Steve's Crypto Thoughts

(also, good liquidity please. Don't shill me something I can't buy with size)

I feel that my bear market PTSD is pulling me down. The max upside I can see in my bag is one of the coins doing 12x from here, while most of the others are around 4-6x. What are you holding that you think can do 10x or more? and why? any category, as long as it has a good chart, small/mid cap, good community and chad team. Shoot. I'll look into everything. Thanks!

Part 2. Now let's discuss allocations. This is where I think attention is/will be and good Xs can be made. Because my work time is 80% dedicated to Crypto I allow myself some trading as attention shifts between these categories, but I do think it's 100% fine to be allocated and not trade much. When something goes hard, I'm not going to fade its momentum and sell too quickly but when the remaining juice is less than the remaining returns in ETH, there's no reason for me to hold it. Here are a few categories of investments I made. They are either already in play or I predict they will become stronger. A multiplier of gains is the ability to rotate between them, but most cannot do it well, so don't be too cute with rebalancing after every 5% move. In no particular order: - NFTs. There will be a lot of new mints and I suck at identifying what can go well, so I'll probably ignore them. I like established collections that have good communities and leadership. Pudgy Penguins is probably my favourite, and the rest are on Solana: Mad Lads, Claynosaurz, Tensorians and Chads. This is like a leveraged ETH and SOL bet. I believe these collections may have 4-5x in them, in ETH or SOL terms, and then ETH and SOL are likely going much higher themselves. - DOGE, expecting it to run hard when retain is back. How hard? possbily harder than before given Elon's Doge rocket literally going to the moon soon, and plans to integrate crypto payments on X. Yes there are newer memes but I think DOGE is the retail's meme while the rest are "our" memes. I also have an allocation to BONK. Not sure about PEPE. - Depin / storage: Shaping up to be a strong category which I need to learn more about. Currently allocated to $SHDW and hearing good things about AIOZ but need to lear more. AKT is a possible Cosmos play. - AI: can't have crypto allocations without AI, right? well I don't yet really have any. Still learning. - Gaming: I hold BEAM and PRIME. The former as a form of a basket bet, the later because good people I trust like them. I can't tell PacMan from Police Quest so can't really make my own Gaming bets. - Gambling: RLB and THALES are tokens I held in the past. The former may be shifting to rev share instead of token burns, the later seems to enjoy nice momentum recently. Might get back to them. - Crypto related stocks - Miner shares (CLSK, RIOT, MARA) often do extremely well in a bull market. A leveraged bet on Bitcoin. Also, COIN. Coinbase is a beast in its current business, now think what it does as an ETF custodian as well. - Solana ecosystem. It's red hot for a reason. People with 4 digit portfolios are sick of high fees and constant bridging, and projects on Solana have improved a lot. The blockchain is stable and super fast, and not the joke it once was. FTX and Alameda are gone. Clear blue skies. I have some SOL, BONK, NFTs and SHDW. Even a bit of WIF because of the hat. I'll continue to stay involved and look for more opportunities. - ETH. Basically rolling profits from all of the above into ETH. Or leveraged ETH in the form of Penguins. That's roughly it. Yes I'm missing a shit ton of other things. Only so much one investor can focus on. Enjoy the bull. Stay safe.

Hello frens! Been a while since I've written much in long form. I'll try and do it now as I believe this is a very important point in time. This will be my mid/long term thoughts on the market, some important rules that I use (written in blood and sweat), and a bit about my allocations. Not financial advice of course - just what makes sense to me, and there really is no one way to "make it". So feel free to adopt ideas that make sense to you, ignore the ones that don't and comment if you have questions/suggestions. Alright. First, my overall thoughts. - I believe we are at the beginning of a bull market. There are lots of ways to mark when the beginning was, but they do not matter. Overall, with macro getting better, ETFs about to get approved, inflation and rate hikes behind us (and cuts happening in 6-9 months imo), US election year, halving, Binance cz deal, to name a few, all together make me confident that the total market cap of Crypto is going to be much higher 12-18 months from now. - I don't know what the path to get there looks like. I have guesses like anyone else, but I'm not willing to put much of my money on path dependent bets. I know we're going much higher, don't know exactly what future charts look like, therefore I'm almost always unleveraged and care not about today or tomorrow. - Making (more) money is my focus. I don't give half a fuck about blockchain speeds, transaction costs, or what coin A with a market cap of coin B is. It's all about attention in a bull market. Good fundamentals can definitely be a good reason for a project to get attention, but good fundamentals are not enough. In this environment I care much more about flows. I don't mind jumping on an already moving train, and I much prefer doing that then being right about the level of decentralization of a blockchain I like, who's gas token is stuck. - Remember, holding something today is akin to buying it today. Would you buy it today? Doesn't matter what your history is with a coin, is it a good buy today? - I've been married to my wife since 2006, I'm happy in this marriage and see no reason to get married again. All coins that I buy or have bought are destined to be sold if they haven't been sold already. I'm not marrying any bag. Yes this includes ETH. If you've followed me for years, you have heard me at different times speak fondly about THALES, SYN, UMAMI, CNC, LYRA, RUNE, LBR, RLB, FXS, to name a few. They've all been sold for various reasons. Have I been wrong in selling some of them? probably, but at some point I determined my money can do better elsewhere. - I'm not willing to lock ANYTHING to ANY PERIOD of time. Written in (almost literal) blood. - Adapt, but not to everything. Not every little hype that lasts a week deserves your attention (remember hamster races?). The big shifts do deserve your attention and are the difference between a 4x and a 20x. Think sol vs eth a few months ago. - I listen to many others, both who think the same and those who do not. I always allow room for them to be right while I'm wrong. My SOL buys started in June as a hedge of my heavily ETH denominated portfolio, thinking what if they actually manage to pull it off. They did and they still do, and there were plenty of signs that they could. I could have insisted on the superiority of ETH and keep a large ARB bag instead of SOL. Just an example. - 100x opportunities, even if you are good at identifying them, do not really exist, as many of us can't really hold through the entire move. I rather aim smaller, several times over. - Concentrated bets, otherwise you can't really keep track and manage. But not too concentrated, no "all in'' in one coin. My comfy number is 5-10. - I have rough price targets but they are just a tool to decide if a bet is worth it compared to ETH or BTC or even SOL. Your targets do not matter. You'll need to GTFO when Coinbase is in the top 3 downloaded apps or similar signs of ultimate tops. Part 2 coming soon.

If I remember correctly, there have been quite a few here who were bullish on ILV back when they launched the token and kept holding for a while. I would love to hear what they think about the project in the comments. The reason I'm asking is that I don't know much about gaming, but it seems like an awakening beast, getting close to the game release, and I sense an interesting opportunity. I already bought some but would love to hear pros & cons from people who've been following for longer than me. On paper, what I'm seeing reminds me a lot of RUNE. Different products of course, but in both cases the token did extremely well before an actual product was available, corrected 95% in the bear market and now there's an actual product and the token is waking up.  Thanks!

More ft codes : ft-kd9lu4gl ft-fpm7lejg ft-gd0gc5ge ft-7znb3qi5 ft-najyv5fj

Bull vs. Bear definitions can be very subjective. It's not a binary definition, it's more of a scale. There are times when things are very bullish, very bearish, and all sorts of levels in between. If you imagine a scale where "very bearish" is -1 and "very bullish" is 1, I think we're at -0.1. This, of course, is not about the entire market, and not about the next 4h candle, but rather the weekly or even monthly charts of BTC and ETH. These are the definitions, if we need any, that I like to use. I made them up by the way and I'm happy with them. Why am I bothering with these definitions you may ask? because by setting these baselines, I can now talk about where we are, what I anticipate, and how I play it. -0.1 means it's not time to be reckless and buy whatever you like, it also means it's not the time to be 100% in stables waiting for new eth and btc lows. -0.1, especially after 22 months of a bear market, means it's time, in my opinion, to be almost fully exposed, but to relatively safe assets, which to me are btc and eth. The play, for me, is to accumulate as much eth as possible in anticipation of eventually hitting anything between 7k and 12k, sometime in 2024/2025. To me, buying anything other than eth (and you can use btc here if you prefer), is based on the assumption that this other asset can outperform eth during the next 1-2 years, or has a short term reason to spike while eth remains relatively flat. So, even if I think an asset might 3x in the next two years while eth 4x, I might still buy it if in the short term I see a very good reason (and evidence) that it might outperform short term and allow me to accumulate more eth. Rotating eth into something else, riskier, in order to accumulate more eth, is not something I do often in the -0.1 market. Everyone is very suspicious and quick to fade any significant move, no new money is coming in, so we need to be very careful. I've been successful doing that in recent months with a handful of tokens: LBR, RLB, RUNE,UNIBOT, to name the main ones, but also took some unsuccessful trades. Really, there aren't easy rides these days. But I remember the first half of 2021. Every day, more and more charts follow each other forming great bullish formations. You throw in 5 eth and cash out 10 later that week. Again and again and again. This too will come back, though I suspect not quite as strongly. This is typically a very short period of time but one where everything is so much easier, which is why I try not to bother too much right now. Preserving capital so I can be ready for said bullish (1 on the scale) period is more important than trying to find another risky 10% in this less favourable environment. Bottom line, I think we're getting there sometime in 2024, but I really think patience is key right now, at the same time I wouldn't be too bearish and miss the whole thing. As usual, I still think that most will be better off just holding eth and btc. This is all my opinions of course, not financial advice, because I can be, and I am, wrong sometimes.

Friend tech codes

I'm now on friend.tech. Really liking the concept and I think I'll start sharing thoughts there. Get your shares while they're still cheap 😉 The twitter handle is SuperSteveFarms.

Following up on my last post, Conic has been hacked. Twice. In a few hours. This is what CNC looks like. Sorry if you saw my bullishness and decided to buy, but DYOR is not a meme.

Here are some of the potentially better performers short/mid term in my mind.  Rollbit - $RLB ran real hard of late. A combination of casino/perp, central exchange with a coin. The first jump 3 weeks ago was due to a move from Solana to Ethereum, then Hsaka announced he was partnering with them, and a few other traders also took sweet marketing deals. They are producing huge volumes and RLB holders will be benefiting from it in the form of reduced fees and possibly burns. It already did roughly a 3x in 3 weeks but I believe it has potential to run harder. Won't be a straight line though. Synapse - SYN, often feels like a cursed coin but catching a bit of a bid lately. They are not 'just a bridge' anymore but about to launch their optimistic rollup L2. Together with OP and ARB who are obviously the bigger L2 plays, they all seem to be running nicely, possibly following the narrative of an Ethereum upgrade later this year that makes fees on L2 even cheaper. I'm bullish short term on all three. $UMAMI will probably take longer to fully pump because the value of the token is correlated to TVL, which is muted at the moment as they are capping their v2 vaults to around 2 mil. They raise the cap weekly in the next few weeks and due to the high yield and good security, I believe TVL will grow significantly, together with fees paid to umami stakers, pushing the price up. The coin is highly illiquid though. A 7k UMAMI sell order earlier today (roughly 115,000$) pushed the price down by 25% (of which 15% has been recovered already), so keep that in mind if you want to build a large position. Conic ($CNC) is also seeing some momentum, attracting most of the crvUSD liquidity and launching ETH omnipools. This is a very speculative play, but I'm thinking it can echo the Convex run from 2 years ago.  Of course there are others, and as usual, I can get things wrong so don't follow my takes blindly. By the way, I'm way more active on Twitter so if you find this kind of content valuable, you probably want to pay attention more over there, SuperSteveFarms.

If you're not too concerned about the path to get there, I think there are relatively safe 5-15x opportunities even without going full degen. Think btc eth, sol, they are likely going to feed current buyers very well. Sure, we might get better entries, but it isn't guaranteed, and will you buy then or get scared again? On the way to 150k btc or 12k eth there will be major corrections that will feel bad if you haven't gone through similar corrections before. If you can ignore the path(avoid leverage), then does it matter what the path looks like? If you are very experienced, AND successful, then I think you can look for path dependent investments where you try to jump on what's hot right now and accumulate more eth and btc this way, but for most, I'm 100% sure buying and forgetting the bluechips I mentioned, will prove to be the best decision. Cheers.

I posted the following on Twitter a few hours ago, I just want to add some more context. This is in line with using the spreadsheet I mentioned a month or two ago where you constantly compare the remaining expected move of an alt to that of ETH or BTC. I'm actually getting more confident about SOL as well lately and starting to treat it as a base asset. Not confident to the level I am with ETH but getting closer to what ETH felt like 3-4 years ago. Don't ask me what it is that I like there or what specific projects on the chain as I'm not a Solana expert in any way. But if I look for dev activity and r:r opportunity, it seems like a no brainer. The tweet: I'm starting to see the usual moon tweets that are part of bull markets, and I'd like to suggest a system that makes sure you eat well, while you still preserve your wins and not round-trip. Firstly, imo we are not yet in a full blown bull market. Those are rare and short. Think 11/2020-5/2021. I believe we are in one of those "are we there/could it be" runs. Think pretty much the entire 2020 or Q2 2019. We are likely not in a bear market anymore as well. But can definitely see significant pullbacks.Risk:reward is certainly good here. Most of the damage, if not all, has been done in 2022 and being carefully long here makes a lot of sense to me. Now to the system. Not complicated at all. Also not financial advice but rather letting you know what works for me. Chose yours. 1. Chose 1-3 base assets that you believe are safe bets that can feed you well if you buy them down here. The classic candidates are $BTC and $ETH. 2. By default, allocate to the base assets. This is now your "cash". 3. Perfectly fine to stop here and enjoy the 4-7x that I believe $ETH can make you from here in the next bull market. But if you want, you can pick riskier assets which you believe can go much higher. I'm not getting into evaluation processes here, I'm assuming you have a good one or you're learning how to. 4. Allocate some into these riskier assets and keep track of price movement. Some will pump, some will lag vs. your base assets. Think weekly chart though. Don't stress about low timeframe moves. When something pumps hard, don't fade momentum, but gradually start selling into your base assets. If your base assets has 3x left in it and a riskier one ran hard and now doesn't offer 20x anymore but rather 4x, time to sell most or all, into base assets. 5. Innovation keeps happening so obviously allow for new coins to join your riskier bets as we go, as long as your base assets are not close to their targets. 6. Try to ignore moon boys and clear shills near the top, both for your riskier assets and for the base ones. At the height of the previous bull, there were mainstream predictions of ETH to 20k and BTC to 300k, as well as $AVAX to 1k. It will be the exact opposite of where we are now. Everyone will be crazy greedy as opposed to very fearful. That's when you sell. 7. When your base assets reach the low end of their targets, you should by then be allocated only to them and completely avoid riskier ones. I'd sell a lot of the base assets around there and allow for another squeeze up with a smaller portfolio. 8. Bonus, only if you are experienced. Now that you are mostly in stables, use 10-20% of them to catch a crazy 50% knife on your base assets. The first dead cat bounce to mark the start of the bear can print you 50-100%. But it's not guaranteed, hence a small allocation. No one can catch exact bottoms or tops. This is how I plan to play it. Cheers.

Hola. We have all heard of the "buy the rumour, sell the news" expression, and we've seen variations where it actually works the other way around. Some thoughts about it, with examples, including what I think is a gem, at the end. When there are rumours or actual plans for something to happen, IF there's a high degree of certainty it will indeed happen, you likely want to be early - buy the rumour and sell the news. A good example can be a Bitcoin spot ETF. We've all seen how the SEC declined to approve such listings in the past, but now that Blackrock has files, the market believes the listing will be approved. Current investors know that when it is approved, it will allow much more money to flow in, and therefore the Bitcoin price is likely to go up. Many are buying now in order to enjoy the price action when it happens, casually causing said PA to happen right here and now. I fully expect some sell offs when (IF) it gets approved, but since the product will indeed unlock new liquidity, there's a good chance for a "sell the news" event to be just a correction. On the other hand, look at the ETH Sanghai release two months ago. The main update was to enable staking withdrawals, an important feature that is required by any serious potential ETH staker who wants to know they can get their ETH back. The "rumour" was that this was going to be successful but the market didn't think it's certain, hence there was no "buy the rumour" move. Most investors waited to make sure the release was a success, before backing up the truck to buy (and stake) ETH. This was a "buy the news" case. So in my opinion it is usually about expectations. If a future event is considered a sure thing, you'll see the buying (or selling if it's a negative event) start early. If not, it will likely happen after approval of the event happening for sure. Now, if the event is a one off transaction (Like Mt. Gox BTC being sold) then that's it, buy/sell the new and move on, but if the event has a long lasting effect, it can magnify an already existing trend that started due to high confidence at the rumour stage. This is likely what we'll see with a BTC ETF approval. Now to the gem. UMAMI is a project I'm very bullish on. They will soon launch GLP based vaults that are expected to be yielding north of 20% and support circa 100m of TVL. There's no such product in the market. Furthermore, the work that they've put into these strategies is going to be reused to create vaults on top of other underlying LPs, potentially including uniswap pools. This is huge. They are doing it in the safest way possible and not rushing into releasing half baked non-audited products. The rumour about a release happening soon and a high confidence from the community in their chad team is definitely showing in the price, but I do believe the real move up will be once the release is confirmed and the vaults TVL climbs towards 100m. UMAMI stakers will benefit from the platform's fees in a big way. Don't ape. Research. There's always risk. But this is my recent guilty pleasure and a good example for buying a rumour because of a growing belief in the news actually taking place. Cheers

I hope no one is panicking too much today. We've been through many such days, haven't we? It can get worse before it gets better but in my opinion (not advice!) there are plenty of great opportunities. I was dreaming of such prices for MATIC and SOL (just examples). Stay strong. If you need to talk, reach out, don't panic. This too shall pass.

I got rugged today on a coin called TORO that ended up being a honeypot. Small amount that I was ok losing and I'm not going to tell you that I made a mistake here, because I didn't. It ticked the right boxes and with proper risk management, my loss was minimal. A good lesson to learn here is about risk management. That's what saved me. Shit happens and will keep on happening. It was not the first time I got rugged and won't be the last, because I'm a risk taker in this space. But I am able to keep going because I learned from past mistakes and I size accordingly. I lost 0.6% of my portfolio here and if I had more time I would probably lose another 0.9%, I just thought I'd take a shower first. Unpredictable shit happens. In most cases, you won't be rugged. There are numerous reasons why an investment that ticks all the right boxes can go wrong. New competitors. A change in the markets. Unforseen legal action. Team members ending up not working well together, you name it. That's why risk management is more important than research. You can be right and still lose money. So please, be careful with sizing. It's an asymmetric bet market. You don't need to sacrifice a lot to make nice returns. Now here's the other side of it. The markets or specific coins can also rally when you don't expect them. Always try to allocate in a way that makes you comfortable whatever the market does. You think we're still in a bear market? fine. But you may be wrong so allocate SOME. You think we're in a crazy bull market? fine. But you may be wrong, so don't go all in on 5 crazy shitcoins. I hope no one got F'd by TORO. Been a crazy good month for me with PEPE, GMD, LBR and others, statistically something bad just had to happen.  For the few readers who are in NZ like me, there are crypto meetups today in all major cities. I'll be at my local one. Cheers.

A week ago I was complaining on Twitter that the market is boring. I was also tweeting several times about Lybra Finance (LBR) and it ended up going up 10x in a few days, so things were not really boring anymore. With that said, having been in these situations enough times to learn from, you can make good calls and get a high dopamine rush. This can be very addictive. I know some of you jumped on LBR and made nice gains, but please fight the urge to feed the dopamine beast. At the end of the day, in a chop/bear market, these success stories are often just luck. There will be a time and place to ape into everything in sight. But we're not there yet. That's likely next year. Stay safe frens.

gm. Some back of the napkin semi-retarded math that actually works in crypto, in regards to ETH and BTC price targets for sometime in 2024-2026. Bitcoin. The 2017 top around 20k was roughly 20x from the previous bull's top. The top in 2021 was 3.5x from the 2017 top (20k->69k). It makes a lot of sense for the next top to be again a smaller gain compared to the previous one. For simplicity I'm using 2x or around 140k, ~5x from here. Ethereum. Interestingly, the 2021 top compared to 2017(technically Jan 2018) behaved exactly like Bitcoin and did a 3.5x from 1400 to 4900. Side note: in a way this reinforces ETH being at least as major as BTC. Using the same thought process, expecting 2x here brings ETH to ~9800 or 5.3x from here. These are my base expectations but they can be changed significantly. A bull case sees Bitcoin finally be adopted by central banks of major countries. This can change the above math in a crazy way. The bullish case for Ethereum could be the same, + adoption by 'legit' financial institutions that want to enjoy the rad staking returns+deflationary aspect. Keeping these bullish ideas in mind, we can see those 5x moves mentioned above develop into 10x. If that's not enough, for both BTC and ETH there are opportunities in DEFI that can amplify your returns, depending on risk appetite, by 10-40% (conservatively) over the next two years. With this being my base case for the next few years, I'm eliminating any riskier position that I don't expect to do significantly better. If you want in on what that ends up looking like, I might start the 1:1 sessions again in a few weeks, depending on availability. But I'm gladly sharing a lot of my thoughts here and on Twitter anyway. Now as I stated above, this is super simple stupid math that doesn't account for so much more complexity. But it tends to work with big numbers, plus or minus 20-30%. DO NOT TAKE IT AS ADVICE. Crypto is very risky and it's not just about what a coin ends up doing, it's also about how you handle the swings along the way. So don't buy just because I'm bullish. I'm just a guy. Cheers

gn Something I wrote about often during the 2020-21 bull run and feels like it bears starting to mention again. I strongly recommend comparing whatever you think a coin can do from here to whatever you think Bitcoin or ETH can do. Unless you are some sort of a maxi who hates money, you can probably acknowledge that the only two adapted chains or protocols are by far Bitcoin and Ethereum. To a lesser degree we can probably name another 20, and you're welcome to do so, but anything after that is way riskier, and a sizable investment is essentially a bet. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for these, with proper risk management and sizing, but I suggest you always compare what shitcoin number 914 can do from here to what ETH or Bitcoin can do, and if you're sure about Solana or Atom or GMX or whatever - use them as a measuring stick. But do measure. If you think ETH can do a 5x from here and shitcoin number 914 can do 50x, and you've done your research and have a good system that made you money, by all means, buy it. But if you think it does a 7x, is it worth the risk compared to a more likely 5x on ETH? Also, keep measuring, not just when you buy. You think 914 does a 50x from here, you buy, and because you're brilliant it does a 10x. There's 5x left according to your analysis. Keep holding or go for something that's less risky and has a good chance of those same 5x? It may seem like common sense, but once we buy we tend to analyse much less, so I thought I'd mention this way of continuous measuring. Cheers.