1/ Algorithmic stablecoins seem primed to explode this coming year similar to how oracles ( $LINK, $BAND, etc) had a great past year
2/ Stablecoins have achieved product-market fit at a mind-blowing scale - with demand for stables pushing total supply into the tens of billions and still exponentially expanding
They're used as SOVs (Eurodollar 2.0) and MoEs in & outside crypto
3/ The issue with current stablecoins is that they are not truly censorship-resistant. They can be shut down & represent a weak link in our DeFi ecosystems.
What's desperately needed are truly decentralized stablecoins. These can make DeFi applications truly unstoppable
4/ There are a few projects already live on mainnet - notably
5/ The key factor with these algorithmic stablecoins is that they need to reach scale ($1-10B+) in order to effectively function as really stable stablecoins and to be liquid enough to be useful on mass scale
6/ That leads to a bit of a conundrum - how do you create enough demand to expand supply if the system hasn't reached threshold stability/liquidity yet?
This is actually the exact same problem Bitcoin faces
7/ The elegant solution? Ponzify it
By entitling the early speculators to greater economic gain, the system is able to bootstrap itself
Those that speculate have an incentive to draw in more speculators. And the more that are drawn in, the more legitimate the systems become
8/ Going from millions to billions to trillions turns Bitcoin from a purely speculative asset to a real store of value and potential global reserve asset
The same is true for algorithmic stablecoins
9/ The stablecoins in these systems when young have little normal demand so by making the holders of the stablecoins the recipients of supply expansion/yield, the projects can harness the power of speculation to create demand
This is otherwise known as the pool2 effect
10/ As the supply for these stablecoins expand, stability & liquidity increases, confidence in the system increases and more conservative speculators are drawn in
This is how $AMPL reached $1B FDV and how $ESD and $BAC probably reach billions
There's too much hot money not to
11/ The verdict is still out on whether these algorithmic stablecoins actually work. $ESD has been holding stability but only a few months young
The amazing thing is that they will gain value whether they work or not
A traders dream, especially ones that understand reflexivity
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1/ Genericized Impermanent Loss Insurance - A new proposed financial primitive for bootstrapping AMM markets
2/ Last year, @synthetix_io pioneered liquidity mining - the model of incentivizing liquidity in markets via paying rewards to LPs in @UniswapProtocol and @CurveFinance
Rewards are streamed through the "mintr contract" which has become a mainstay of liquidity mining programs
3/ Liquidity mining allowed new projects to disintermediate centralized exchanges and market makers and bootstrap their own liquidity - saving significant time & resources for projects with many other positive externalities
Pretty cool to see a project that originally raised $130M (and never launched) ended up being launched by anon devs with 0 funding with a few months of dev work
Goes to show how excessive some of these fundraises in crypto actually were
That being said, I think it's well accepted that the Basis model doesn't actually work in a real world setting
Cool experiment and I think algorithmic stablecoins will be a pretty hot category this year, but imo there are better ones out there
Also, these capped farm launches are pretty dumb. The intent is to improve distribution, but funds that have inhouse developer resources just end up eating all the cake
The first such asset to simultaneously serve as a Store of Value (SOV), stablecoin and a speculative asset
An incredibly asymmetric and reflexive opportunity
2/ Stablecoins were the first crypto products that achieved product-market fit at scale after Bitcoin
Stablecoin growth is currently parabolic (USDT alone approaching $20B) and will be the first crypto sector to achieve mass adoption
3/ So we're all bullish on stablecoins, but traditionally it's been very difficult to gain exposure to their growth
- Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) are private companies whose shares trade extremely thinly OTC
- $MKR is a poor proxy of DAI growth (DAI up, MKR sideways)