As part of my attempt at aping into projects, I’ve stumbled upon a good candidate: Aave. Let’s take a look at its fundamentals. Mid term price action First, Aave token was launched in 2017 actually in an ICO. Its price stagnated for a long time before breaking through to $34 on 19th Oct 2020 (what happened there?). Subsequently, like many other alts, it rose to prominence during Defi Summer and beyond. In May crash this year, it dropped from a height of $600 to $192, and has made steady recoveries since then. ...

So, the thing about aping into protocols is that you don’t have to start from scratch. It’s always a good idea to get glimpses into what the pros (whales) are doing, and ape along. Whilst exploring Sansheets, I discovered this chart that gives me some leads in terms of which tokens are hot right now. Not entirely sure how to interpret the chart (lol) but it’s good discovery for me atm. ...

Main guiding thought: should I long or short ETH? 1. How is it looking on Trading view? -upward momentum- Suggests upward trend, at least in the short term. 2. Volume. Historically, the best time to buy is when volumes are trending way above price. Right now, the volumes are looking pretty thin. 3. Social Volume Historically, social volume is a topping indicator. Right now, we’re at the height almost of social volume. Which means, it’s not a good idea to buy. ...

That’s it - I am done with sitting on the sidelines. Im confident that with my current level of skills and knowledge, Im finally able to begin making some power moves with substantial money (for my standards). All good moves comes from thinking hard about strategy and moving fast and decisively when you spot an attractive position based on your evaluation. My previous approach has been the cautious one because I realized that the pond is deep and there’s too many ways to lose your money here. ...

In my bid to understanding how APR of a liquidity pool is being calculated, I am forced to take a closer look at the mechanics of liquidity pool rewards. Right now, all I know is that for platforms such as Uniswap, 0.3% of all swap fees will go to liquidity pool rewards, which are then distributed to liquidity providers. The rewards are distributed every block. But there are deeper questions. ...

The network profit loss (NPL) indicator (brown line above) by Santiment is a very interesting one that I’ve just discovered. I really recommend reading this article to get a sense of what it is. Basically, network profit loss indicates to us whether most people are taking profits or losses from their trades at any single moment. If the mechanics behind this indicator is sound1, it is truly a novel indicator of Defi. NPL is derived by taking every coin on the blockchain and making the assumption that the price at which it last moved is its acquisition price, and the price at which its currently transacted at is its ‘sell’ price - therefore deriving the ROI. From the ROI, we get a rolling image of overall ’network’ profitability. ...

Stablecoins fulfil one simple function within the world of crypto. It helps participants in the crypto universe ground values to the real world without them having to leave it. Imagine a trader, Bob, who wants to buy and sell Bitcoin in order to profit from it. Bob uses money he has made in the real world (USD) to pay for it. Assume, that Bob, like the most of us, ‘on-ramps’ his fiat money into the crypto universe with the help of a centralised exchange - literally the only way to own crypto assets if you’re not a miner and if you don’t have a direct contact sending you Crypto (i.e. P2P) - then, at the moment you want to realize your profits, you’ll have to convert your BTC to fiat somehow. Without Stablecoins, you’ll have to take profits by converting it back to USD, effectively ‘off-ramping’ with every trade. With Stablecoins, however, you could take profits without having to off-ramp into fiat. Skipping this step is crucial for both convenience and cost savings. ...

Dune analytics allows you to query on chain data using SQL queries via its web app. Although execution time is a little slow due to the large data volume (~14s for a simple query, ~1min+ for more complex ones), it is still one of the most useful products for basic on chain analysis I’ve used so far. The prerequisite, though, is that you would need to know a bit of SQL. ...

It’s Q4 of 2021 (28th Oct), and Ethereum’s gas fees are currently raging at $17USD / transaction. If you catch the right, off-peak hours such as Saturday evenings GMT +8, you could get it cheaper at $2.30USD. The problem is: will your profitable trade wait till Saturday evenings? This brings us back to our original problem. What is the current state of development of our Layer 2 solutions? Layer 2 solutions manifesting on Uniswap as network options (31 Oct 2021) TLDR: Arbitrum is the only successful implementation of L2 solution at scale. Other projects, such as Optimism, and zkSync, are either operating at curtailed scale, or are still in development/testing Gas fees are still not ridiculously cheap for now. If broke, use Polygon. Let us first begin by considering Polygon. In my previous post two months ago (13 Aug 21), we saw that Polygon was the third largest network with 5.66Bn TLV. It’s widely heralded as a low cost alternative to Eth, with transaction costs going down to $0.00005USD and a TPS of ~88. Since then, much has changed. Not only has other projects such as Solana, Terra, Avalanche, and Fantom overtaken it in terms of TVL, Polygon’s TVL has actually declined over the period. ...

As of 13 Aug 2021, Polygon is the third largest blockchain with $5.66Bn TVL with 46 protocols running on it. Source: Defi Llama &nbsp Even though it is growing rapidly, it is still 19 times smaller than market leader Ethereum, and about a third the size of Binance Smart Chain. Source: Defi Llama &nbsp Polygon has always been attractive to developers and protocols due to its commitment to extremely cheap gas fees. To put things into perspective, the cheapest transaction on Ethereum costs roughly around $2USD these days (if you’re lucky); whereas on Polygon network, it costs $0.0005USD. Yes, that is 0.05 cents, in other words, 4000x cheaper. ...