third interview in the crypto market series with legendary trader @Galois_Capital

crypto market wizards

a text transcript of my interview with Jordi Alexander of Selini Capital

an insight into the mind of one of the best crypto traders in the the world

Sometimes I get so cynical about crypto because it only rewards founders that build slots and the traders that can extract

But then I wonder if the matching of capital to talent is just part 1

And how they allocate capital after crypto is done is the next part of the story..
maybe all that comes of it is a cohort of talent armed with capital filtered purely by the meritocracy of the markets

and maybe that will turn out to be a good enough

I’ve realized recently how non straightforward the path capitalism can often take to achieve innovation

I bear posted about unsustainabillity of the broader crypto altcoin market at the end of march near the top of the total altcoin market cap

a thread on crypto altcoin supply and demand dynamics

1/🧵

https://twitter.com/thiccyth0t/status/1771340322464751905

Altcoin valuations pushed hard this year to a point where the altcoins were emitting over 250M of supply a day, more than the average daily inflow of the bitcoin ETFs

h/o @BillyDishman for the chart

2/

In my opinion these are the sharpest crypto traders (not investors) in the space in no order:

- GCR: godlike intuition and forecasting.

-Light: world class analytical skills.

- Defisquared: elite mix of both intuition and analytical ability. World class scalper.

- Hal Press: expert at positioning for catalysts. Incredibly diverse array of alphas these guys are printing money in literally any and every market environment

Bull markets really elevate the one hit wonders and moonbois but the real ones know

The crypto altcoin sector has added ~$17B of supply year to date thru unlocks and staking rewards

This is an average daily altcoin inflation of $225m at these prices, roughly the same as the average daily inflow to the Bitcoin ETFs Altcoins have added roughly $200m of market cap or up 53% ytd

BTC is up 53% and Ethereum 45% ytd at the time of this post

though I expect both APT and SUI to go to zero in the longer term, I do think pairing SUI long against an APT short in anticipation of the upcoming unlock will be a great trade for a 3-4 month duration

Aptos and SUI are both move based alt L1s that are heavily marketed towards Korean retail. They both have very similar idiosyncratic exposures when it come to alts which makes it an attractive pair to hedge versus each other.

An interesting phenomenon in the chart is that APT/SUI has been up only since the launch, which is a little counterintuitive.

SUI is a newer token that currently has a 3.5x lower circulating supply (was like 10x lower at the start). Why has SUI done so poorly vs. Aptos?

Because SUI has a monthly unlock of circulating supply hitting the market, whereas Aptos hasn't unlocked a *single* token since its launch

In roughly 1 week, Aptos will unlock 25mm tokens a month to team + investors, roughly 150mm usd every single month for the next three years.

Because of this dynamic, I think APT will severely lag behind SUI on a 4 month timeline until SUI has their massive unlock as well.

We saw this exact dynamic play out earlier this year with arbitrum and optimism. As optimism approached its large unlock the arb/op pair ripped faces up 80%. Arbitrum was a new launch with no new supply for a year.

I expect this same exact dynamic to play out with APT/SUI that the market isn't pricing in yet.






another thing to keep in mind is that SUI has more TVL than Aptos

many of their developers and ecosystems are on both chains, with many stopping development on Aptos to move to Sui instead

Like I said earlier, I think you can naked short both of these and be fine on a longer term horizon.

But if you want a delta neutral trade that doesn't make you net short alt degeneracy, this is a good bet

in addition to the SOL that the ftx liquidators sent to kraken,

it appears that they are sending small text transactions of all of their alts

probably nothing platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/entit…

I wondered why rollbit price action looked so terribad

so I looked at all of the trades on chain

and did an analysis of the biggest jeeters

tldr: there are some big holders selling and hiding their steps and I have no idea how much more they have left to sell

1/ I analyzed all RLB trades in the Uniswap ETH, USDC, and USDT pools and grouped them by the biggest sellers since 8/01

I then looked into all of these wallets to profile them

I identified 3-4 megajeeters that we will explore

2/

Goldfinch is a rwa protocol that makes loans to businesses in 3rd world countries

A $5M loan defaulted this week to a Kenyan motorbike company called Tugende

it was discovered Tugende violated the terms of their loan

this was ~4% of the TVL of the protocol

tuff :(

1/ they received 11.70% APY for this 2y loan back in Oct '21

the 2y is currently trading at 4.77% so the current premium to the risk free rate is pretty bad

Tugende completely disregarded the terms of their loan by lending 1.9m to another company

2/

A memecoin worth $100m at its peak on Coinbase's new Base chain just rugged

I indexed all transactions from the Bald deployer BaldBaseBald to tell the story of the market manipulation that occurred today

what happened?

how much did the rugger make?

a thread

1/ $BALD launched on July 30 on the Base chain, Coinbase's new Layer 2 built on Optimism

$BALD was a strong coordination point for speculators on this frontier chain since had the deepest liquidity, reaching 100m market cap in just 2 days with over $25m of liquidity in the pool

2/

Blackrock filed to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF today

some writing for dummies on:

- why spot ETFs are the shit
- why no spot ETF has been approved so far
- whether this time will be different
- whether this is the start of a new bull market

1/ The SEC has approved quite a few Bitcoin futures ETFs that holds near dated Bitcoin futures contracts on the CME but no spot ETFs

These currently trade on US Equity markets, but have very little AUM

Why are they so unpopular?

2/

BNB perp books are where max level players are pvping rn

my thots on some of the trading dynamics

1/ completely baseless speculation:

litany of fines + criminal charges will be possibly crippling for nance

big red coming when/if it happens

2/

my writings compiled into one megathread in chronological order

something for everyone:

- trading metagames
- defi research
- crypto derivatives
- dao shenanigans

1/ [DEFI RESEARCH]

On the profitability of Uniswap Liquidity Providers

2/

https://twitter.com/thiccythot_/status/1589022227437039616

the financial engineering of crypto derivative explosions

a story about the trading dynamics behind the explosive leveraged degeneracy this past week

for noobs and veterans alike

1/ 1) What
started it all

On May 29, $150M of leverage built up on TOMO, a 100MM market cap coin at the time

TOMO then exploded and squeezed shorts over 120% in 5 minutes from $1.2 to over $2.5

2/

what if the insiders don't distribute the unlocked coins until after the upgrade?

are you prepared to hold your shorts for a few weeks?

https://twitter.com/thiccythot_/status/1663462970746351616

i took some of your upnl but you can still close your shorts anon

it's not too late

Optimism and Sui have token large unlocks coming up this week

A 🧵on unlocks (for those who don't understand)

AND

my thoughts around the trading dynamics around the unlocks coming up this week

1/ What are unlocks?

When crypto projects launch tokens, they don't get them all at once

Typically these "vest" or "unlock" over years so that service providers are incentivized to grow the network over the long term

These unlock according to a predetermined schedule

2/

Rolling correlations of bitcoin with other global macro assets

I spent my Saturday night looking at some correlations after spending Friday night with a real girl

(you guys probably wouldn't understand)

some analysis :3

1/ Bitcoin correlation to risk (tech) has steadily declined in the past months

Bitcoin correlation to gold has stayed relatively constant in the past months

2/

does anyone know what satofishi.eth is plotting with SNX?

it's been trading weirdly

he's been draining CEX supply of $SNX on ETH and moving it over to Optimism just to deposit it back into Binance to repeat the same loop

1/ one theory is that this restricts the supply on ETH, since it takes 7 days to move the tokens back from the L2 to the L1

Seems like all CEXes have lost ETH balances over the past few weeks

but why is he doing this?

I looked into Litecoin and its upcoming Halvening in ~70 days

some weekend writing about:

the psychology of Halvenings
and whether Litecoin even needs to exist anymore

1/ First some history

Litecoin was created in 2011 based off Bitcoin with faster blocktimes and a different mining algorithm

Litecoin, like Bitcoin, halves the amount of block rewards for miners every 4 years in order to reduce inflation and increase scarcity

A true dinosaur

2/

a more nuanced view of the current liquidity situation

3/10 banking volatility
3/22 binance 0 spot fee program ended
3/27 binance cftc charge

big market makers scaling back is just one reason for the reduction in liquidity I just wanted to troll normies for engagement bait

thanks to the nerds for keeping me honest

please support your neighorhood MMs:

@OrthogonalAlpha
@macrocephalopod
@therobotjames
@quant_arb
@allaboutvol
@0xShitTrader

https://twitter.com/thiccythot_/status/1656054917490958336