USDe supply has hit an ATH, passing $4 billion. sUSDe rewards now sit at ~29%, dramatically outpacing T-Bill benchmarks.

All this is exciting, but what’s next for @Ethena_Labs?

What catalysts will continue to drive increased USDe adoption, and what’s important for 2025? First off quick disclaimer: not investment advice, any mentions are not projections or constitute things that 100% will happen. You guys know me I don’t shill tickers, but I do get bullish on projects underlying fundamentals and Ethena obviously is one of them.

I am a contributor to the protocol and have exposure to ENA. I have no idea where ENA is headed price wise. These are all my views and not the official view of other contributors or entities related to Ethena.

Mentions of USDe and sUSDe will be made interchangeably, but the two are totally separate concepts. USDe is a synthetic dollar with no rewards, sUSDe provides rewards and is an opt-in.

I’m extremely excited to be joining @Ethena_Labs as Head of Strategy!

I’ll be working across the protocol to scale USDe, incubate Ethena-first apps, and to enable Internet Money.

Joining Ethena for me is a continued expression of how bullish I am on DeFi's future 👇 USDe is the fastest growing dollar-denominated asset as one of 2024’s biggest launches. Reliable dollar-denominated assets will only become increasingly relevant, especially as rates off chain trend lower once again.

Dollar-denominated crypto-assets have become one of the only DeFi products will true PMF. USDe is arguably the most unique product in one of DeFi’s biggest verticals.

DeFi more broadly continues to be the best use case of smart contracts. DEX dominance is increasing, and we’re seeing breakthrough applications and sustainable economic value being created on chain.

Ethena, in my view, will continue to play a key role in creating and driving real economic inertia on chain. I’m very excited to learn from and work closely with G and the rest of the Ethena contributors in this effort.

Really interested to see the @optimismPBC ($OP) token launch play out today. Will be the first major token launch (aside from $LUNA 2) in the recent bearish regime.

Expect it to strong affect how and if projects launch tokens in these market conditions.

Quick thoughts 👇 In a bull market, launching a token quickly can seem obvious.

Equity holders (team and investors) can feel paper rich, (likely) overpriced token can lead to juicy yields to pump TVL, and it's a good box to tick and get out of the way.

It is the easiest it’s been for crypto founders to raise. *Everyone* has money for crypto venture.

There are more funds than ever and investors are quick to revert with “wen allo?”

I’m not a founder (yet) but I wanted to share some fundraising tips.

A 🧵 More money than ever is flooding into primary markets.

Crypto fundraising is up multiples YoY. There are dozens of multi-million dollar deals a month. And the creation of new funds, both large and small, continues at a rapid clip.

It has been just over 4 years since I began working in crypto and 1 year since joining ParaFi Capital.

It’s been a crazy journey and a great year.

A 🧵of updates, thanks, and learnings. It's been a whirlwind of a year at @paraficapital. Thought as we reach year-end, I'd reflect and put down some key things I learned after spending 12 months in the trenches.

Disclaimer: Tips may not apply to everyone, they're just my personal learnings.

From a UX perspective, Ethereum's optimistic rollups are not yet perfect.

Swaps on AMMs still cost $3~5, 10x better than Ethereum mainnet but still expensive for users with smaller portfolios.

Vitalik recently proposed a solution to bring fees even lower. A quick thread 🧵 Before we get into @VitalikButerin's solution, a recap on optimistic rollups.

Rollups are L2 technologies that inherit the security of the underlying network while improving tx throughput and fees.

They attempt to solve the trade-off between fees, security, and usability.

Curve is DeFi's second-biggest protocol by TVL, with over $15b in liquidity.

The protocol has stablecoin and reserve asset liquidity across Ethereum, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and other chains.

But how does it all work?

Let's break down the basics of Curve.

A thread 🧵 TL;DR: Curve introduces new automated market maker (AMM) algorithms to DeFi, allowing for a lower slippage and lower fee exchange between like assets.

Users with idle reserve assets can deposit their coins into Curve and earn trading fees along with governance tokens.

The past few months I've seen a deluge of IRL and digital frens look to get into crypto & DeFi professionally.

With talent in this space continuing to swell, thought I'd open-source some of the tips I've picked up over these past years.

A thread🧵 #1: Find your tribe(s)

This is by far the most important tip I'd have for someone new.

Find a group of friends that you can trust with anything, that will criticize your views, that will support you through thick and thin.

Find your tribe. Find your squad.

The biggest crypto story of the past few days has been the growth of Arbitrum.

Yield farms have skyrocketed the Ethereum L2's TVL beyond $1 billion.

Everyone's talking about it but what is Arbitrum anyway?

Let's get into it 🧵 By far one of the largest narratives this year is Ethereum's transaction costs.

A combination of a rapidly rising ETH price and an increase in usage due to NFTs, yield farming, trading, and volatility has led to gas costs in excess of 100-200 gwei at many points this year.

Whether you're participating in Avalanche August, Solana September, or classic Everyday Ethereum farms, I wanted to write a quick follow-up to my original thread on DeFi / yield farming tips and tricks.

A quick 🧵

https://twitter.com/n2ckchong/status/1390494848478683136

1) It doesn't always make sense to auto-dump farmed tokens.

Some of my biggest mistakes from the past year are related to selling farmed tokens w/o thinking.

Missed a number of 5-50xes.

Look at the fundamentals before you sell. Is there a narrative the coin can ride up on?

We're 3 days into Ethereum's integration of EIP-1559.

I've been constantly checking the burn. Thus far, the number of ETH lost to the ether has been impressive.

For all those still learning about this change, I wanted to condense all resources here.

A 🧵 First off, a brief recap explainer + context for those out of the loop:

Aside from lost coins, there is no way for ETH to be removed from circulation. Further, every block, coins are minted by miners. There are also no built-in "halvenings" into ETH's supply schedule.

Uniswap Labs just removed a number of DeFi assets from their interface (the one most of us use on a regular basis).

Let's dive into this decision and bit and understand a bit more about the numbers of the assets delisted.

A thread 🧵 First off, let's be clear:

Uniswap *did not* delist these assets from trading.

Users can still trade the assets affected via contracts, decentralized interfaces, or aggregators. The liquidity still exists.

Uniswap as a protocol to list and swap assets remains decentralized.

The last time Ethereum gas was this low—as far as I remember—was the start of 2020, around the time of the initial launch of Aave.

A lot has changed in that time for Ethereum and DeFi. Let's recap.

A 🧵 Ethereum now settles over $45 billion in transaction volume each day, between ETH and stablecoins alone.

At the start of 2020, this value was closer to $900 million, lower than Bitcoin's $ throughput at the time as per CoinMetrics data.

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

Next on deck: @MakerDAO, DeFi's "central bank" and the issuer of the DAI stablecoin. Arguably one of the most important dApps.

A 🧵 TL;DR: MakerDAO allows users to collateralize their Ethereum-based assets to issue the $DAI stablecoin in a permissionless manner.

MakerDAO is often seen as DeFi's "central bank."

As more retail enters DeFi, more capital will flow toward yield farms as users seek to capture the best return on their idle assets.

I don't claim to have it all figured out, though here are a few tips I've learned over the past year.

A 🧵 1) Watch your favorite follows' favorite follows and their likes.

While many DeFi chads may be tight-lipped in their feeds about the farms they're in, some (mistakenly?) follow the farms they enter or are watching on Twitter. Likes matter too.

Over the past few months, both real-life friends and new Internet friends have asked how they can start getting involved in crypto & DeFi more professionally, even as kids my age.

I don't claim to have it all figured out, though I have some personal tricks & tips.

A quick 🧵 1a) Work on your Twitter!

Twitter is actually *the place* to network in crypto. Aside from the shills and low-effort shitposts, almost every person "in" the space is somewhat active here.

You can easily access founders, investors, innovators, programmers, and more.

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

Next on deck: Uniswap (@Uniswap), a decentralized exchange built on Ethereum utilizing an Automated Market Maker (AMM) model.

A 🧵 TL;DR: Uniswap is a decentralized exchange that automatically matches buyers and sellers of Ethereum assets.

Any user can swap any between any asset, as long as there is a pool that can be routed through.

Any user can also provide liquidity to earn trading fees on assets.

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

So, let's break down the basics of some of the top protocols.

First on deck: Aave (@AaveAave), an Ethereum-based money market protocol.

A 🧵 TL;DR: Aave is a protocol through which any user anywhere in the world can take decentralized loans by collateralizing their assets.

Aave also allows those will idle assets to earn a relatively safe return on capital from lenders, whose rates are determined by a curve.

Spent some time this evening thinking through Uniswap v3 a bit more.

Wanted to break down the basics of this upgrade and some effects it may have on the rest of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem space.

👇 Fees (1/4):

v2 popularized the model whereby 0.3% of each transaction accrues to liquidity providers.

v2 also has a fee switch where UNI holders are entitled to 0.05% of each transaction—or 16.6% of transaction fees.

A thread compiling some of the most cost-inefficient Ethereum transactions seen on chain.

Aside from these transactions being a silly way to spend precious $ETH, high gas fees + continual usage may be a sign of strong PMF, as @santiagoroel said in his recent @UpOnlyTV show.

👇 0x74e spent $42.05 worth of gas to deposit approximately $160 into Uniswap.

The pool is currently yielding 26% in fees per Uniswap. It will take one year, assuming no IL and consistent fees, for this user to recuperate his transaction fee.

So @santiagoroel and I have been scrapping for followers over the past few weeks. I'm still 3k ahead.

To keep it that way, I'm hijacking his @UpOnlyTV fame by sharing 9 key points about DeFi and crypto he made during his interview with @CryptoCobain & @ledgerstatus.

👇 1. Ethereum struggled for a while with product-market fit until Maker, then the other money legos that we now call "DeFi" today.

I did a thread in the past on this subject about how much has changed since crypto was last in this range.

https://twitter.com/n2ckchong/status/1350328538646212608