crab notes 🦀 lobsterdao

Fun 🐳 RektPlebs Submission

It's weekend, so we can take a bit of time off *after 7 hours of staring at excel sheets* and talk about checking back our trading moves.

Here is my investment transcript since the beginning of 2020 🦞 The USD numbers in the text are just for fun.

1] I sold 25% of my BTC and ETH in April at 7.3K per BTC. That is +60% now for BTC and 107% for ETH. I wanted to cash into fiat because muh corona bank runs. So if you price that 25% as 25K USD of a 100K portfolio, that would be on average a 20K unrealized gain. On a 100K portfolio, that is a 20% unrealized gain.

2] Instead of cashing into fiat, I kept that USDT which is a bit below the $1 mark instead of like Dai which has premium.

3] To protect myself from the "ever-degrading European Union", I swapped a bag of EURO for USD at 9.18. Now it’s 8.45. About 8% on currencies. That was the ATH.

4] I didn't farm CRV for free even though I knew about it very early. I was afraid of the hacks. To date, still no hack happened. We will probably see this retarded move as a 100K+ unrealized gain.

5] I was the second person to learn about YFI but didn't think it would be much despite counting P/E and earnings and all. I joined it a few days later and mined 4 YFI and the pulled out. Sold at 1K. Just for the reference, with a small bag I would be at about 500K profit for only taking the protocol risk. The number is that big because early on anyone could do it with 50K or so.

6] Moreover, I sold my ETH to yCRV to mine YFI (I know about lending, thx). Since then, ETH went up so I basically got rekt by moving things around. By more than 40%.

7] I was lazy to claim KarmaDAO airdrop and lost 2K USD there just for clicking a button too late.

8] I never bought REN, KNC, LEND, or any DeFi coin. I thought the peak hype was in March because all my bubble friends are coder degens who been doing it since 2019.

9] I bought NXM at the bottom to then sell it at +80% a couple days later. By the time I finished dinner on that same day, it was up 300% more.

10] My portfolio is still currently >60% in USDT. It's bull market guys. It's still 60%.

<--------->

RESULTS 🤷 we are looking at 1M USD+ of free, actually risk-free gains here. Or rather, non-losses. I don't think anyone can beat this record! I am proud of it.

PS: this post is a meme. It only includes bad trades and doesn't account for hending with SAFTs... But tbh this is what my doctor told me to tell to myself to stay sane.

There is no investor worse than me. Even Ian Balina is better. Plz sir muh familie.

https://youtu.be/tOzUV2uq0xE

Lobster DAO 🦞 Not everything needs to be a DAO

Update on WHY NOT: https://twitter.com/IvanGBi/status/1289160756416720898

Some thoughts and updates on DAOs: what can DAOs do and what could Lobster DAO potentially do. Note: no sale, no raise, no anything. If there will be a token, it would likely be not listed - just for the sake of membership signing some governance decisions. There is no goal to make money here, and it will be literally valued at $0. Not even valued at all.

TLDR - I basically don't see a strong need for a DAO here. It's all open, community is there, why complicate? Strong opinion shift towards "fuck DAO, we are good as we are".

Maybe I am missing something, discuss 👉 https://t.me/lobsters_chat/63770

​​Liquid Staking by STAFI - Rich Code or Rekt 🐳 @stafi_protocol

With the market hitting ATHs, we see the resurgence of the primary market. In fact, VCs are hammering into anything "DeFi" without a second thought. Does this mean market topped? Well, I thought it did so in April, so I missed out all the profits sitting in USDT... muh familia, not even funny. Legit missed out all the profits: DeFi, BTC, everything. But now I am here to buy the top and get rekt!

DeFi is a more sustainable pyramid 🗻 if a pyramid at all.

It's good to note that DeFi has organic demand and a user base which actually pays fees, so despite being bloated - it has a bottom floor and legitimacy. Some OG chats called DeFi the top a long time ago, but remember that YouTube is just coming around to it, while normies are still buying ADA in Chinese onion villages - so, who knows. Just make sure not to go all-in, degenerates.

Staking is growing 📈 What's next for staking?

The staking industry is not stopping at all. Here is a more elaborate report and analysis on pros and cons of staking as an economic mechanism: https://lobsters.substack.com/p/there-aint-no-such-thing-as-free. So what do you do when some industry is booming? You make new services and solutions for it, capturing all its users. That's what Stafi is doing for staking.

The new asset class in DeFi 💧 liquid staking derivatives.

Stafi is the first DeFi protocol unlocking liquidity of staked assets. Users can stake PoS tokens through Stafi and receive rTokens in return, which are available for trading while still earning staking rewards. FIS is the native token on Stafi Chain. FIS is required to provide security to the network by staking, pay for transaction fees on the Stafi chain, mint & redeem rTokens.

Kind of like if you lock your Dai over the bridge to issue xDai. In the future, the market will do its thing, with extra products, derivatives, and other products in the ecosystem.

Ivan, fuck your fundamentals 🚀 what are the pumpamentals?

First of all, it's actually a cool product. It's not too easy to make, and the staking-lending derivatives are a very security-sensitive thing. The galaxy brain Tarun Chitra (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.11156.pdf), reports by Chorus One (https://mirror.chorus.one/liquid-staking-report.pdf), and many more. The liquid staking debate has been going for quite a while actually, there is a lot of noise and research in that area. If you see some cool links - shoot them in the chat.

🎯 Polkadot: Stafi is actually building on Substrate, as a parachain to Polkadot. Stafi received the grant and the support of Web3, helping Polkadot tap into DeFi. It doesn't mean that Stafi is restricted to the Polkadot ecosystem, it just rolls on the narrative and hype, while building its core blockchain on it. It will tap into Cosmos, Tezos, etc. later on. In fact, its non-incentivized testnet is in top-5 of active ones already after only a couple of days: https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/Stafi%20Testnet%20Seiya
🦄 DeFi supported by CEX: Stafi will be supported by BitMax liquidity and user base, giving a huge head start with its AUM once the contracts go live. That's an insane boost to any new project - an existing audience. More: https://medium.com/stafi/an-ama-on-staking-derivatives-by-bitmax-stafi-12412c0ca8
📈 Burning FIS token: a burning mechanism for fees paid with Stafi protocol usage. This P/E, burning cashflow idea sticks well with communities.
🐦 Unique staking audience acquisition. There will be dedicated lockdrop-style campaigns for different blockchains, that's a super strong user acquisition model. Stay tuned!

PS: I got a bag a couple weeks back, so obviously I want to see it moon. The final valuation is far below the DeFi crazy hype approx 10M, and the initial market cap will be way below 1M USD. I prefer projects with a very low start to have a better chance at showing returns for the early participants instead of starting at 50M. DYOR and check more in @stafi_protocol.

There ain't no such thing as free APR ©

This is not about yield farming sirs, this is about the myths of staking. A big part of the piece is dedicated to reverse-engineering professional validators [P2P, Figments, other cool teams] and show that a coin outside of TOP100 has close to zero chance of getting such guys. But is the brrr even relevant there...

As always, the article comes with dozens of typos, subjective opinions, and advice on how to get rekt.

Cheers 🖖 https://lobsters.substack.com/p/there-aint-no-such-thing-as-free

PS: you don't have to subscribe, just skip the notification if it pops up.

​​Primary market coming back? 🤔

This screenshot sums up the past few feeks. While the alt season meme has been dead for over half a year, recently we have seen resurgence of lowcaps on non-centrlalized exchanges. Socks and tapes on uniswap, very little-known coins on IDEX, and so on. Some random stuff people are trying to gamble on, which shows more retail engagement all across the board. 4chan pumping and shilling an expired Opyn insurance, that was just next level lol.

But the question is: will it scale in volumes enough to accommodate more traders? X10 is cute, but on a $100 daily volume it meands nothing. Etheredelta could handle thousands of ETH.

As the primary market is driven by retail fomo, this continuous trend could bring in some of the primary market investors back, making the margin pyramid of seed-private-crowd work again. However, higher volumes are needed for it. Will this trend continue and bring in the primary money market back, or will it pop like most of the attempts of the last 2 years?

The next round must be priced higher! "Evolution" of token raises. NuCypher's WorkLock & UMA.
👉 https://lobsters.substack.com/p/the-next-round-must-be-priced-higher

Hi everyone, trying out a new format with substack... to make things look a bit more professional [lol].

You don't ever need to pay or insert your email, just ignore if it asks you. Oh and also I won't be making a personal token 💩

Today diving into:
💵 How raising the next round has been getting harder
🙏 The evolution of ICO/IEO and how it now requires more downside protection
😮 NuCypher's numbers on valuation boost. Spoiler: need 200,000 ETH
⭕️ UMA's model leaving people stuck at break-even

Let's discuss it over a bear in the chat!

​​Update on the above. Instant x6-7 due to 1.5M USD getting in 7K ETH 🤯

Gas usage reminds of ICO times of 2018, pretty cool! I sadly didn't get in... Also expected only 500K interest so had a lower price range.

Now prepare for some shills people will use to offload, enabled private sale staking, and further dilution to take advantage of this. Not FUD, just an imho 🙂

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6264c8d158f32bd8c01b8a0102b57dfcfcfb8561

​​2/2 UMA -> https://t.me/blockchain_lobsters/822.

NO CIRCULATION?! 🤯 This relates to how Uniswap works. There is no orderbook, there are no hidden orders. It's a curve. You can't be fucked over unless you can count. So here is the thing: if the only tokens in the market are 2M offered on Uniswap - while those are backed with 1:1 ETH, then it mathematically cannot go below $0.26. ⭕️ Liquidity provision... what if that changes? They can just withdraw all/part of the ETH side of the pool. Or somehow add more tokens to the UMA side of the pool - but that would be directly scammy, don't expect that.

- Valuation at full dilution 💯 approx 26M USD
- Market cap 💰 530K USD but actually... 0 USD + some hackathon rewards + maybe inflationary rewards + black swan unlocks

This 0 USD thing is what makes the idea super interesting - but only if the lockup and liquidity statements holds true. Then you legit cannot buy below $0.26 for the coming weeks. The only dilution would be staking rewards then, which might be allowed for by private sale whales Inflationary rewards can be claimed by the voter within two weeks of being earned, and are not subject to any transfer restrictions.💡 I will check this later. But the protocol has the chance to pick up later and create demand, because they do cute things.

Also, just a couple of days ago a contract admin was allowed to allow more UMA minting over the cap LOL because they "decided" to make it earn inflationary rewards for fulfilling price requests and participating in governance: https://twitter.com/allilulllc/status/1254944093354016768

Anyway, the listing is in 2 hours or so, I might try with a couple of ETH! I don't know any backers or the team, so for me it's a pure gamble. But it is innovative as the token model, innovative as the project, and overall feeling cute about it. Let's go lose some money fam! https://uniswap.exchange/swap/0x04fa0d235c4abf4bcf4787af4cf447de572ef828

UNO, Duo, Tre... I mean UMA 🦄 A $0 CMC project?!

Hey seafood, we got something new today. A gambling opportunity one could say, but it's not as trivial as it looks. Let's go!

The gambling pot of today is UMA.xyz 🌈 A protocol that enables users to create synthetic tokens (ST) through overcollateralization. A synthetic token tracks the price of some predefined reference asset or index, like gold or the S&P 500. Here is a great TL;DR I stole content from: https://twitter.com/tokenterminal/status/1255237984783384581.

It's actually a pretty cool thing if you look deeper into it. Synthetic assets, fully running on ETH and not its own chain. It got a lot of ETH enthusiasts' attention in the past few months. The team presumably audited contracts with OpenZeppelin. Interesting use cases and integrations can be done with this, including the creation of new weird stablecoins. Look into it if you like DeFi!

Mr. Lobster, I just want to lose money!
- Glad to hear this, my fellow degenerate. So let's talk about this UMA token thing.

UMA tokenholders = the oracle. They charge fees for voting how much any given ST was worth upon its expiry or liquidation (if the liquidation was disputed). They also charge a periodic % fee of all the value locked in the system (= mgmt fee). The usual staking value accrual model. It works if there is usage, sure thing. So the narrative works. But for speculation purposes, it's fine as it is now.

UMA will have initial Uniswap Listing today, at 15:00 UTC.

At that time, the Risk Labs Foundation will deposit 2mm UMA tokens and ~$535k of ETH into a newly created liquidity pool. This represents an initial listing price of ~$0.26/UMA, which implies a fully diluted market capitalization of ~$26.67mm. This is the same valuation used in our initial seed investment. https://medium.com/uma-project/umas-initial-uniswap-listing-afa7b6f6a330.

Now to the fun part which is confusing and is a bit rekt if you look closer...

1. Are they really locked? They have some cool backers who are supposed to be locked until 2021 [muh VC sir] like Placeholder: https://umaproject.org/about.html. Yes: team, foundation, all backers - as the text states: Approximately 48.5mm UMA tokens are held by Risk Labs’s founders, early contributors, and investors. These tokens are transfer-restricted until 2021, and all individual token grants are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule. ⭕️ However, it's not in the smart contract and it's also said a bit vaguely.

2. Future token sales...how soon? 35mm UMA tokens will be distributed to developers and users of the UMA network. The mechanics for this distribution have not been finalized and will be put forward to the community for discussion and approval. An additional 14.5mm UMA tokens will be reserved for future token sales. Here is the thing, they are talking about it pretty vaguely again. The next token sale might even happen next week, who says it's not possible? ⭕️ Next to that, they already did a few small rewards, so that might be a burden for the price too.

1/2 UMA -> t.me/blockchain_lobsters/823

Did it again fam, one more for the team 🚀 Imagine holding 3 years to sell "the bottom"...

Is BTC halvening priced in? 🤔

Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in.

You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of.

You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). (c) reddit

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So: no one knows! However, really high volatility - orange coin go up and down - is expected. Be careful riding, and don't get shaken off. Otherwise, you will become "Le Pleb".

​​Calling the top & reviving Lobsters 🦞 HI THERE 🖖

Today is a boring post, but we need to catch up and put things in order.

Up until recently, people were still feeling rekt and thus there was little noise: just friendly discussions on fundamentals and products. As time passed by and BTC / markets kept going up - people started feeling safe again. Stimulus, priced in, whales - nobody knows. But why is that important? Even if the recovery idea is flawed, people seem to be ready to gamble again 🤷

While I still believe the economic effects are not nearly priced in and we will see more rektness in 2020... It's all a gamble! Nobody knows.

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1️⃣ BTC & S&P Decoupling Meme

People are/were fleeing to liquidity cash from assets, causing sell-offs all across the board. Including gold and digital gold BTC LoL. Now, they try to either clame correlation or say BTC has decoupled - but remember, they use statistics simply to fit their bias. Don't pay attention to that, it all depends on timeframes. Gold dipped but then revived. Same as BTC. Correlation? Meme. There is so much complexity in this question that I wouldn't even try to get into it. Muh familia is an x10 degenerate, not a debt expert. Check some screens below.

However, if major hedge funds and rich plebs start believing in decoupling, it's definitely a benefit. So yes, vote for decoupling sir.

2️⃣ Currencies = stableshits

Holding cash is perceived to be safe by 99% of the world population, especially doing 3% yearly rates in a bank, wow! Well, don't forget to check for inflation and the relation with USD. If you help rubbles, you are so rekt now. Even your higher 7% interest rates in riskier countries would land you destroyed. This is a topic for the next post which should include more juicy info. But the message for now is: cash is not the same everywhere, and it's not nearly as stable purchasing power. Everyone here knows it, but the charts are still fascinating.

3️⃣ Onlyfans for ETHereans

No, it's not about onlyfans. It's about selling your brain's future cashflows. This is not a new thing as human IPOs have been performed many times. Let's not get into the legalities of this bullshit. Anyway, it's not a good sign as you sell off the most important asset to you - yourself. A toxic ETH dude Alex got 20K like this, and more people attempt to use Gitcoin grants to sell their time... it's a freaking terrible idea and the fanatics should have a limit to this stuff. Check: https://bit.ly/3cR4pPs

4️⃣ Alts ripping - your wallet dipping

Alts seem to be popping all across the board. People buy and fomo again, but the volumes are still small. What is clear is that traders are okay to engage again. SOL, HIVE, CARTESI - have popped a few X from their adjusted market caps: https://t.me/Generation_Crypto/1161. Does it mean the projects are good? Absolutely the opposite, but the valuations have been adjusted to the market. In 2017 it used to be 100M, in 2018 50M, in 2019 25M, now it's 15M and below. Less liquidity, less buyers, what else do you expect. But it doesn't mean big seasonal moons can't happen.

With xDai STAKE BitMax, and JUST Poloniex going next - we might see good performance if BtC stays fine? That's the assumption, who knows.

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Sorry for the boring one, most of the info here is known to you. It's a summary of the past month as not much has happened. DeFi security is a special topic so we will look into that and more stuff later. Good luck out there gambling, don't forget to bring in interesting whitepapers to @lobsters_chat and hope you are safe.

Interesting links

- Global market trends - tech is going nice: https://meetglimpse.com/covid19/
- Covid-19 trends from China old: https://twitter.com/Nik_Quinn/status/1241436772808056834
- Permabear material, don't agree per se: https://www.crescat.net/crescat-capital-quarterly-investor-letter-q1-2020/
- Nothing about Oil being negative. No, gtfo. It was only a short period for WTI. Still rekt, yes.

BRRRRRR https://brrr.money *sound on*

Take time to read - https://medium.com/@allenfarrington/this-is-not-capitalism-5ed0a9d5dfa9