A diary of distractions
An unstructured summary of my week
I’ve been a bit distracted this week trying to do 15 trillion things simultaneously, both online and in the real world.
So instead of writing about one well-thought-out, intelligent topic, you've got a random assortment of thoughts and experiences I've had throughout the week laid out in a badly structured and disorganised manner :)
Enjoy!
I experimented with some new wallets.
MetaMask currently has a monopoly in the world of Crypto wallets.
This makes me sad.
Their pace of innovation has been lacklustre, to say the least. The product is slow to load and is missing a ton of basic features.
Why do I still have to manually add tokens such as USDT and USDC on Arbitrum & Optimism, or even WETH on Polygon?!?!?
I know I am dumb, but the number of times I’ve freaked out thinking I sent all my soon-to-be-worthless dollars to the burner address instead of a new wallet is ridiculous.
IT IS 2023. WHY DO I NEED TO GO TO COINGECKO OR ARBISCAN TO MANUALLY PASTE THE CONTRACT ADDRESS FOR THE THIRD BIGGEST CRYPTO COIN IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!
The good news is, the last time there was an incumbent monopoly that was slow to innovate (OpenSea), a new, faster-moving platform turned up and gave me lots of free money. (Blur)
MetaMask is asking to be dethroned, and there’s a huge opportunity for some new innovative wallets to come out of the shadows with the advent of EIP-4337.
For this reason, I’ve started trying out some new wallets in the hopes of finding something promising. I’ll let you know when I find something that stands out.
I spent a ton of time feeling like an idiot
which, counterintuitively, is one of my favourite feelings in the world.
This week, I listened to various Twitter spaces about roll-ups and read articles written by people orders of magnitude smarter than me.
Going directly from NFT influencer Twitter spaces to hearing Hasu and Keone discuss the merits of parallel execution is like leaving preschool and walking straight into a rocket science class at MIT.
You too can feel dumb by reading some of them here, here, and here.
There are many benefits to gaining a foundational understanding in Crypto. You can build strong conviction in your bets. Understand how things work. Differentiate between a novel development and vapourware. Better predict the future and increase your hit rate for successful bets.
However, the opportunity cost increases the further down the rabbit hole you go.
It’s important to remember that knowing every intricate detail of tech doesn't necessarily help you become a good trader.
How many times throughout history has good technology been the loser?
If you spent all your time learning and then arguing on web forums about the technical reasons why Blu-Ray was superior to HD DVD, you might have missed the Netflix moment and a 28,000% return.
Netflix chart from 2006 to present
If you spent your time researching the raw materials that went into Blackberry's keyboards and why they were superior to Nokia, maybe you missed the iPhone.
Or maybe you were super into cars in 1884 and realized then that electric vehicles were probably superior to internal combustion engines? Well, you would have had to wait nearly 100 years for Elon to be born to make that trade come true.
https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/a-brief-history-of-the-electric-car/
Or maybe you spent the last bull run arguing about the reasons why Ethereum was a better version of money than Bitcoin and missed out on NFTs.
I think its wise to ensure you have a solid foundation of crypto knowledge, but remain broad in your scope, keep incredibly open minded and fight the urge to delve too far into the minutia.
I did some digging into the behaviour of Blur farmers and what they might be missing.
Spoiler alert: It’s probably listing points.
I’m fully prepared to have egg on my face with this prediction, but reading between the lines of every interview Pacman has ever done, Blur's ambition is to make NFT trading as liquid as possible.
One way to achieve this is to ensure the gap between the bid side and the ask side is as slim as possible.
We know for certain that listing points will be worth the same as bidding points. But the exact formula is yet to be published.
With a little mental gymnastics, we can imagine a world where there is a hidden leaderboard tracking the listings for each collection and assigning points every 5-minute epoch, with preference going to those listed closest to the floor.
While this is speculation, in my mind, it is the most logical path for them to take if they want to keep the spreads tight.
You'd imagine then that with listing points being worth the same as bidding, thousands of people are trying to game it and lighting money on fire like they are with bidding?
Well, it appears not:
When I very nerdily manually counted last week, here were some numbers.
Within 0.05 of the floor:
Opepen - 17,000 bids, 88 listings
Lil Pudgys - 14,000 bids, 75 listings
Otherdeed - 10,000 bids, 100 listings
Sappy Seals - 6,000 bids, 30 listings
Pudgy Present - 6,000 bids, 27 listings
Cool Cats - 3,000 bids, 12 listings
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but one side of the trade seems awfully crowded, whilst the other might just be being ignored.
I thought a bit about LSDs
With Shanghai now less than two weeks away, I've started to look more closely at the LSD narrative again.
I still believe that once withdrawals are enabled, we'll see an increase in attention, innovation, and of course, the ponzification of Eth staking.
An arms race is likely to take place to capture the significant liquidity that results from this, so we may see big token incentives in the form of airdrops or token yields.
So far I’ve tested out EtherFi & DIVA. Both look interesting, and have recently completed raises, but with anything in DeFi you are overwhelmingly likely to simply be donating your money directly to Kim Jong-un. Please DYOR.
I wanted to throw my PC out of the window.
I spent far too many hours working out how much poorer I’ll be when I have to pay my tax bill. Any of you who have gone through this process know the pain involved in calculating Crypto taxes so I won’t bore you with any more details here.
I hope you enjoyed the brief summary of the random assortment of topics that have entered my mind this week.
Have a great weekend!