GM Digest #51
Gm with Valuable Alphas / Insights — Make Sure to DYOR. All of This is Not Financial Advice. Ape at Your Own Peril
Vitalik Hack
• @VitalikButerin Twitter account was hacked which resulted in over $691,000 drained from users’ wallets
• The hacker shared a malicious link to a “free commemorative NFTs” site, tricking victim to connect their wallets, before ultimately stealing all their funds
Thoughts: Avoid blatant “Token Airdrop” & “Free NFT Mint” links at all costs. Besides Vitalik’s hacked account, we’re starting to see more NFT & Token scam ads daily since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Practice digital hygiene by not clicking sussy links
Luxury Brands Use Blockchain
• Loro Piano, Louis Vuitton, and Maison Margiela have launched services built on the Aura consortium’s blockchain that allow customers to verify that their item isn’t a knockoff
• @AuraConsortium are a non-profit association of luxury brands investing in technologies to enhance the customer experience and build a virtuous future for luxury
Thoughts: Since Blockchain is Immutable, this serves as one of the best use cases for Luxury / Rare items whose authenticity needs to be proven to underpin its intrinsic value
Plutus Proposes ARB Staking
• @PlutusDAO_io proposes to Arbitrum Foundation to activate $ARB staking, unlocking native yields for $ARB
• Since in the $ARB code there's an option to inflate the total supply by 2% annually, Plutus suggests that 1.75% should go to $ARB lockers through a locking mechanism (the longer the lock, the larger the rewards)
• A few of the benefits as suggested by Plutus: Reward long-term aligned stakers with yield, while penalizing mercenary capital and short-term actors, significantly increase interest in Arbitrum and $ARB
• @AvgJoesCrypto’s comment encapsulates this perfectly → “Took Plutus 5 months to come up with a proposal that aims to
Coincidently, you guys already ‘locked’ ~9.5m ARB (while wrecking users)”
Thoughts: Stop it already…. This is sad lol….
Vesta Founders Rage Quit
• Due to cultural misalignment, lack of shipping, and lack of coherence, in the week of September, Atum and Midnight, the two other co-founders beside Mikey, asked to get bought out by the Vesta treasury for $0.4 per token. Each holds 2.1m tokens, so the deal meant using the treasury to pay them $840k per person
• Now they have posted two proposal:
⇢ One is for them to get bought out for $0.4 as mentioned above for a total of $630k per person (minusing the unvested portion as compared to $840k above), and
⇢ The other is for every token holder to redeem at the same price ($0.4)
• Mikey has since then proposed to
⇢ Fully let go of the two founders immediately, decreasing yearly salary burn by 32% in this team of ten people
⇢ Buy back the two other founders’ shares at a reasonable price, which we shall discussed in the proposal
⇢ Vesta continues building to deliver V2 and build out the next big project: oracle-less lending
• @vestafinance is L2-First stablecoin protocol on Arbitrum. It was one of the project that received highest amount of $ARB airdrop relative to its FDV. Not much have been happening since the airdrop which contributed to the sharp decline in price. Since the news of the proposals, $VSTA has pumped 110% and is trading at $0.3
Friend Tech Frenzy
• @friendtech hype is back, all CT timelines are talking about Friend Tech farming which depends on Portfolio Size, Trading Volume, and Activity (messages)
• @perpstech $perps token has pumped massively overnight (500%). The platform allows users to long/short friend tech keys
• @FTFarming Friend Tech airdrop maximizing bot (via buying newly created keys quickly) has pumped 200% overnight as well
Thoughts: Metakeys DAO NFTs have pumped hard since Hsaka got in, one NFT granted access to 55E+ worth of FT keys. Frenlend has also seen a decent pump on its key. The FT Frenzy trend usually comes in waves (two waves have already happened in the span of 2-3 weeks each contributing to an inflow of TVL to Friend Tech). As more projects build on top of FT, these waves could last longer as there’ll be a few projects that finds its PMF and bring value to FT community as a whole. My play is to (hopefully) be early in identifying these new opportunities
LootBot Loyalty Point & Scroll
• @lootbot_xyz introduced Loyalty Points → Lootbot collects 20% of all airdrops users get if they’re using the bot for free
• Users holding $LOOT or $xLOOT earn loyalty points everyday which will entitle them to the airdrop rewards once they happen (xLOOT has 2x Multiplier)
• With 8500+ freemium wallets and 3-4 upcoming airdrops within this year, the 20% of airdrops could likely be a decent reward
• LootBot continues to ship in this market and has recently expanded to Scroll Testnet, allowing users to farm Scroll Airdrops
Thoughts: More than 1/4 of the total supply has been converted to xLOOT (NFT). Since majority of the users utilize Freemium plan, there isn’t a lot of utilities to the token other than 50% discount to premium model subscription price. We might see this changing when Loot has successfully itself to generate $$$ from its upcoming airdrops as 20% of airdrops from freemium wallets get streamed to $LOOT and xLOOT holders
SteakhouseFi Proposes On-chain T-Bills
• @SteakhouseFi proposes to @MakerDAO to add Tokenized T-Bills into the MakerDAO treasury
• Since MakerDAO has already invested $2B in short-term bonds through off-chain structures, Steakhouse suggests that MakerDAO starts moving towards on-chain tokenized T-Bills
• The benefits outlined in the proposal are:
⇢ Higher transparency
⇢ Simpler accounting. Just need to multiply the amount of tokens by the price rather than calculate manually
⇢ Managing on-chain T-Bills are less complex than managing off-chain structures
⇢ More easily automated: with tokenized products it will become possible to automate Asset-Liability Management which is currently manual and slow
⇢ Faster redeemability: with some on-chain products, redeemability for stablecoins is much faster than selling for fiat off-chain and moving back into stablecoins
• Steakhouse suggests that MakerDAO begins experimenting on tokenized T-Bills products by allocating up to $100m
Thoughts: By bringing more T-Bills on-chain, traditional assets with attractive yields can be “more” readily available for Defi investors to get into. In T-Bill case, it’ll also help establish Risk-Free Rate as 5%+ rather than the 2-3% on stables as we have right now on AAVE
Nouns DAO Fork
• @nounsdao is a daily auction NFT project where all the ETH from the mint auction goes into the NounsDAO treasury. Currently, there is around 35.5 ETH per Noun in the treasury and auctions are currently going for 20-30 ETH. Some holders decided that they wanted to exit the DAO and get their ETH back rather than to get diluted by new holders.
• There is a fork for @nounsdao holders to return their Nouns and exit (rage quit) the DAO with a fair portion of their treasury
• Currently 265 Nouns holders have entered the fork - around 30% of supply. With 9,410 ETH in the fork treasury, users who have entered the fork can freely exit with about 35.5 ETH per Nouns NFT
Thoughts: We’re starting to see more projects having Rage Quit proposals or drastically pivoting one way or another because of the current market environment — Concave, Vesta, and now Nouns. New Order DAO has also merged with Synonym Finance pivoting away from the Web3 incubator model as the model is difficult to sustain and there’s more chance of success doubling down on an omnichain money market utilizing Wormhole.
Degen Section
No Degen section today. Will touch some grass and get ready for Token2049 next week. Have a great Sunday guys!
*Reminder to Size Your Entry for Degen Plays and Take Your Principal Out (Take Profits) Whenever You Hit Your Target*