Bald, Base and Robots
“I am the master of my fate but I might need a little help”
Crypto is a funny place. Every day new stuff pops up and like in my home country, 10 thousand million imitations show up if it is successful. In this one, I would be full “Sybil” arguing out of both sides of my mouth.
So the idea around DEcentralized FInance is one must be totally responsible for one’s financial fate. That means one is the bank and participates in the transfer/switching networks (think of VISA, MasterCard), and is mostly responsible for all transactions successful or otherwise and there is no going back on actions taken. Individuals have lost millions and potentially billions to hacks and hoodwink. Hell, one person wiped out over $40B, another over $8B, and the world didn’t stop spinning**.
Anywho, the rest of the world built stuff around NLP (AI), and crypto bros wanted a bit of the action- this is me hating btw and comparing apples to oranges.
Along came Unibot. Some weeks* ago, I stumbled on the $Uni at $10 and I faded*** it. My bros rode that wave to $73+.
What is Unibot?
It’s a telegram bot that lets you do all your defi stuff with text. Literally, you text, sell xyz, or buy and it does this and many other things after you generate your wallet**** of course. And guess what, the bot holds all the keys. Lol.
Along came the bot “summer”.
My thoughts on Uni and Bot mania?
It’s no different from putting your money in an exchange because it holds all the Private Keys.
It will onboard a healthy amount of new users and I am not sure if it’s a good thing but we need new money in crypto.
Final thoughts, cross your fingers when you trade bot tokens and use said bots because it’s “dangerous” af.
Base
Coinbase built an L2 based on Optimism and released it to the market. Think of a layer two as those interns or entry-level staff who do not know as much as the seasoned staff but can run through too of information for the seasoned staff and then report what they found. The best part however is how the launch has been.
Once again America being the greatest country in the world comes to play here. The rollout has been quite an NFT/utility campaign. Get a wallet, and go to onchainsummer.xyz. I have followed L2s for most of the year and nothing comes close to their “get people (and hopefully normies) to use this thing” attitude to crypto. The UX is annoying still (cos you need to know about wallets etc) but I think it is a breath of fresh air.
“Degenerate gamblers looking for less seasoned gamblers so there is more in the pot”.
Bald
As with all things crypto big and shiny equals drama and drama happened on Base. Some Sundays ago I finally opened Twitter at 8pm and saw a tweet of some guy that changed ~$1k to $1.5m. Imagine how that made me feel. For context, I had followed Base from its test days and it was now in Beta and the one day I take a break from being “onchain” this happens.
The rumor goes that someone that people assume is Brian Armstrong made a token ($BALD) and deployed ~$20m of liquidity over most of the day. People rushed to buy because (meme coins … yay ) also the grapevine says there is always life-changing money on new crypto things. L2s mostly. Also, Brian is known as “the bald man” so between crypto Twitter hoping it was Brian and the gist of the degen(erate) that had made $500k by early evening that day, degen mania ensued. It would have made sense but the deployer of the token rugged and so no one actually made any money 😂😂 except the deployer of course.
It's funny to me cause I had to fight FOMO the whole time as others printed and no one actually made any money. 😂😂 In some unrelated story the DEX also got exploited.
Anyway, things are mostly great on Base now and this leads us to Friend.tech
Friend.tech is gamified Twitter. Social media but you sell shares before someone can “follow you”. So I get on the app, connect my Twitter, “fund a wallet”**** with some BaseEth and buy shares. It’s still really early and the app is going crazy. I like it for two reasons;
It's a new shiny thing that will definitely pull the attention of crypto adjacents and hopefully normies*****. It's still slightly difficult to use if you haven’t transferred Eth before and or you are new to defi. You should check it out and use my codes below. Also, feel free to buy my shares and “follow” me @toothy61 😉. {ft-30jcqkaa , ft-fuxfkb7a}
If FriendTech holds Steam, then it has a shot at the stuff above. I feel they can be a good experiment for figuring out our UX problem******. If for any reason they lock on to Twitch and the Fans site. It’s straight to the moon.🚀🚀🚀
Finally, I think what we will find at the end of summer 23 is a trend where an amateur user spends more time in defi than on exchanges. Newcomers will use crypto and defi products and have no idea they are using crypto as more people begin to trust third parties with their keys, thanks to democratized intelligence tools, more users will begin to do a bit of due diligence.
I remain bullish and onchain. Stay safe out here. 👋🏽
On gambling check out $Bullet. It's literally on-chain roulette. It’s a game where x -6 players put money in the pot and pull a trigger in telegram. One of six will randomly get shot and the survivors share the money in the pot. The buy-in……? $10k😂😂
- *months cos this has been in the drafts for that long.
- **The grapevine says $300B guy started a cascade of events that took out $40B guy. Unfortunately, it came around to bite him.
- *** At the time I thought that was the top.
- ****UX Problem *cough. Normies don’t have metamask or care about Dexs and bridging to layer 2s.
- *****New users (money) is the only way up.
- ******Crypto/Defi is annoying to use because there are too many things you have to learn about to begin. The average person has no incentive or will to learn all of these things. Adoption only happens when the average user can interact with crypto without having to know anything. I should write extensively about this and the technologies hoping to solve this. You should begin by reading about MPC wallets and Account Abstraction.
- Democratized intelligence tools: Arkham (an opp btw but thats another story), bubble maps, metadapp.io
- Dangerous af here means many replica bots are scams and the only sure bot I know of is Unibot. I held $loot for a bit cos its a close equivalent. Also if you provide your private key to a bot and the developer is a bad actor you are NGMI.
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