way off, Grayscale is probably the best bet for exposure to Bitcoin. There are a few things to keep in mind though. Grayscale operates with a two percent annual fee, and the bitcoin per share of GBTC is currently at 0.00095320, according to their website. However, the Grayscale vehicles trade at a premium to the underlying value of the BTC in the trust. The GBTC premium is currently at twenty percent, and the ETHE one is at fifty, although this is near an all time low.

Other equities

Let’s take at the companies listed on the BitcoinTreasuries page. I’ll mention the ones that I have positions in: RIOT, HIVE Blockchain (HIVE/HVBTF), MGTI, and Voyager (VYGR/VYGVF). I also have two other positions not on the treasuries list, Marathon ($MARA) and DPW Holdings ($DPW), that have exposure to BTC as well.

A number of them are involved in mining activities, so let’s break that down.

Bitcoin is the world’s first truly scarce asset. The mining process, as it’s called, is actually a competition to see who can win a mathematical contest to mine a new block, and win the block subsidy, (currently 6.25 BTC) as well as the transaction fees. There are a couple analogies that one can use to describe this, but I like to use coin flips.

Imagine that you and I are in a contest to see who can flip ten coins in a row and have them all come up heads. It may take the two of us a while to do that, but as more people join our game, the amount of time before someone ‘wins’ will decrease. This is essentially what happens with bitcoin, but in this case the game is a contest to perform a cryptographic hash function using the last block and a random nonce as inputs. In this case the winner is the one that can generate a hash with a sufficient number of zeros in the front. This process is known as proof of work (PoW).

Another critical component of the bitcoin algorithm that makes it work is the difficulty adjustment. This adjustment, built into the bitcoin PoW protocol, is triggered every 2016 blocks, or about every two weeks. It changes up or down to keep bitcoin’s blocks coming every ten minutes on average. As more miners enter the blockchain network, this adjustment ramps up. As you can imagine, this leads to a race for hashpower, as manufacturers put out faster, more power-efficient hardware to mine faster.

So when someone asks what the “intrinsic value” of bitcoin is, I usually point them to the capital cost of the hardware securing the network, as well as the cost of electricity used to run those machines. There’s a lot more detail to go into about the mining process, especially with regard to the stock to flow model and halvening process, for example, but that will have to wait for another post. What I will mention is that we just had the second largest difficulty adjustment in history, as a number of Chinese mining companies shut down their equipment. Most of them were taking advantage of low-cost hydroelectric power during the recent rainy season, and are relocating due to higher prices. The takeaway here is that it will mean better returns for others who are still mining on the network.

One last note about mining companies. There are number of cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin that can be mined. There are forks of bitcoin that can be mined using the same specialized ASICs, although I recommend staying away from them, and there are other currencies that use traditional graphics cards like those used for video games, called GPUs. I mention this because there have been ASIC mining operations that focused on non-bitcoin during the last bear cycle that weren’t able to stay afloat.

Generally speaking, I don’t recommend exposure to any of these mining companies unless you’re very familiar with the space, and/or as is my case, looking to take a gamble that one could see an outside return during a BTC bull run. Caveat emptor.

Other cryptocurrencies

As I alluded to a moment ago, anyone can take the Bitcoin source code, modify it, and create a new bitcoin fork. There have been many attempts over the years, and I won’t name them. I generally stay away, and agree with most bitcoin maximalists that the original BTC is the best store of value out there. That said, there are other blockchain projects out there that have different aims and use cases. The only one that I’ll mention is Ethereum, which is a smart contract platform, and allows one to program applications on the blockchain and have them run in a decentralized, autonomous way. It’s been around for several years, and is the king of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space, which is generating huge interest amongst developers and finance types. It’s the main focus of my activities right now.

There is a lot going on with Ethereum right now, so I recommend caution before taking a position in it, at least until you understand the landscape. I advise even greater caution with other cryptocurrencies, or altcoins. I’ve been in the space since 2014, and have spent hundreds of hours researching various projects, reading white papers, and the number of scams, hacks, contract failures and rug pulls that I’ve seen in this short time is staggering.

Fiat onramps like Coinbase, Gemini, and others have been adding other cryptoassets to their platforms over recent years, mainly cause the demand is there, but anyone who thinks that any of these tokens will see price appreciation anything like bitcoin over the last four years are probably going to be in for a rude awakening. Are double digit gains possible? Sure, but I am not betting anything other than a small stake, especially if we’re on the cusp of a BTC moon run.

A note about trading pairs: a few years ago, your owly onramp into cryptoassets from fiat was into bitcoin, which was then traded for other altcoins. As a result, most traders tracked their performance by the BTC price. The rationale here being that if you lost value in BTC terms you would have been better off not trading. As fiat on-ramp have made it possible to go directly from USD to other tokens, some have stopped this practice, although I still stick to it. More recent trading and market making platforms have introduced swap mechanisms which make it possible to go from one token to virtually any other, performing whatever third or nth level conversions necessary in the background. Since my long term goal is to accumulate BTC, not USD, I still track all trades via the BTC pair.

Stablecoins and Tokenization

Another trend that I think is worth mentioning is that of stablecoins and tokenization of hard assets. Basically, fintech companies have figured out that they can use a type of Ethereum asset called an ERC20 token as a digital dollar, and transmit these tokens over Ethereum as an alternative to the traditional fiat settlement system in traditional finance. Ethereum transactions settle in as little as twelve seconds, compared to ten minutes for bitcoin, and days for banks. These tokens go by the name Tether, USDC, DAI, or GUSD, and are supposedly backed by physical reserves of the various issuers. There is a lot going on in this space, I recommend you checkout The Crypto-Dollar Surge and the American Opportunity if you are interested in more.

Lastly, I wanted to mention asset tokenization, cause it will likely be huge in the coming years. Stablecoins are basically tokenized dollars, and we’re already seeing companies tokenize traditional equities on blockchains, and real estate is right around the corner. I bring this up cause I was asked directly about Vemanti Group’s plan to offer a gold-backed crypto. I’ll only speak in general terms, since I’m not familiar with Vemanti. I have seen a host of gold-backed crypto projects in my day, and I’ve got a general unease about the concept.

While there’s generally nothing wrong with gold-backed crypto per se, the whole idea as bitcoin as an alternative to gold makes me question the motivation behind such aims. The whole point of bitcoin as an alternative to gold as a store of value has to deal with gold’s difficulty to transport, as well as seizure risk. It seems like a step backward to me.

The main risk here that I see is one of custodial risk. Bitcoin, Ethereum and blockchain technology as a whole are decentralized projects, and one’s which allow trustless interactions between adversaries. When you start talking about asset tokenization, you’re putting trust in a third party. Tether for example, has been highly controversial because of accusations that they print more Tether than they actually have reserves for.

Color me skeptical about gold-backed crypto projects. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it in general, but for the most part, I think that the more people understand how bitcoin works, the less interest they’ll have in gold in general. Again, I do think there is a huge opportunity in tokenization of assets, and I’m looking forward to see how this plays out in the future.

TL;DR:

To sum up, I hope this serves to answer some questions traditional asset investors have about the crypto space. I truly think it’s the greatest opportunity of my lifetime, and that we’re on the cusp of widespread adoption by retail, institutional and sovereign investors that will be unlike we’ve seen. The tech is moving super fast, and truly understanding Bitcoin requires a fundamental shift in thinking about money and economics, especially scarcity.

Again, the best exposure is direct exposure to BTC, preferably in self-custody, but getting started with an institutional custodian while you figure that out is ok. It’s how most people start. There are a number of new instruments popping up for retirement or institutional accounts that we didn’t cover, Grayscale is probably the best option out there for those getting started.

Once you understand the technology, good luck to you, cause I don’t know anyone that has invested the time to make it that far that has ever gone back. It’s a whole new world. Please do your own research before you make any significant investments.

Hopefully this helps! If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment.

Getting older

I feel like I got hit by a bus.

I spent nearly all day yesterday ripping up my back patio deck and laying down new boards. My breaker bar was too short, so I started using the other deck boards as levers, popping them up one at a time. Then I had to clean the old screws up. I tried knocking them back and forth with the break bar, like a golf club, then went back on my butt and popped them off with a hammer and pry bar. Then came time to lay the new ones down.

I only had one good battery for my drill, so it took me three sessions to get it done. I took a break to cook lunch and watch a documentary about Space X, and a second one to balance the house accounts and do some work on my trade planning. Then a last session laying boards.

By that time, Missus was feeling unwell and was in bed, I still had to cut the grass. I threw a meatloaf in the oven, took a much-needed shower, and spent the rest of the evening battling with the girls to get them ready for bed and sleep. I went to bed at the normal time and slept like a tank.

I woke up this morning aching everywhere. I’m not sure the last time I worked so hard.

We’ve got a small get-together for Elder’s “Better Late Than Never” birthday celebration, but I am already beat. I just want to relax.


I opened a position in PolkaDot yesterday

I don’t really have a target price on this one. The Bittrex listing spiked pretty high, so I set the OCO orders just in case.

I’m really interested in this project. There’s a lot of activity, and it seems interesting from a development standpoint. I signed up for the Substrate Developer Conference later this month, and I’m really looking forward to checking it out.

I still remain very bullish on Ethereum as well. There’s a EthOnline hackathon going on this month and I’m going to be watching the talks there as well. I’m taking a break from the Ethernaut challenges though right now as I’m reading through the Rust book before I take a dive into Substrate.

I haven’t been doing much programming lately. I’ve been mucking about with spreadsheets, still trying to refine my trade planning. I want something that will let me plan out my trade and position sizing using the Two Percent Rule, and track the performance of open and closed orders. Trying to do this on a spreadsheet is proving difficult, but I’m picking some tricks up from others that I’m incorporating.

One thing I did figure out is that I can use the symbol as a currency indicator in Google sheets. I also started listing everything in Satoshis instead of as a fraction of a bitcoin. Obviously it doesn’t affect the math in the sheet, but it seems to have a bit of a psychological effect, seeing a price represented as ₿63,000 instead of 0.0006300.

Technically I should probably represent sats as s₿ or something to differentiate. There’s been discussion in the past about creating a Satoshi symbol, but people have pointed out that there already is one: $! This is of course the endgame for Bitcoin, the day when one sat is worth one dollar.

Blood in the streets

Markets continued to tank today. So, we learn.

Seems like everything was in the red today. I didn’t take a lot of time looking at the markets today, but it seems that everything was down significantly. $BTC broke below $10K, and took everything with it, it seems.

The losses that got stopped out in the last week or two, like $BAT and $CVC, were actually good in that they preserved some capital. And since I only deployed two percent on the other orders I placed, I’ve managed to avoid taking losses on $ZEN and $SOL. I’m still waiting for my COSMOS/$ATOM order to hit, and if Aave’s $LEND token has another flat day I may pick up some of that as well when it hits a nine on the TD Sequential.

I’m also keeping an eye on the IDEX-ETH price. If it spikes I may trade some; I’m still open to the possibility of providing liquidity on Uniswap. We’ll see.

I read a lot of Mastering Ethereum. The cryptography chapter managed to put me back to sleep this morning, but I’m actually getting to the smart contract part and am looking forward to trying my hand at Ethernaut right after I get done with this. I’m really looking forward to writing some programs to watch what happens with these liquidity pools.

Should be fun.

Liquidity

Spent some time today delving into Uniswap. Here’s a couple of posts that have some good information:

Understanding Uniswap Returns

An Introduction to Automated Market Makers

I had a bit of a flash this morning that I should probably start exiting my IDEX position into ETH, specifically the yETH pool, but it turns out that Yearn has halted deposits on the pool. I’m glad i got my little test deposits in when I did.

Still, I was looking at the best way to exchange my tokens. On IDEX, obviously, but I have never actually used them since they implemented accounts, so I can’t trade there as of now. Binance has trade pairs to BTC, but that would involve another trade. Then of course, there’s Uniswap, so I took a look and found an IDEX-ETH trading pool.

The liquidity here is not very impressive. And I saw an opportunity for me to provide some, although I still don’t understand how the assets in the pool are being staked together. I would assume that the pool would need to be 1:1 in value between the pairs, but it actually looks to be about 1:2, as far as the USD value of IDEX-ETH. And I’m not going to put any more capital at risk until I understand what this “divergence loss” is and how I can keep from being affected by it.

I also spent some time looking for arbitrage opportunities. There was a bit of a price divergence between the IDEX exchange price and the Uniswap price, but the liquidity is so low that trying to take a large order would eat the price divergence back to par, and dealing with low amounts would have caused any profits to have been eaten up by gas fees.

So for now, I’ll take no action while I wait for a bit of a price recovery on IDEX and explore other opportunities. I’ve given up trying to get the Monero blockchain running locally, and have it syncing in a cloud server. What was taking over a week with my SATA stripe array looks like it’ll take a few hours on cloud.

Other than that, I’ll be working through Mastering Ethereum, trying to understand these smart contracts, and hopefully figure out how these smart contracts work, how to design my own, and how to build programs to interact with them.

Black Thursday

Today was a good day, unless you count what happened in the markets.

This morning actually started out pretty good. My four-year old slept in her bed for the first time ever, and both my wife and I had the best night’s sleep in a long time. Everything was pretty calm around here and I managed to get a lot done.

Bitcoin took a huge dump today, but so did most of my equities positions as well. I was actually pretty calm about it, as I had some stops trigger over the last couple days, so I’ve got my bigger positions protected. I even picked up some more Grayscale Ethereum Trust, $ETHE, as the premium held, and DeFi isn’t going away anytime soon. I was actually pretty calm about it. Staircase up, elevator down.

I had a couple stops set on $ICX and $LISK from last week, it looks like both of them triggered, but neither of my recent buys hit my stops, so that’s good. I picked up some $ALGO today as well, and Cosmos, $ATOM, just hit a nine on the TD Sequential, so I’m probably going to market buy some of that as soon as I get done writing.

I did spend some time fretting about my USDC holdings which are currently just sitting in my wallet. I’m half tempted to dump them in Yearn, but with the gas costs I’m probably just better off dumping it back in BlockFi. I am however, at total risk of becoming a degen and dumping my entire ETH holdings in the new yETH vault, with it’s shiny 99% APR. Thankfully I missed the withdrawal window to get my funds out of BlockFi until Tuesday at the earliest. Waiting is probably a good thing right now, so I’ll do nothing.

I spent some time reading over the Ethereum yellow paper today, and I plan on spending the rest of the evening Mastering Ethereum as it were. I want to be able to read these contracts and understand exactly what they’re doing before I go and do anything stupid.

And I’m really feeling the urge to do something stupid. I got a notification from my student loan issuer yesterday. The debt forgiveness has been extended until January 2021, so I don’t have any debt or interest to worry about till then. But I have an extra $600 a month that will be coming due then, and that is going to be a real big problem for me unless I take another job — or choose one of the other payment plans. The possibility of raking in some of that sweet, sweet, yield farming money is looking really, really good right now. If I was willing to dump all of my BTC into ETH and stake it, I could pretty much retire right now.

I know it won’t last for long, and I would rue the day I was born if I did something like that and lost everything to something like a contract failure or exit scam. I’m taking it real easy right now, and trying not to get caught up in some stupidity.

At least for now.

Slow day

Markets were down all day, so today was a chance to catch a breather.

So the Yearn.Finance ETH vault went live earlier today, and I managed to stake a small position plus another twenty dollars in gas fees. Apparently they’re depositing the funds in Maker, using it as collateral for a DAI loan, then depositing that on Curve, earning CRV tokens, selling those which goes back to the ETH pool.

I’m comfortable with these little 2% experiments and consider it as a sort of tution. Unchained covered why DEXs are taking off in this latest episode, and they really break things down quite well. It’s worth a listen.

I’ll admit I didn’t get a lot done today, I stayed up too late last night and got woken up too early by the kids. They were quite a handful today and it was tough trying to get some work done while nursing the lack of sleep.

About the only thing I did do was re-opened a position in $ZRX.

This isn’t ideal, considering that I just stopped out this position less than a week ago, but I want to explore picking up positions on the TD #9, before it closes. I’m still trying to flesh out the “rules” about how I’m going to set stops on these positions. Damn Binance and the lack of decent trailing mechanisms. I’ve got a lot of work to do to code these things up.

Using my Google Sheet trade calculators has become very cumbersome given that the CryptoFinance module that I had been using for price feeds no longer works. I had built custom API lookup scripts for some of the smaller markets in my mining portfolio, but it’s just too cumbersome keeping those together between various sheets. So I think the time is nigh to convert those over to some sort of Python program, maybe with a web front end.

I’m not sure how much work that’s going to be, of course.

All of this DeFi madness did get me to pick up Mastering Ethereum, which I started reading through today. Things seem to have come quite a ways since I tried experimenting with things a while back, now they have a online IDE that lets you compile, deploy and test smart contracts on a local JS node. It’s pretty handy, and the whole thing is pretty damn handy.

Market updates

September is starting off with a bang.

$BTC was up to $11.9k this morning and has been edging on either side of $12k all day, but most of my attention was on ETH and DeFi tokens. I entered positions in Horizon ($ZEN) and Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust ($ETHE).

DPW Holdings

I started a value averaging protol with DPW Holdings ($DPW) back in June of last year. I believe they were on a list I pulled together for autonomous or aerial vehicles or something and is one of those stock pics that I threw a minimal amount of capital at without too much thought. Within a week they went from a dollar to six, and I thought I was a damn genius. It fell right back down, thankfully I sold some during this and a subsequent spike in mid-July. The protocol ended early last month, and my position is a bit underwater, but it’s less than half a percent of my total portfolio.

DPW Holdings

I set a contingent order to set a trailing stop should the price exceed five dollars. It’s my first time doing this with my brokerage, but I think I’m going to be putting them to use in the future.

Horizen

Horizen came up in my notes yesterday while I was feeding off of CryptoPanic. I was looking a running a node, actually, but discounted the one percent returns on the “Secure” node as weak, while the capital required for the 14% APR “Super” nodes as too steep. And mining the coins seemed completely out of the question as well. Still, the ticker price was trending as a nine on the TD Sequential for most of the day, so I broke out my trade calculator and took out a two percent position.

Horizen ($ZEN) chart

The price recovered after my order, so the nine actually turned into a one by close, so that might actually make a good strategy. My stop is set at the last entry signal, and I’ll raise the stop if it hits the exit target.

Grayscale Ethereum Trust

I’ve been heavily invested in Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust ($GBTC) for at least a year or more, and right now it makes up about a fifth of the holdings in my managed IRA. And while I hold a special place in my heart for Ethereum, I’ve refrained from participating in Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust ($ETHE), mainly due to the insane premiums that have been attached to it since it was made available through my brokerage.

Since all the madness in DeFi and yield farming has taken off, ETH has become extremely lucrative, jumping to the top of the mining calculators over the past couple days. I switched my rig over last weekend, and at last check I’m making close to three times mining revenue than I was six months ago. And while the price of ETH has risen four times since last March’s lows, ETHE’s premium over NAV (the ratio between actual assets and number of shares,) is actually at the lowest level in a year.

The ETHE premium (ETHE/ETHUSD/NAV; NAV = 0.0934346 ETHE/ETHE) on the candlesticks. ETHE (falling) in blue, while ETH (rising) in red.

To me this seems like the best time to enter into an ETHE position. There’s not a lot of chatter about it on Twitter, but I did find the following thread which thinks that the premium could go even lower, and the price down to $40. Given what’s happening in DeFi right now, I don’t think it’s likely, especially given that price computes below NAV, but I set a stink bid regardless and opened a small position (0.5% capital) before the end of the day. Taking these nominal positions relieves my FOMO and gives me some breathing room.

It’s just crazy to think that just back in June, ETHE was $220, ETH was $240, and now ETHE is $60 and $ETH is $470. I’ll scale in from here and keep an eye on the premium. The closer things go to NAV, the better a deal we’ve got here.

Evening update

Today was supposed to be my self-designated RDO, or regular day off from work, something I’m experimenting right now as a way to reclaim some of my time so that I can work on personal projects. I did wind up doing a fair amount of reactive work for my day job, but got a surprising amount done still.

Of course I was focused on money: activities in the equities markets, crypto, and trying to make sense of what the hell is going on in DeFi right now, which is just a bit mind boggling.

I did finally say goodbye to my Basecamp account. As much as I like the product, the monthly fee of a hundred dollars is just too much for me when I don’t have any active projects going on. I think I can do most of what I need there in Notion, anyways.

Of course I rewarded myself by starting a TradingView trial. After god knows how many years I’ve been using that, and I’ll never have to see a stinking nag screen or ad again. Hallelujah.

I caught some nice profits off of Materialize ($MTLS) earlier this week after placing a trailing stop on them after they hit a nine on the TD sequential. It got pulled up with a spike on Wednesday I pocketed a nice one hundred percent gain. I’ve had a value averaging protocol in place on this one for more than three months now, and reset the position to start accumulating again while I watch and see if the TD generates a buy signal.

Materialize ($MTLS). Value average accumulation period in white box.

I’m not seeing any good entries in the crypto markets right now. Cardano (ADA) looks like it might be setting up for a buy zone. It seems to be at the support formed by the June buy setup. I would probably size my position here to stop just under the 200-day MA.

Cardano ($ADA) chart

Tezos ($XTZ) seems to be a bit of a mess, but might be worth a look. It looks like it takes 1000 XTZ to stake, which is a bit much for me to accumulate, so I’ll keep this one on the back burner at the moment.

Tezos ($XTZ chart)

The topics of staking came up in conversation with an associate today. My IDEX holdings are maintaining for right now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the release of IDEX 2.0 in the coming weeks. I don’t know whether that will be a “sell the news” type of event or not, but I’m hoping I’ll have enough of a stake to operate a Tier 2 node when the specs are released. Still no word on what that’s going to look like. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be getting double the staking rewards every two weeks.

Perhaps the biggest decision right now is whether to accumulate more Ethereum in advance of the planned change to poof of stake. 32 ETH seems to be the magic number needed to create my own money-printing machine. That’s going to require a substantial investment, but will it be worth it? I’m guessing yes.

I was also exploring the possibility of running a ChainLink node. Interestingly, it doesn’t actually require staking LINK, although ETH is needed. The hardware requirements are pretty steep though, requiring 16GB of RAM. Running one in AWS isn’t going to be cheap, but if LINK continues to perform, it may be worth it also.

And speaking of LINK, half of my original ICO proceeds are now officially locked up in a Yearn Vault. I may have been overzealous, cause I still don’t understand fully how it works or is paid out. So far it has cost me a bit of gas to purchase Aave’s aLINK and deposit it in the Yearn vault, not to mention the cost I’ll incur to pull it out. For now I can just wait and see what happens, and watch to see if any more buying opportunities arise. The price has really pulled so far ahead of the moving average that I would expect it to consolidate or pull back for a while. Given how much ChainLink has been up to, though, there’s really no telling how far up this is going to go. I just can’t see selling any of this right now.

And I still won’t be buying anything yet, until I get my trade plan program up and running. I haven’t looked at it in a year, and who knows what I was doing last time I worked on it. I’m almost scared. I’ve got a few more things I want to do with my BEAM converter before I change gears to work on it, so hopefully we’ll have several more weeks of opportunity before things start to take off.