Saffron Weekly (6/23/21)

What’s new in the week of 6/23/21–6/29/21.

So… this week is already off to an interesting start. Bitcoin support breaks below 30k for the first time this bull run — defying all expectations from market predictors — and slides all the way down to $28,500 before rebounding back up to $33,750 at the time of this writing. A lot of eyes are on Bitcoin and the rather curious price movements over these past few weeks. Are they organic? I’m sure someone will write a tell-all book someday. But for now let’s check in on Saffron:

Meltem Demirors appears on Saffron Academy Podcast

In times of market downturn and uneasiness, a little injection of “hopium” couldn’t hurt — and we’ve made sure to deliver with this latest episode of Saffron Academy Podcast. Meltem Demirors is a digital asset investor that needs absolutely no introduction — if you’ve been dialed into the industry for more than a picosecond you know who she is. Her creative intelligence, explosive charisma, and uncanny knack for identifying valuable assets has propelled her to become the Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares — a digital asset investment firm that manages $4B in assets - a teacher at her alma mater MIT as well as Oxford, and a founding member of the World Economic Forum Cryptocurrency Council.

In this podcast episode she talks about the recent market moves, digital freedom, El Salvador, the future DeFi and why she is long term bullish on her investment in Saffron Finance. This is a must-listen for anyone reading, and you owe it to yourself as someone who may be holding SFI to check it out. Check it out on iTunes and Spotify!

The market may be experiencing significant turbulence now, but either way it ends up going you may find yourself in an incredibly unique position to accumulate based on some of the data presented to you over the past few months (should you be so inclined).

Limited Edition Saffron Finance NFT Update

All of the NFTs have been distributed! If you signed up for the form during the promotional period but for whatever reason did not receive your copy, please reach out to me on Telegram or Discord. Posting about it in a channel and hoping I see it isn’t enough as both our TG and Discord are picking up in activity, you’ll have to DM me (I promise I won’t bite!).

BILLY awarded Saffron Scholar

BILLY has been rewarded the title of Saffron Scholar on the Discord — this reward is given out to individuals that go above and beyond to help out the community, are even-tempered, and are given out moderation powers to help curb some of the spam/trolling on the channel. This is a new thing we’re trying out, so if you have any feedback, recommendations, or find that a Saffron Scholar is misusing their power please message me privately.

StableCoin Market Cap

Last month I posted a candid video about market volatility and gave my own honest thoughts on it. One of the biggest reasons why I joined this team last year and saw the massive potential in the protocol can simply be described in these two images below:

Stablecoins are seeing massive adoption rates with the marketcaps of the two most prominent stablecoins literally doing a x100 in just a few years. The yield generated through DeFi eclipses everything that the traditional market can provide — and every day more and more people are realizing this and turning their fiat into stablecoins. I know most of us reading this are deep in the weeds here and are used to seeing 10%+ APY on anything in DeFi, but let me briefly regal you with an anecdotal tale and the reality for 95% of the rest of the country.

I received an email the other day from Marcus by Goldman Sachs — I have been using their high yield savings account for an small emergency fund and have curiously watched the interest rates over the past two years. They had an exciting new offer to show to me, but to properly put it in perspective let’s first give some background:

In 2019, Marcus by Goldman Sachs was offering a competitive 2.15% return on their HYSAs for their customers. For those unfamiliar with HYSAs, that means that if I parked $10,000 in that account, one year later I would have generated $215 just for using their service. By June of 2020, that rate was cut by more than half — 1.05%. Now, as of June 2021 that same “high yield” savings account now has an interest rate of 0.50%. To put it in perspective, as inflation becomes more and more of a reality that $215 in yield in 2019 has become only $50 in 2021.

This is not meant to single out Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs is still offering one of the most competitive rates in 2021 for a high yield savings account and I would recommend them to anyone choosing to remain in traditional finance. The problem is endemic within the entire traditional market. If you assume that on average the year-over-year inflation rate in the U.S. is hovers roughly around 2%, parking your money in a HYSA in 2021 means that every year you are drastically losing purchasing power. But everyone needs to have savings that hedges against inflation, so where is the best place to go?

More and more people are beginning to realize that their hard earned dollars can be put to work elsewhere and are making the connection that DeFi is becoming the answer. If you don’t believe me, just look at the above charts — we are continuing to see unprecedented levels of adoption and that is not stopping anytime soon.

What if I wanted to take that $10,000, convert it 1:1 into USDT, and deposit it into the A Tranche of USDT/COMP with Saffron? As of right now, the current APY is 49.36%. Let’s assume the obvious that the 49.36% APY will not remain a constant throughout an entire year — let’s be conservative and reduce that rate to half — 24.68%. What would my $10,000 (now 10,000 USDT) yield? 2,468 USDT, or $2,468. Now let’s be overly conservative and knock that original APY down to a fourth and assume extreme volatility — putting us at 12.34% APY. I’m still walking away with $1,234 generated in yield after one year.

I think I’d rather have that over the $50.

Yes, perpetual staking may not be here yet — but with every day that passes V2 gets closer and closer and having to restake your principal will no longer be an issue. And as we read in the whitepaper back in November, eventually holding SFI will be required to take advantage of these rates.

Anyway, back to my original point: Marcus by Goldman Sachs emailed me, excited to tell me about a special, promotional 18-month CD that they were offering. What was this special, limited time offer rate?

IYKYK.

Twitter Recap:

Let’s see what the buzz is around Saffron this week:

Community resources

Web3 app: https://saffron.finance
Telegram: https://t.me/saffronfinance
Discord: https://discord.gg/pDXpXKY
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saffronfinance_
Github: https://github.com/saffron-finance/saffron