1/ [December Bitcoin yield update]

Over the last year and a half, I’ve earned ~1.2BTC with various yield generating services to earn an average of 5% on 30 BTC.

Here’s my journey and how to guide👇

2/ Here are the ways you can earn yield:

Lending (Easiest/most popular)
Yield: 3-6%
- Ledn: https://t.co/4x0YATuQ0v
- BlockFi: https://t.co/90Xtg2cNka

Covered calls (Harder)
Yield: 1-80%
- Deribit: https://t.co/2iQVkXlylP
- LedgerX: https://t.co/hZ2pgMHYD1
3/ Earning a yield enables you to stack more sats (what I’m doing), or reduce the temptation to sell your coin through earning an income.

The yield you earn comes with RISK!

Below is my current allocation for Dec (will update MoM)

(yellow = changes)

https://t.co/PZwVYs8lFT
4a/ [Nov > Dec Changelog]

- Covered calls: approx. 4 BTC was in $40k 12/28/20 contracts. Those closed without them being exercised (a good outcome for me). However, I was nervous about my January 1/28 $50k contract so I decided to close out my position at a small loss.
4b/ [Nov > Dec Changelog]

- In process of reallocating the 5 BTC (probably will be a lending platform).
- I incorrectly had my Ledn rate at 6.5%, it's 6.25%
5/ When I first started, I had 10 BTC in BlockFi.

BlockFi is a lending/borrowing platform where you can lend your Bitcoin out for ~6% interest. Much of this borrow is going to the GBTC arb trade, shorting, or the futures “cash and carry trade.” (for all lending platforms)
6/ Risk assessment: When you lend your coins to Ledn, BlockFi, etc. you have to trust that they’ve evaluated counter party risk properly, which includes:

- Financials of borrower
- Collateral requirements (typically 30-110%)
- Trading strategy
7/ As everyone knows, March and December were insanely volatile months. Here’s how they operated through the volatility:

- Deposits and withdrawals all processed normally (1-2 business days)
- “zero losses in the lending book”
- All of the products had near 100% uptime
8/ Note: there may be no benefits to diversification as you do not know the counterparty overlap between lenders (ex: BlockFi and Genesis).
9/ Note: I am not a fan of lending/borrowing services that have a token. There is no reason why you need a token as it introduces regulatory and structural risk.

Case in point: Cred blew up earlier this year.

https://t.co/dBijOhgwIM
10/ There are other ways to earn interest through lending, which include lending coins to exchange margin pools:

- Bitfinex: https://t.co/ydrPHVQEr6

What is beneficial about this method is you understand your counterparty risk.
11/ Lending is by far the easiest way for a regular trader to earn yield and at size if you’ve got more coin (ex: call strategies suffer from poor liquidity).

Next I’ll dig into covered calls👇
12/ What are “covered calls?”

It’s an option trade which has the owner of the underlying asset (“covered”) sell their upside above a certain price (“strike”) in exchange for a payment (“premium”)

The more likely that event occurring, the higher the premium (very simplified)
13/ So how does that look with some real numbers? (Pulled 1/5 split spread)

2/26 $50k strike = $1,822 premium (68% annualized)
2/26 $100k strike = $223 premium (8.3% annualized)

Annualized is a bit of misnomer -you don’t know what the yield will be the next time you sell calls
14/ Historically I’ve been selling $40k/$50k strikes 2-3 months out an earning an average of 4-6%

Because of how intense Bitcoin's bull run has been, I'm not selling any new calls for the time being.
15/ With covered calls you only have exchange custody risk, which is some of the lowest risk you can have.

One advantage of covered calls is that if you sell a 1yr+ duration call AND it gets assigned (price > strike) then your premium is taxed as long term cap gains (in the US)
16/ You can also earn a yield through trust minimized services like CoinJoins and providing lightning channel liquidity.

CoinJoins:
Yield: ~0.5%

Get started: https://t.co/TQs5OvvB5s

Lightning Pool
Yield: TBD

Get started:
17/ Coinjoins allow for Bitcoiners to obfuscate their coin holdings through mixing them with other Bitcoiners. In order to create a market of individuals willing to mix, there are makers and takers. Makers post availability to mix, takers pay the makers for that convenience.
18/ Lightning Pool

Most simplistically, it is an order book for lightning liquidity (or a channel marketplace) done in a non-custodial manner (note: there is a coordinating server).
18/ Hope you enjoyed this thread! I fell down the yield rabbit hole and haven’t looked back :)

If you haven’t already, check out my Google sheet where I’ve got all of this information available to you to play around with.

https://t.co/PZwVYs8lFT

More from Dan Held

More from Crypto

2020 was a game changer for Ethereum.

The vast majority of its success was fueled by #DeFi.

Here's what happened in 5 Tweets 🔽

1) Governance Tokens 🪙

Projects gave complete ownership of billion dollar protocols to their users, often using retroactive airdrops.

Early adopters earned tokens for past usage, and token-based voting now dictates all technical


2) Liquidity Mining ⛏️

Power users were the first to earn on-going distribution by providing liquidity.

$COMP sparked the wave, with $BAL coining the term a few weeks


3) Yield Faming 🌾

Projects coupled liquidity mining and governance tokens to boost 'yields' by combining lending rates with an incentive layer.

APYs peaked as high as 1M% during 'DeFi summer', leading to a 'food coin' craze like $YAM and


4) Fair Launches ✅

Who needs investment when you can launch using yield farming?

@iearnfinance debuted $YFI with no formal funding, seeding a community treasury for self-sustainability.

The notion of a core team and community became one and the
Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

Short version:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from.

Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Here's an example. This artwork is by Beeple and sold via Nifty:

https://t.co/TlJKH8kAew

The NFT token is for this JSON file hosted directly on Nifty's servers:

https://t.co/GQUaCnObvX


THAT file refers to the actual media you just "bought". Which in this case is hosted via a @cloudinary CDN, served by Nifty's servers again.

So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless. It refers to nothing. This can't be changed.

"But you said some use IPFS!"

Let's look at the $65m Beeple, sold by Christies. Fancy.

https://t.co/1G9nCAdetk

That NFT token refers directly to an IPFS hash (https://t.co/QUdtdgtssH). We can take that IPFS hash and fetch the JSON metadata using a public gateway:

https://t.co/CoML7psBhF

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There is co-ordination across the far right in Ireland now to stir both left and right in the hopes of creating a race war. Think critically! Fascists see the tragic killing of #georgenkencho, the grief of his community and pending investigation as a flashpoint for action.


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Declan Ganley’s Burkean group and the incel wing of National Party (Gearóid Murphy, Mick O’Keeffe & Co.) as well as all the usuals are concerted in their efforts to demonstrate their white supremacist cred. The quiet parts are today being said out loud.


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🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


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#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"