How did Ooze become my biggest DeFi investment?

Even though news says we have 6% inflation, it feels like prices of everything has gone up at least 20%. I was in the quest of some additional income to beat inflation. I heard I could earn great “passive income” in Crypto while I am sleeping. My DeFi journey started in April 2022 at the best/worst time for Crypto, depending on how I want to judge it. I was happily earning 2%-3% everyday in COTPS, Swapnex, MetaFi Yielders in April, until the Terra Luna terror happened in mid-May. Suddenly in a span of 3 weeks, all of the DeFi programs I was in folded. Investors were told COTP was “hacked” and stopped overnight. Swapnex was relying on COTPS’ “arbitrage trading” as revenue, so it pulled the plug a week later. MetaFi Yielders lasted another week or so, but stopped payment as supposedly the Luna fiasco had affected their “yield farming” business. Lucky for me, my loss from these 3 programs was minimal.

On May 12, a few days after Luna started crashing and the day before COTPS was “hacked”, I was awake doing my research at 11pm. I watched USDT unpegged to 0.95 live on chart. Since there was news everywhere about an an algorithmic “stablecoin” failing, I smelled danger. I immediately withdrew my USDT funds from COTPS, and converted it back to USD. This withdrawal paid for my loss in Swapnex. I did not take action on MetaFi Yielders, because it had an owner, Michael Daher, that showed his face on Youtube, and met with investors in-person. On the day I could withdraw my initial capital after 42 day lock out, withdrawal from MetaFi stopped. Lucky for me, I had been withdrawing my profits so this program paid for itself minus a few days worth of profits.

I was introduced to these HYIP programs by a local fellow who supposedly have done his share of research on the programs he brings us. He lost. His followers lost. I lost.

I saw no further investment activity among the group who was with me in these rugpulls, and that’s when I decided to start a “healing” Telegram group and introduce my future plan, with the hopes to reignite interest amongst the group on Crypto. Many of them were investors and not traders. They were not used to betting. I started doing my research to create an investment methodology for Crypto ROI DApp, and share what I have learnt. In addition to the failed programs I joined in April and May, I went on reading and watching Youtube on more than 50 big and small ROI DApps that has come and gone over the past 2 years.

Here is a summary of my go forward plan:

1. Figure out my portfolio allocation. Treat every DeFi investment as possible full lost. Make sure there’s ammo left for next round. If you are a trader, you are familiar with the never lose more than 2% each trade risk management concept. My allocation in DeFi is similar. I will write about this in detail in another article.
2. Audited smart contracts — Only participate in programs with smart contracts. I have read that even programs with smart contracts could be rug-pulled. Know the auditors.
3. Doxxed developers — Only join a program with doxxed (documented) developers. Look, even programs with a “face” like MetaFi Yielders could turn out to be a scam. At least some team members must have a well-known history.

My next set of investments in chronological order were Sphere, Paramount Miner, Yieldnodes, Drip, Hydrowhale, Ooze, and Stable Fund. They are still all alive at the moment of this writing (touch wood, even though I know one of them is going to bite the dust soon).

My next lessons are on identifying DApps that offers high chance of profitability regardless of when an investor joins. This mostly speaks to sustainability of the DApp.

• Revenue plan with utility — DApps with revenue based solely on tax and new funds will eventually have profitability and sustainability issues. There needs to be an external revenue source. Even better if the revenue source provides a utility as the utility will attract buyers and larger investors
• Pegged to a stablecoin — DApps that is pegged to a stable coin will reduce the variability of income in the current bear market. Your return is reliant on the coin price in addition to the DApp’s performance
• Marketing — Marketing plan and the developer’s “network” is important
• Developer’s timeliness — Developer’s experience in delivering a feature on-time. Executing a roadmap on-time will give confidence to more and bigger investors

Above is a table I use to compare the DeFi Apps I am invested in.

• “X” means the criteria met
• “-” means criteria not met
• “*” means criteria is met with caveat. For example, Sphere token price relies on an algorithm that switch between Matic and USDC.
• “?” means I have not seen or read (please comment this article with info if you have any)

I have omitted explaination why I rated each program its score because the discussion warrants its own separate article. Leave a comment or contact me individually if you are interested in discussing my evaluation.

The rest of this article is an Ooze Finance shill. After participating in a few non-rugpull DApps for about 2 weeks to 2 months, I decided to make Ooze my largest Crypto DeFi investment. As noted in the table above, Ooze Finance achieved all my criteria. This is not to say there’s no room for improvement that I wish to see from Ooze Finance, but they meet all criteria to a “satisfactory” extent.

I was introduced to Ooze by a team that is big into Drip. The owner of the group have majority of his funds only in two programs so I trusted that he saw something in Ooze. I actually missed the pre-sale and got into Ooze a week after its initial public sale with a “small” allocation. Recall back in end of June, when Ooze went public, I was still skittish and recovering from the rugpull fiasco the few weeks prior.

@Matrix my cute Ooze

I did not fall in love with Ooze due to the “cute” turtles cartoons. I do like the victory sound effect. My taste for Ooze grew over the next few weeks as I observed how the developers and admins operate the DApp and its ecosystem.

First, I give a brief summary of Ooze’s basic earnings mechanism. We are talking about earning money after all.

Ooze is an ROI DApp like DRIP, EMP, Piston, etc. It is NOT a fork! All the code and contracts are written from scratch. At the basic level, you can earn a 1% of your deposited Ooze tokens daily up to 365% if you decide not to compound. If you compound, you can earn up to 8x your initial deposit. There is a 10% claim tax. Your investment value is held by an NFT. The max you can claim from each NFT is 50,000 Ooze limit. You can own multiple NFTs!

There seem to be a lot of limits. They are designed with careful calculations by the devs to ensure sustainability. Lets look at what kind of return you can get even with these limits in place. Assuming Ooze token price stays at $2.5(price at the time of current writing), once you achieve 50k Ooze, you can earn $250k from each NFT. This article How Fast Do You Want Your $100,000? | by Shawn M. | The DeFi Sewer | Aug, 2022 | Medium shows you the various strategies you can use to reach the max 50k OOZE for an NFT. Yup, your Ooze investment could potentially 40x to 250x in 2–3 years!! This calculation does not account for token price increase!!

There are plenty of training material, Youtube, and Medium articles detailing how Ooze work. I highlight below how Ooze stands out compared to other ROI DApp currently in the market:

• Ooze has been a revolutionary force in the DeFi space, changing the way that people view NFTs. In addition to compounding and withdrawing daily, investors can recoup their initial investments or get a lump sum cash by selling their NFT. NFT can be listed in the marketplace in the DApp or on PaintSwap. Ooze collection sales is #1 on PaintSwap in volume over the past 7 days for a few weeks running now
• You can purchase Slime, an LP of Ooze and USDC to earn XP. XP can be used to upgrade your NFT’s attribute to achieve more/faster income. The speed attribute increases your daily earnings to a maximum of 2% daily. The strength attribute increase your max earnings from 8x to 12x your intial deposit. The stealth attribute reduce your tax. For further details, here a link to OOZE Finance Whitepaper (gitbook.io)
• For a glimpse of Ooze’s revenue generating roadmap, skip to the “Roadmap Items for sustainability” section in OOZE Sustainability. With its innovative approach to DeFi… | by Gavin | The DeFi Sewer | Jul, 2022 | Medium An example of a feature with utility is an in-app “Billboard” for content providers to deliver content to Ooze fans
• The owners of this project are FOUR devs. This is extremely uncommon in DeFi projects. While they have chosen to keep their real identifies private, they have been KYC’d through Obsidian Council and audited by Prisma Shield. As a matter of fact, OOZE finance is the first official awardee of The Obsidian Shield! They showed dedication to security and excellence by successfully completing a Deep Logic Audit with @PrismaShield and KYC through Verified by Obsidian

Yes, the people, the #1 reason I went big on Ooze is “developer timeliness”. Compared to many other DeFi projects where features are delayed after delays, I appreciated the way the Ooze team lays “just enough” view of their roadmap as a tease, makes no promise on dates which they cannot keep, and delivers each feature with quality. Only in a recent interview (Our Own) Ooze Finance AMA! is when I realized Ooze developers are (perhaps were?) enterprise software developers. This explains the thoughtfulness, and maturity I observe in the way they release software. This team means business.

Not only the dev teams deserve kudos, the Ooze Finance admins is in their own league. They tirelessly (re)explain the concepts on the Ooze. They help every member at every level of expertise. The amount of training material is impressive.

There is a concept in software development call the Conway’s Law. It says

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

In colloquial terms, it means complex products end up “shaped like” the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. By the way the team runs itself, the system will be successful.

Come join me and invest in the Ooze team! Mint your first NFT with @Matrix (capital case matters) as your Guru (team leader). I give you 75% kickback (referral bonus) I receive from you back to you. While I may be new to Crypto and DeFi, my experience as a trader will hopefully offer you some fresh perspectives. Above all, lets have fun and learn from each other while making $$$!

You can find instructions to get started with Ooze in the “How to get started” section here OOZE — Don’t Get Fooled!. DeFi is serious business. Degens are… | by Shawn M. | The DeFi Sewer | Aug, 2022 | Medium The process to purchase Ooze is going to get much easier starting early September 2022 with the new multi-bridge chain feature. Meanwhile, contact me if you have any questions.

Two final tips if you are new to Crypto and DeFi:

1. Set an initial target investment amount for Ooze, and dollar cost average (DCA) into your NFT by splitting your target amount into small portions, and investing the small amount regularly. Avoid putting all you can afford at the beginning. We are in a bear market so the token price will fluctuate. You and the program will be in a better position with consistent influx of capital.
2. Crypto and DeFi are RISKY assets. Even though I trust Ooze Finance will be able to sustain the bear market, there’s always external factors not in the developers’ control that could affect our investments. Consider Ooze as an angel invesment (smaller than small cap, more like a series A). You need to be able to stomach the risk or it is better off you leave your money elsewhere safer. Invest only what you can afford to lose.

I told my own DeFi stories, a structure I am using to evaluate DeFi programs, a summary of Ooze, and a whole lot about the Ooze team. I hope you have enjoyed this reading and found the information helpful. This is also my first Medium article! I welcome comments that will make this a better article.

P.S. Thank you Shawn M. (https://medium.com/@vegandad2010) and Gavin (https://medium.com/@gavin1177) helping me with this article.

Contact Me:

Telegram: https://t.me/BZOwl

Email: bzowl852@gmail.com

Please follow me :
Twitter: @BZOwl852
Medium: https://medium.com/@bzowl852

Here are the links to the Ooze Finance Socials:

Twitter — https://twitter.com/oozefinance
Website — https://ooze.finance/
Telegram — https://t.me/oozefinance
Discord — https://discord.gg/AufJ7t2gh4
Medium — https://medium.com/ooze-finance
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeOPwhEMyw9iXI5zbnUdmng
Litepaper — https://bit.ly/oozefinance
Whitepaper https://oozefinance.gitbook.io/ooze-finance-whitepaper/

Disclaimer: This article is not to be considered investment advice. You need to do your own research (DYOR) before investing and only invest what you are willing to lose. We are in the infancy of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and you should familiarize yourself with the risks and rewards of DeFi and being an early adopter before investing.