Cryptocurrencies are worth nearly 3 infrastructure bills! Amidst the celebrations of these all time highs, let us pay respects to those we lost along the way.
At four months, TriCrypto1 was taken from us too soon, but remains forever in our hearts. For the candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.
Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away. With the breakneck speed of development within cryptocurrency, we experience jaw-dropping news on an hourly basis.
Consider TriCrypto, survived by TriCrypto2.
TriCrypto2 is also approaching its fourth birthday, and has already captured over a billion dollars worth of value. Looks like the next generation will be all right.
Another example of rapid iteration: it was only mid-August when Cronjeβs bribes.crv.finance was the epicenter of palm-greasing. Just a few short months later, this has turned into a ghost town. All the cool bribery moved to Votium.
Is bribes.crv.finance another victim for the DeFi graveyard?
**UPDATE (8:46 AM PT): I thought bribes.crv.finance was dead, but Iβm informed I was just too lazy to wait for it to load. More updates to come?**
Well, not content to sit around and mourn the dead, Cronje already launched a new service to delegate that unused veCRV.
If you read into the fine print, youβll see itβs not necessarily for everybody.
Itβs a great reminder of just how fast everything in this space moves. If you looked away, you may have missed that $CRV is climbing up the Bitwise DeFi index.
The most important story in the entire universe right now is the Convex Wars. Has any major newspaper covered it? Has $CVX even been listed by any major exchange? Apparently what they say is true: the revolution will not be televised, nor even noticed beyond a small handful of people.
If youβre paying attention, you are still early.
We live in an undecipherable and unforgiving universe, but one that tends to reward people who interpret it correctly.
Those who immerse themselves fully within crypto tend to find their lives vastly improved by the experience. Perhaps thereβs a lesson in that.
One last example of time flying.
This newsletter marks the close of one full year of Curve Market Cap newsletters. A complete and uninterrupted year, with only weekends and bank holidays. And what a year it has been.
In the beginning, we were considering using DeFi but afraid of rugs. We started scraping some numbers from the Curve website because we didnβt understand it and wanted to understand it better and see if it was safe to use. We started publishing these numbers to a silly website, since nobody else seemed to have historical data.
Nor could we find any reliable way to get feedback either. Thus, one year ago we decided to start penning our observations in public, getting things wildly wrong, and being told what an idiot we were. Thankfully, some things never change.
The whole process at least worked to accrue a basic understanding of Curve. Yet over the course of the year, the frenetic Curve developers would ship faster than we could keep up with. As volume exploded and spilled onto factories and sidechains, our website essentially fell into obsolescence. The newsletter alone would survive out of habit.
Interestingly, at one point in the crazy year, Curve found a half-decent impressionist to publish tutorials about Brownie. In all honesty, those videos demand significantly more effort, and are overwhelmingly more useful than anything weβve published to our fanzine. Start there if you want to level up your life in crypto, come here if you want the afterparty.
So what is one year worth of steady content worth? If we were as efficient as TriCrypto, then we should expect something in the order of billions of dollars. But weβre stuck in America, where we would never dare innovate. So instead we get to run an all-volunteer operation and remain poor, with all funds going to support PAC DAO crypto activism.
In the interest of transparency, hereβs what our numbers look like at the one year mark.
Even though we havenβt even cracked the emotionally significant 1000 mark, Iβll keep this newsletter going. Itβs a fun way to collect my thoughts each morning, and I can crank it out fairly efficiently. Plus itβs still growing, so this must be close to the target.
Mostly though, I hope sharing my meager metrics encourages all of you to plunge headfirst into crypto. Seven years ago this space was empty by todayβs standards, it could fit onto a subreddit and a few forums. Even just a couple years ago it felt devoid of content: BTC vs ETH maxi arguments on retread. One person could follow the totality of the space and still have time for a proper breakfast.
Today weβve passed a singularity. Weβre at the point where itβs too big for any one person to comprehend it all, no more than anybody could understand the totality of the internet.
As cryptocurrency flippens legacy markets, talent is rushing into the space like Iβve never seen. If you also choose bring your talents here full time, we will all be richer for your contributions.
If you get started in crypto today, you may well expect to exceed my numbers by todayβs date 2022. After all, Iβm a functionally illiterate, cantankerous midwit; a social leper whoβs burnt bridges with nearly everybody in the industry. The utter audacity of somebody so mentally unstable writing about stablecoins!
Unencumbered by any of my baggage, just think what you might accomplish. If you do choose to plunge into the rabbit hole, please reach out! Weβd love to highlight people launching new projects in this space, whatever their nature.
Disclaimers! Author is a functionally illiterate, cantankerous midwit and $CRV/$CVX maxi.