November 27, 2024: Thanks 🍂🦃

As we review our bounteous year, we truly have so much to be thankful for this year, as is the case every year.

For one, whenever the Thanksgiving table talk turns to cryptocurrency, we won’t have to be prepared to argue our mental sanity this year. Instead we’ll get to hear how the past few years of suffering the brutalities of the bear market is, in fact, us getting “lucky.” Who among us doesn’t wish for good luck?

Let us count our blessings…

Curve

Bull or bear, the Curve ecosystem remains bountiful as ever with innovation.

We’ve just seen the full launch of Curve-lite:

Additionally, a new governance proposal dropped to upgrade the crvUSD AMM and Controller implementation contracts. This would bring missing pieces to the puzzle, like using leverage when minting $crvUSD (it’s currently just in Llama Lend), using LP tokens as gauge collateral, and some feature enhancements to make the borrowing experience friendlier.

Combined with the fact $scrvUSD has already shown signs of improving the health of the ecosystem (it now passes $13MM TVL with APR north of 15%), we may finally have unlocked the elusive organic scaling of $crvUSD we’ve all coveted.

For humble yield farmers like myself, studying Curve closely has allowed my cup runneth over with good opportunities. It’s truly a great time to be focused on DeFi.

As long as you understand incentives, you can essentially predict the future. Given the healthy state of vote incentives across the greater Curve ecosystem, we’re excited that we’re likely to see a wave of innovative DeFi protocols launching to take advantage of this free money hack.

Beyond the Flywheel

Outside the immediate flywheel, it’s the first Thanksgiving in recent memory where the broader crypto ecosystem can celebrate amidst a spirit of pervasive optimism.

We’ve of course seen the market euphoria in the wake of this month’s election results. While we’re not equipped to comment on price action, as Americans we’re simply excited to see our country potentially prepared to embrace, rather than repel, the innovative technology we follow so closely.

The changes appear to extend even beyond the shakeup in the executive branch, which has already led to the announced retirement of the disastrous Gensler reign-of-terror. The legislative branch has also flipped pro-crypto.

More importantly, the judicial branch appears to be pivoting in unison.

That’s all three branches!

For years we were advised by our peers in crypto to flee the United States for friendlier shores. Congratulations to all who stayed and fought the good fight. In the new year we pledge to never grow tired of winning, and humbly request the grace of magnanimity in victory.

If the regulatory touch is to become lighter, it becomes ever more important that we as a community step up and self-police ourselves to prevent the worst excesses. Thankfully, we’re seeing some signs that our community is rising to the challenge.

To some degree, we’re referring to pump.fun moving to tidy up its affairs after some clear excesses. Even though we have no exposure to the Solana memecoin world, we recognize it served as an anchor dragging down the entire ecosystem.

But more importantly, we’re mostly referring to the arcane topic of block building in Ethereum. Our favorite decentralized blockchain has long tolerated so many highly centralized bottlenecks. We always leaned on the canard that we’d push towards decentralization in the future. With the launch of BuilderNet it’s nice to see this actually happening:

You

Finally, a word of thanks to you, readers. Your attention is your most valuable resource. With no shortage of good crypto content competing for your time, we’re pleased you’ve continually chosen to make room for us. This weekend we’re celebrating four years of growth through thick and thin.

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Disclaimers!