Emin Gün Sirer🔺 Profile picture
May 10, 2022 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Even fully-collateralized fiat stablecoins have depegged. Even some of the weak algo stablecoins have recovered.

Some thoughts. 🧵👇
I have always said that algo stables are subject to destabilizing bank runs. The only mechanism that can defend against this is a strong, active team that performs open market operations.
My thoughts and takeaways today:

1. We need a decentralized stablecoin. Fiat-backed stables are subject to legal seizure and capture. A decentralized economy needs a decentralized stablecoin whose backing store cannot be frozen or confiscated.
2. There isn't room in the market for a dozen, or half a dozen, or even just two algorithmic stablecoins. This is a market where the biggest one wins and all others lose.
3. If there'll be a decentralized stablecoin that succeeds, it'll be the one with the biggest value and the most battle-tested team.

Let that sink in. It's not a game where johnny-come-lately has a chance.
4. Hope you all can see why you should not touch copycat algo stables issued by purely technical teams. If the team's claim to fame is that they were once interns are Google, they are NGMI. The team that has the best open market operations is the only one that can pull it off.
5. For various regulatory reasons, there's no way a US-based team can succeed at an algo stable. Pretty much only a Korean, Singaporean or Swiss team has the right regulatory environment. All others are ticking time bombs.
6. For the algorithmic side of the stablecoin to work, the underlying chain has to offer high capacity and resilience under load. Few chains have the right mempool, fee and API infra to handle high loads.
7. The space is incredibly resilient. We just weathered a substantial bank run. Had this happened in TradFi, there would have been talk of doom and bailouts galore. One thing we know though, the bankers' bonuses would still be paid.
8. I'm not the least bit surprised by UST's resilience. Remember that every single stablecoin has, at times, depegged, including fully-collateralized fiat-backed stablecoins. All of them that have a real team behind them have bounced back.
9. The bounce back is a great arbitrage opportunity. The dynamic that gives rise to a bank run executes in reverse on the way back.
10. More complex stablecoin designs seem unlikely to be more stable under a bank run. The simpler the mechanism, the easier it is to understand and implement. I can imagine many more complex designs, I can't imagine that any of them would achieve better stability.
12. Every single sovereign currency has also had difficulty maintaining advertised pegs. There isn't much difference between sovereign fiat currencies and algo stablecoins in terms of the challenges faced when defending a peg.
13. Before anyone says "hey, open market operations by a team doesn't seem decentralized," remember that the value proposition here is to create an asset whose backing store is decentralized and can't be confiscated or frozen. A capable team is absolutely essential for this.
14. We all love drama, and it's possible to trade into the drama to eke out small percentage gains while taking on some risks that are hard to anticipate, like CEXes halting trades or deposits or what not. The real fortunes in crypto lie in more straightforward long trades.
Overall, the UST depegging played out exactly as we saw in past historical cases. I'm even more bearish on all copycats, and bullish on UST once the dust settles down.

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More from @el33th4xor

Aug 21
I just got back from vacation and what on earth is going on with economic policy proposals from the Dems?
Price controls have no place in a free market economy. This isn't communism, as some have claimed, but it *is* tantamount to a centrally planned economy. The same people who brought you the current US healthcare system are going to now meddle in the prices of all goods and services? How does any of this make sense? And how does a party with so many renowned academics in it even come up with this terrible idea?
Levying a tax on unrealized gains would kill entrepreneurship in the US. Also, here's a fun experiment:

I create 300 trillion of a new token called FU

I sell 0.000000001 FU to a friend for $1.

I airdrop 1 FU to every American.

Congratulations, you all now have $100m in unrealized gains and have to cough up $25m to Kamala Harris. Yes, there are additional nuances, but for every nuance, there's a complication I can add to this scheme (holding periods and lockups that span reporting proud) that will force you to be on the hook.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 18
I keep seeing prominent folks on this platform use words like "Communist" and even "Bolshevik" these days. These terms are anachronistic, and quite non-sensible in our current times.

🧵 👇
As far as I can tell, literally no one is arguing to nationalize the means of production in the US. Not even the crazy guy on the street. This election is not a Labor versus Capital fight -- that battle is, sadly, over. It's Incumbent Capitalists versus Challenging Capitalists.
The folks who use the phrase Bolshevik aren't, say, it's opposite, namely, Mensheviks themselves. These people sound like Grandpa Simpson ranting on about the Kaiser for "stealing the word twenty."
Read 5 tweets
Jul 5
1/ When we say Avalanche is many fast chains that feel like one, a critical piece of that is the ease of token transfers across multiple destinations. Today, we are introducing Avalanche Interchain Token Transfer (ICTT), a universal facility for interchain token transfers.
2/ The Avalanche Interchain Token Transfer (ICTT) service is a *permissionless* way in which tokens on Chain A can be sent to a recipient on Chain B. As such, ICTT serves the same function as a traditional bridge, but it is NOT a bridge and has none of the traditional drawbacks of bridges.
3/ How is ICTT different from a bridge?

1) It does NOT rely on a small set of nodes for its operation; 2) It does NOT involve a central operator; and 3) There is no multisig that is in command of its operation.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 2
1/ As we approach July 4th, I'm struck by the changing landscape of our industry from a political standpoint. A lot has been said about the advantages of blockchain and crypto, but I’d like to drill into the political power of crypto owners. #CryptoBloc 🧵 Image
2/ An estimated 93 million Americans now own one or more cryptocurrencies. With more households that own crypto than dogs, there is now a serious group of voters up for grabs – and at an average age of 38, they represent the future of politics in America.
3/ As political parties realize that crypto is here to stay and that people like owning their digital assets, more politicians are going to get smart and appeal to these voters as a legitimate interest group.

Potentially one of the largest single interest groups in the country.
Read 5 tweets
May 21
Ok listen up, there's something cool and novel and interesting happening in crypto that you should know about. Namely:

1. There's a new vertical developing, called SocialFi,

2. The best examples of this vertical are on Avalanche

3. There is a new application that you just have to see that I will link below.
Now, I don't know what your thesis is in crypto, but I think we can all agree that we cannot all get rich trading memecoins between each other all day, and the new L1s are slicing the salami way too thin to pose decent value propositions. So it makes sense to look forward a bit and project where the new growth in the space will take place.
It seems highly likely that crypto will follow the exact same path as all other infrastructure tech, like the Internet and telecom. Remember how the Internet started out with just email, then came "the web," and then suddenly we had all kinds of new verticals (e.g. ecommerce, online games, dating apps, digital health, etc etc). We already saw the same thing happen in crypto, starting with simple, inward oriented verticals such as NFTs, memecoins and the like.
Read 15 tweets
Apr 29
Please don't get taken in by another project that is faster at inventing new terminology than it is at transferring value. That is all.
This is especially true for projects that are trying to adopt technical terminology from the humanities.
Remember "effective altruism"? The silicon valley cover story for stealing everyone's money? The head guy, who was inventing enough highfalutin words per minute to fill a few humanities journals, just had his institute shut down, after Sam used his ideology to power fraud.
Read 9 tweets

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