Osmosis blockchain resumes, one-year anniversary and thirdening, and a launch of a brand new support site for users
Power struggles intensify around CEX’s and crypto heavyweights that turn against each other
Certain Stablecoins are looking shaky
Crypto market cap now under $1 Trillion in recent brutal sell-off
Art and Memes, we could all use the visual and comic relief
Keep fighting
Greetings Pioneers,
Things have been tough. Bitcoin’s down from ~$29K seven days ago to ~$19K currently, while the broader crypto market cap continues to bleed due to macro-economic forces and continued fallout from Terra’s collapse - this week it’s been crypto CEX’s that are in the crosshairs (theories on that later). Total crypto Mcap is down by 50% since the end of April (~7 weeks) …brutal. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen market turmoil like we’ve experienced in the past several weeks. But, in my opinion, things are never as bad as they seem, and volatility presents opportunity.
Osmosis Updates - June 18, 2022
Chain Functionality Re-instated
The Osmosis team successfully re-instated the Osmosis blockchain last weekend and processed all missed epochs. The chain ran for about 1.5 hours processing these missed epochs and distributed all missed rewards to miners, as well as airdropped additional funds to anyone that suffered loss from the Nitrogen V9 upgrade exploit.
The team has promised a more thorough and secure code-review process in the future. As stated last week, my assessment of the strength and viability of the Osmosis teams, validators, and community is significantly improved after overcoming this event.
Wosmington NFT’s Closer to Launch & New Roles
The Osmosis Discord will soon launch a new channel for WosmoNFT’s.
Users who want to take a more active role in Osmosis can head over to the Discord, #roles channel and sign-up for the categories they’re interested in:
Governance Role (take part in network proposals and debates)
Testnet Role (get access to testnet details)
Mental Health Support Channel (nice to see them doing this IMO)
Wosmo NFT’s - gamified NFT’s with potential perks and benefits
If you’d like to take a more active role or the most up-to-date info, check Osmosis Discord.
One-Year Anniversary of Osmosis and Thirdening Incoming
Osmosis will celebrate its 1-year anniversary tomorrow June 19! 🥳 🥳 🥳
As part of the pre-defined Tokenomics (Token Distribution Schedule), the supply of OSMO released every epoch will decrease by 1/3
Ultimately this will be generally supportive to the price of OSMO, however, like all crypto, OSMO is subject to market forces and internal dynamics.
Osmosis Support Site Launched!
The Osmosis team recently launched a support site for users, and so far the objective reviews have been very positive and supportive.
The site is a collab between the Osmosis Support Lab, the Osmosis Frontier Devs, and third-party designers and devs.
I highly encourage everyone to check it out, whatever your experience level is. The Dev section points you to the Osmosis Docs page, which looks like it recently had a face-lift itself, awesome.
Here is a link to the site: https://support.osmosis.zone/
Power Struggles Intensify
Battle of the CEX’s
A lot of what we’re seeing in the market is the result of the old power structures fighting against the up-and-comers, namely crypto and crypto-centered businesses. Business such as Celsius network. Celsius is under attack, possibly from the powers-that-be and possibly from some in the crypto space seeking revenge from the fallout of UST. Celsius hesitated to list UST on its platform for over a year before it finally decided to at the request of its customers. And it was one of the first to abandon it when things started to get shaky. They got out the door with their customers money intact, having sold almost all of their UST holdings.
This had led to the belief that others may have sought to take them down, who they sold to or who were similarly exposed to UST but were burned. A lot of FUD going out there on this one, especially as they froze customer withdrawals. It’s hard to see them regaining customer trust anytime soon, however, at their core the business is designed to make the customers the primary beneficiaries by returning the vast majority of profits to their customers. As opposed to a traditional bank, which shares virtually nothing with customers (0.06% savings rate, anyone?).
The alleged story of what is happening with Celsius is here:
As far as I can tell, their CEO (Alex M.) is a public figure and his statements hold him accountable under a court of law. I don’t see any ill-intentions or any shady, scandalous behavior - but of course we have no idea what’s really going on behind closed doors. If the story is true, I sympathize with him for doing what is best for their customers, but again, I’m not privy to any agreements that were in place with their other partners that are now supposedly gunning for them. Could Celsius’ participation in the bail-out have saved LUNA/UST? Possibly, but it also could have put them in a worst situation than they’re in now.
Things are getting tougher and it will be a battle for survival as crypto turns on its own. Ultimately, we need to flush out the system of excess and get back to the projects that are the strongest, soundest, and have the best leadership. I abhor the self-destruction tendencies and reckless behavior these guys are engaging in, if true.
What’s Up with the Volatility?
I tend to agree with the following statement. Volatility is always an opportunity. Long-term investors don’t mind, especially if they’ve bought and are looking to sell later at the long-term tax rate, pocketing anextra 20% in saved taxes over short-term gains.
Volatility is not a bug but a feature, as they say in the IT world. The purpose of which is the following:
Non-Hard and Under Collateralized Stables Looking Shaky
Supposedly USDD stablecoin is under collateralized and is losing its peg
Supposedly MIM (Magic Internet Money) is also in a similar situation. MIM is a soft-asset stable, and run by some less than upstanding characters..
We have a scoop from one of our associate autists: MIM (Magic Internet Money) may be nearly insolvent. MIM is one of the larger stablecoins, with a market cap of ~$300M. We can't believe that a project called Magic Internet Money has been acting irresponsibly either. Details:If it tells you anything, Wonderland sold $57MM of MIM for USDC
This is a reminder why sticking to hard-asset backed stables that are over-collateralized can save your skin when you know what hits the fan.
A Sub-$1 Trillion Market Cap
The total crypto market cap (tracked by Coinmarketcap.com) is now back down to just about $1 trillion USD. This is about 8% of the total market cap for Gold, which has historically been considered a “relatively small” market on the fringes. By comparison, the global equity market cap is somewhere in the range of $100 trillion. So crypto is about 1% of the world’s companies, by dollar value. $1 Trillion is a big, round number, and if you look at the trajectory of the market cap over time, there is a support at $1 Trillion (prior resistance becomes support), so I would expect at a minimum, prices will generally hold their current values in the short-term. As liquidity miners, this represents opportunity. If we can deploy capital, hold for a month, we profit from the mining rewards during this time, assuming price remains flat to up. If price trends down a bit, we may break even as our rewards would offset the principal losses.
The other thing too, is that according to Plan C’s model, when Bitcoin was trading at around $21k is effectively the lowest risk entry you get in crypto (model appears broken). Based on prior historical data that feeds the model, this moment is one of the lowest risk entries ever recorded. Now, models can and do break, and BTC and others can always go lower due to negative surprise shocks or systemic failure the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
We are also below realized cap for only the 5th time in Bitcoin’s history. We can hang out here for a while, again going lower, but ultimately all of the prior times have proven to be unique and profitable periods for accumulating BTC. Is this time different?
What I’m Looking At
The benefits of dollar-cost averaging and holding tokens like Bitcoin outright during periods of volatility, staking Sats.
Monitoring Osmosis activity and seeing a trend to flip ATOM:
Shapes on a Plane - a generative NFT art-project from Mount Virtruvius
Mint and dutch auction details here, you’ll need a Tezos wallet. I downloaded and set up Umami for this. You’ll also need to connect it to FXHash. This will be my first experience with NFT’s on Tezos Blockchain.
I am a collector of MV’s other two collections, Z-Huge and Mind the Gap and just love these AI-generated art works
The rising dominance of Bitcoin against other cryptos, reversing a long-term trend lower as BTC dominates in its defensive position against others
Conclusion
Crypto is not going away, but maybe the concept that every crypto project requires its own token to trade will. The tech is here and it’s useful. The United States Presidential branch wants to innovate and work with crypto, although generally it may still be unpopular outside of the Millenial generation and with certain groups. I get it. The internet was very unpopular too when it was growing. And most of the early internet companies didn’t succeed. The same thing is very likely to happen with crypto. Yes, there will always be companies and tokens that go to 0 (like the dot-com bust). Yes, power will be consolidated in the cryptos that survive, and these are likely to perform better than the others. There is only so much room at the top, but that’s not to say that smaller projects can and will find their niche, be successful, and provide opportunities to add value to the community and investors.
When we look at markets, Federal Reserve policy-making, and the established world order, we can start to see why crypto is unpopular in certain circles. Crypto is threatening the way things are, in a way that entrenched powers have little control over, I.e. that they cannot simply shut it down or ban it outright. As power slips, authoritarianism rears its head and seeks to tighten its grasp. The response to crypto is to fight it harder, seek more control, and move towards a more authoritarian government structure. This is already happening.
Being in crypto is a bit like being a freedom fighter. Some come to make money, but even then, they are incentivized to fight for crypto, and inherently all the benefits that crypto brings (Reference human rights advocacy here). It is times like these that the phrase “Never invest more than you can afford to lose” comes to mind. As long as this is the case, you have a fighting chance. And fight we must.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this little gem. Best. Meme. Ever? Not financial advice.
Stay nimble in your LPs, and committed to the cause.
Cheers,
Mike Broudy, ACS and StakeSchool.com founder