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- Weekly Rundown - April 7, 2024
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Has it been three weeks since my last rundown?
Time flies when you're having fun. I heard Ethereum died while I was away and Solana took its place as the blockchain everybody uses, but hates.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
All we need to know about the direction of the market, we can get from looking at Bitcoin. Wherever it goes, altcoins follow (not all at once or at the same pace).
What’s going on with Bitcoin’s price?
It’s right on the edge of an almost 18-month parabolic upswing.
Why does this matter?
It's one of many developments we need to watch, for reasons I've discussed at length—most recently in my update for April 3, 2024.
In that update, I also pointed out some interesting behaviors related to Justin Sun’s stablecoins, TUSD and USDD, as well as a potential new trend in ETF flows and a reflection on the market.
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What’s on tap for the next few months?
Look for a special report on what to do after the halving, a new altcoin report, and some other goodies TBD.
Scroll down for some content you may enjoy.
Bottom line: Fetch.ai (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) held a vote on merging into a decentralized AI network. The voting’s still open if you want to participate (link immediately below).
My take: Expect more mergers as more projects realize they don’t need their own tokens. Consolidation is a form of creative destruction and better than letting these networks wither on the vine. Also, one more reminder that everything's made up and the points don't matter. Once developers build this new platform, we can see whether the fuss is worth it.
Why you should care: no reason to get upset, excited, or turned off. We’re all figuring this stuff out as we go!
For those who want to chase free crypto, a thread:
Imagine earning $300+ per day just by running apps.
DePIN - the future of decentralization.
Top projects that will generate passive income for you 🧵👇
— Rasgard (@rasgard_lodbrok)
8:17 AM • Apr 5, 2024
Bottom line: USDe, a new synthetic stablecoin with high yields, evokes memories of UST, an old synthetic stablecoin with high yields. When UST collapsed, it wiped out more than $40 billion in wealth and triggered an almost $1 trillion collapse in the crypto market (with help from massive fraud). Experts worry the same will happen with USDe, for reasons articulated in this article.
My take: As with all stablecoins (and all altcoins, for that matter), they’re great technology but risky assets that can collapse at any time. With traditional stablecoins, you risk custodial failure, government seizure of stablecoin assets, insolvency, fraud, embezzlement, and theft of collateral and reserves. With algorithmic stablecoins, you risk protocol failure, user error, device geoblocking, and defective smart contracts.
USDe balances long and short positions to extract value from speculators and hold its peg. Yield gets passed to holders while the long and short positions balance each other out. As a result, no matter which way the market goes, the protocol should hold its value.
Does that happen in practice? With all due respect to the experts, I'm happy to wait and see. Meanwhile, I don't see how USDe is more risky than anything else in crypto.
Why you should care: if USDe gets big enough, you can add it to the list of structural market risks along with restaking (house of cards), rewards/airdrops farming (Ponzi schemes), DeFi (rug pulls / smart contract failures), Tether . . . the list goes on.
Relax and enjoy the ride!
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