Detail read 👇 on what Coinbase's revenue trend & strategic pillars reveal about the industry

Went through Coinbase earnings from 2021-2024 for cycle recap & parallels, such a reality check: retail isn’t coming back. CB’s consumer trading rev still down 50% from 2021’s peak, likely triple-killed by

1️⃣ On-chain casinos
2️⃣ ETF flows
3️⃣ Tech stocks Everyone expected retail to "come back" to buy altcoin bags (in cex) once BTC hit ATH, but they didn’t.

This is likely an upper funnel problem all CEXs are facing (confirmed by top offshore exchanges too). It’s also fueling the controversial high FDV, down-only tokens listed on CEX as a downstream effect.

Without fresh retail liquidity, altcoin performance is massively dispersed, money is either rotating faster or doubling down on a few main characters. Let’s not ignore the distraction from AI stocks & TradFi ETF flows, Both I covered earlier in this thread from last year x.com/DoveyWan/statu…

Simple math for next cycle founders:

CB+Binance = 200m accounts;
MetaMask = 20m addresses;
Active onchain users = 200k

It’s a 10% to 0.1% ratio from top of the funnel. Every new cycle top of the funnel will grow organically as price action (fomo and greed) is the best acquisition.

Solid work that can drive 10% to 20% or more, or 0.1% to 1% will be next cycle’s trend setter The data structure above at first glance is a pyramid, but from user intent/profile perspective is more like a barbell: ❚·══·❚

onchain experience serves best for either the MARGINAL users (no good access to cex or financial infra) or POWER users (self-custody, whales who want to trade with transparency, heavy yield farmers, additive hamster degen) at current phase. The large middle distribution are either indifferent or not enough incentive/too high of mental switch cost to move onchain.

When competing with offchain experience on cost, speed, usability, or content quality & accessibility we are far from there. imo is not the right battle to fight: Twitter will not be decentralized by a Twitter form factor thing, onchain STEAM needs to have its own Counter Strike level hit first before it can be a distribution channel.

It’s just unrealistic to expect “better onchain content delivery to beat web2” recommendation, targeting, curation all these are too costly to do it in crypto native way. retro fitting NGMI, we need to reimagine in the native and creative way.

Simply have tokenomics on top of apps will not magically lower down the CAC or fix the broken retention rate, which are the two main causes death of consumer facing apps

So my thesis for funding next gen products/protocols are

1. How to serve the two sides of barbell better
2. How to enlarge the barbell coverage (ask the q: why mid distribution will care and what’s the trigger to move them onchain)

I get we need something positive, but the imaginary China narrative is pretty dumb considering how predatory mainland situation is for crypto founders

There is a on going retroactive witch hunt, ie ICO founders from the 2017-18 will be harassed even if they already quit the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… the underlying motivation for many cases is less abt "regulatory suppression" is more about economic exploitation, typical case during bad time surveillance state abuse its law enforcement power to overstep in private sectors, confiscate asset, fine the riches

Local… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

On “Bio Hacking”

Always got friends ask “how to bio hack”

I don’t like the term “bio hack” as it makes us think there is magical quick fix in achieving bio vitality

but in reality most of us are not even getting the basic right: good sleep, food, mood and moves

1/ The most effective approach to “hack” our bio is simply back to a more primitive form of life. I.e if you go camping for a week, you naturally fix your circadian clock

Our biological evolution is so lagging behind technological evolution and change of life style. Modern urban… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Will be on the panel of Cefi vs Defi in the afternoon as the only Defi rep😅

HK is largely a Cefi hub as the gateway for China so not everything is "politically right " on the stage

I posted what's really on my mind about this topic here, with HK context

A thread - 1/ At the macro level, most countries (except China and Russia and a few handful others ) in the world have no monetary sovereignty, including HK here unfortunately. HKD is a synthetic US dollar. The slow rug from the Fed has been extremely costly for HK to maintain the peg

Aftermath of #SVB on Chinese outflow and Singapore inflow

1/ My private bankers in SG said they have seen massive Chinese wealth outflow from US after SVB crisis into Singapore

SVB is not just a Sandhill VC bank but also bank to offshore GPs and Chinese tech firm under VIE 2/ just anecdotally one of my Chinese tech investment (a series B company) had $10m in SVB

It’s a bank to global tech money and HNW tech persons

Most Chinese HNW post 2000 (age between 35-60) are made under tech, who used to considered US bank as ironclad not anymore

Just read the @circle announcement on USDC circle.com/blog/an-update…

last year I ask @jerallaire their repo experience and how it's time to stress test it. They are well aware of all risks and should have rehearsed the liquidity ops for an extreme situation like this ... I believe Circle and the team will go through this and might have to raise an equity cushion (or bridge loan) to buy time while FDIC process their uninsured claims

this should be an easy ie to collateralize their bond interest for the raise

now it's the WORST time to unwind or swap USDC, USDC holders and Defi vault operator with USDC don't panic

1. the actual loss of Circle's 3.3B deposits will likely take ~25% haircut so <1B, which can be primarily covered by its 2022 income from $32.B short-term T-bill yield imo 2. Coinbase publicly said will resume redemption on Monday, even if you don't have CB account, there will be on-going arb as long as the redemption is there. So the onchain exchange USDC will be relatively peggish as long as redemption is open

https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1634399032767307776

Internet users: 5 billion; cex users+ onchain wallets ~250 million

The adoption is at most 5%, there’s 95% more to conquer

To bank the unbanked, to chain the unchained, this is the most exiting paradigm shift of our time

The future is here, just not evenly distributed “The tightest-knit supermassive black hole duo” is the pic to present my thoughts on “web3”

Internet is built on telecom but is NOT telecom 2.0

crypto economy (protocols, dapps and all related infra & services) is built on the web but it’s orthogonal, sometimes opposite to web2

Most tech investors considered crypto is perma overhyped and AI is finally to an inflection pt

I hold a diff opinion -

1/ models will be commoditized and most consumer facing features will be embedded into existing incumbents for free, leaving no room for new SuperApp to grind 2/ verticalized training data is hard to acquire from an bootstrapping new app

but with tokenomics, micro incentive, collective peer review (a DAO format) will be much easier to pull off

Crypto founder will build Proof of Micro Intelligent Work and a de-Amazon mechanical turk

Having been training my own AI alter ego as a beta test for a friend's project, it's absolutely weird and thrilled

I've been wanting a twin forever now I'm close to getting a digital one. This recalibrates my views and values toward life/death, legacy, and truth

a meta thread 1/ AIGC and ChatGPT are blurring the line of what's real, the cost of forming a consensus of reality will skyrocket

Crypto lays the foundation of an immutable ledger to anchor value consensus, in the future much more work will be required to sustain a meaningful immutable truth

After playing with @midjourney_ai I was initially impressed by the flawless rendering, but didn’t take long to feel aesthetically fatigued

AIGC human while visually impressive, are devoid of expressive eyes and featured vacuous

AI can’t generate firm gaze, AI can’t create soul Future will fill with zero production cost content, the lasting value of those can be equally set to zero for lacking of human ingenuity and originality

Even Da Vinci can’t recreate Mona Lisa

When everything is dubbed “art”, the real art will be extremely valuable

𝐄𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

🧵

1/There is no compression algo for innovation, given enough time and numerous small mutations, innovation will emerge

It’s the law of nature just like evolution, all of these happen through time, change and entropy dissipation 2/ In crypto we have unfair advantages in an open and permissionless innovation environment comparing with other domains:

what used to be once a “moat” is up, it’s hard to disrupt (which imo it’s part of the reason that leads to innovation stagnation in the past decade)

China now officially enters into an era of negative population growth, one thing is for sure the Ponzi design pension system will be a historical burden for the younger gen and future newborns

游戏现行版本又肝又氪，要是还推荐新手入坑，不是蠢就是坏 South Korea's fertility rate has fallen to 0.8 since 2021, , and started negative growth around the same year (Japan started to decline in 2008)

Japan, South Korea, and China are entering into similar aging paths with shared social structures and cultural background

BIT TECH vs DEEP TECH

in holiday had pretty intriguing conversations with family members on this topic (many healthcare and bio practitioners in my fam from my parent's gen, and in my gen most are in Bit-Tech)

it's a rehash of discrete thoughts but I think worth a thread here for parent's gen, tech for them means bio, chemical, healthcare, manufacturing tech, and another more industrial tech. Tech that's oriented around atoms level, moving atoms around, what I considered as DEEP TECH or heavy tech

Composability in Defi means both compounding opportunities and composable risk

As the earliest investor & LP on GMX and Rage, I'm bullish about their direction. Meanwhile feel it's responsible to share risk analysis on the @rage_trade Delta Neutral GLP vault for future LP

a 🧵 I’ve already LP in both vault after weighting in all risk factors, you should DYOR too. and pls read their design doc before any proper aping

docs.rage.trade/mechanism

assuming you know the design framework already, let's get into the risk stuff!

maple.finance/news/maple-sev…

This @maplefinance shitshow and current state of defi c2pool undercollat lending reminds me of my vc investment in Lendinghome back in the day, a worst combined in a few layers of risk management

a few thoughts - the premise of proper risk mgmt is to collect enough **verifiable data** to put together your borrower's PnL

- esp for the crypto assets as PnL can easily be fabricated, most of the credit default is the result of complacency in diligence and greed from the sale side

The more I read abt societal collapse (reading “Upheaval” by my fav Jared Diamond rn), the more I realize it takes centuries to build a solid civilization but can break apart in generations, due to social or geographic catalysts leading to an inexorable downhill path Individual however, due to limited life expectancy and horizon (as well as cognitive limits in what’s beyond their own vision) will be frogs in the slow boiled water

Generational wealth of individual is useless when there is no generational prosperity at a civilization level

“The Darker Triad in Crypto” 🧵

Historically we have seen evil leaders in all spaces rise with 1 or 3 traits on the dark triad, leading to catastrophic aftermath (we are in one rn

The evergrowing influence of social media aids them to be more deceptive and manipulative

1/n thanks to the reflexiveness of the online community, lack of nonverbal signals in virtual communication, and access to the vast majority of less independent thinkers all over the globe

These "leaders" can now effortlessly target the audience that will easily fall for them

2/n

JUSTIN

MAS Reprimands Three Arrows Capital for Providing False Information and Exceeding Assets Under Management Threshold

mas.gov.sg/regulation/enf… a few important pieces of info from the announcement

1. 3AC notified MAS on 29 April 2022 (right before LUNA collapse, which also coincided with their abrupt move into Dubai) of its intent to cease fund management activity in Singapore with effect from 6 May 2022

I know it’s a market bottom when I once again pickup my low carb bakery game … baked bunch of keto 蛋黄酥 (egg yolk pastry) today to save $$ on eating out & bad carbs 😋😋

https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1218558805098680320

Some last cycle achievement in my keto bakery

https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1196667377976410112