Sushi

Oct 01 2023

Crypto Isn’t Dead; It Isn’t Even on Life Support

We originally wanted to call this post “Night of the Living Crypto.” And that may have made sense given the fact that this is October 1 and we are entering Halloween season and the industry is a little sorta kinda zombie-esque.

To wit, here’s the YTD 2023 performance of the assets in our hypothetical “Growth Portfolio,” which took $10,000 and put it equally on 1/1/23 into 10 different crypto assets:

To paraphrase a former colleague, “That’s not too freaking bad.” (Of course — and I’m paraphrasing another former colleague — “It’s not bad, but it’s not good.”)

BUT…it’s not…DEAD.

We wrote about the Growth Portfolio here earlier this year; who would have thought that, in these modern times, somehow you’d be only down a little more than one percent entering the 4th quarter of the year?

And, also, without the dead weight at the bottom of that list, you would have — theoretically, since you would have had to time the market exactly on 1/1/23 — done really well.

The Big…Three? Two? Five?

We’re gonna go with the Big Two. Tether is an asset that is supposed to mirror the US Dollar in that it trades 99% of the time at $1.00. Binance has had its issues (read more about those here: The Street Binance Story) and XRP has just re-emerged as something you can trade in the US (Learn more about that here: Investopedia XRP).

First up, Bitcoin. BTC is…A-OK.

It does help that 1/1/23 was the bottom. Note to self: always buy at the bottom.

But what about Ethereum? ETH is, also, A-OK.

So it’s the Big Two. Had you invested your $10,000 stack into just those two coins, BTC and ETH, you’d have a tidy $15,313.50.

What Next? Who Knows, But…

First of all, that bottom three? Yikes.

That’s not incredibly bad — not down 99% like some defunct coins — but it’s not great.

Maybe the names are the ones that are gonna survive long-term? Or maybe having access to some of these $JEWEL or $SUSHI coins will give you access to potential 10-baggers?

However, what we *are* seeing here is that it’s really really REALLY tough to call the bottom; you would have been right predicting that 1/1 was the bottom for $BTC and $ETH and dead wrong for the bottom three.

In any event, the Big Two are doing just fine this year.

And Crypto Isn’t Dead.

Feb 14 2021

What Hath (The First Six Weeks of) 2021 Wrought?

We’re a few weeks past the GameStop Short Squeeze Apocalypse. Bitcoin has gone from $28,000-and-change on New Year’s Eve to north of $40,000. Altcoins seem to be flying off the shelves. Decentralized Finance is also on fire — if you pick the right one, natch — and the “degenerates” might be having their day.

So…what next?

Here’s some potential calm for the coming storm: a few ideas that, while they’re not financial advice and you need to DYOR (Do Your Own Research), could help you successfully hedge against the coming storms.

1. Just Buy and Hold Bitcoin

We’re reminded of a couple of conversations we’ve had recently with this little nugget of advice; both of the convos centered around “how do I get started?”

Bitcoin is…well…Bitcoin. If it’s not the centerpiece of a portfolio, that’s fine; but it’s also the core concept behind every single coin anyone uses. Without it, no crypto.

My predictions for this metal bull year of 2021:#Bitcoin $202,100#Ethereum $17,000#Dogecoin $2#Cardano $2 #Silver $45 #Apple $200#Alibaba $300#Tesla $3,000#GME $550#AAL $30#Moderna $50#Novavax $80#Carnival $33#USDRUB 54#EURUSD 1,36#USDJPY 88#USDTRY 5,90 https://t.co/k5cy2y8HZc
— Crypto Times (@Crypto__Times) February 7, 2021

Ignore the fact that there’s a guy with a Twitter handle of “@russian_market” and somehow he got a blue checkmark — which gives him some sort of authority, right? — and take a look at his Bitcoin prediction for 2021.

Also consider the fact he may be smoking something.

[TIME FOR A CLEARLY MARKED AFFILIATE LINK: Get some BTC, or other crypto, on Coinbase here. We’ll both get a bonus with a qualifying purchase.]

But, if our Russian friend thinks Bitcoin is doing a 5- or 6x this year, shouldn’t we look down the list and…and…

2. Ethereum Is on Fire

If you’ve followed this space for a few years, one of the things you have learned is this: without Ethereum, crypto apps don’t work. In addition to being a currency unto itself — and one that’s trading at around $1800 as of this writing — on pretty much any of the app-centered parts of crypto, you absolutely have to have “gas” to operate. That gas is ETH. Without ETH, no trades on Uniswap, no liquidity pools on any other #DeFi app, and no yield farming to speak of.

Chart from CoinGecko, Graphics from Metacoin.co

Even if you don’t understand any of that previous paragraph — and, let’s face it, most of that is Greek to the everyday Joe — realize this point: Bitcoin’s market cap is inching towards $1T, and BTC is four-and-a-half times that of ETH; ETH is NEARLY TEN TIMES AS LARGE as the next crypto coin (Cardano, ticker of $ADA). Ethereum is big, it’s very important to the crypto economy, and it is not going away.

3a and 3b. #DeFi Building Blocks

We’ve made a few mistakes here — without a “warts and all” approach, we don’t think this site would have lasted, actually; we’d rather you read up on the $50 we blew on some crypto app than invest in it yourself and lose your own money — and a couple of those mistakes are related to two trades we made with Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) coins that have caught fire.

First, item 3a. Yearn.finance is $YFI and, defying logic (er, “DeFi-ing logic”), had you gotten in on the ground floor — or, more accurately, the basement; only really truly early adopters got this price — you could conceivably have turned a grand into $1.4M.

A more accurate description of the “woulda, shoulda, coulda” factor here is that you may have gotten in on perhaps the first or second floor of this high-rise. Our own experience had us taking a chance (by “taking a chance” that means a hundred bucks or so) on YFI when it was priced at $2000 to $3500. So we’re still doing okay. But…

3b.: Uniswap. $UNI. This beaut was an airdrop. Last year, the UNI team decided that the best way to get users on board with its coin was to gift it to ANY account that had used the platform. The airdrop gave 400 coins (or so, as one of ours got a few more than 400) that were valued at around $3 each. We hodled some, sold some others, and it has turned out nicely, hovering above $20 for most of this week. (TBH, though, the fact we sold some a couple weeks ago does irk us more than a little.)

4. Take a Chance on These?

We added a question mark because — AND AGAIN DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH — you are more likely to lose your entire stake in any of these coins than you are to make mad bank (as the kids say).

If you want a couple ideas, though, here goes:

Sushi ($SUSHI), which forked from Uniswap, has done well this year (currently trading in the low teens).

Dogecoin ($DOGE) is the love of folks like Elon Musk; it’s also projected by the Russian guy up there to go up at least 10x this year.

Kimchi ($KIMCHI) was thought to be dead — and may actually BE dead, in that there don’t seem to be any active developers still working on the project; this is called a “Rug Pull” and we explain it a little more in this post — but it is still throwing off triple-digit APY.

N.B. on pools such as KIMCHI: not only are pools like these highly risky, these interest rates will fluctuate wildly; you’re betting that KIMCHI stays stable (it has been ranging from $0.0002 to $0.0004 for the past few months) and that you don’t get totally whacked with growth of the other coin you pool it with. If one of the coins goes way up while the other stays at roughly the same value, you’ll be kinda okay; if one goes up and the other goes way down, you’re going to have some “impermanent loss” from the coin that doesn’t grow. We explain more here:

A lovely YouTube video from Dave

And A Final Few Notes:

We hope this post gives you a few ideas about how to maximize your investments. We need to share a couple other things here:

Past performance (DUH) is not indicative of future results.
DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.
None of this is financial, legal, or tax advice.
Of the coins mentioned above, we own small positions in the following: $BTC, $ETH, $UNI, $YFI, $SUSHI, and $KIMCHI.

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 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.