Reimagining money w/ @SierraIsMoney | Tweets represent my own views and are not financial advice
Palau
Joined March 2018
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No crying in the kitchen just got added to CT lore
Metamask.eth responded to Jaredfromsubway after they offered 50% white hat bounty to the exploiter.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Good luck pursuing legal action after getting sandwiched once. If it would pass in court (it wouldn't) then everyone you ever sandwiched would have grounds for a class action against the endless sandwiches you made. You would be supremely shafted. And even if it doesn't pass, your name will be out there and you surely wouldn't want that. You can't do shit, re*ard. GGWP to the guy that got you rekt. No crying in the kitchen, fa**ot.”
“send 100 eth to nsa.eth for good luck. and stop crying in the kitchen”
You are very very early
Bear markets are where winners are made (airdrop alpha below)
Projects are realizing not everyone is willing to farm everything anymore. But they still need early traction, so campaigns are becoming more generous, honest, and rewarding again.
Airdrop farmers bring:
- Early traction and attention
- Liquidity
- Numbers for fundraising
In a bear market, these are more valuable than ever.
We’re already seeing this trend, here are two new projects running campaigns with much better conditions than what we saw during the bull market:
1. @SierraIsMoney
- $SGT airdrop in Q3
- 30% of the total supply reserved for the points campaign
- 100m points maximum (less than 10m distributed so far)
- TVL went from $5m to $20m since I last mentioned the project 3 weeks ago
Stablecoin (or dollar-denominated) project, not saying this is a guaranteed win, but if this continues to grow, you are very early.
2. @apyx_fi
- Season 1 will run for exactly 12 weeks (or $1b TVL)
- 5% of total supply reserved for season 1 only
- A bit of a larger project which people have called the "Microstrategy of stablecoins"
- TVL is sitting at $68m
Another stablecoin project, smaller airdrop % but larger project with more partnerships and integrations. 5% airdrop of total supply for a 12 week campaign is still good.
Both projects are on @pendle_fi, so you can theoretically farm with leverage through YTs.
Compare these campaigns with most of the projects from last bull market. No info on campaign duration, no info on airdrop %.
The main risks here: TGE delays, projects dying or failing to gain traction, or teams not honouring their promises.
The point of this post isn’t to directly endorse the projects above, but to show you that in a bear market, teams recognize they must incentivize and run more generous airdrop campaigns to survive. Some of these will pay off once market conditions inevitably turn.
Rather than poor market conditions resulting in more airdrop sell pressure, I think the biggest determinant is the extent farmers realized losses to obtain points
If true, its bearish new Perp DEX token launches and bullish for governance token launches for Liquid Yield Tokens
Central banks control the money supply, AAVE is closer to JP Morgan than the Fed given its TVL growth is constrained by new deposits
I think its awesome to see this unique approach of converting tokenholders to equity shareholders, props to Across for the innovative idea and respecting tokenholders equally with team and private investors
Much better outcome for ACX holders than Axelar aquistion
What's not clear to me is that one motivating factor cited is that their entity structure was only a foundation, which is understandably hard to do commercial business
Why not keep the ACX token and setup a wholly owned subsidiary of Foundation that can do commercial efforts and return any value generated to ACX holders?
And the researcher cannot find any explicable reason why people supply WETH to AAVE below stETH staking yields…
The future of successful token launches:
fair value raise in private > allow retail ICO participants access to same (or better) terms > find some degree of PMF & revenue > launch at fair FDV > return value to tokenholders > token does well > both team and investors make money
Check out SIERRA’s new market on @pendle_fi and the blog explaining key details around Peaks and the Summit Program
Should be some great fixed yields on SIERRA PTs and looping coming soon!
We're really excited to announce the launch of SIERRA's market on @pendle_fi
This milestone marks the first chapter in new opportunities to earn yield on SIERRA throughout the Summit Program
Read below on why we're launching on Pendle, how to participate and key details👇
The real question is who borrowed all of the UST from Galaxy?
The administrator winding down Do Kwon’s Terraform Labs has sued Jane Street, alleging the trading giant engaged in insider trading to profit unlawfully from and ultimately hasten the crypto empire’s collapse on.wsj.com/3OyiIkf
Mitchell retweeted
With all due respect to Hasseeb, I completely disagree with this take.
Chris was and is a mentor to me, I'm not pretending otherwise.
But neither Chris nor Haseeb are builders in the category.
I have spent the last year in the trenches trying to build non-speculative consumer crypto usecases. Ignore "non-financial". That's a useless umbrella. I care about non-speculative.
Here's what I know with total clarity: Three years ago it was 100% impossible to ship a good consumer crypto experience.
Not hard. Not early. Impossible.
The wallet experience was complete and utter dogshit.
Injected wallets are an unacceptable UX.
Seed phrases, unacceptable.
Blind signing, unacceptable.
Bridging, unacceptable.
Here's your onboarding experience for a consumer media flow:
1. Install a fox-faced browser extension
2. Write down a 24 word seed phrase and hide it under your fridge (btw now some romanian dude's gonna break int your house)
3. Select a chain if god willing you understand what that means
4. Go find a bridge (Wormhole, LayerZero, ...) if you guessed wrong
5. Sign hexadecimal strings with very scary error messages
6. "Transaction pending... would you like to increase your gas price" (wtf is gas? they'll say)
Thats is before you even fund the thing.
But I'm not done, on ramps were even worse.
If you wanted to use some "web3 media" app, you had to open an exchange account. The UI looked like DraftKings for slop-maxxed decentralization jargon.
Spin the wheel to get decentralized compute coin on Arbitrum or turbo DNS coin on Polkadot! Last cycle nonsense.
Before you buy anything you need to go through a rigorous KYC process. SSN, address, Drivers License verification, transfer to your mobile device, liveness check on your face, transfer back, "a human in a remote country will check this asynchronously and we'll get back to you".
Now we sign into Plaid, put our bank credentials into some random form on this new DraftKing exchange, now they can auto-draw down money. Perfect.
Now god willing you've found UDSC and bought it on the right chain. You're ready to transfer out. You paste in your 40-character Hex address to the fox-head app.
That'll be 24-48 hours before it arrives due to ACH fraud risk.
Aaaand now you can use the web3 media app.
And KYB on ramps for enterprises? Rectal inspection. I need not go deeper.
Consumer apps are viral flywheels. If there's too much friction on the axle, the flywheel never spins. Crypto had superglue on the flywheel.
So when we say "the market rejected consumer crypto," we should ask a basic question.
Did we ever actually ship it in a form that normal people could evaluate.
Finance worked because the users were willing to tolerate absurd friction. Traders will jump through flaming hoops when their perceived EV is +infinite (because they're a genius and have alpha or astrology signals or whatever).
Media and other consumer activities do not get that tolerance budget.
Now enough with the pessimism of the past. Let's fast forward to today (or next 3 mo).
- Embedded wallets are real
- OAuth style onboarding is real
- Headless custody is real
- In app onramps are real
- Stablecoin onramps are real (this is a distinct thing and is critically important and I don't have time to explain in this post)
- KYB capable providers are emerging
Privy. Bridge. Stripe. Zerohash. Coinbases' new stack. This stuff is recent. Widely usable versions are maybe two years old. Broad developer adoption is even newer.
For the first time you can do something like:
- Sign in with email
- Wallet created under the hood
- Buy stablecoins inside the app
- Transact instantly
No exchange account, no raffle spinny wheels for decentralized slop, no fox icon, no seed phrase under your fridge.
That stack did not exist in a usable form when most of the "consumer experiments" were run.
After teh blood sweat and tears out of the L1 engineers, L2 engineers, the cryptographers, the wallet teams, the exchange teams, the compliance teams, and the onramp providers, we are finally getting something that resembles a sane consumer stack.
We are just getting the grease.
That does not mean consumer crypto is inevitable.
It does mean we are only now in a position to run the experiment honestly. It's the best time to build in crypto, in the history of crypto.
If it fails from here, with real UX and real onboarding and real distribution, then fine. I'll eat my shoe. Call it dead.
With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take.
Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases.
OK, think about this for a second.
Does this pass the smell test?
Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really?
If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams.
Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them.
Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope.
Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever.
Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature.
2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value
2014: Tether - stablecoins
2015: Ethereum - programmable money
2017: ICOs - capital formation
2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket)
2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name
2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked)
2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off)
All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis.
In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there.
This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto.
The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry."
I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes.
Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions.
But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.
