GM Digest #41

Gm with Valuable Alphas / Insights — Make Sure to DYOR. All of This is Not Financial Advice. Ape at Your Own Peril

Base Rapid Increase in TVL

• @BuildonBase TVL skyrocketed 30% overnight due to the launch of Aerodrome. Base TVL now stands at $254m, growing from $194m yesterday

• @MoonwellDeFi & @overnight_fi have both doubled their TVL to $16.4m & $16.0m respectively. @friendtech continues to slow down in TVL and DAU

Thoughts: Base trends shift from Shitcoin Run ($BALD) ➨ Early Defi ($BSWAP, $KRAV, $BOOST, etc) ➨ SocialFi (Friend Tech) ➨ Established Defi Project (Aerodrome). Aerodrome is going to kick-start the next wave of Defi Summer on Base, given the Velodrome team’s extensive experience and partnership integrations that they bring to Base. ****

Aerodrome is Now #1 Protocol on Base

• @aerodromefi has started its emissions for the First Epoch today. TVL is currently at $58m, making Aerodrome the #1 DEX and Largest Protocol on @BuildonBase

• $AERO liquidity was recently seeded. PA is in discovery mode and is slowly climbing pretty nicely. The total FDV is $200m which could seem high but bear in mind that 90% is locked in the form of veAERO and less than 10% is in the form of liquid $AERO

• Very Juicy yields on Stable Pairs at the moment 100-300% APR this Epoch — Conservative play if you wanna get exposure to Aerodrome without speculating on $AERO

➥ $AERO CA: 0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 | Swap Directly on AerodromeFi

Thoughts: Even though the FDV is around $180-$200m, currently only 2% is liquid $AERO in the form of liquidity pool. MCap should hover around $3.6m - $4.0m, making $AERO a pretty undervalued coin right now (MCap/TVL <1/10th)

If you’re concerned about the early epoch emissions, stablecoin pools are offering between 60-300% APR in the current epoch

I’ve started to DCA in — starting at $0.4, will likely buy more at $0.34 & $0.30 if it keeps on falling. There’s a good chance $AERO 2-3x in the next week due to its flywheel

gBOT OTC Gone Wrong

• @GBOTofficial price declined 99% overnight. Saul Goodman has stated in @GMDProtocol Discord that he was doing an OTC deal and a scammer was able to get his hands on a lot of gBOT and was dumping on market. More detailed announcement will be made soon by the team

• Snapshots were taken before the dump (at $80 price) and new $GBOT & $esGBOT were airdropped to snapshotted holders a few hours after the ordeal

• New gBOT price is currently trading at $70 — since Perp TG bot product is out. This could be a good dip-buying opportunity (Buy the FUD kind of play)

• Based on the initial statement, I still don’t get why he’s doing another OTC since the team just did Private Sale & Public Sale Rounds

Thoughts: Not a good short-term play due to the mishap, GMD Ecosystem coins are likely going to take a hit because of this. Bad timing since the TG Perp Bot Beta recently launched. Will just keep on monitoring this as I still have a stack of esBOT from Presale stuck in there.

Wombat Goes Cross-Chain

• @WombatExchange Cross-Chain StableSwap Beta will go live on Sep 6

• Users will be able to efficiently swap their stables across Arbitrum, BNB, Ethereum with optimal swap rates. Wombat leverages Wormhole’s established cross-chain security and decentralization

Thoughts: Protocols are starting to integrate with Wormhole Cross-Chain Tech Stack. Since the slow decline of Curve, we could likely see Wombat’s Efficient StableSwap gain traction if it continues to expand across chains ➨ Reminder that Magpie $MGP is the best play for this (Wombat Governance Aggregator + Value-accrual from Magpie Eco Coins)

SharesFi Official Launch

• @SharesFinance official launch is today (Aug 31). SharesFi launched its beta a few weeks ago with $SHARES token that everyone could benefit from not just top creators, the team, and VCs

• $SHARES price skyrocketed during the first week of Friend Tech boom, dumped after the week due to the decline of FT hype. $SHARES price is currently climbing back up 30% from yesterday due to the anticipation of Official Launch

Thoughts: FT brought the hype of SocialFi and new ways for creators & their audiences to interact and make money. I personally am bullish on FT’s ability to seamlessly integrate with Twitter (one of the biggest crypto community social network) but at the current development pace, we might see second and third movers like SharesFi take in FT market shares. I’m not gonna be actively investing in this sub-sector based on my own thesis (Curious to learn what my thesis are? — Probably gonna share this later)

Starknet Campaign Paused

• The Quantum Leap free NFT mint campaign coordinated by the whole @Starknet ecosystem was paused after users rushed to join for potential airdrop

• Despite the bear market, $OP and $ARB airdrops proved how lucrative airdrop farming can be and this campaign proved that when the incentives are high enough, people will go through the extra steps like downloading a new wallet to participate in the ecosystem

• This also highlights the technical difficulties involved with launching and running a new blockchain. Starknet is one of the leading ZK-rollup L2 with $32M in TVL

Thoughts: Airdrop farmers are arguably the most active users on DeFi and some campaigns have seen over 100k+ participants. Starknet ecosystem’s current activity is mainly driven by airdrop farmers. It’s gonna be a while before we see the Starknet boom given the chain is Non-EVM — Users are required to have Argent or Braavos Wallet to interact with the Dapps. Users can’t use Metamask to integrate with Starknet yet, seamless onboarding is just not there at the moment.

NFTFi

• NFTFi has completed one of the first “payday loans” in DeFi where a user borrowed 8k $USDC against his 15k $USDC future income (tokenized via @Sablier) for 5% APR

• Financial NFTs like tokenized payroll and token vesting could catch on and become the norm next cycle as they bring tangible utility, transparency, and efficiency to the users. This form of NFTs could significantly contribute to the adoption of RWA

• @NFTfi is a borrower-friendly NFT lending protocol with 0% origination fee

Thoughts: Financial NFT is a new innovation in the space that hasn’t gained much adoption. We could see many protocols leverage this tech and create new use cases that are not currently available in TradFi. Tokenized payday loan is a good example of what is achievable: it is often a captive market and lenders usually charge over 20% APR since it is difficult for them to repossess the collateral. Tokenized payroll and NFTFi reduce the origination and repossession cost and bring real-time transparency to both parties.

Uniswap Win

• Uniswap Labs and Paradigm won a class action lawsuit accusing the developers and investors of violating securities laws by allowing scam tokens to be traded on the platform

• Judge ruled that Uniswap was not liable for the actions of token issuers and the same judge is set to take on the Coinbase case as well

• Uniswap Labs is one of the biggest contributors to DeFi and this case set a very important precedence for the industry as majority of DAOs have a similar set up to Uniswap

Thoughts: A huge win for the industry and DAOs who have a very similar setup to Uniswap & Uniswap Labs where the team set up another entity and contribute to the protocols through the new entity. This is a second big win in court this week for crypto and the US regulatory environment looks much more promising than earlier this year.

ZERO x Uniswap

• @zero_zkevm submitted a partnership proposal to Uniswap to launch a friendly fork of Uniswap V3 on @0xPolygonDeFi

• Protocol would give 10% of its token to Uniswap and in return utilize their backend infrastructure and receive access to ecosystem-funded tooling

• Polygon zkEVM has been relatively quiet and Polygon POS’s activities is still quite low. Not a lot of alpha at the moment but we are closely monitoring their ecosystem

Thoughts: Zero got started by the team behind Retro Finance on Polygon POS. Retro is a friendly fork of Thena that launched in June 2023 and hit ATH TVL of $15M. They are taking a different approach than most protocols forking Uniswap and how UNI holders vote might shape how the protocol plans to expand into new chains. Personally not touching this given my bad experience participating in Satin Exchange, Retro’s previous endeavors (Solidly Fork) that miserably failed its launch on Polygon (I had really high hopes on that too lol)

Curve is Live on Base

• Launched on Base with stable (USDbC/axlUSDC/crvUSD), LST (eth/cbETH) and tricrypto pools (crvUSD/tBTC/ETH)

• Low slippage on stablecoin swaps is key to the growth of any new networks and having a credible OG protocol like Curve on Base should boost the overall liquidity of the network

• @CurveFinance is one of the largest DEXs with $2.4b in TVL focused on stablecoin trading

Thoughts: Large DeFi protocols are paying attention to Base and Coinbase’s 56m users. Interesting to note that Curve chose crvUSD stable pool and not their 3pool (DAI/USDC/USDT) which highlights their commitment to market and push their new decentralized stablecoin.

Degen Section

• $AERO is my play for today. I’m purely speculating on $AERO, holding it, and taking profits once it hits 1.5x, 2x, and 3x gainz. Bullish on this seeing how Velodrome team created the First Successful Solidly Fork on Optimism, took the #1 DEX Spot in term of Volume & TVL, while maintaining good level of TVL and solid $VELO price action. Also gonna be moving some of my stables from other chains to Aerodrome, to farm the stable pairs rewards

• Lendle $LEND (The First Money Market on Mantle) will launch today, raising up to ~$500k Hard Cap. The sale will be structured as fixed price of $0.1 until $300k Soft Cap is reached. Afterwards, it’ll be Price Discovery up until ~$500k Hard Cap. Won’t be participating in this sale given how high the valuation is

⇢ Min: MCap $300k | FDV $10m

⇢ Max: MCap $500k | FDV $16.67m

• $LBR v2 is today (Aug 31). Starting to see “sell-the-news” price action, won’t likely speculate on this today

• $DMT +25% from yesterday’s dip. Congrats to those who bought, still at a good price to continue accumulating

• BB BookieBot did a textbook +70% from their dip yesterday — BB has accumulated more than 77e in revenue share wallet. 80% of the Rev will be split with token holders, 10% with Betting Volume. Wait for retracement to around $3 before you get in (if you’re thinking of aping)

• $LINQ is dying and LINQ forks like $LIM is dead. I’m holding my stacks for the fun of it (Already took my principal off early when it 2x’ed)

• Still holding $HiPVP, gonna be holding this until $5m & $10m MCap where I start taking some profits

*Reminder to Size Your Entry for Degen Plays and Take Your Principal Out (Take Profits) Whenever You Hit Your Target*