1. In my home country, Ghana, and many other developing nations, Tron USDT on Binance is the lifeblood of stablecoin P2P trading
2. "How did Tron pull this off?" : Around 2019, Tron struck a deal with Binance that made it the default blockchain for depositing/withdrawing USDT. Binance also facilitated Tron transactions for free in the early days.
To this day, Tron is the top USDT option in Binance UI. It even sits above Binance's own chain! Even though it costs more!!
3. "Why don't L2s try to form similar partnerships with Binance to capture that emerging market stablecoin activity?": It looks like that's what Scroll is trying to do.
Nuance:
The plan is logical, but I don't know if it will produce the same results as Tron got. I'm not a prophet lol.
I hope it works. I'd prefer for an Ethereum zkrollup to get emerging market stablecoin activity rather than Tron.
I'm biased because I've done work for Scroll as a data consultant. But I don't have insider info on the Binance collab or the token allocation strategy, so this is my honest outside perspective.
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I often get asked the question, "What's happening onchain?"
The answer usually lies in incentives. Every new wave of onchain activity is driven by a new incentives playbook. For example 👇
[2020] Liquidity mining
- Compound, a lending protocol, kicked off the liquidity mining trend in June 2020 with a wildly successful token incentive program. Compound's TVL spikes from $100M to $600M in one week
- Every DeFi protocol under the sun copied this playbook and DeFi summer entered full swing.
[2021] Joint Liquidity Mining
In early 2021, the Polygon Foundation launched joint liquidity mining programs with popular DeFi protocols.
First was Aave. Polygon gave $40M worth of MATIC to lenders and borrowers on Polygon Aave. Users bridged to use Polygon Aave to earn these incentives -> Polygon Aave's TVL grew rapidly.
Polygon repeated this playbook with other protocols like Curve and Sushiswap. Polygon’s TVL jumped from ~$100M to high billions within two months.
The playbook was replicated by a host of other chains like Avalanche (see Avalanche rush) and this drove the alt-L1 rotation in 2021.
Learning crypto data science changed my life and was 100% free.
If you're looking for a change (I was a transport planner), start coding 1 hour a night. More on weekends.
Pick a simple @DuneAnalytics project. Learn just enough to build it. Pick a bigger project. Repeat.
It took me 3 years to get to my current level of crypto data proficiency (preceded by 3 years of writing coding in other fields). Here are some free resources you can use to get there 10X faster 👇
1. SQL and Blockchain data
Go to Headmaster Andrew's twitter account (@andrewhong5297) 🧙♂️✨
Click the link in his bio.
You'll find intro guides for Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin Dune data analysis.
How to become a DeFi frontend engineer (starting from scratch):
Step 0: Learn basic JavaScript and HTML from a free resource of your choice (CodeAcademy, w3schools, freecodecamp .etc)
For JavaScript, if you understand variables, functions, if statements, and while loops then you're fine.
Step 1: Work through the reading and exercises in the 'Get Started' section of the React documentation (Quick start, Tic-tac-toe, Thinking in React .etc)
React is the most popular library for frontend engineering