DeFi

Oct 01 2020

More DeFi Food: A Deep Dive into (A Plate Full of) TACOs

Really, #DeFi developers, do all of these things HAVE TO BE NAMED AFTER FOOD?

Well, they don’t HAVE to be, but it appears that some of the more interesting concepts in DeFi (Decentralized Finance) actually are named after food. Like $TACO, a platform that we learned about when we were trading $SHRIMP and $SUSHI.

More Than a Cute Logo and a Clever Name

TACOs has turned their brand of deflationary token launch into a game. They have set aside a large chunk of the token supply to be burned: 6 percent of the Uniswap pool gets torched daily.

(Nobody likes to eat burned tacos, but…)

Hey, this does appear to be sorta clever: no more TACOs can be created, and the supply gets “crunched” so that your TACOs become more valuable over time.

It works like this, and we were able to confirm through a couple of “trades” of our own yesterday:

You decide if you want to “crunch” the outstanding tokens and claim 10 percent of the amount being crunched;
You pay the gas — we paid $3.12 on one of our transactions yesterday — and have to calculate whether the gas makes up for the value of the tokens;
You make the transaction and see the 10 percent in your wallet.

But here’s where it gets interesting: you may decide that the gas price is totally worth it, despite only getting (in the above scenario) 42 tokens added to your balance. Given the recent price of just short of 7 cents per token, you’re paying a little more than $3 to get 42 tokens. SO you’ve covered your costs.

In another case, when we decided to say “what the heck?,” we paid 10 cents a token for another 60. We think there’s potential with this platform — in fact, we did the math and the burn rate — or “crunch rate,” even “crunch rate supreme” — might mean that supply gets tremendously sliced over the next month.

This means that on Day 30, $TACO has nearly half of its coins destroyed.

OR…if you check the contract, you realize it’s not moving THAT quickly…

It’s still early and there are some kinks to work out — and the website itself is a little murky on details. BUT, if you’re willing to play a game, and don’t mind the potential that you could be playing a game that could be worthless, spend a little time with a plate full of TACOs.

Sep 28 2020

Shrimping Experiment: Time to Roll the Dice

As fate would have it, we now have the opportunity to shift one of our DeFi experiments from the world of food — or at least tokens that are named after food — to the world of gambling.

Yes, it’s time to roll the dice. Literally: we’re going to move our $SHRIMP to $DICE.

The Shrimp.finance team announced overnight (our time; we’re on Central Time, USA) that they were moving their development efforts to Dice.finance; you can read what they said on Medium here.

How This Could Impact You…

If we’re correct in our research — and based on what we’ve learned talking to others who have followed both $SHRIMP and $DICE — this amounts to a “burn” of the Shrimp token. And you can take it directly from the blog post:

Fair enough.

As the Medium post tells us, if you had Shrimp, they’ll buy it back at $2.50 each. The buyback, though, is in $DICE, which you need to leave on the platform for six months in order to get rewards — which will be on top of the value of the tokens you deposit.

Betting on Horse…or Jockey?

In our opinion, you’re betting a little on the horse — if you’re in the USA, for instance, you know how prevalent all kinds of gambling are — but a lot on the jockey: XiXi Huang.

Cute Logo.

Huang appears to be a rather innovative character, and he’s somewhat active on Telegram; his interest in making this move appears to be driven by the desire to focus on the growing gambling sector, and the location of Dice (Macau).

The Dice price, though, is pegged for this swap at $165; that’s a far cry from the trading value earlier this morning of $56.25.

Dice Price is Nice (Today, at least, if you’re a HODLer).

Next Steps?

We will keep you posted; we’re still investigating the opportunities here and still processing how to move things from our meager Shrimp holdings.

Again, stay safe, do your own research, and be prepared to watch any of these projects go belly up, too. That’s always a risk — though we hope you hit it big with one of these, it’s possible that you could get rekt, too.

Final Note: A Warning About Dice on YoBit

You can find a few coins marked “DICE” out there; one such is the DICE that were awarded to YoBit users. Be sure you’re looking in the right place for your Dice. Visit the buyback site from Dice itself here: buyback.dice.finance.

Sep 24 2020

Could Dego Be the Next Big Thing?

We just learned about another one, and this #DeFi development brings an element of NFT trading, art, and…LEGOs*!

* one thing we’ve noticed is that there doesn’t appear to be an official Lego connection. However, there’s an NFT that COULD be Lego-esque. We’re still trying to sort through that…Anyway, on with the post!

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

Back in our corporate days, we worked with a really smart guy who said that phrase a lot. It’s a great question, and, at first glance, it might appear that $DEGO is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist: how do you merge Legos and #DeFi?

But, dear reader, that is not the point; and, given this take here on their Github-style page thingy, we believe this one could be trying to solve a few problems.

OR, this could be trying to bite off way more than it can chew.

Price, Supply, and Whatnot

21 million tokens will be available, and, as of this writing (Sept 24, early afternoon, Central Time in the US), $DEGO was trading at 73 cents.

Right Now, It’s About Two Things…

All of these coins, tokens, platforms, and whatzits are all working on a combination of HYPE and HOPE.

Dego is trying to get the hype through a really cool UI; see the screener below and tell us it’s not just being a Windows 95 clone.

The HOPE comes from the launch of a couple things, like a liquidity pool (which is here now) and eventual Binance smart chain launch, lending and insurance.

Again, we’ll watch for more…and we encourage you to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. These are highly speculative investments.

OH, and here’s a CLEARLY IDENTIFIED AFFILIATE LINK: Dego Affiliate Link. Check it out for yourself and good luck!

Sep 23 2020

DeFi Fever: Catch It!

If you’re having a hard time keeping up with all of the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) developments, don’t fret: so are we.

Seriously: we saw a thing on Telegram inviting us to join Pancake and we, too, were wondering WHY DO THEY ALL HAVE TO BE ABOUT FOOD!

Alas and alack, here are three more DeFi platforms to consider; though one isn’t about food and, to readers of this space, won’t be a complete mystery.

REMINDER: Do your own research. We’re not responsible for your success or failure. We hope you get rich and make mad bank, but you could also get rekt. Seriously, study this stuff closely — and be prepared to lose your entire investment.

Pickle: Does It Do Anything Interesting?

Pickle announced its intentions in a Sept. 10 post on Medium: “to bring stablecoins closer to their pegs using farming incentives, vaults, and governance.”

About that “off peg bad” stuff, here, from the Medium post, is the team’s motivation:

So there you have it…stability! A more stable stablecoin for a better world!

Or something like that…with the volatility in the first eleven days, it may take some time for the “peg” to be, well, pegged.

Watch this space for more developments; we haven’t invested in $PICKLE yet, but some of our DeFi “degenerate” colleagues have.

How About Pancakes?

This one comes with a couple asterisks: $CAKE is too new to rank on CoinGecko yet and it’s also on the Binance platform. The latter means that we can’t experiment with it yet at HQ because we don’t have any assets on the Binance platform.

ALSO…

In addition to wondering why these all look the same, this one doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence yet:

Once they get the “test” off of the site, we’ll let you know what we learn.

Biggest Non-Food DeFi Development: MCP3D’s $MEGA

This probably deserves its own blog post; but we wanted to make sure this got out before what could become a feeding frenzy.

MegaCryptoPolis, MCP3D for short, is a gaming platform that’s like the Sims. We have written about it a few times in the past; and in this post we felt like we were one of the early adopters on the cusp of something that was about to become huge. Well, the economy within MCP3D lets you use resources to build things, and you can create those resources by actions of your citizens (say, getting one of them to run a power plant).

That economy will soon — as early as tomorrow — let you trade these resources, put them into a vault, and collect the $MEGA token. You can read about these developments in the company’s post on Medium.

We’ve been a fan of this for quite some time — there’s tremendous potential if you’re into the gamification of these crypto communities, and combining the DeFi world with the Sims-type world may be huge.

Or MEGA.

Again, watch this space for more developments and, if you’ve got something to share in this world, let us know!

As always, stay safe out there. DYOR.

Sep 13 2020

Three More DeFi Experiments

After spending the better part of the past couple weeks grazing at the menu of #DeFi options — why are they all seemingly named after food? — we decided to conduct another experiment. Here’s a plus/minus analysis of three of them: $SUSHI, $SHRIMP, and $KIMCHI. Hungry for more knowledge and really stupid food puns? Time to dig in.

$SUSHI: High Potential Platform

One of the most compelling reasons to check out Sush i is its head-on challenge to Uniswap. Let’s say you’re one of the OG LPs in DeFi — “Original Gangster Liquidity Providers in Decentralized Finance” — and you want to maximize the fees you collect from providing liquidity. Uniswap had you covered until it was forked — or, more accurately, copied — and Sushi was born, but with a twist.

The folks at Decrypt explain what happened much better than I can; suffice it to say Uniswap offered few benefits other than the trading fees, so Sushi stepped in.

All this backdrop — and the back-and-forth between the creator and the community, culminating in the appearance of shady backroom deals and the payback of $14m in ETH — doesn’t impact our experiment too much, though; we’re in it for the APY and the possibility of decent passive income.

Our Experiment: A Few Hundred Bucks and a $SUSHI/ETH Pool

He looks friendly, let’s see what he’s serving…

In order to invest, we followed this process:

Take $ETH and go to Uniswap*
Find $SUSHI by adding the Sushi token on Uniswap, which we needed to do by copying and pasting the contract address; you can find it at this link: Sushi Swap Contract.
Swap the $ETH for $SUSHI (this is where you actually buy it) but leave enough $ETH to both pool with the Sushi AND pay for gas fees (at the time, we were paying $5 or so a transaction).
Now, do that “Pool Thing,” which is where you “Add Liquidity.”

* we invested using Uniswap, but now you can just go straight to Sushiswap.org and click on the “Exchange” tab. This is what you’ll see.

If you follow all of these steps, you, too, can become a Liquidity Provider.

That estimated APY has come way down, actually, in the past 24 hours; we were experiencing an APY that was around 1000% up until yesterday. Here’s a screenshot from just a bit ago:

We’ll continue to watch this one; the fact that the interest thrown off so far by our holdings, in the first week, added around 8% to the value of our LP tokens is nothing to sneeze at.

So Then We Got Hungry for $SHRIMP

This one, Shrimp.finance, deserves a warning label: Votalite as Heck. You could lose everything. AND, because we still haven’t figured it out completely, it is VERY SLOW to tell you if you’ve actually gained anything.

To wit, we invested in this one and held for about 24 hours before we tried to “harvest” our earnings. When we went to harvest, nothing was there beyond our original investment.

Our investment, however, is part of one of the “Advanced Pools,” screenshot below, and we believe that might mean that our investment needs to be held for 7 days before we see what our APY actually turned out to be.

Time to talk about math, too; or, time to talk about our understanding of the math involved. For instance, when we first saw this pool, the APY was estimated to be something like 300,000%. We think this was calculated by figuring out that the TVL in this pool was de minimis and the 3000 Shrimp thrown off to one user would amount to 821% interest per day (or 300,000 divided by 365).

When we got in, the interest level immediately dropped — though it was still a tidy 25,000%.

Math tells me that was on track to earn 71% a day, until someone else jumped into the pool…

It has dropped to 21% or so per day — two days after we jumped back in, so we’ll play a wait and see approach and find out when and if we’ll get the interest added, and, if our math is semi-correct, how we’ll benefit. (71 percent added each of the first two days, then 21 percent added for the next few days; we’ve promised ourselves to wait until the 18th, when it has been a week, to see how interest is credited.)

Note that the volatility also calls into question just how much money this will add up to: when Shrimp launched, on Sept. 4, its price was reported at $2.65. Its own website gives the price as of this writing at $0.516, while CoinMarketCap says it’s more like 79 cents per.

As they say, “watch this space for more.”

If You’re Really Hungry, Add $KIMCHI to Your Meal

Kimchi has the potential to be quite lucrative for us; it also has the potential to blow up completely in our faces. Time for this reminder to “DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH” and not to use any of this as investment advice.

We got into this one in part because we just needed to add one additional token to our repertoire: $KIMCHI. We could have gone with one of the other liquidity pools on the page, but, in this case, all we had to do was follow similar instructions above and use some $ETH we found under the couch cushions.

Here’s this morning’s interest rate:

Over a year, 23x your original investment.

After we bought the $KIMCHI and pooled it with our $ETH (on Uniswap; remains to be seen if they’ll add other platforms, especially with Sushi’s developments this past week), we ended up with around $520 worth of investment in the pool. (NOTE: Gas was expensive when we first tried this, and, even at $5 per transaction, you want to maximize how much you invest and minimize withdrawals.) Here’s what our stake looks like now.

Is it possible that we’ve already made around 6% interest on our original investment? Yes, it is entirely possible.

It’s also possible, given the low-ish “TVL” on the platform, and the sub-7-figure value of the coin itself, that this thing will continue to languish for the foreseeable future.

Or it could pop. What should the market capitalization be in relation to the total value locked? If you take $YFI as an example, the token’s market cap is north of $1 billion, but the TVL as reported by DeFi Pulse is below that. Even at a 1/1 ratio, you’re looking at a 3x growth from here in the coin’s price.

Let’s Watch This Unfold…

We’re probably best described as anxious when it comes to these platforms. Not sure what to expect, and, again, it’s an experiment. Could end up being a delicious meal, or we could have indigestion. Or worse.