January 20, 2021: #SAD! 🐎📉
Keep Ahead of the Curve
Here are today’s trends to watch from Curve Market Cap:
What’s a bigger mistake than using Stochastic Gradient Descent optimization on the saddle point of high dimensional non-convex optimization problems? How about yesterday’s rollout of SADdle, the latest victim in a line of failed Curve copycats.
The recipe for “half-baked Saddle” is to stick hard fork into Curve, remove any trace of innovation, season lightly with destructive VC meddling, and serve it lukewarm directly into the trash bin.
Shortly after Saddle’s launch, reactions ranged from tepid to tears of laughter. @RektHQ wrote in its scathing review:
“Fast forks are understandable when done by small teams - often anonymous developers just looking for fast cash. However, this was a heavily funded and promoted project that offered nothing new to the community.”
Of course, much of the codebase did not even hide the fact that it was directly copying from Curve. At unfinished points in its documentation, it would explicitly point users to the more thorough Curve documentation. At one point they channeled their inner @TSElibot and made their strategy explicit:
Interestingly enough, a hard fork would have ultimately been more successful. The hasty copy paste excluded some of the gas optimization features, amounting to a late Christmas present for ETH miners.
Worse yet, like when somebody tries to copy your math homework but misses a few key lines, their execution backfired. An enterprising hacker quickly identified the mistakes and vacuumed up hundreds of thousands of dollars within 6 minutes.
Security experts quickly recommended against trading in Saddle.
Holders of veCRV swiftly voted to axe rewards to the lightly traded tBTC Curve pool, a project from the team behind Saddle. This is unfortunate news for anybody who wanted KEEP rewards, which can now only be obtained by risking your money in Saddle.
Like a Shakespearean tragedy, some noted that Curve’s partnership is what put tBTC on the map so they were essentially biting the hand that fed them.
The cryptocurrency markets are ruthless towards secondhand knockoffs. Newer readers may not have even heard of Swerve, which tells you all you need to know about the prior attempt to fork Curve. It’s all reminiscent of how Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic trade at ever-diminishing fractions of their victorious counterparts.
In a winner take all market, if you come at the king you best not miss.
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