Gm,
Or should we say, 早上好. Have you already been China-pilled, old friend?
The
bear feared many moons, the meeting of the dragon and the
bull. For the bear knew how much the dragon loathed his presence.
Or something like that.
Anywho, if this all sounds foreign to you, then you better buckle up. You have a lot of catching up to do young anon.
The thread section this week was very busy.
So busy that a few threads only made the honorable mentions section at the end.
As for the must-reads, you probably noticed that something is brewing on Arbitrum. You are right. The chain is bubbling with activity. Route2FI broke down in his thread what makes Arbitrum so great and which protocols you must know. The TLDR:
- Arbitrum is the first L2 to process more transactions than the mainnet.
- GMX, RDNT, and GRAIL are projects you should know.
- GNS, VELA, and DPX are other interesting protocols.
The full thread, including his portfolio breakdown, is here:
(By the way, we also have deep dives into
Arbitrum and
GMX if you want to catch up on those.)
Obviously, if you have invested early enough in all of these gems, then you, too, would be sitting with a portfolio at ATH now. Just like Loround, who explained the mistakes he made to lose 90% of his portfolio and how he made it all back:
- Not using a framework.
- Being too greedy.
- Trading with fear.
- Avoiding the truth.
- Overtrading.
The full breakdown and how he ran it back turbo:
So if your portfolio puts on cement shoes during the bear, you may want to learn how to find gems early. Well, good thing there’s a thread on this too, this time by The DeFi Edge:
- How to read chain TVL growth and stablecoin inflows.
- How to decide on chains and find gems there.
- How to read forks.
- Learning risk management
- Creating your own system.
A lot of ground covered in this one:
Next week, CMC is hitting you with a massive guide to the best blockchain analytics tools, so stay tuned for that one as well!
If you need help with finding gems and educating yourself in crypto, here’s a thread with the best-of-creators in the space. Too many to name them all, so just check it out yourself:
Last one for this week is ChainLinkGod’s thread about tokenized real-world assets:
- What tokenized real-world assets are.
- Why stablecoins are an example of real-world assets and why they have blown up.
- Why tokenized real-world will become a thing.
- Which big players are involved in this space.
Indeed a narrative that is very interesting. Here’s the thread:
And now the honorable mentions that did not make the full cut:
- Dov wrote a thread about Who TF is Snowfro. You heard about Snowfro in our Generative Art Deep Dive.
- Gmoney’s thread covered Creator Royalties. A great complement to the NFT Royalties Guide that came out last week. Btw, he also predicts the emergence of smaller marketplaces.
- Brendan Malone is a “recovering central banker” that explained why bureaucrats are so obsessed with crypto.
Alright, if you still haven’t caught up with the crypto China narrative then here’s your chance to catch up.
If you were on Crypto Twitter (obviously you were not, otherwise we wouldn’t be here), you know that CT whale GCR
predicted China and Asia in general to fuel the next run.
He wasn’t wrong, you know?
Many China-related coins, or what people think are China-related coins, pumped the last weeks:
GCR isn’t the only one who is reading the Go board:
There are actually fundamental reasons why money from Asia is flowing into crypto. It’s not just the usual crypto pump narrative covered in the Talk of the Town section, so keep an eye out for that.
Meanwhile, here’s the promised Chinese wisdom of the week, courtesy of ChatGPT:
Elon was on a tear last week. Not a building tear though, but a memes ‘n shitposting tear. Check this out:
Haters will say he is only doing that after tweaking the algorithm to give himself more visibility:
You be the judge. But you can’t definitely fault Elon for “not eating his own dog food.”
Loads to cover in our “serious section” as well. How about we start with that massive
BLUR airdrop. It made OpenSea reverse course on its NFT royalties policy. It could also force them to cough up their own token soon:
Blur ain’t bluffin’. Sure, you could say it’s “greasing the wheels” with a lot of wash trading and airdrop farmers that just harvest the rewards, but so far it’s worked. Delphi Digital
broke down how Blur pulled it off.:
But that only brings us to, like, Tuesday. The fun didn’t stop there. First, we found out that Pacman (the founder) is a high school dropout-turned-math wiz:
And then there was a
massive NFT whale dump on the market to farm rewards…or manipulate the market?
This is all one big “developing story” at this point. The TLDR: everyone wants a piece of the BLUR rewards. We’ll see who’s still standing once the airdrop smoke clears.
Moving on to China. Barely mentioned that one, have we?
If you still don’t believe the narrative is real, this might convince you:
On a serious note, Tedtalksmacro
explains how the People’s Bank of China is injecting
liquidity into the system after the Covid lockdowns have been abandoned. And we all know how much crypto loves liquidity.
So Chinese money printer go brrr = crypto up only?
And then there was of course the big kahuna, the suitcase from Pulp Fiction, the absolute mother of all bombshells of crypto news. Ahh, Coinbase is onboardinggg:
Definitely did not see this one coming. And neither did Crypto Twitter, judging by the variety of opinions on this. John Deaton summed it up nicely:
Now is the Coinbase move a precedent that others will follow and that will onboard millions to crypto (Bankless)? Or a strategic blunder because the SEC is watching their every move (Gabriel Shapiro)?
Time will tell.
Wait, we’re not done yet. There’s still a last-second “DeFi protocol is not so decentralized” plot twist:
In short, decentralized only means decentralized until the multi-sig decides otherwise. Happy days for DeFi degens.
Even the Coinfessions knocked it out of the park this week. This one had the best attitude though:
Ahh, so many memes, so little time. Time just flies by with these weekly crypto cycles:
There wasn’t even a chance to talk about non-crypto things this week. Leave it to the memes to explain it:
And if you’ve had enough of the China narrative, you’re not alone:
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