I don't see CT talking much about Reddit's Community Points so I want to share some observations since the tokens increased by >100% yesterday.

There are 2 fungible tokens for r/cryptocurrency (MOON) and r/fortnite (BRICK) subreddits. Both are issued on Arbitrum Nova.

I was surprised at the sudden increase yesterday so went searching for a reason. Turns out there are some interesting changes to Reddit TOS. Web2 centralized virtual goods like Coins & Awards are going away while Web3 Community Points can now be traded.

https://twitter.com/unofficalmoons/status/1680551451385364482

I don't see this take mentioned on Crypto Twitter but I can't help but question why did the FTX story break this week?

Why not last week or next week?

Assuming FTX insiders know that they have to break the bankruptcy news, when would be the best time to orchestrate this? One PR lesson that I have observed over the years especially among politicians is that to cover up negative news story, politicians will swarm the media's attention with another bigger story to distract from the current saga at hand.

I'm still shocked at the scale of FTX's collapse. I've seen multiple exchanges disappear, but this is the worst. I managed to withdraw my funds on Sunday night after hearing rumors on CT, but it seemed far-fetched to me last week that such a situation would occur.

My thoughts: What SBF and the inner team have done misusing user funds was outright fraudulent with extremely malicious intent. A $10b hole this big doesn't just appear overnight. This hole has been in the making for months, most likely from the fallout of the LUNA/UST crash.

The Ethereum Merge is scheduled to take place on 13 September. Christmas season is here again.

ETH holders will soon be airdropped ETH PoW tokens. What should you do to best position yourself?

Here are 7 steps you may consider to fully take advantage of the Merge: Before we get to the steps, what is happening again?

Ethereum is going through an upgrade where it will transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. After the transition, ETH miners can no longer mine. Miners are forking ETH to keep a PoW version so they can continue mining.

Been seeing tweets about EVMOS airdrop being clawed back from 1 August. Couldn't figure out how to claim previously but I thought let's try to figure out now or never.

Turns out claiming the EVMOS airdrop is a bit more complex that what I thought it would be.

Details below 🧵 First off, what is EVMOS?

EVMOS is an EVM-based PoS blockchain on Cosmos. Supporting EVM on Cosmos means that your favourite EVM-based DeFi applications such as Uniswap and Aave can now be easily ported to the Cosmos ecosystem, offering high throughput and fast finality.

1/ Some stats on previous market cycles:

2013-2015
BTC: $1,127 --> $200 (-82%)

2017-2018
BTC: $19,423 --> $3,217 (-83%)
ETH: $1,448 --> $85 (-94%)

Current cycle:
BTC: $67,167 --> $27,682 (-59%)
ETH: $4,815 --> $1,466 (-69%)

Make what you want with the info above. 2/ I like @cburniske take on the market and agrees with him. From the next cycle's view, we are probably near the bottom but that doesn't mean that price can nuke 50% further.

https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1535701325870030848

Last week, we had our monthly townhall in CoinGecko.

Some of the questions asked during the all-hands were:
- how is CoinGecko preparing for the bear market?
- are we planning for any layoffs?
- our opinion on the bear market

Here's what we shared and some additional thoughts: The crypto market is extremely volatile. During our townhall, LUNA and UST was in the middle of getting completely destroyed, wiping out large amounts of wealth. Things like this have happened many times in crypto and may continue happening. Risk management is extremely important

One of the big initiatives that the team has been working on at CoinGecko this year is to build an on-chain DEX aggregator. We call it GeckoTerminal and soft launched it in Jan. It now tracks over 34 different chains (EVM & non-EVM) with over 160 DEXes and over 600,000 tokens! We started doing this initially to solve our own problem at CoinGecko, which is the need to get accurate on-chain pricing without relying on 3rd parties that may go down. This is a problem on fast chains like BSC where external infra can't keep up with new trades on Pancakeswap.

1/ One of the things that I hope to see emerge in 2022 is a cross-chain bridge aggregator. Similar to DEX aggregators that search for the best routes for trades across the various AMMs, this cross-chain bridge aggregator should search for the most cost and time-efficient bridge. 2/ Currently, cross-chain bridges are not optimal. I have to keep at the top of my head several different bridges when moving from one chain to the other. Most bridges support only a few chains and that's annoying. The number of tokens supported is also rather limited.

1/ Many people are complaining about not receiving the @paraswap airdrop. I think Paraswap has been smart in not rewarding all wallets that interacted with the contract. Too many people trying to Sybil attack future airdrops and it does not make sense to overly reward these folks 2/ No idea what was the exact criteria used, but if I have to guess, they probably wanted to reward the top 20k wallets. If I want to choose only my most active users, some criteria I would use:
- # of trades done
- total $ traded
- how early first trade done
- cross-chain user

Crypto is a very dangerous and adversarial place. If you are not careful, you risk having your valuable cryptocurrencies stolen from you.

I've compiled a thread on some security best practices that you can follow to stay safe. Read on below 👇👇 1/ Never reuse passwords
Your password has most likely been compromised in security incidents from the hundreds of websites that you have signed up. Always use unique passwords. If you want to see which websites have leaked your passwords previously, visit haveibeenpwned.com

Algorithmic stablecoins have been going through rapid growth and innovation in the past year. Today, let's take a look at UST, a stablecoin by @terra_money, now the 5th largest by market cap and its mechanics.

Our analyst @NeBB399 prepared a report on UST.
A thread below 👇👇 Since UST's genesis in Sept 2020, it has grown to $2b in circulation. To put things in perspective, Tether is 30x larger with $60b in circulation. UST's growth has been strong and it is larger than other stablecoins such as TUSD, PAX, sUSD, and many more.

1) This weekend, I had the chance to catch up with an old roommate from my student days in London. I was telling him how he should have some crypto exposure on his portfolio and hold for the long-haul (>5 years). 2) He used to have some BTC/ETH from 2017 but doesn't want to trade a lot as doing crypto taxes is a big pain. Fair point on simplifying tax paperwork at the end of the year. He is in several chat groups with friends and they talk about rotating in/out from all kinds of shitcoins

I have been fascinated by this NFT project, @TheHashmasks since its launch one week ago. I think it is one of the best executed projects so far and contains many interesting Easter Eggs, some yet to be discovered, and will continue surprising us in the days and weeks to come. Here's a summary of what it is so far:
Hashmasks was launched on 28 Jan 2021 and is a digital art created by 70 (still) unknown artists globally. A total of 16,384 digital art were represented as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) on Ethereum and hosted on IPFS (decentralized storage).

Hate to say this but the current high gas costs on Ethereum has made it no longer welcoming to beginners or small account holders. It is now no longer economically feasible for small transactions to take place on Ethereum leaving only whales to make on-chain transactions. When we first started using DeFi apps, it costs only couple of dollars for gas. Now, it costs $30-100 for smart contract interactions. No one starting out will want to spend this much money just to learn and will in fact have a very negative experience of this "future of finance"

Algorithmic stablecoins have been one of the most exciting parts of crypto recently. The design space is wide and there have been many innovations taking place. I have been following FRAX closely and want to take an opportunity to share my learnings here coingecko.com/en/coins/frax FRAX is a decentralized stablecoin where its target peg is $1. Unlike over-collateralized crypto stablecoins like Dai and sUSD, it aims to be capital efficient by using fractional reserves via a 2 token model. Its other token is Frax Share (FXS) coingecko.com/en/coins/frax-…

2020 has zoomed by so quickly and it's time for me to give my predictions on the crypto markets in 2021. So here we go my predictions on what I think will take place next year: 1/ BTC will have a very strong year driven by institutional demand. We have broken past ATH so all eyes will be on log price chart with next line of $100k. More public listed companies will hoard >$100m BTC. One small central bank will start holding BTC. Bitcoin ETF will launch.

1/ Just read @iearnfinance quarterly report here: github.com/iearn-finance/…

Impressed with the transparency shown by the team and it's something that more teams should emulate. Particularly like the detailed list of Treasury and payments to contributors/grants. 2/ The report makes it easy to do research on projects.

Here's a short summary: Yearn made a total of $3.8m in net operating profits for the past 3 months ending Oct 2020. $2.5m were paid to stakers in governance contract.

Would have been good to see average staked amount.

1/ Our November monthly report is out again! 🎉
This time round, almost every chart is upward sloping and at ATH! 🚀 Amongst top 30 coins, market cap grew by 46%. 2/ Bitcoin achieved its ATH and had the highest month-on-month growth in 2020 with a 42% increase in November. BTC ended November up 173% since the start of the year.

I've been observing @barn_bridge token price since it started trading on Monday morning. The price seems to be going only up and at $185, it is nearly 140x seed round price of $1.33. I am fully anticipating the price to go down next week so do be careful. Thread below 👇 Let's be clear: I am interested in Barnbridge's fixed interest rate solution. Their method of splitting variable interest rates into junior/mid/senior tranche is innovative and I look forward to seeing this team launching their product. I wrote more here:

https://twitter.com/bobbyong/status/1318141385740931073

1/ The next wave of DeFi innovations will be very interesting. We are replicating the entire suite of traditional financial markets in crypto. On the lending side, we have crypto collateralized loans which are more efficient than any collateralized loans in traditional finance. 2/ Interest rates are now mostly variable per block and the next wave of innovations will be projects looking to provide solutions to have fixed i/r over time. @AaveAave have some fixed i/r options but we are starting to see other methods being implemented to have fixed rates.