Cena Ethena

Back stateside after spending the last two weeks in India for my best friend’s wedding. Three late observations, first on the drawdowns, recent Eth ecosystem interop announcements, and lastly inverse alt season. (1/3) DeFi brought me into this industry, and it is amazing to see how robust and resilient each piece of the DeFi ecosystem has become. After nearly 10(?) billion usd in liquidations no bad debt accrued to major protocols like Aave, Kamino, Ethena etc. No major chains had downtime. Priority fees and liquidation engines just worked. Everyone is celebrating the hockey stick growth of stablecoins, and they should, but can’t help but believe there’s still so much latent potential for the team that figures out how to package DeFi access to anyone, anywhere in the world (2/3) Exciting to see the news come out of Arbitrum / Polygon and Socket. What’s going to matter the most though is getting app devs to use these new primitives to help grow and reach more users. If app devs are not more successful because of interop, then what’s the purpose of all this investment? Optimistic you’ll see OP Labs join the arena shortly. (3/3) Ray Dalio describes this with respect to US dollar debasement but also relevant to the inverse alt season we’re all observing: printing money doesn’t create wealth. So underperformance in alts is a function of yes the increased number of tokens in the market all jockeying for a bid and second significant unlock schedules (>700m / week) of said tokens. If the canonical alt season is a symptom of a more nascent industry and this trend of extreme sector rotation continues there’s a ripe opportunity for a managed index fund product, a la M1 Finance’s deprecated Hedge Fund Followers portfolio that would frequently update the underlying basket of investments based on the recent filings of Coatue / Berkshire etc. Allows the end user to try to outperform holding the index without requiring to be in the trenches daily.