As discussed on yesterday’s live video, come join our shiny new Discord!
We’re now several hours into the beginning of the mass $CVX unlock event.
So far it’s mostly bearish for diehards hoping for any shred of evidence to corroborate their nebulous and oft-refuted Death Spiral™️ hypotheses. Convex prices stubbornly stayed above $0. Though we doubt our haters are primarily motivated by accurate prognostications, it still must be difficult for them to sit by idly and watch their credibility repeatedly absorb swift kicks to the crotch.
Watching the price action can also be misleading when sources like CoinGecko fetch their Convex data from unreliable sources. Therefore I followed the action by putting together a simple Brownie script to pull data from the Curve v2 pool, which is arguably the most reliable source of on-chain CVX liquidity anyway.
Fortunately the community also stepped up to provide many great venues to grab some popcorn and enjoy viewing the unlockening. You can always get quality entertainment from the active-to-radioactive #cvx-trading Discord channel, particularly for events like this.
Also, a big shout-out to Badger for building a great dashboard:
Another great source, @0xRoll (Twitter aka: @crypto_DIPsy) built out a helpful Dune dashboard for the event:
The Defi Wars website saw interesting changes in realtime:
And @DeFiShaka provided outstanding play-by-play on Twitter.
A niche DeFi token event is spawning top tier entertainment value as an externality, so captivating it’s outcompeting primetime television, and you’re worried it’s all going to 0?
We know that the full unlockening action will be spread out over several weeks. Accordingly, some large wallets are yet to move.
Still, it’s early enough to begin extrapolating trends. Most of the CVX would simply get relocked.
Yet the most interesting trend, by far, was witnessing how much $CVX would slosh around the ecosystem into the various services getting built on top of CVX.
Of course, a lot got moved onto Aave, whose debt protocol was a key battleground in the relockening itself.
To date, the preferred destination for CVX relockers has been taking the opportunity to try out CLever.
Some info on the upcoming CLever airdrop was dropped on a recent Twitter space. The rationale for CLever is further laid out here in a bilingual bonus:
Outside CLever, other traders are looking into BadgerDAO’s bveCVX.
BadgerDAO will hosting another Office Hours today on the subject, which may be useful for fence-sitters interested in learning more:
Others are also dancing with Pirex’s pxCVX:
You can check out our prior chat with Sami. Pirex will also be hosting a Twitter Space today for those interested in learning more.
With several Convex tokens still in limbo, we have to imagine these protocols will continue competing to attract CVX to their coffers.
In my opinion, the willingness of flywheelers to use the relock as a chance to try out these new products is particularly exciting. Bear markets are for building — yet it can be tough for on-chain entrepreneurs to get quick adoption for CVX products with users locked in quarterly. Hopefully these relock events continue to functions more like trade shows, with vendors hocking their CVX solution and hoping customers flock. The Great Hock-ening? Flock-ening?
From an adoption point of view, it’s certainly bullish to see the flywheel continue flywheeling. Prices will do whatever they will, but if you’re here watching for the fundamentals it’s exciting to watch. Which brings us to…
Curve Wars
Just as surely as lockers keep relocking, the Curve Wars keep raging.
With protocols imploding left and right, it’s been a notably risky time for anybody to keep money locked in DeFi, to the extent we reiterate our advice users just stay out of DeFi. Fortunately for those irresponsible enough to play around anyway, Curve thus far has been bucking the implosion trend. In fact, Curve and its cash flow has arguably been the comfiest destination from which to ride out the bear.
This week the effect of the bank error in Curve’s favor is playing out, and it’s a doozy.
This week it may be the case that a single veCRV earns nearly enough to pay off the price of its $CRV equivalent. We cite this of course not as financial advice (the cooloff window means it’s far too late to lock and get a piece), but merely to give an example of how comically stupid DeFi token valuations are at the moment.
The record high fee distribution is nice, but what’s been particularly interesting lately is the explosion of supplemental bribe activity. StakeDAO liquid lockers in particular are generating eye-popping yields.
For a longer refresher on how this works, observe this testimonial:
Paladin Quests have also been extremely alluring, which are seeing success both for $CRV and $BAL. As always, a good time to check our chat with the team.
The veToken Bribe site is also enjoying steady flow in $MIM bribe activity.
No wonder the Curve lockening and fundamentals continue to move seemingly independent of price.