The DeGen Bible to Financial Freedom - Vol.31

Week 16 May -  22 May 2023

There is no meme. - Mars Captain

🧠 Observations

• It's comforting to see BRC20 related standards popping out as if mushrooms do after heavy rain. And what is more comforting is to see them rot as fast as pedestrians stepping on snails. One is divine and two is a curse. Let's focus on the ossification of DeFi.
• If the Ordinal theory can be forked on all bitcoin forks. Why don't people fork mimblewimble of Litecoin on Doge? Are we missing something important in the blockchain technologies?  
• The 2023 summer will be a narrative-less one. Looking at the decoupling of BTC & ETH, we might as well see a mini uptrend on ETH at the eve of ETHCC Paris, which degens speculate new narrative on Ethereum.  
• Captain is really skeptical on the cheerleading of the EU or Hong Kong dethroning the post-LUNA-3Arrows-Celsius-FTX US regulation leadership. The EU wants tax, and Hong Kong's doing whatever their government is told to "experiment". Why would people think it's sincere/healthy? If ChatGPT can get these governments to their same objectives, tomorrow they will ditch crypto to embrace AI. Please, read the BTC whitepaper to understand why a permissionless and uncensorable distributed ledger came into existence 14 years ago.

💵 Stablecoin & Market Landscape

• Stablecoin market share remains high in reference to the total crypto market capitalization. 11.18% of stablecoin (130B) on 1.17T crypto market.

Reminder: Mid-NOV 2021, this percentage was around 4ish% with a 3T total MC. Now we are at 11ish% with a 1ishT total MC.

• Now at 1.16T.  Still hanging around on the T level. Going steady.

Reminder, June and Nov 2022 witnessed a bottom of 800ish B MC vis-a-vis the market’s top in NOV 2021 at 3T.

Infographics

• I guess if we are in it for money, the only source you need to pay attention to is Elon Musk's twitter. A tweet from Elon beats 365 days of TA.

• This is very interesting, the gold and the oil of the crypto world. If the analogy applies to these two assets, to a certain extent. We might as well look at the correlation of gold and oil in the real world to see if there is any insight.

• What shall we say about this? They are close to default every now and then, release some juicy news titles for click bait, lure people into thinking that the collapse of US economy because of the debt default. Wait, isn't that problematic? They raise the ceiling last minute every time, anyways. It's the true UP ONLY mechanism, and if they say they want inflation down? Are you sure the government cares about the economy?
• If this was put into a blockchain consensus, it will blow off a dozen of LUNA easily.

• It's logical and it makes the US dollar more of a joke, and how little confidence people have in fiat.

• We all know this now, the retrospective reflection is that, what would it have been, had this happened coincidentally with the NFT summer in mid of 2021?
• Meme is the essenece of the crypto market. All infrastructures are built first around meme, then to speculation, and finally to use cases. Good lesson learnt here.

• Wow, Doge size really is size.
• Alameada pumped Shiba still a blue chip meme.

🔢 Index

• Retracing to a more healthy level vis-a-vis the current price level.
• Hopefully it falls more before the June FOMC.

• Staying flat and no surprise.

📰 Current affairs

Starfish Finance:

Prediction Market — The First Game of Starfish’s Entertainment-Fi

Play to earn?

MediumStarfish Finance

Starfish Finance is Live on Arbitrum for its new chapter in Entertainment-Fi

Starfish Finance is listed officially on the Arbitrum portal. https://portal.arbitrum.io/?search=starfish to check out Starfish Finance

MediumStarfish Finance

Starfish Finance II - Attack of the (Dapp) Clones

Far beyond Earth and millions of miles past the moon, there’s a planet where Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and NFT-Fi meet on an interoperable network. First observed in 2022, the world known as “Starfish Planet” is home to degens, hodlers, frens and a starfish named Sean.

CoinDeskCoinDesk Staff

Starfish Finance: A cross-chain DeFi, NFT-finance platform on Astar Network, a Polkadot parachain

Starfish Finance is a pioneer project in the Astar incubation project and the first decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) finance platform on Astar Network.

CointelegraphCointelegraph

BTC

Meme Tokens and NFTs Took Over Bitcoin—Now It’s Happening on Dogecoin and Litecoin - Decrypt

Ordinals hype has spread from Bitcoin to both Dogecoin and Litecoin, driving network activity on all three chains to recent all-time peaks.

DecryptJason Nelson

ETH

Ethereum Researchers Remain Mystified After Blockchain Briefly Fails To Finalize

User Transactions Continued To Be Processed Normally

The DefiantSamuel Haig

Layer 1s/ Major DeFi

Jump Trading Did Secret Deal to Prop Up TerraUSD Stablecoin, SEC Says

The Chicago trading firm made $1 billion through its dealings with crypto mogul Do Kwon’s company, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Wall Street JournalAlexander Osipovich

OKX to Offer Ordinals Trading Within its Wallet by June

By late May, OKX customers will be able to mint Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens within the wallet.

BlockworksJames Cirrone

Ledger Crypto Wallet Under Fire Over Seed Phrase Recovery Service - Decrypt

A new update from crypto wallet provider Ledger lets users link their seed phrase to their passport or identity card. But should they?

DecryptRyan S. Gladwin

MakerDAO Founder Proposes Dedicated Blockchain and New DAI and MKR Tokens

Rune Christensen outlines roadmap for controversial Endgame plan.

The DefiantSamuel Haig

Axie Infinity’s Token Jumps 12% After Firm Lists Game on Apple App Store

The dollar valued locked in the open futures contracts tied to AXS has surged to highest since February, signaling an influx of new money into the market.

CoinDeskOmkar Godbole

Flashbots is Now Offering its Users Frontrunning Protection

Flashbots has created a new tool to protect user wallets and dapps from being frontrun by bots.

BlockworksBessie Liu

Tether buys bitcoin with a portion of its net profit to back USDT stablecoin

Tether said it would invest 15% of its net profit into bitcoin to “diversify” the reserves that back its USDT token.

CNBCRyan Browne

Dogecoin Activity Surges With Ordinals—But a Core DOGE Dev Is Skeptical - Decrypt

Dogecoin’s new DRC-20 standard is similar to Bitcoin’s BRC-20, which allows arbitrary and non-financial data to be included in blocks.

DecryptPedro Solimano

Twitter

NFTs

NFT Collector Turned Memecoin Creator Nets $7M in Sketchy Presale

PSYOP Token Launch Has Been Repeatedly Delayed

The DefiantSamuel Haig

Macro econ/ Regulations

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Financial Times

EU Finance Ministers Give Final Go-ahead to MiCA - Decrypt

EcoFin passed the Europe-wide regulation unanimously, meaning the new crypto rules will become law this summer.

DecryptAlys Key

Peter Thiel Backs Bitcoin Startup River in $35M Round

The Series B funding for the Bitcoin financial services provider was led by Kingsway Capital.

CoinDeskBrandy Betz

Fleeing U.S. Crypto Firms ‘Welcome,’ French Regulator Says

100-odd companies could be registered in France as the just-agreed MiCA EU crypto legislation beds in, Financial Markets Authority officials said

CoinDeskJack Schickler

Exclusive: Unit of Chinese developer to apply for virtual asset trading in Hong Kong

A unit of Shanghai-based Greenland Holdings is planning to apply for a licence to trade assets including cryptocurrencies, NFTs and carbon credits, according to its CEO.

South China Morning PostEnoch Yiu

Research reports/videos (DYOR)

The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement

A crypto-finance revolution looks further off than ever

The EconomistThe Economist