Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In this issue:
I share information about the most recently announced crypto SPACs.
Jesse has a report on Solana defi protocol Serum, and examines what
makes Serum worth paying attention to.
Rekt Capital discusses a range of big cap coins and what their next move
could be!
Defi Dad is sharing how you can earn 50% ROI using insurance protocol
Bridge Mutual.
The team from dTravel join us to discuss how they are disrupting the travel
industry.
This week saw another major hack take place. This time it was Chain
Swap which is a bridge protocol between BSC and Ethereum. Many
tokens were affected. 2 days later Anyswap was hacked. There have also
been a smattering of smaller project hacks and or rug pulls. This serves as
a reminder than anytime you do almost anything in crypto there are risks.
Investing in altcoins is risky. Investing in altcoins that operate in defi is
riskier. Investing in altcoins that operate across multiple chains is riskier
yet again. Yes, the rewards are sweet, but never forget to keep the
downside in view.
In the last week we have seen some very big announcements around two
new crypto SPACs. A SPAC is a Special Acquistion Company, which is
basically a stock exchange listed pile of money looking for purpose to its
existance via a merger. Both Circle and Block One’s crypto exchange
Bullish will be coming to market in the near future via SPACs so I wanted
to examine these SPACs for you and see if either of them merit our
attention.
BULLISH is the newest idea from the team at Block One. After their block
buster ICO in 2017, which raised 4 billion dollars, the team is back, this
time with an exchange valued at 9 billion dollars. It seems that the
long-hyped voice.com social media site has been a complete failure. Even
the main product from Block One, the EOS blockchain, has suffered from
their rather hands-off approach to the eco system. Of the 4 billion that
Block One raised to fund the future of the EOS blockchain, very little has
been spent on that goal. In fact, Block One spent a huge sum of their ICO
money on buying Bitcoin. Yes, I am serious. You can’t make this crap up!
They have at least 140,000 BTC, although I have seen some comments
from the team indicating that up to a quarter million BTC may be in their
hands. This is all important back story. Because now let’s talk about their
new crypto exchange Bullish. In theory, this has all the right stuff. A huge
amount of Bitcoin to jump start liquidity. It has huge backers like Peter
Thiel and Galaxy Digital. And it will be the second crypto exchange to hit
the US markets, after Coinbase. However, the valuation at 9 billion is
insane. At this point Bullish has on boarded no users. It has zero revenue.
And yet, they are trying to come to market at a valuation 1/6th that of
Coinbase. Coinbase being one of the oldest, most respected exchanges
with huge revenues and like 50 million users. C'mon man…. This is nuts.
No way I am buying this. That being said, more competition is good. Most
exchanges crash constantly, because they can’t handle the demand from
customers. So, if Bullish can be better than that, then maybe they will have
something. BUT there is no justification IMO for such a big valuation.
Circle is the company behind the very popular USDC stablecoin, which is
jointly administered with Coinbase. They are being valued at 4.5 billion.
Circle’s most famous business is the USDC stablecoin, which has seen
wide adoption throughout the crypto space, now ranking as the second
biggest stablecoin with a total cap of 26.4 billion. Recent partnerships with
Compound Finance and Coinbase now allow for offering 4% APY via
those platforms for USDC holders. It is also worth noting that Visa chose
the USDC stablecoin as the only crypto it is working with for crypto-based
payments. The latest funding round was led by Fidelity and Ark.
HOWEVER, that is not their only product and they have been putting a lot
more energy into a range of services for defi and a platform called
SeedInvest which is a security token launch pad. In the short term, Circle
is projecting that by 2023 there will be 190 billion USDC in circulation. The
company is seeing both institutional and retail adoption right now and has
a steady revenue stream. This is a way to invest in the second biggest
stablecoin and own a piece of the picks and shovels of the crypto gold
rush.
Top 3 Cardano Projects by Hashoshi
During the week of June 12th 2021, the launch of the latest phase of the
Alonzo Hard Fork testnet on Cardano is set to begin. This latest phase
dubbed “Alonzo White” expands the group of smart contract testers on
Cardano to continue to refine the codebase for broad mainnet launch later
this year. As the launch of smart contracts continues to go according to
plan, excitement is brewing in the Cardano community about significant
projects that are set to release their tokens and platforms at the dawn of
mainnet launch for Cardano smart contracts. Many of these project teams
are planning to launch alpha versions of their code for use by the
community when the public testnet goes live late this summer, and this will
inevitably further amplify the excitement around the projects. While there
are many projects that are presenting exciting ideas and garnering
excitement, a few stand out ahead of launch:
SundaeSwap
Among the more exciting prospective areas of focus on the Cardano
decentralized application (dApp) world post-launch is the decentralized
finance (DeFi) industry. SundaeSwap is one such project that is aiming to
bring an exchange and swap protocol to Cardano at the advent of smart
contracts. SundaeSwap is at its core an Automated Maker Maker or AMM,
which leverages a mechanism that was popularized in DeFi by Uniswap to
facilitate exchange and swap transactions between various cryptoassets
using liquidity pools. This liquidity pool mechanism is colloquially called
Constant Product Liquidity Pools, where the core market making process
is driven by an algorithm that balances the total liquidity of both assets in a
pair for stable swaps with minimal price slippage. SundaeSwap will start
by providing a tried and tested model that is built using Cardano’s unique
execution environment as its base, and then begin developing unique
features atop this foundation. Plans for a token offering and a testnet
launch are unfolding at the time of writing, and more information can be
found on the official page.
Liqwid Finance
Similar to SundaeSwap, Liqwid Finance is creating a powerful DeFi
ecosystem on the Cardano mainnet. However, rather than building an
exchange and swap platform, Liquid Finance is building a full lending
marketplace which will provide a critical base layer for the composable
nature of DeFi on Cardano. Liqwid will give developers, users and stake
pool operators a way to earn yield on their ADA as lenders contributing
liquidity, and subsequently it will allow users to put up ADA as collateral for
a USD loan, presumably in the form of a stablecoin. While the project itself
is somewhat novel in its approach, a common parallel one could draw to
an existing Ethereum-based project would be with Aave or Compound
who also provide DeFi lending platforms. Much like other early-stage
Cardano projects, Liqwid Finance is poised to launch on the public testnet
when it becomes available, and the native LQ token with a supply of 21
million is already technically live on the Cardano mainnet via native
multi-asset support at the ledger layer of the Cardano network. That said,
users who want access to LQ tokens will have to use the protocol at
launch to earn those tokens. Again, one can learn more about Liqwid
Finance on their official page.
Nami Wallet
Despite the fact that at face value a wallet is an odd choice for a project
with huge potential, upon the launch of smart contracts on Cardano, a
browser-friendly wallet will be paramount to enabling access to the many
decentralized applications that will live on Cardano. A large part of the user
experience for Ethereum is driven by MetaMask, which effectively allows
one’s web browser to interact with an Ethereum-compatible blockchain by
signing transactions and performing other blockchain-specific tasks. Nami
Wallet serves this same function, but with a special focus on Cardano
rather than Ethereum. Without Nami, users would face a potentially less
appealing user experience when trying to interact with Cardano’s first
dapps, such as the aforementioned DeFi protocols in SundaeSwap and
Liqwid Finance. Nami Wallet is free and open source, and does not require
any investment or payment to use, but it is a critical cornerstone in the
Cardano dApp world ahead of launch and should be supported by the
community as such. Nami Wallet is available now to test and audit by
heading to the landing page.
OpenSea one of the biggest NFT market places has seen an explosion in
users over the last month.
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Fidelity is hiring a lot more staff to help deal with the flood of institutional
buyers. Source
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Crypto usage has soared 11 fold in Turkey in the last year. Source
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Stablecoin companu Circle which is behind USDC is going public via
SPAC. Source
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Poland is the latest country to join in the public crack down on
Binance. Source
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Anthony Hopkins will release a film as an NFT. Source
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Bridge Mutual has gone live with the first version of their insurance
products. Source
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Chainswap a BSC to Ethereum bridge protocol was exploited in a big way
allowing the attacker to mint tokens and crash multiple tokens in price.
Popular tokens like Wilder and Umbrella were affected. Source
________________
Law makers in Paraguay will introduce their Bitcoin bill on July
14th. Source
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Social media platform Tik Tok has joined with other major platforms in
banning all forms of crypto advertising. Source
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Square is planning on launching their own Bitcoin wallet. Source
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Power Ledger has announced that it is moving to Solana. Source
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Mercurial Finance is partnering with Terra. Source
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Uniswap V3 has launched an alpha version on Optimism, a key scaling
protocol for Ethereum. Source
Airdrops
New Airdrops
In order to say thank you to early supporters, Only1 will be Airdropping 100
exclusive NFTs to the community! These NFTs hold unique value and
perks, giving holders additional token airdrops and more. Once all tasks
are completed users can fill out the NFT Form to participate in the drop.
Giveaway entries end Friday, July 16th at 11 am PST and winners will be
announced soon after.
Spores Network is a leading NFT marketplace with a full-stack
interoperable Defi platform. With the rising influx of users amid the NFT
hype, Spores Network aims to empower world creators by providing a
user-friendly platform. Via Telegram Airdrop Bot participants can earn up
to 500 SPO tokens chosen at random for 1000 entries. To be eligible users
will need to complete a few follow, like, and retweet tasks.
CRD Network runs on Hyperledger Besu to merge Decentralized Finance
with everyday banking by creating a legally compliant environment that
lessens the points of friction between you and your money. CRD is
conducting a large-scale Airdrop that matches users token for token until
September 20th 2021. For any amount of CRD bought until the 20th of
July will be matched 100%, 20th of July until 20th of August matched
50%, and CRD purchased from 20th of August up to the 10th of
September receives 25%. A total of $500,000 in CRD will be airdropped to
users who hold their tokens until September 20th 2021.
WebUSD has attested live on binance smart chain for global payments
and is aiming to be the world’s most transparent stablecoin. They’re
conducting an Airdrop in collaboration with the WUSD token sale. For a
few follow and retweet tasks users can claim their tokens directly from the
token page.
Happening in collaboration with Coin Market Cap;
Polygon Launchpad Polystarter is Airdropping 40,000 POLYS tokens to a
total of 1,000 winners chosen for task completion on July 17th.
Cross-chain application service NEXTYPE.Finance is Airdropping 30,000
NT tokens to 2,000 users who complete the required tasks by July 25th.
Ongoing Airdrops
Spar Finance will Airdrop a total of 6,214,286 SPAR to LUNA and MIR
stakers. The snapshot date will not be announced and the claim will go live
at TGE, which is expected to happen after the completion of their public
testnet. MIR holders must stake their tokens in governance to be eligible.
As of the most recent post by the project, the snapshot has not been
taken yet.
Polkally, a P2P auction platform for NFTs, powered by Substrate & IPFS is
launching an Airdrop in collaboration with ZeroSwap. From July 5th to July
15th a total of 500k KALLY will be airdropped across 100 users who
complete the required tasks. Users only have one day left to complete
these tasks.
To celebrate this edition of Euro Cup 2020, Binance Futures is launching
a special promo for both new and existing users to win a share of 100,000
BUSD. During the campaign duration, eligible users who trade a minimum
of 10,000 USDT or BUSD across USDS-M or COIN-M Futures within the
campaign duration, can vote for the teams that they think will be the
finalists and the winner of the Euro Cup 2020 and stand a chance to win a
share of 100,000 BUSD in the prize pool.
Pylon Protocol is a new suite of DeFi savings and payments products
powered by yield redirection built on Terra. Pylon Protocol will airdrop their
native governance and value accrual token MINE to LUNA stakers only.
With an initial airdrop and recurring weekly airdrops to follow.
Hacken is conducting a $25k USD airdrop via CMC where users can earn
up to 195 HAI tokens and a lifetime free premium HackenVPN promo code
for unlimited VPN services.
Binance Will Support the APENFT (NFT) Airdrop Program for TRON (TRX),
BitTorrent (BTT) and JUST (JST) Holders. Snapshots will be taken on the
10th of each month from June 2021 to June 2023. NFTs will then be
airdropped to their respective holders on a monthly basis.
Solana hackathon project Solare Network has released its
community Airdrop form. For a few social quests and voting in
the Community Choice Awards users can be entered in a pool to receive
SOLAR tokens. There’s no announced end to this drop yet.
The first Polkadot parachain community designed to create smarter
Polkadot Parachain investors PolkaSyndicate. Has an Airdrop Bot to give
away a total of $50,000 worth of PSYN tokens. This Airdrop will be
ongoing until September 27th.
Top 15 Trending Coins This Week
***Please note these are high risk high reward plays. Token launches are
often plagued by all sorts of drama, and often insane hype. Buyer
beware!!!
These are the upcoming launches that I believe could bring in big returns
for investors. It is a curated, and far from exhaustive list.
The token sales of today will be the big thing of tomorrow. So, it’s
definitely worth trying to get into them if you can.
HERE ARE SOME PRACTICAL TIPS TO HELP YOU GET INTO SALES
1 - Every sale is different, there are no set rules. Part of doing your
research is finding out the exact details of the sale.
2 - Always read the whitepaper and get all the info you can.
3 - Stay up to date, often sales are announced a few days beforehand.
4 - Be punctual! High demand means that sales will often finish in minutes.
If you are late, you miss out.
5 - Americans often are excluded, sorry guys! BUT you can be ready to
buy in the first few minutes of the Uniswap listing, so make sure to stay up
to date! Be aware that the first 5 to 10 minutes often see insane price
pumps by bots. Usually, but not always the sweet spot is around 30
minutes to an hour after listing.
6 - It is not necessary to chase every sale.
UPDATES
Manta is launching Calamari a Kusama based version of their privacy
tech. Follow their socials for parachain auction details. HERE
Polytrade has announced that they will be doing a Polka Starter sale. You
can whitelist HERE
Yield Guild will be holding a token sale on Sushi Swap on July
27th. Details
Polka Switch Alpha product launching on Polygon.
Scaleswap has delayed their sale after suffering a massive DDOS attack
on the day of the sale. A rather unfortunate start to the project.
Sigma Dex has now announced that their sale is being delayed for the
foreseeable future due to adverse market conditions. Stay tuned.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll focus on Large Cap Altcoins and their higher
timeframe price predicaments.
ETH/USD — Ethereum
ETH is forming a confluent support area that is the orange horizontal (i.e.
the support that has been effectively holding up the wedging structure via
downside wicks) and the black trendline denoting Lower Lows.
That area would be the next support region with the blue area below it
denoting previous 2017 All Time Highs which would be a major support
area.
LINK/USD — Chainlink
Ever since rejecting from ~$40, LINK has been pulling back into this local
blue order block.
Previous resistance is now becoming new support.
Of course, it has been holding for the past two months, perhaps even
three months if we see downside wicking into the blue area this July.
Hold here and a revisit of the ~$38 (red) region will be a possibility.
Because LINK likes to form ranges at highs.
A breakdown from the local blue area and LINK will return into the
blue-blue range where LINK has historically enjoyed multi-month
consolidation.
Whereas breakdown from the blue-blue range and LINK will revisit the
red-blue range, where actually LINK has never consolidated inside before;
price could very well return to the red area, though we can’t assume this
with certainty as we have little price history to come to any conclusions
when it comes to said range.
I’m not saying LINK is going to the red area ($3.50); I merely offer this to
you to illustrate how I think about LINK’s price action.
In any case — the key takeaway is this:
LINK ranges.
At the moment, LINK is holding the very bottom of its $17 (blue) to $38
(red) range.
If $17 fails to hold, then LINK would breakdown into the $8.50 (blue) to $17
(blue) range.
Simple as that.
At the moment, LINK is at a crucial support right now, holding there.
LTC/USD — Litecoin
Because after all — Bitcoin is inside a range right now, holding Weekly
support.
Convincingly losing ~$32000 (black) would probably impact Altcoins like
ETH LTC or LINK to breakdown from their current supports, but if BTC just
downside wicks into the green area again ($29000) only to recover, then
ETH LTC or LINK will perform fake-breakdowns, momentarily losing their
supports.
Which is why it’s good to keep an eye on key levels for Major Altcoins, but
ultimately Bitcoin’s price predicament will be dictating whether these levels
hold or not.
ADA/USD — Cardano
The last Large Cap Altcoin for today is threatening to break back down into
a multi-week range.
There are progressively weaker bounces occurring from the ~$1.30, and
with this current Weekly candle slipping below one of the black supports, it
could be a challenge for ADA to protect this area.
Weekly Close below black and ADA would slip back into the range.
That said, the bottom of that range has a confluent support in the orange
Higher Low trendline at around $1.05 which is very close to the
psychological support of $1 in of itself.
The downside wicks forming the Higher Low trendline (orange) have
dipped to as low at the $0.90 region so should ADA break back into the
range, then wicking into that region wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.
The problem would lie in losing the $1 level convincingly, as there is no
support at all until the 2017 All Time High of $0.72.
ADA needs to hold these local black levels to avoid a breakdown into the
range; a breakdown could see ADA revisit the $1 area which would
probably offer strong support.
That being said, ADA will closely follow ETH’s tune so if ETH revisits its old
All Time High — ADA possibly could too.
All in all, however — all Major Altcoins are holding their higher timeframe
supports.
And with outlined scenarios, it will be easier to understand where price
could go should those higher timeframe supports fail.
However, those supports have no failed.
Armed with perspective, let’s take it a step at a time.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. If you enjoyed today’s market analysis, you’ll really like the Rekt
Capital newsletter. Cutting-edge insights on the Crypto markets, straight
to your inbox three times a week.
dTravel AMA
What partners are you working with that will help ensure the success
of dTravel?
Dtravel is backed by Binance, Travala.com, Kenetic Capital, Future Perfect
Ventures, DHVC, Plutus VC, GBV Capital, AU21 Capital, Shima Capital, LD
Capital, NGC Ventures, and others. There are partnerships with major
online travel agencies (OTA) that Dtravel will announce soon.
How to Earn Up to 54% ROI with USDT over 8 Days with Bridge
Mutual
There are 3 opportunities in today’s tutorial, with emphasis on this short
term liquidity mining program ending in 8 days.
1. Deposit USDT to provide cover and earn up to 2454% APY (based
on BMI price and liquidity deposited)
2. Earn ~40% APY staking BMI
3. Earn ~605% APY staking the BMI/ETH Uniswap V2 LP
A few important details to consider in the farms above.
● Coverage Liquidity is subject to an 8-day cooldown (necessary to
keep the platform capital efficient for claims).
● During the Coverage Mining ending in the next 8 days, Coverage
Liquidity cannot be withdrawn until the event is over, plus an
additional 8 days cooldown.
● For withdrawing rewards (BMI), there is a 100-day lockup, or else
you face an exit fee, starting at 90% and gets reduced every day by
0.7% for 100 days.
● After the 8-day cooldown period, users have 48 hours to withdraw
tokens.
Please also be aware of a few major risks.
● Smart contract risk in Bridge Mutual contracts.
● Oracle failure could also contribute to a loss of funds.
● Pegged assets like USDT can de-peg.
● The quoted APYs are likely to change by the time one hops into this
tutorial. The amount of deposited iquidity and the market price of
BMI will affect the estimated APYs.
● As always, this is not financial advice.
Here’s how to get started!
1 - My favorite opportunity is to earn with USDT by providing cover, which
refers to the title “earning 54% ROI over 8 days.” Assuming I have USDT, I
first go to the Bridge Mutual Earn Interest app.
3 - To earn the higher 605% APY, I can zap into the BMI/ETH LP in
Uniswap V2 with any token using Zapper here.
4 - Lastly, return to the Stake BMI/ETH Uni V2 tab on the Bridge Mutual
app and follow the prompts to Approve & Stake BMI/ETH Uni V2 with 2
MetaMask transactions.
That’s it! We’re now bootstrapping a new DeFi insurance (cover) with
Bridge Mutual and potentially earning higher yield with just USDT over the
next 8 days.
For more DeFi video tutorials and insights, follow me @DeFi_Dad on
Twitter and subscribe to DeFi Tutorials with DeFi Dad on YouTube
at defidad.com.
Disclaimer & Risks: This is not financial advice or a
recommendation/endorsement to buy BMI. You should approach all DeFi
applications, wallets, protocols, and tools with caution. Please be aware
there is always risk in using DeFi, especially technical risks (ie smart
contracts bugs), financial risks (ie liquidity crises), and potentially admin risk
(admin key compromise, governance vulnerabilities).
Serum Report by Jesse
Geez Axie Infinity, would you slow down and let someone else have some
gains this week. With another almost 200% increase in price,
runner-up Flow with 70% gains seems to pale by comparison. Whether
this is due to naturally occurring price movement or a short squeeze on the
remaining AXS tokens that haven’t been migrated to Ronin is still yet to be
seen. Diving into the Solana ecosystem this week, we’re going to be taking
a look at its first DEX Serum.
Introduction
The Serum DEX is a fully trust-less, fully decentralized exchange
supporting full limit order books, fast order placement, cancellation, and
fund management. Serum DEX’s goal is to bring the speed and
convenience of centralized exchanges to DeFi while remaining fully
trustless and transparent. Serum is built on the Solana blockchain,
allowing for a fast, costless trading experience on par with CEXes. Serum
is a high-throughput low-latency exchange that has a completely on-chain
order book and matching engine. Serum also offers bridging with
Ethereum via Wormhole as well as true decentralization. Serum prides
itself on its composability to automatically integrate into any other DeFi
application as if it was native to Serum. Builders can join the Serum
ecosystem and leverage what the Serum DEX can offer. Networks like
Ethereum are currently too expensive and slow to support an order book
due to operational complexity. The order book and matching engine are all
entirely on-chain, thanks to the Solana blockchain. This allows Serum to
never rely on any centralized servers to match trades. The use of
Wormhole allows existing projects, platforms, and communities to move
tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to enjoy Solana’s high
speed and low cost. This level of interoperability unlocks extra network
effects and allows for only the most efficient use of resources. Bridging
across to Solana negates friction and still allows for the value to settle
back to the Ethereum network if chosen by the user.
Serum provides foundational infrastructure, allowing applications such as
trading interfaces to ‘plug’ into Serum’s composable ecosystem. Serum
lives in the heart of the ecosystem, with many other applications
surrounding it and each with its own set of users. Anyone can create a
consumer-facing application that leverages Serum’s liquidity and its
thriving network. The choice to build on Solana is due to it being a fast,
secure, and censorship-resistant blockchain providing the open
infrastructure required for global adoption. Selected for its performance
and technical innovations, allowing it to achieve extremely low transaction
latency, high throughput, and low fees. With Serum being more of a tool
for the development of additional products and services on Solana. The
following protocols have been given grants and built from the ground up to
support the Serum ecosystem. With the ultimate vision of Serum being to
drive the global mass adoption of DeFi.
Aurory: An upcoming gaming platform based on the play-to-earn
mechanism. There are many game modes planned for Android and iOS.
The solo game mode is a J-RPG-inspired side scroller where the player
fulfills quests, interacts with NPCs, and defeats opponents to advance the
plot. Every creature defeated will be earned as an NFT in players’ wallets.
These NFTs cards will be the core of Aurory multiplayer modes and will
allow players to compete against other players or to gain extra items.
Completing quests also allow players to gain tokens for multiplayer game
modes or to buy items in the marketplace. Aurory will use an SPL token as
the core of its gaming ecosystem.
Bonafide: The flagship Serum GUI and full product suite bridging the gap
between Serum, Solana, and the user through its highly intuitive trading
interface, Solana data analytics, and sophisticated ancillary features. On
top of offering a user-friendly DEX UI, Bonfida features advanced on-chain
order types, exclusive markets, and listings, and two trading modes for
users of a different experience. Bonfida also developed Bonfida Bots,
which allows people to automate their trading strategies on Serum as well
as copy trading. These bots also have the capacity to plug into
TradingView natively so any TradingView strategy can be automated on
Serum out of the box. In the first month of launch, the bots executed over
240k trades with an average of 8k trades daily.
Cope: Rolled out in two phases. In Phase one, trader performance will be
evaluated retrospectively based on their calls on crypto markets; call
makers will be categorized into a leaderboard that provides a narrative
informing a new type of investment product based on top trader calls.
Phase two involves an automated investment product that users can get
permission to trade on their behalf based on this leaderboard. There are
three core products on the horizon: COPE Leaderboard, COPE Index, and
COPE Trading Pools. These products will use the Solana blockchain and
integrate it with its ecosystem. The COPE Leaderboard allows COPE to
catalog and understand the skills of the most effective investment minds in
the community. The COPE Index allows the Community to harness and
invest in those minds. The COPE Trading Pools will allow community
members to select call makers with the most effective performance.
Dexlab: Makes launching on Solana easy with a token minting lab, REST
API, a launchpad, and a dedicated DEX for all listings. It is an integrated
DEX platform that provides a GUI to issue Solana-based tokens without
the need to code. It leverages the Serum Decentralized Exchange (DEX)‘s
central order book to support ultra-fast transactions, shared liquidity, and
new features for monetization. The SPL CLI is the primary method to
create and manage Solana tokens. Currently, it lacks the linkage to be able
to manage environment settings, token sales, market listings, and token
information. With Dexlab’s GUI, one will be able to manage these settings
and be able to do everything from token issuance to adjusting utility
settings, etc.
Jet Protocol: A borrowing and lending protocol built on the Solana
blockchain. Jet’s core lending function will build on the token-lending
program found in the Solana Program Library repository as well as the
applicable cross-margin pull request for the initial mainnet launch. Users
can also look forward to Jet Protocol’s innovative interest-bearing
products which will be used to create markets on Serum DEX.
Mango Markets: Built to merge the liquidity and usability of CeFi with the
permissionless innovation of DeFi at a lower cost to the end-user than
both currently provide. Towards this goal, Mango is building margin
trading/lending and perpetual futures along with decentralized governance
to decide the future evolution. Mango’s permissionless ecosystem
encourages spectacular new innovations.
Maps.me: A leading offline mapping and navigation app with 9 years of
history and over 140M registered users globally. Maps.me 2.0 will provide
a new, immersive online and offline mapping and booking experience with
DeFi-powered financial services to its massive user base.
Media Network: A privacy-first and community-governed content delivery
network (CDN) that bypasses traditional CDN providers’ centralized
approach for a self-governed and open-source solution where everyone
can take part. Media Network creates a distributed bandwidth market that
enables service providers such as media platforms to hire resources from
the network to come and go as the demand for last-mile data delivery
shifts. Media Network allows anyone to set up new Media Edges and
serve content without introducing any trust assumptions or
pre-authentication requirements. Participants earn MEDIA rewards for their
bandwidth contributions, a fixed supply SPL token minted on Solana’s
Blockchain.
Oxygen: A DeFi prime brokerage service built on Solana and powered by
Serum’s on-chain infrastructure. Built to support hundreds of millions of
users, it serves as a permissionless, cheap, and scalable protocol that
democratizes borrowing, lending, and trading with leverage and allows
users to make the most of their capital. Oxygen aims to recreate the
business units traditionally found within investment banks and to make
them accessible to retail and institutional users. With Oxygen, users can
earn yield, borrow from peers, trade directly out of their pools, and get
trading leverage against a portfolio of assets. One interesting integration in
progress is Oxygen’s composing as the financial backend for the DeFi
yield generation function in Maps.me. Maps users will interact with an
intuitive UX to enjoy their wallets earning them yield.
Raydium: Previously discussed, this is an on-chain order book AMM built
on Solana and leveraging Serum DEX’s central limit order book for fast
trades, shared liquidity, and features for earning yield. Raydium provides
on-chain liquidity to Serum’s central limit order book, meaning that
Raydium’s users and liquidity pools have access to the order flow and
liquidity of the entire Serum ecosystem, and vice versa. Raydium offers
single and fusion (dual) reward farming pools to drive ecosystem-wide
liquidity and enable projects to grow.
Star Atlas: An immense metaverse with a space exploration and territorial
conquest MMO game built on Solana. By combining blockchain
mechanics, state-of-the-art graphics, and the latest in 3D technology, Star
Atlas is carving out the future of the gaming industry by redefining how
virtual items are traded and what they’re worth both in and out of the
metaverse. Star Atlas uses the Serum DEX for trading all game assets.
When a user views their inventory in the Star Atlas UI, they can see all the
Official Star Atlas NFTs that they own. When they click to view the details
of an item, they will also see the best ask and bid prices on the Serum
Market Order Book for that specific item, allowing them to place orders for
it. There will be many thousands of in-game items, and to make that
efficient, we aim to have one Serum Market per NFT, pairing them with the
primary currency of the Star Atlas metaverse, the ATLAS token, and a
convenient UI to trade other currencies into ATLAS directly through the
same interface.
The Token
SRM (Solana) (Ethereum) is the utility and governance token of the Serum
ecosystem. In the exact same way, MIOTA represents one Million IOTA.
MSRM known as MegaSerum represents one Million SRM stacked
together. You can create 1 MSRM by locking up one million SRM, and you
can redeem the MSRM back out for one million SRM. However, there is a
limit of 1,000 MSRM allowed in the ecosystem, so in theory unlike IOTA,
they are quite scarce. The supply distribution is allocated as 27% Partner
and Collaborator Fund, 27% Ecosystem Incentive Fund, 22% Project
Contributors, 20% Team and Advisors, and 4% Locked Seed and Auction
Purchasers. Initially 10% of all SRM tokens begin unlocked. The other
90% all have the same unlock schedule. They are fully locked for the first
year, and then unlocked linearly over 6 years, at a rate of approximately
1/2190 per day with all seed sales locked. The initial circulating supply was
set at 175 Million SRM to provide liquidity to the DEX. As tokens were
unlocked initially 125 Million SRM were voluntarily locked into the
platform’s reserves for staking rewards, leaving a circulating supply of 50
Million SRM currently available. Serum has also installed a burn
mechanism that has conducted 17 token burning events since release.
Despite this Serum has enabled a maximum supply of 10 Billion SRM
tokens after all distributions are completed.
The Founders
Project Serum is built by the Serum Foundation, a group of self-proclaimed
experts in cryptocurrencies, trading, and decentralized finance. However,
the team is not transparent in who exactly is working on the project.
Early investors in the project include CoinFund, Jump Trading, Genesis
Block Ventures, Kinetic, Lemniscap, Sino Global Capital, Evernew Capital,
Parafi Capital, Lemniscap, AKG Venture and Solana. Serving in Advisory
positions within the Serum ecosystem are Compound Founder Robert
Leshner, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Friend, and TomoChain CEO and
Founder Long Vuong. Operating Nodes on Serum currently is 3Commas,
Age Network, AKG Ventures, AlexDCrypto. Blocto, AscendEX, Capsule
Mining, Certus, Chainode Tech, DecaMegaDAO, Dokia Capital, EcoSerum,
FTX, Kyros Ventures, Genesis Block, P2P Validator, Serum Capital, Ubik
Capital, W3M, and QCP Soteria.
Market Impacts
Coming up on its first-year SRM was released back on August 10th, 2020.
As with most projects released during this time the focus was mainly on
building and not price action. Coming to market around $1.50 and
reaching its first all-time high of $3.60 within the first month, then falling to
$1 where it remained for the five months that followed. It wasn’t until
February 2021 when the bull market began to show signs that SRM broke
above the previous high peaking at $7 before another breakout in May
2021 pushed SRM to a new ATH of $12 which shows some obvious
manipulation in price by traders before the price returned to the exact level
of the price it was at before this breakout from $6. Since then, a lot of air
has been let out of the project’s price where it’s now returned to the $3
mark as of this writing. This is expected to continue or possibly move to
newer lows with the one-year mark coming up in just a few weeks for
investor’s yearly distributions. This will also increase the current supply of
SRM in circulation despite the probability that a fair amount of these
upcoming unlocked tokens will most likely be staked in the network. The
token’s main access to liquidity has been split evenly between FTX
Exchange and Binance as the circulating supply has remained at 50 Million
SRM. Socially, Serum has continued to grow the community and regularly
releases its official Newsletter on a very consistent basis to update
everyone on new developments. On Twitter, they’ve gained a following of
almost 100k, in spite of some level of botting by the developers. A better
baseline would be its 10k strong Telegram community. The DEX itself has
had a fair amount of development done after release back in
August/September 2020. But, now the Github shows a significant drop in
work since then and only a handful of commits since January 2021.
Concerns
Concerns can be seen in the maximum token supply that makes the SRM
token highly inflationary, despite its long vesting and distribution periods.
The need for such a large supply is not necessary to the project’s function
or form and no clear answer for such a large inflationary supply has been
given by the project’s developers.
For obvious reasons displayed many times with reviews of previous
projects falling into this category. A hidden and/or non-transparent team is
never a good sign for projects that wish to be taken seriously, or seek to
gain mass adoption of its services. Trust is such a huge part of investing in
projects like this. Without it the risk we absorb increases exponentially
when you’re unable to properly vet those in the driver’s seat. Especially
with the majority hidden behind GitHub identities.
Conclusion
Serum has shown tremendous growth as an ecosystem in the last year
and undoubtedly is not looking to stop onboarding new projects under its
wing. But this has come at the cost of growing its own codebase. With a
full reset in price action, aside from the growing list of projects being built
with Serum/Solana. Serum hasn’t quite captured any of the market share
it’s set out to. As recent data shows, the DEX has less than $15 Million
USD in Daily Trading Volume. The majority of which is heavily focused on
SOL, ETH, and BTC. Surprisingly even the recently covered Raydium (RAY)
is trading higher volumes than the SRM token itself. This would be like
Chainlink having greater daily volume than Ethereum if you could imagine
that. It just doesn’t paint the best picture for the future of Serum or the
price appreciation of its native tokens. As with all projects in this state,
you’ll need to weigh the risk vs reward and position yourself accordingly if
you want to take part.
Until next time, remember that the only guarantee is BTC. So keep
stacking that Satoshi.
Final Notes
Thank you so much for your support, and I truly hope that today’s issue
will give you insights needed to help you master your wealth.
Do let me know if you have any questions or feedback, or any topics you’d
like to see covered in future issues.
See you next time!
Lark and the Wealth Mastery Team
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