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Bienvenidos mis ositos, tu siempre eres mis queridos! (Welcome back little bears you are always my dears!)
Winter isn’t coming. It’s already here. The last year and a half was pretty good for most digital asset enthusiasts. We’re starting to see some ugly price action in the markets in general. Are people more spooked by potential US Federal Reserve rate hikes? The unrest in Kazakhstan? Who knows?
I’m just another weirdo on the Internet, but here is my guess as to how things will play out.
It might be prudent to start planning for a nasty bear market. I’m talking 50 to 99% drawdowns. If we’re lucky we might only get a sideways crab market.
The only goal is to survive until the next Bitcoin halving cycle in 2024.
I’ve noticed that dividend paying stocks have started to tick up slightly or have gone down less than meme or other hyped stocks. This seems to be happening in the digital asset space as well. People are desperate for cash and decent yields.
Unfortunately we might see a triple whammy of job losses, stock market plunge AND a digital asset purge. I hope I’m wrong because I don’t even want to think of the carnage that could ensue. But let’s not panic yet. Let’s prepare for what happen and not what happen.
As I said before people may have the same idea that I have and are looking for stuff that will have some way of generating cash yield.
Curve Finance was one of the Defi Summer 2020 OGs. They offered the ability for degens to swap similar assets with low slippage (e.g. stablecoins). Lately they’ve been working “version 2” style liquidity pools with uncorrelated assets like tricrypto (wrapped Bitcoin, Etherereum and USDT).
The astrophysicist level math behind the protocol is way too difficult for my smooth brain to explain properly. I would simply recommend taking a stab at going through their gitbook, whitepapers and other docs for yourself.
They are one of the most underappreciated and overlooked multichain protocols out there. Or should I say WERE?
Unassuming, Curve Finance just works quietly in the background and now people and other protocols have noticed their incredible ascent to the top of the DeFillama total value locked rankings. It seems absurd to me that Curve Finance still sits in the mid 70s on CoinGecko.
During 2021 I foolishly dumped my CRV tokens when I was farming on Polygon, Avalamche and other emerging Ethereum alternatives. I did not realize that you could lock your tokens to get voting power and direct future CRV tokens to protocols that want them.
You see these pool gauges don’t just magically appear out of thin air. People need to vote for them and get a high amplification factor.
And what’s the best way to get people to vote?
INCENTIVES
There are other sites that provide ways for protocols to get CRV holders to vote for their projects. In a future article I will talk about Convex Finance and Votium. I mentioned them in an older video.
Here are some interesting future proposals from the Terra Luna ecosystem.
https://agora.terra.money/t/ust-goes-interchain-degen-strats-part-three/3527
https://station.terra.money/proposal/165
There are risks though, when you’re the top dog everyone is coming for your crown. There are protocols like Olympus, Tokemak, and maybe Redacted cartel that are creating new ways to attract and redirect liquidity.
Make no mistake it’s not just about the money anymore there’s also a power play going on in the DeFi space.
You know you’re on to something when other projects are starting to copy the vote and locking model. Yearn and Saber have plans to reorganize their tokenomics.
If you want a seat at the DeFi table you will need to pay respect and attention to Curve Finance.
There are quite a few articles and resources on the “Curve Wars”. These are just a few of my favorites:
https://rekt.news/curve-wars/
https://medium.com/@Magnus_Capital/gauge-wars-the-convex-governance-blackhole-the-removal-of-the-bribe-ceiling-3245c77c3c02
An awesome twitter compilation:
https://twitter.com/tengekisho/status/1477313857781706757?s=21
Be sharp, stay hungry let’s get that money!
