DeFi Enclave's Chronicles #14
Points Mania, Voodoo rug, DYM airdrop, project with one-click arbitrage strategy and much more.
In this episode:
Voyager's Observations - personal reflections and insights on DeFi and Beyond
Voyager's Vault - Detailed Report on My Investment Moves
DeFi Survivor's Bookshelf - Handpicked must-read threads and articles
DeFi Projects Radar - detailed survey of projects news and developments
Alpha/Airdrops Whispers - unexplored DeFi territory, proceed at your own risk
My newsletter is completely free, but there are my referral links to the projects I recommend. I would be grateful if you use them as a small token of appreciation for my work.
🔎 Voyager's Observations
Points Mania
Have you seen how projects are now slickly tricking users with all the hype around points ?
Gone are the days when big projects could just pull off scams or self-exploits without drawing too much attention. Now, if they try anything too obvious, they might just end up spotlighting their own developer, who could then reveal how the bosses asked for a loophole in the code and paid nicely for silence. Now, they've got to be more cunning. And luckily for them, there's a hysteria over points.
The goal ? To squeeze as much real money as possible out of users for these virtual points. So, what do they do ?
Promise an airdrop for points, then roll out a new "deal" every week where, for this week only, you get not 1 point per $1 of your fee, but 20% more. And believe it or not, people fall for it, throwing even more of their money away. And just like that, a new tulip mania begins, with everyone trying to outspend each other for points that lose value by the minute.
Kelp DAO ? They're just shrinking the font size to cram all those zeros into their fancy tables.
Hyperinflation has never been so cute.
Oh, and in case you forgot – we're still giving real ETH to new projects that pop up every day, in exchange for wrappers that often you can't even cash out.
Have you heard about projects promising a fixed pool of points ? Are they playing fair ?
Well, it's a mixed bag. Let's take a look at Drift Protocol, which promised to distribute 2 million points every week but then suddenly launched a campaign offering 8x points for trading BTC & ETH for one week.
What's up with that ?
No further details, just take what you're given, or your neighbor will, and you'll be left watching their back as they pull ahead.
So, Drift either decided to devalue its points by inflating the fixed pool or to take away already earned points and redistribute them among those who trade less but at the right time. And guess what happens in a few hours ? Yep, a new record in your fees. A win for Drift's managers, who'll likely get a nice bonus from our fees.
On the flip side, there's Hyperliquid, which promised to distribute 1 million points weekly and has stuck to its word without changing the terms. As a result, there's a fierce battle for every point in Hyperliquid, and many people aren't happy, complaining that they've racked up 20k in volume only to get a few points.
Yes, dude, but your few points are worth more than a hundred Drift points, why aren't you happy about that ? Because it's hard, hard to think and do a calculation any schoolkid could manage. We came here for the freebies, not to think and crunch boring numbers, right ?
Voodoo trade rug
Another beautiful scam happened during the LBP by Voodoo trade.
Voodoo trade is just another fork of GMX. Everything followed the classic scenario - the launch of an aggressive marketing campaign through influencers, followed by "sorry, we messed up," while of course, those who needed to cash out did, and those who didn't won't learn their lesson and will fall for the next such case.
What follows will either be a rebranding or compensation for the victims at the expense of user fees, or they might just continue as if nothing happened, since the crypto world has a very active rotation and new naive crypto enthusiasts looking for quick profits will replace the ones who left.
I was also approached with a request to write about this project, and they didn’t even offer anything in return, which seemed quite bold (welcome to the world of small X accounts, even scam projects don’t want to pay you).
I replied that I need to check the project first, but of course, there was nothing to check in another fork, so I just ignored further chasing. And a few days ago, after another round of influencer thread spam about this project, I even jokingly wanted to write a post that it's time to give Voodoo trade a red flag, they're advertising themselves too actively.
💰 Voyager's Vault
Once a month at the beginning, I make a snapshot of my portfolio with detailed proportions and P/L.
You can check January Report in DeFi Enclave's Chronicles #13
Today, I will share some updates and thoughts regarding the changes in my portfolio over the past week.
Not many events for my portfolio this week.
I'm trying to sell my tokens of the BinaryX project, this is what I really call RWA. I owned shares in 3 villas. The project is good, I've been in it from the beginning but decided to exit. This real estate brings about 12% annually and I decided that in such a market this is not the most rational use of money, considering how many more interesting opportunities there are now. Besides, I'm tired of waiting for their TGE with the airdrop, there's not much happening in the project, probably as it should be for a Real Estate company, it's a boring conservative business. Maybe one day I'll return to this project.
I continue to buy PSP & PNP.
Disappointed with Penpie and their partners. They promise to award points for bribes but in the end, only pearls from Swell are credited. EtherFi & KelpDAO are busy with something else. Of course, most likely the points will be credited in the end, but such poor organization is disappointing.
DYM Airdrop
I received a $1400 DYM token airdrop and sold it immediately. I looked into what projects they have in their testnet and it made me uncomfortable, you should also look into Dymension's competitors. Personally, it became clear to me that selling DYM at the post-launch price was a very generous gift.
📚 DeFi Survivor's Bookshelf
Blurring the Boundaries between DeFi and TradFi: An Introduction to the Real World Assets sector - link
Binance Research - Monthly Market Insights, February 2024 - link
ERC404: Everything We Know So Far About Pandora - link
The Castle Chronicle: Volume 55 - link
Balancer Protocol - The 8020 Initiative - link
Balancer Protocol - The Yield Bearing Asset Thesis - link
Synthetix 2024 - link
Fraxtal Has Launched. Here is Everything You Need To Know - link
Bitcoin Layers: Bitcoin Economy Awakened (Part 2 of 4) - link
🛰️ DeFi Projects Radar
Algebra - Weekly Digest #114 - link
AltLayer - January 2024 Recap - link
Balancer - Report: (Re)Staking - link
Deri Protocol - Monthly Report for January 2024 - link
Frax Finance - This Week in Frax - link
Frax Finance - FraxCheck #62 - link
Holdstation - Weekly Recap: Week 1, Feb 2024 - link
Holdstation - ZK Stack's Arrival - link
Infrared Finance - Understanding iBGT: The Future of Liquid Staking on Berachain - link
Layer N - Introducing Layer N's StateNet - link
LI.FI - January 2024 - link
Rabbithole - Introducing Boost Inbox - link
Ramen Finance - The Ecosystem (3,3) Launchpad Protocol for Berachain - link
Sphere - Monthly Report - link
Synonym - Live On Mainnet - link
Velodrome - The MetaDEX - link
ZKFair - A Letter to Everyone - link
🪂 Alpha/Airdrops Whispers
Polynomial
Polynomial is one of the projects in the Synthetix ecosystem (if it can be called that). Basically, it's another unremarkable perp DEX with a clunky interface, but I found something interesting there.
In the Strategies section of the project, there's an option to open an arbitrage strategy in just a few clicks and earn on funding rates. Here's what happens using the token AAVE as an example: when you open a position, you short AAVE on the Polynomial platform itself and immediately do a loop on Aave, thus opening a leveraged long. The funding rates for the AAVE token are currently at 219% annually.
The functionality is in beta stage, you can open only one position for now, and the tokens available include AAVE, LINK, OP, ETH. The interface is awkward and the open position starts to display after a few minutes, but everything works as it should.
https://www.rektfees.xyz/ - On this site, you can find out how much in total fees you have paid on each of the chains.
https://app.cielo.finance/ - A useful tracker for wallets and on-chain activities with various filters.
https://zkcodex.com/ - A convenient wallet scanner to check your activity across various chains for airdrop hunting.
Expectations for the next week
On the 12th, public access to Theseus - a new vault from Mozaic, will be opened; I managed to test it and the yield was very pleasing.
Also, on the 12th, public access to Panoptic - an options project that took so long to launch that it has been caught up and overtaken by other projects like Thetanuts, Cega, & Ithaca protocol, which look much cooler.
Starknet airdrop - for some reason, I'm confident that next week there will be an announcement of their airdrop.
Paraswap made an announcement of an announcement, something will happen on the 13th, and it seems to me that it's quite serious. Paraswap, in theory, is quite a boring swapper, and if such projects announce something, it's something big.
My newsletter is completely free, but there are my referral links to the projects I recommend. I would be grateful if you use them as a small token of appreciation for my work.
I continue to make a significant bet on participating in the following projects:
Ether.fi - Have Robot NFT(wtf ?) on Ether.fan, some YT-eETH on Pendle for points
Dolomite - Lend/Borrow/Galxe OATs
Drift Trade - points/tickets
Hyperliquid - points
Nostra - Lend/Borrow
Izumi (Mantle + ZkSync + Scroll) - LP/Swaps - The project promises to share all airdrops it receives, with the nearest being for Mantle Journey. Other relevant ones include ZkSync, Scroll, and other chains.
Gravita - The rewards for the project look promising.
Cega - Cool project for investors who want to invest via options.
Velvet Capital - I have been participating in the project for a while now and even successfully managing an investment portfolio there. Feel free to join.
IntentX - Making a big bet on this project, I continue to accumulate points.
Swell - I have high hopes for Swell, even though I also passed it by for quite a while, along with EigenLayer. Finally, Swell will soon launch rswETH, and they will enter L2.
Kamino - Lend/Borrow for points
CARV Gaming - exp/levels
GRVT - Boxes
Ithaca - testnet/points
Merkle Trade - Perp DEX on Aptos with elements of RPG
KiloEx - points + NFTs. Trying to get 100k points to earn VIP badge
Paraswap - staking PSP for fee refund + Paraswap revenue share
HMX - all-in for their token
Vertex - going to accumulate VRTX, they have crazy roadmap
LogX - new promising perp DEX aggregator with a lot of incentives
Chromatic Finance - new perp DEX, mainnet launch soon
Mode Network - I received the initial 10k points as a holder of Degenscore (don't even think about getting it, it's not worth it)
My Nodes
I'd be glad to hear any advice on what to add or change in the comments here or on my X (Twitter).
I'm very interested to see how Dymension plays out. I didn't get the airdrop but bought 100@$5 to stake as a "just in case" if it plays out like TIA airdrops. Even if just Avail airdrops I think it will have been worth it. Very interesting to see some high quality influencers setting up validators, I think they somehow might have created a passionate community around that drop.