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While I didn’t get a substantial airdrop for either Celestia or Dymension (skill issue, I know), many did and they’ve profited handsomely from it. I’ve seen quite a few close friends and mutuals on the timeline having made 5-6 figures from this airdrop alone.
If perchance you staked your entire $TIA airdrop on the day claims went live, not only have you profited from the price appreciation and the APY, but you were also made eligible for at least 5 more airdrops which in turn is most likely going to make you eligible for more airdrops.
“Something something, flywheel is working & in full effect” - Abe Lincoln, 2048 (probably)
A surprise to most people was holders of “Pudgy Penguins” getting airdropped (at the time of writing, Feb 25th) around $10,000 in $DYM for holding a pudgy penguin. This wasn’t limited to one per address but rather 1 for every instance of a penguin. You can do that math.
Mind you, these are the same NFTs which were trading for below 1 ETH in June 2022 when ETH was priced at $1,800. Had you bought and just held a Penguin from then, your penguin would now be worth over $35,000. Rumours now are that Pudgy Penguins holders will be in for a very profitable year as they’ve been confirmed for several other airdrops throughout 2024. Being in the huddle has never been comfier.
One thing that both of these “trades” have in common is that the people who won didn’t luck into it. While there will always be some people who get “lucky” a large majority of them made an excellent investment knowing the r/r.
Our very own UpOnly co-host, (Hi Cobie) published an article on his substack back in 2021 titled “Trading the metagame”. If you haven’t already read it, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Your post-rich self in the future will thank you.
His article is centered around finding what the “Meta” is and trading that. Meta is just another word for (in this instance at least) what currently has the collective mindshare. This could be ETH killers, AI coins, GameFi or any other number of rotating metas. Looking at an ongoing meta, the cool new kid on the town is “Modular Money” which is what Celestia and Dymension are a part of. While I do not know the intricacies of each service nor do I need to understand what makes this rollup service better than the next one, the thing is, I don’t need to. This isn’t the article to do that.
Cobie’s approach is what I would consider one side of the coin. Playing the metagame that is occurring well and identifying it early on to make the most gains. However, that’s not the only sustainable approach.
The other side of the coin would be “narrative hunting”. Rather than playing the metagame, the other approach would be to bet on what will become the meta and buy winners in those categories.
Diving into this rabbit hole you will quickly realize that there are a lot of sub-sectors that are not only promising but equally as complex and thriving in their mini-ecosystem.
To succeed you need to discern very quickly what is “noise”, what is pandering for a higher valuation vs actual innovation and how to properly place a value on the core idea & the underlying tech. You not only need a constant source of information for the newest projects but also the capacity to understand them and most important of all, bet on what narrative has the highest chance of taking off and scaling. It’s a lot like seed investing but in a PvP market where no one gets preferential treatment. The only thing that differentiates you is how early you get in and how much you put in. Then there is also the question of securing profits against other people who also want to optimally exit for the highest % gains.
As you can imagine, betting on the wrong narrative can and has completely wiped out a lot of smart people with the ever-so-relatable line:
At its core, while Crypto and Blockchain tech are fundamentally freeing & open for everyone without any prejudice, it equally houses some of the worst UI/UX; To decode the Future of France you need a Ph.D. in Crypto-linguistics.
This is a vault that Yearn.Finance is offering people to deposit their tokens. Try to figure out what you need to deposit here at a glance.
It wasn’t until the end of January that I believe I stumbled onto something fundamental in trading narratives in the most crypto-centric possible way; Anime Waifus
Isekai.Money becomes relevant as they’re adding a “Layer of Ease” over the complex world of DeFi Money Blocks. Not only can you chase better yields but now you don’t have to know what the underlying token is nor what the exact steps are.
It’s easing friction for the end user. For the mass adoption of tech, the tech needs to be simple to use; Mind numbingly easy to use.
Think of all your Web2 interactions from social media to banking. A few clicks is all it takes to do 95% of the actions and people are used to that standard. Ease of use and comfort over everything else. If the product you’re launching as a competitor product isn’t better in UI/UX or gives you an outsized improvement over the existing product, you will have a very tough time gaining traction.
Using the example of GameFi, if you were around for the last bull market you would remember “DeFi Kingdom” (DFK) and its token $JEWEL. That was an earlier attempt to simplify many of the DeFi concepts in a game wrapper which they incentivised through this token. Simple? Sure it was simpler than pure interactions with AMM but not too much. We had other projects that launched after DFK iterated and improved its offering and one such project would be SpartaDex.
As this space is still in its nascent stages and has a lot of eyes, you can tokenise and incentivise usage through this “-fi fication”. You’d think that PURE simplification is not a profitable endeavour in this space at all; Everything that launches with a “-fi” needs a token for simplicity's sake. Not at all for speculation and the profit of the dev team, VCs or early participants. Go figure.
This model has been so profitable in fact that we even attempted to incentivise walking and it was dubbed “Move-to-Earn” (M2E) and the leader in its category “StepN” even reached a market capitalisation of $2.2B at its peak.
Taking a step back and fundamentally seeing “narratives” for what they are, they are bets on what industry you envision (and subsequently bet on) getting popular, both for existing users and the ones that will join or be converted. You have most likely heard of these narratives as well.
“GameFi”, SocialFi”, “DePin” so on and so forth, each offering an improvement over their web2 counterparts by accessing or unlocking something which hasn’t been possible before so, here is my new proposal for not a new but rather an overarching narrative; a metanarrative.
“SimpliFi”
If you’re scrolling through Twitter, in a telegram “alpha group”, discord server or just hear anyone talk about a narrative, your mental model now has another “lever” which you should be able to use.
Does this narrative help with simplifying an overarching problem? What is this narrative trying to achieve and what are the chances it catches on? Usually, if something is notoriously difficult to navigate but it’s a big enough market in its own right, chances are there will be a market for it.
DeFi was a narrative which turned into an entire industry. TardFi is inherently opaque and complex to use, so let’s open those systems up to make them transparent and allow people to build on top of it.
We’re currently in the middle of an “AI Narrative”, which should be very easy to understand as to what kind of problems they’re simplifying. Rug.ai is making trading infrastructure tools, Paal AI collects data from users & “gives them a voice” to be understood, CT’s favourite coin Bittensor powers decentralised AI (as opposed to what OpenAI does) & IMGN AI is powering an uncensored AI generation platform.
If the last bull market is anything to go by (and most of the time, they usually get crazier), then you’re going to witness a *lot* of narratives & sub-narratives come and go. You’re simply not going to be able to catch them all because your attention liquidity is much better concentrated into one or two areas and work with a group that understands the same concept while they focus on other niches.
A must-read blog post going into this crazy bull cycle is Squad Wealth. It would be best if you worked in a team of some sort to capture & organise information you wouldn't have otherwise and act as a “buffer” for your own bias. While you may be sure that one narrative is “absolutely going to happen”, someone else may not agree and ask you details or questions about it that you may not have considered. If everyone leaves satisfied, you’ll know better what is a “worth it” trade and what isn’t. You won't be able to answer questions or if it gets really busy with multiple “hyped launches” a day, you will quickly need to present a 1-sentence thesis from everything you will have learnt and hopefully honed in.
That’s where a mental model like this will help you, and ultimately what the basis of this piece was supposed to be, to provide clarity.
Hopefully, you kill it this cycle, anon.
Thanks to Tolks & Tervo for their help with editing and cleaning up this article.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading and I hope this has been a useful read. You can follow me on Twitter (and now Farcaster) to let me know what you think about this post & don’t forget to subscribe to Page One for your essential crypto readings!
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