Did you know that the majority, almost every project, especially L1s/L2s - are not made by real teams this cycle? They are fake teams installed by incubators 🥶

Zero passion, zero desire to make things work. Just first month pump&dump for the chosen maliciously unlocked holders and foundation - and then slow rug by paying to random hired members.

Here is how this works:

1. A VC incubator (or a founder-incubator like Neel Salami with VC connections, many such cases) sees a narrative. They make a pitch deck and install a couple of initial team members to make it look real;
3. A silly VC agrees to lead and/or be part of the grift and/or the initial grifters just semi-lie about soft commits to get a lead. This depends on the market fomo and the grifters’ reputation. This is the hardest step.
4. As the round gets confirmed, they hire a devshop to make ui/docs/app and some more real team members. Usually the working team has 0 clue about the grifting plans. See Movement.
5. Raise more, bump social metrics… then either the initial parties start OTCing before TGE and/or they get a piece of the foundation selling at TGE (since investors should be locked technically). The initial grifters share parts of the foundation sales.
6. After this, the token remains as a free option to bull market: the project lives, some updates continue, maybe even something happens with new hired real devs figuring out some innovative things - but usually unlikely as there is no “soul”.

This was kinda done last cycle too, but the number of such projects was much much lower. This cycle nothing is investable because the majority of stuff is done this way. And it keeps happening.

In fact, last cycle it was much less grifty. There were more “advisors” around (some were useful, some not) but founders were real and actually had control over such parties. Advisors had unlocks changed, weren’t liquid on day 1, etc. This cycle, public founders and team are often totally clueless in such setups and have no control over anything.

The root causes and issues of capital formation in crypto were discussed by many smarter people on twitter already (@Tiza4ThePeople, @0xShual, @fede_intern, @VannaCharmer, @Fiskantes, @cobie - read there). But an undeniable fact is: lack of new talent entering into the space. What we see around are the same established cabal circles trying to milk more with recycled “new” ideas.

PS: not commenting on morph per se, but the article fits the general context. Ah and the comparison with last cycles and the issues here: it’s not like advisors with 0.1-1% of vested tokens. It’s grifters with direct or indirect control over the foundation with 3-5% ownership each. Quite literally never ending sales in every shape & form with no remorse.

DeFi summer run back turbo? I wish. Points mania is accelerating community's hatred towards it, but it also remains a gamified (sometimes abused) source of fresh tokens and DeFi integrations.

Fuck around, find out = fun? 🤔

Despite the points hatred, many users of @GearboxProtocol (and pendle, and direct depositors, and everyone really) have farmed incredible amounts of $$$ both on the passive and on the leverage side. And while the restaking narrative has been turning into a fatigue, due to how high level its use cases might seem - we might be getting something juicy and decent around the corner. What's the sauce, you might ask?

Recently, a few big brains have been making 4D chess moves, but they might have done it too discretely. So discretely, that nobody actually understood what is going on. Therefore, this thread is my attempt at rectifying the situation, for the sake of our bags.

TLDR: @mellowprotocol has launched atop of @symbioticfi, @LidoFinance is at the core of it all, and @paradigm is aiding the journey. This thread is not intended as a direct shill. I am pretty sure these teams will shit on me, at least for this weird cabal picture below. But it's done in good faith, relax sers, I am just trying to explain to fellow retards like myself why this is all kinda cool <3 First of all, @symbioticfi is trying to make restaking truly permissionless. The goal seems to be to foster a configurable, permissionless core of the shared security layer. Practically any token, with any slashing logic, launched by anyone - can be done with Symbiotic. No need to crawl and bend your knee in front of the core team. No need to ask for slots and play corporate games. Instead, let any developer do their thing and spin up networks with ease. There are a few cool tech things here, but this deserves another thread.

The core team behind it are @statemindio, with the backing of @paradigm and @cyberFund_. Cyber Fund (who are @Lomashuk, @_vshapovalov, and other Lido chads) posted a thesis on it to give a bit more clarity: , there are also docs , but need to digest it.

The effort seems interesting, but BD efforts is a big question. Hard competition? After all, huge EL VCs and many angels already placed their bets, and it's in their interest to bring projects to EL. They have alignment.

However, here is why projects can be interested in working with Symbiotic: because they can turn their own tokens into staking tokens. It's almost like "set up your own pool on Uniswap". An extremely permissionless approach resonates well with builders if done right. Better narrative, better community spirit as a result. Look at the @ethena_labs+@LayerZero_Labs idea proving that: cyber.fund/content/symbio…
docs.symbiotic.fi

https://twitter.com/ethena_labs/status/1800533120233734514

𝑌𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑚 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑖𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔!

GM! Relax, this is just a flashy title. But it's an important topic 💡 for teams & founders especially 💡 as that's a trap many fall into during prolonged bear markets.

Are you doing it all wrong? 🧵 Aka "scrape it all, let's change, a 180 degrees turn!" 🔫

Wake up honey! Governance is broken, again 😩

Every once in a while people like to sh*t on governance and remove it all fully. It is absolutely correct to do so if done based on proper arguments, and not just "it's all bad kill it forget it". Reasoning matters! A bit of a 🧵

https://twitter.com/euler_mab/status/1687055214736457728

Governance can be blamed due to:

1] Hard issue: objective intrusive flexibility (=control) over the protocol parameters and/or user assets
2] Soft issue: ineffective, lack of participation, vote rigging, & other subjective aspects

Scroll down to #7 for less obvious stuff.

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