Dear Diary,
It's been 5 days since my last post.
Sorry about that!
I flew across the country, went to a funeral for my late 5-year old nephew, met with a bunch of people I probably won't see for years, and then flew back. Again, in theory it seems like I should have the time to blog when I'm on the road, but it proves to be exceedingly difficult in practice.
This is especially true because I was dealing with the Polycub launch for hours an hours and hours. It's surprising how much time one can "waste" on DEFI projects. I scraped together $27k and dumped $23k into xPolycub within the first 5 minutes of launch.
As you can probably guess, that was pretty awesome. On the day of my nephew's "celebration of life" (wasn't a traditional funeral) I had increased my $23k to $140k. Was the wildest ride ever, and very odd considering the circumstances of supposed to be sad for my nephew.
I had a plan.
It usually takes 2-3 days to reach peak FOMO on new projects.
On day 3 I hit $140k.
Did I cash out?
LOL NAH
In fact, remember that other $4k of the $27k? I put that into pLEO/MATIC because that's the safe pool. Both LEO and MATIC are oversold in my opinion, so it was almost impossible to lose money there within the first three days. Still is, really.
So yeah on day 3 instead of cashing out I transferred the LEO/MATIC LP into pCUB/ETH. I also got a 25k LEO powerdown and a 5k Hive powerdown that day which was worth about $9k. Then I took out around $10k from xpolycub. I shoved ALL OF THIS money into the pCUB/ETH pool. I was very excited to get an ETH stack back and the yield was like 5000% per day. I was making like $2000 a day in yield.
Then the next day pCUB crashes from $3.50 to 1.50 and I lost like $70k.
What a painfully obvious outcome...
and I even knew it was going to happen (2-3 days is the sweet spot).
So yeah, I'm still up a ton of money, but I still feel dumb.
Me and a friend aped into the xpolycub pool instantly and it was only 7% more expensive than pcub. How wild is that? Now xpolycub is worth +600% more than pcub (x7 multiplier), and I still own over 7% of all xpolycub in existence. It's pretty wild I must say. At one point I think I owned like 18% of all xpolycub. Competition has been increasing for obvious reasons.
Strategy.
I have a plan for trading this market, even if I botched the opening 2-3 day hype cycle. Again, I'm very wary to discuss this strategy... because this is a competition and honestly enough people read my blog now that I've already lost money multiple times talking about plays I was going to make on CUB itself.
What I can say is that CUB and LEO are grossly undervalued. These are super safe assets that are getting largely ignored because everyone want to participate in the shiny new thing with totally unsustainable yield. At this point, it's unclear what will perform better. Polycub is obviously insanely volatile, and liquidity is pretty thin. It only takes a single whale cashing out to dump the price and cause a bit of a panic, leading to more selling. Still, I think the range we are in now is a lot more sustainable than $3-$5.
LEO liquidity
LEO liquidity is off the fuckin rails. Because the polycub yield is so massive, $735,746 is in the LP right now. That's three times more than the amount in the pCUB/USDC pool & pCUB/ETH pool (not added together). Each of the main pools has around a quarter mill sitting in it, while LEO/MATIC is around 3/4 million dollars. This is the most liquidity LEO has ever had ever. If you ever wanted to buy LEO, this is absolutely the easiest time to do it. Slippage is so good, it's incredible.
Things will calm down a bit by the time yield on pLEO/MATIC is equal to bLEO/BNB. the pLEO LP sucked all the liquidity out of the other pools because the yield is exponentially higher. The bLEO LP only has $170,950 in it, and yield has basically doubled to 150% APR (340% APY). Still, it is not worth putting money into the pool unless you're overwhelmingly bullish on BNB, which let's be honest, most people on Hive are not because of the hostile takeover. Also Matic is a good token, looks oversold, and is lower on the market cap and perhaps has more room to improve. Also Polygon seems to be cheaper and perhaps even more secure than BSC, but that's just a rough estimate (or perhaps wishful thinking). The fact remains that operations on Polygon are exponentially cheaper than BSC because MATIC only costs $1.40 and BNB costs near $400. The token price per operation seems roughly the same, but the USD costs of the tokens is radically different.
Marketing campaign
I'm told that a massive marketing push is coming for the LEO ecosystem and polycub in particular. I have no idea if we will get any outside money pumped into this thing, but that would certainly be nice. Meanwhile, LEOFINANCE has been BANNED from YouTube with no reason given. The war against legitimate projects continues, and the censorship campaign continues to ramp up. Wen project blank?
Polycub launch
The launch was very frustrating. That's because there was no fair launch in play and bots had all of the advantage. Khal set a time for launch, and then he pushed it back, and then he pushed it back again, and then he pushed it back again, and then he pushed it back again, and then he pushed it back again, and then finally he just stopped pushing it back and made us wait until launch.
During the final push of launch Khal had to add liquidity slowly because bots kept buying it all. Next time we really need to do a fair launch so that anyone can buy at $1 if they want to. I tried to buy at $1 and I ended up getting 9000 Polycub for $23k, which was obviously pretty fucking annoying, because we are giving the bots free money.
What does a fair launch look like?
Let's assume the next launch is LunaCub. Anyone would be able to buy in early by "donating" UST (terra?) to the liquidity pool. LunaCub would then mint 2 tokens for each dollar added to the smart contract in this way. One of the tokens will be paired to the UST and added to the vault, providing permanent liquidity, the other token will be given to the user that added the UST.
I talked about this in Discord today, and @khaleelkazi asked me if I had watched the AMM. I hadn't and still haven't. He basically said this was addressed and people would be able to buy in a similar way that I described, except users would own the LP tokens instead of raw LunaCub.
My way is superior to this, because the investors don't control the LP tokens and those LP tokens and liquidity move into the vault forever. Again, we should always be looking for a fair way to print more tokens if those tokens add value to the protocol; that's just free money on the table waiting to be scooped. By printing an entirely new set of LunaCub for every UST that was pumped into the vault, we accomplish this, and essentially double the value of the protocol on day one. If bots buy at $1 and push it up to $2, we can immediately dump on them for a gain while still maintaining massive liquidity pools.
In addition, all LunaCub could/should be automatically added to the xLunaCub farm right on block one. These launches should always cater to the degens; the LEO bulls that are willing the throw down money blindly because they trust the mission. This is clearly what polycub was going for, but it missed the mark a bit in the beginning.
Khal launched PolyCUB after being awake for over 50 hours. I essentially begged him to abort and create a fair launch. It was so obviously going to be a bit of a disaster because people were burning like $200 on low liquidity test pools that only had a few polycub in them. It was very obvious people who wanted to buy in weren't going to get a fair price without a bot.
If I had a bot in this case, I would have easily been up $300k in 48 hours instead of $140k. Probably more. Clearly we should just be printing more tokens instead of forcing people to compete at the starting line. Either way, it looks like this will happen for the next launch, but like I said, we should be printing 2 "LunaCub" for each dollar pumped in, one for the vault LP and one for the user that "donated". That's just free value waiting to be printed.
Conclusion
I have so much more to say about this, but if I say it I basically give away my strategy, and I think my strategy is pretty good and I don't want people copying it. Unfortunately volatile launches like this are very much a zero-sum game. We should work to change that, but for now it is what it is, and I want to "win".
I should have taken the $140k and pumped it all into Hive.
LOL, I thought about it.
Infinite greed is infinite.
Even $140k in two days wasn't enough for me.
Mindblowing.