Daily Recap
Fry duty awaits
So…you watched crypto skyrocket for the first half of 2021…then you fomo’d in at the top. Now your portfolio is down 80%. Wat do?
Fortunately, McDonalds is hiring! See below for details.
Decentral America: Inside the frontier of Bitcoin adoption
Here is an update on the state of Central/South America’s Bitcoin adoption.
Microstrategy now holds over 105,000 Bitcoins
Microstrategy (NYSE: $MSTR), founded by (now) Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, has just completed the acquisition of another 13,005 BTC after raising an additional $489 million in cash.
Bitcoin in China after the government-imposed mining ban:
Polywhale Finance soft-rugs
DeFi is inherently risky (for now). While “blue-chip” DeFi protocols like Yearn, Aave, Compound, etc. are all thought to be safe, the truth is that any time you move your funds off of cold storage (a hardware wallet) and into DeFi, you are taking on some level of risk.
The reward in DeFi is typically proportionate to the risk. Let’s take Yearn, for example, which is one of the “safer” projects in DeFi.
If you were to withdraw the dollars sitting in your bank account and convert them to USDC or DAI (stablecoins pegged to $1), then deposit those stablecoins on Yearn, at this moment you’d be earning 6% interest on your dollar.
If you kept your money in the bank, you’d be earning approximately .01%. The average annual inflation rate is 2.25%. By letting your hard-earned cash sit in an interest-bearing savings account, you’re losing money.
If you’re willing to take a mild/moderate risk, the USDC or DAI Yearn vaults are a no brainer. While a 6% yield on your dollar sounds great, many crypto-savvy “yield farmers” have learned that the deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the crazier yields you can find. For some degenerates, 6% APY doesn’t cut it.
Polywhale Finance was one of the first experimental yield farming protocols to launch on Polygon. Being one of the first applications, and having an anonymous team, this was an inherently risky play for investors.
Yields were high at first, but as competition came along, rewards slowed and liquidity flowed to competing platforms. Today, Polywhale’s developers put out a statement before “soft-rugging” their own protocol.
A rug-pull is when a team (typically anonymous) drains their protocol of all locked funds…then they vanish.
A soft-rug is not a complete exit scam, but it shows that the protocol has no future. In this instance, the developers gave up on their project. They didn’t steal users’ funds, but the developers sold their tokens and basically said, “we’re out.” The $KRILL token is now down 99%.
R.I.P Polywhale
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That’s all for today.
Onward,
Josh