Table of Contents
📊 History Rhymes
💵 Data Dump
👍 Laevitas / Ribbon
🧠 Three Interesting Stories
3 min read
History Rhymes
Crypto is dead, Regulators are knocking at the door, Bitcoin is going to zero, our beloved Cobie is actually a Fed...lolz
As the class of 2020 strolls the hallowed halls of Crypto Twitter, these are the messages that reach their soft, supple, little baby ears. Apocryphal rhetoric is en Vogue, yet again. But some of us are old enough to remember Gox, we were around for the block wars, we sat through the desolate wastelands of crypto winter, and we remember when Charlie Lee still had his Litecoin, RIP.
I personally remember sitting at a San Francisco conference where no more than 100 people showed up in a room made to seat 1000. Vitalik sat a few rows ahead of me, furiously hacking away on his laptop, unbothered, moisturized, in his lane.
Did we know that only a few years later, Bitcoin would climb into the 60’s? Did we know Ponzi Defi summer would explode? Did we foresee, at the height of our optimism and bravado a third dopamine wave in the form of NFT mania? Absolutely not.
"I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them." - Andy, (The Office)
Now look at us, infighting, rookies running for the exits, soft. I think everyone needs to take a hard look at how complicated, how deeply troubled, yet how beautiful the Bitcoin Maxi is. No matter the circumstance, no matter the FUD, at least they picked something to believe in, and with unwavering faith will die on that hill. Crypto in general could use a bit more of that.
The point I’m trying to make here is that these cycles come and go. Like an idiot, I sold bitcoin at $400, and watched it run-up to 19k, when it came back down, I resolved to not make the same mistake twice.
Last point, Andreessen raised $600M for blockchain gaming, would anyone pump that much money into crypto if they didn’t believe in the future of the space?
Do what you want, I could be wrong. But it seems to me history is simply rhyming.
Update: As I write this another tweet just posted.
And you’re worried about losing your .05 BTC. lol
Data Dump
Bitcoin seems to be stuck in a range at the moment, but with Macro factors looming, I’m half expecting another pitch down.
ETH as well.
Here is a relevant thread I posted on Macro yesterday.
Options
Laevitas is coming out with their V2 very soon, and it is slick. If you are an Options trader this will be incredibly valuable. It’s all the things I wished I had over the last two years.
In case you missed it, I wrote a thread the other day highlighting some of my favorite features.
Ribbon
I’m sure you all know what Ribbon is by now, but if you don’t, they are a structured product protocol with 175M TVL. In other words, they create Option Vaults, you deposit your tokens, and the vaults execute option strategies automatically. I’ve written about this ad nauseum.
If you have followed us for any length of time you probably knew all that, but what I bet you didn’t know is that Ribbon is now making their foray into fixed income.
“We are working with Porter Finance to issue and sell to lenders $3M of convertible bonds [4] 22 backed by $15M worth of $RBN collateral. The exact amount issued will depend on the interest rates at auction time, but we are targeting up to $3M…
The call strike will be 3x the market price at issuance.
We expect a 3-4% net borrow APR for the cash raised since the 7% borrow APR and Porter’s 1% service fee will be offset with 5% in Porter tokens through their liquidity mining program. Since the token has not launched, we will receive IOU’s redeemable for the Porter token at a later date in the future.”
Very interesting to see the natural evolution play out in real-time. We (here at Variant) have long held the belief that the final form of NFT’s will be debt. I know that’s not what we are talking about here specifically, but the stage is being set.
On to making money using Ribbon. This last week my SOL covered call vault made around 1%, which is around 67% annualized. If future posts we will dive into the mechanics of how these vaults work and more importantly how I am buying insurance to hedge my “IL” (or what sane people simply call loss.) But for now here is a thread straight from the source highlighting the performance of the vaults.
Three Things
That’s all we have for this week. Friends tell friends to subscribe and share this newsletter so they don’t miss out! Just saying.
We will leave you with three interesting, albeit, eclectic articles.