Slow and steady wins the race

Bitcoin is often critized for being slow in everything

But here is the thing: the more you complicate a design early on, the more you push it down a specific road

Get your assumptions wrong, and it's off-road

Thread/

1/ crypto VC is going through an explosive 🧨 phase

there are big funds (>$500M AUM), a lot of small funds (<$50M AUM), and *tons* of prop firms + angels

i’ve done 15 deals in the last 3 months as an angel + small fund @CoinSharesCo VC.

observations + implications... 👇🏾

2/ the big firms need to deploy in size - $5M checks and up

a $250M fund could do a $5-10M deal every month for two years and still be under-allocated

and there aren’t enough companies raising series B / C / D rounds!!!

every deal i’ve done lately is under $50M valuation

3/ so we see firms competing to take down entire rounds.

a recent series A financing had two firms competing to take down the ENTIRE ROUND, and it eventually got upsized, a LOT.

if a company is putting up user acquisition / growth and a revenue story, it’s highly competitive

4/ most projects and co’s don’t need money tho - why would a founder take 20-40% dilution when they’re banking cash and crypto? so they do 5-10%

so the valuations go up, but available allocations go down, resulting in an even bigger squeeze on allocators who *need* to deploy

5/ add in the onslaught of non-crypto M&A that’s coming, which is culling the herd of investable unicorns

add in the wave of SPACs and direct listings taking later stage opportunities out

there just aren’t enough places to put capital in size rn

what’s a fund to do?

1/22 Why XRP will beat Bitcoin.

(Video version @ https://t.co/VIHEoHLYpN)

A thread. 👇

2/22 Despite last night's major Bitcoin correction, it still sits at $33k, well above the last bull run's all time high. With XRP currently at $0.28, it may seem rather ridiculous to think XRP will ever become #1.

3/22 However, it's important to compare Bitcoin and XRP not in terms of price, but market cap. That's because there are 100 billion XRP (and will never be more) and 19 million circulating Bitcoin (21 million max). So comparing the price of individual tokens doesn't work.

4/22 XRP's market cap is $12.6 billion. Bitcoin's is $623 (roughly 50x more, 55x if you factor in the 2 million Bitcoin not yet mined). That's a huge lead, but not as big as the 119,000x lead if you compare token price!

5/22 Bitcoin's primary advantage is its early adoption. It caught on earlier and became the front runner of crypto. Don't underestimate the power of being first. It gives a massive advantage. But it doesn't GUARANTEE being the winner long-term.

If you've been following DeFi or Ethereum over the past few months, you've likely heard the term "flash loan" mentioned again and again.

This new DeFi primitive has been at the core of a number of economic exploits and arbitrages.

A thread on the basics of flash loans - 👇

Most DeFi loans take place across days, weeks, or even months.

You can deposit Ethereum into Aave, then withdraw stablecoins for yield farming in Yearn, for instance.

On-chain loans have garnered much traction, with total debt outstanding moving toward $2.5 billion.

While popular, DeFi loans are not capital efficient: to account for custodial risk and volatility risk, you need to put up 130-150% of the value of your loan in collateral.

If your collateral slips below the threshold, you're liquidated, resulting in a fee anywhere from 5-13%.

Flash loans are much different than longer-term DeFi loans.

Flash loans are non-custodial, take place over the course of one block, and require no collateralization.

That's to say, the coins you borrow never appear in your wallet.

When taking a flash loan, you can direct the coins to any protocol and function, as long as you pay back the loan + interest fee within the same transaction.

So what the hell? What are flash loans used for?

More often than not, arbitrage.