is staking as easy as:
1. leave coins on coinbase
2. click button agreeing to T&S for staking
3. profit

Stop feeding the machine, if u stake, stake it yourself. Don’t even use a pool if you can avoid it, obv this is impossible in some cases unless ur a whale… but that’s the attitude we need otherwise this ***** is gonna die tits up. Don’t even stake at coinbase IMO

Yes, until you remind yourself that poker jesus let full tilt spend every dime of our bankrolls sitting at full tilt on red username text fonts and lobsters. You can’t trust an exchange,

Look at it this way, can we trust exchanges to “not stake” coins that we don’t want staked. Nope. They only way you can force that is to hold it unstaked in ur own wallet

so if you're a normie, the answer is simply yes.

Yep, donate your red pill to the local housing shelter tho…

I think using the Yearn vault is actually just fine. We're supposed to take advantage of trustless protocols built ontop of Ethereum. Yearn seems pretty solid to me as a long run bet. It's risky, for sure, and you're right that the ecosystem would be better (technically) if each of us ran our own 32ETH validator. I just don't think it's practical. And since most people won't be able to acquire 32eth w/o pools they wouldn't be able to participate in staking and wouldn't be able to reap any rewards. Not to mention how many people simply are not going to be tech savy enough to run their own validator any time soon but should still be able to participate in the market.

I think we should normalize using trustless protocols built ontop of Ethereum. None of them have necessarily been perfectly battle tested for mainstream participation but I feel good about the gamble.

Yeah I totally get it,

The industry needs to evolve the point where “fair access and optimal trustless staking” etc is pensioner proof; like turning a kettle on ( for 32 sats of Eth). We’re prob 2 cycles away from that I guess….

But it’s def down to us guys from the online poker scene to be the voice of reason here based on all the scams we witness, colluding, exchange hacks, regulatory “screw you guys” and rake pilfering. I mean if we can’t set an example, who can? Just challenge people on this **** man. Start your own pools, challenge developers on GitHubs, discord’s etc.

Anyway, I’ll bang me drum elsewhere now.. lol.

On a side note, lots of crypto businesses moving into Austin, what’s it like out there? Changing for the better?

this was enjoyable.

Oh ya I wasn't actually aware of that.

Things have started to improve since everyone started to get vaccinated. The city is coming back to life. It looks like the Austin City Limits Music Festival will happen this year. So there is actually **** to look forward to again.

I am not too familiar with the crypto scene but maybe I should look into it.

Binance opaqueness and decentralized structure makes it agile when it comes to regulatory crackdowns and they're basically printing money from fees.

You can see them as the Pokerstars of the crypto world and they aren't going anywhere.

Yearn is some flimsy defi project where I sure as hell wouldn't keep thousands. You got to be some pill popping yolo guy to put any money into extremely unproven projects with incalculable risks (smart contract issues etc.) and bait interest rates that could change anytime.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/yearn-finance/

If Binance gets hacked there is a 90%+ chance I'll get compensated. When your coins disappear into the DeFi ether there is nobody to complain to...

You're re-writing history.

Reality: They got regulated to death. When even the shadiest of the shadiest processors couldn't facilitate payments anymore, the domain got confiscated etc. it was game over in the US and in Europe it was regulated and taxed to death. The sale to Amaya which obviously wanted to make some profit as the last nail in the coffin. Crypto is a bit more decentralized but all of this can happen as well.

Just hope that the crypto industry has more lobbying power than Pokerstars.

ya dude I don't have all my eggs in any particular DeFi protocol. Maybe i'm capable of weighing the risks on my own?

I use blockfi over Binance w/ a portion of my holdings. Some are just simply in cold storage doing nothing. If I were to stake with a centralized authority, as I said I would use coinbase not binance.

I could even insure my Yearn deposits on Nexus Mutual for that much more security if I wanted to but i'm not going to because I can handle the risk and would prefer just making more money.

You do you man .

on one hand i feel like having money across a bunch of protocols is safer because you're spreading your risk, on the other hand the biggest networks should in theory be the strongest. weird pickle.

i'm curious if anyone builds an efficient portfolio insurance protocol, i'm sure a bunch of LPs would pay a tiny fee to cover against the pool getting hacked or something

Arbitrum anyone?

AMM returns are still so poorly misunderstood: https://research.paradigm.xyz/uniswaps-alchemy

Subtle point that many miss, but LPs returns are merely correlated to uninformed flow, not wholly dependent on it.

And Uniswap v3 is making it even harder for people who failed to grasp how v2 works.

A cool visualization:


Alpha leak: https://duneanalytics.com/

Keep in mind for unsubsidized pools, it's very competitive and you want to be able to find edges. If you're just slinging it in there guessing, you are going to lose.

Liquidity pools feel like a semi scam to me.

Let the sharks add / remove asset arbs as they please while the fish eats the impermanent losses and hopes rewards and fees make it up somehow.

DeFi is great in theory but it feels like 1990s wild west internet all over again which is not a good combination with serious money, which gets obfuscated as honey bunny pancake swap meme coins.

There is a real chance btw. that Ripple, Algorand etc. will just use the technology for custom projects for governments, banking etc. and the coin investors will see zero returns as the coins won't be used in them.

I'm invested in both but risks are just as mooney as the potential of even the best altcoins.

This somehow implies that fish are forced to put their money in pools. They are not.

The fact that smart money will outperform dumb money should not be surprising or considered unfair by anyone.

The more interesting question is to what extent it will be possible to make markets on DEXs without extracting MEV yourself. With MEV as is, and advanced DEX (Uni v3) market making strategies being developed now, I'd posit it's basically impossible. If MEV is solved with a fair/random sequencing solution, that would be great for all non-parasitic users.

Note: not all MEV should be considered malicious/parasitic. Some arbitrage opportunities simply arise because someone makes a bad trade, or just needs to get an order off.

That's like saying people aren't forced to play shell swap street scammer games.

It's an argument that wouldn't fly in a regulated world.

To me rewards and fee shares combined together and marketed as insanely high APRs is very misleading and I'll believe that the average liquidity pool investor comes out ahead when I see proof together with average returns based on time staked and asset volatility during that time.

It took me an afternoon but now I have the Maths done on v3. It’s a lovely tool but only for those who’ll do the work to understand it. It’s gonna reck lazy lps who don’t grasp how it magnifies the impermanent loss or how to convert the risk back to v2 equivalents.

Liquidity pools aren’t a scam but they’re a trap for most people.

The constant harping on by Hayden Adams about return on capital is misleading people I think, return on risk is more appropriate to look at. V3 lures the unwary into way too much risk

The key to LP'ing is finding correlated assets (that are correlated in the same direction and magnitude) and pools that pay nice rewards.

The easy wins here are stable pools such as usdc-dai or usdt-usdc. The issue with those is they generally don't have the best apy% but depending where you look, you can find 200%+ for at least a short period. Eg. Dfyn on Polygon.

Also if you're in stablecoin pools it means your underlying is stable. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you're not going to have the upside (or downside) of crypto.

The other thing to be cautious of is there are endless farms and many of them are rugs or exploitable.

Your best bet these days is just jamming in a Curve pool and putting it on Convex.

If you're also worried about IL, you can set bounds on Uniswap v3. Not sure how many farms, if any, are available for staking v3 lp, but you can at least earn fees.

Set a tight range, hope the pair stays within range, and you can clean up on fees if there's heavy volume. WOOFY-ETH has been good on this front. Hint: woofy is just 2-way yfi peg, but dog memed and 1m:1 ratio.

Ok I'm rambling. Gas is low, get out there.

No offense but all of this is sketch as hell and unusual interest rates are generally 1-2 day bait and switch from my observation to pull in money on platforms like Crypto.com's DeFi wallet.

I'll just keep staking on Binance and get my 5-18% on many coins.

Setting a tight range makes the IL worse (it magnifies it), better to set a wide range - hoping crypto pairs stay within a tight range seems... optimistic?

(Talking non stables)

I am talking about unsubsidized Uniswap v3 pools, which have no rewards; just trading fees. If you put money in that pool, you are serving as a market maker using an automated strategy whereby you set some of the key parameters (liquidity amounts, range top and bottom, fee tier). There is no marketing/rewards. I would caution anyone who hasn't done significant math/data science work on it away from volatile asset pools (such as ETH/USDC).

Honestly this is terrible advice. No part of your strategy on uniswap v3 should involve hoping or picking ranges randomly not based on math. There are no liquidity incentives as far as I know implemented yet for v3, so you are just making markets with a 10, 60, or 200bp spread. If you do this poorly, you will get rekt. The IL in a tight range is absolutely enormous and if you don't have the math on that down, you may as well go play roulette.

This is indeed a point that many smart people don't understand. Yes, an AMM and any market maker that captures the spread or a fee will perform better in a choppy or mean reverting market. But it's not +EV in an efficient market. It's simply a bet on mean reversion, and an inefficient one at that, particularly in high gas fee environments. If you have an edge forecasting mean reversion, there are much better ways to bet on it with better returns and lower risk than throwing your money in an LP pool that will get destroyed in a trending market.

are you talking on a relative basis? because i fail to see how the guy tossing 3.7M into ETH/USDC on a range of 600 to 20k is gonna lose. sure it's probably suboptimal considering your relative share is lower on the more active ranges, but that guy i reckon is just straight up not getting IL and can just ignore it for all they care.

1. And, what does that have to do with the current crypto market?
2. Arbitrage primarily goes through Flashbots/mev-geth
3. Show your work.

Regarding better ways to bet, other types of edges require tangential skillsets, access to certain platforms, capital/margin requirements, in some cases being awake/alert/at the computer. It's not as simple as, "if you can do x, you'd be better off doing y". There are different tradeoffs involved.

I would agree with you though that putting money in an AMM with no math/data science work, no additional incentives, and no "game selection" will, if not already, quickly become -EV in v3. You no longer have the benefits of v2 where all [lazy*] LPs were receiving pro rata payoffs and auto-compounding with each trade.

*seen some quite advanced mempool-watching alpha in v2 =)

Also worth mentioning, you can use uniswap v3 to buy/sell at prices you already want to buy/sell at. In that way, you will always outperform yourself as you receive fees when your orders get executed as opposed to paying them to exchanges. Maximizing net fees (gross fees + incentives[if any] - IL) may be the goal of a linear-wealth-preference profit maximalist, or professional MMer, but that is not most people.

This is very similar to a uniswap v2 range, which would go from 0 to ∞. v2 still leaks to arbitrageurs. In a prolonged down market you'll get destroyed (both because you're long ETH *AND* short gamma). In a flat / ranging market, you'll do fine. In an up market, you'll make money but may not outrun IL.

I'm interested in a DEX protocol that can:
1) dynamically adjust fees based on market conditions
2) discriminate spread based on sharpness of flow

I think we will continue to see the space evolve.