1/ As $BTC / $ETH passed $40K /$1.2K yesterday (>2x under a month), I sat there thinking about the upcoming quarters and how it may turn out.

I came across a few posts which I found immensely thought-provoking by @cburniske @RaoulGMI @DegenSpartan (see below):

2/
https://t.co/xztuB0Tfd5
https://t.co/670x6ErykB
https://t.co/1xEba2Usjk

I think the general CT community / retail are super bullish on crypto in general right now and rightfully so. The narratives I hear are: 1) Institutions are coming in, 2) money printing goes brrrr and
3/ 3) US gov transition is +ve for crypto.

While I agree in general with these 3 narratives, I want to also be mindful of time horizons of those narratives and the scale / magnitude / speed of which those play out.
4/ 1st - let's look at @cburniske post on the concerns of the over-frothy sentiment in the last several weeks in crypto. I share that same concern and try to balance this out ongoingly with Wall Street's famous phrase "climbing the wall of worry".
5/ Crypto is generally a pretty illiquid market (from an institutional perspective), whale traders pump and dump all the time on a day-to-day / week-by-week basis
5/ As a retail investor, I have limited data sets / insights into actual underlying market dynamics and rely on snippets from people like @ki_young_ju and other on-chain data analytic firms to give me an idea of how things are looking
6/ As such, I stay away from the following, despite my ultra risk taking behavior, as it leads to a path of ruin:
1) Leveraging up / buying options (given vol is expensive)
2) Trying to short or bet against a parabolic move
3) Fomoing into updates like ytdy with $YFI or $ALPHA
7/ As the key is to survive and make money. If I want to chase outcomes and idolize the guy that turned $1K to $1MM on $UNI, I might as well play the lottery because I don't want to be the 99% that fails at it and never publicize it on CT.
8/ 2nd - From an investing perspective, @RaoulGMI's post comparing $BTC and $ETH has us all gushing for $20K $ETH and bringing forward that expectation that its all going to happen in the next few months.
9/ While markets are fractals and repeating price patterns exist across different assets, this is only one of the upside scenarios that can exist in a realm of different outcomes.

My job as a retail investor is again not to bet the farm "needing" this to happen but position
10/ myself accordingly to capture the upside if it does. Maybe not as well as @RaoulGMI but compared to my own situation say 6 months ago.

Come to terms that you most likely will underperform OGs of the CT space as a retail guy so keep the ego / risk taking in check.
11/ Last pt - Regarding @DegenSpartan's post, I am a big believer of DeFi and do think it will outperform going forward. Why?

If the $ETH price starts going parabolic / crazy levels, $ETH's flaws once again are shown and any high volume of activity kills my returns.
12/ So as a retail guy, what am I most likely to do? Not transact as much and just hold on to my bags.

If only I think this way, that's fine. The space moves on. What if more people think like me? What is a rational action to one person becomes irrational when adopted by many.
13/ @profplum99 in his many interviews across many platforms brought up the idea of markets becoming more and more illiquid due to passive investing (highly suggested for CT and everyone in general to listen).

In such markets, volatility is heightened and this leads
14/ to a increasingly fragile market both to the upside and downside.

So back to DeFi, if gas wars price me out of doing too much, I effectively becoming a HODL'er along with the other long term HODL'ers to begin with.
15/15 So if that is the case and the rotation comes into DeFi, is the depth of the $25B DeFi market really there to support the inflow?

Guess we'll find out... :)

Remember though, illiquidity cuts both ways so take risk accordingly.

More from Crypto

A primer on how to use @coingecko for your crypto data/research/trading needs.

Share it with a friend who needs it!

1/ Getting started with crypto and want to check prices/projects? https://t.co/LFnk4vukxj has info on just about every crypto you'll need :)


2/ Search over 6000+ cryptocurrencies available on the market. You can see what's trending in the space as well.

Researching by categories? Filter (left side) -> Select categories -> DeFi, DOT ecosystem, Exchange-based tokens, NFTs - anything!


3/ Lets say you're looking at #Bitcoin
https://t.co/g205lj03pG

At a glance you get:
- Price
- Mkt Capitalization (valuation)
- Circulating/Total supply
- 24h trading volume
- Links to websites, social media, block explorers
- Calculator

Next - check valuation?


4/ Market cap is used to rank coins, and we'll show you how its calculated - Hover over Circulating Supply (?) for breakdown.

Note: used @chainlink as example here - https://t.co/Jc46fe79Ag

While MC is important also consider product fit, narrative, team, community etc.


5/ If you're trading on AMMs like @Uniswap or @SushiSwap, you can copy the contract address directly to your clipboard.

Using @metamask_io? Add the token directly so it shows as one of the "Assets" that you own in the wallet.

See: https://t.co/94XihMf5oz
Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

Short version:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from.

Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Here's an example. This artwork is by Beeple and sold via Nifty:

https://t.co/TlJKH8kAew

The NFT token is for this JSON file hosted directly on Nifty's servers:

https://t.co/GQUaCnObvX


THAT file refers to the actual media you just "bought". Which in this case is hosted via a @cloudinary CDN, served by Nifty's servers again.

So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless. It refers to nothing. This can't be changed.

"But you said some use IPFS!"

Let's look at the $65m Beeple, sold by Christies. Fancy.

https://t.co/1G9nCAdetk

That NFT token refers directly to an IPFS hash (https://t.co/QUdtdgtssH). We can take that IPFS hash and fetch the JSON metadata using a public gateway:

https://t.co/CoML7psBhF

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