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DeFi for Dummies
Recorded: Aug. 8, 2025 Duration: 1:10:49Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the evolving landscape of DeFi, focusing on partnerships, token launches, and the potential for yield generation through innovative protocols. Key insights included the importance of understanding risks associated with high APYs and the growing trend of user engagement in liquidity provision and staking.
Full Transcription
... ...
... Hey, people starting to file in. Give us a like or retweet a comment on the space.
I'm going to go hit beer comes beast.
Easy peasy.
Going to add him as co-host.
But like retweet the room while we get warmed up here.
I know Coffee with Captain's finishing up.
So I'm probably going to see significant people join after that
because we went a little long with Lurky, which is kind of interesting.
But I haven't actually hosted my own space in a while so this is kind of exciting and
kind of impromptu um i know we're gonna get a lot of people in here beast while we warm up um one
i like because i'm gonna get into like your journey and everything and we're gonna make
it real basic for people but i i gotta ask um dad life how's it treating you man it's uh it's fun um the little guy is in a super super
fun age um he's like learning a lot and he's absorbing a ton of information like our our own
mannerisms as parents he like picks up and like says funny like i think i say oh man a lot and i
heard him like say that in broken child English the other day, it
made me chuckle. It's great. I think having kids is awesome. Getting to watch them grow
up is really cool. And it's also really, my wife is awesome. So it's great to have a super
capable, super caring partner that can help with all that. I mean, she carries a lot of
the weight there. I imagine it'd be a lot harder and a lot less fun
if I didn't have a really great partner.
So it's awesome.
Bro, feel that.
I think maybe it was our daughter's,
one of her first words was like her third word
or something was like French fry.
And we're like, I don't know what this says
about us as Americans,
but maybe we should stop talking
about fucking French fries. I don't know. It was not us as Americans, but maybe we should stop talking about fucking French fries.
I don't know.
It was, uh, it was not great, but it's, it's funny at that age though, because like, I always describe like people get super offended, but I always like, you know, again, I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a boomer basically at this point.
I have a 13 and 11 year old and, but it's like your kids go from being like almost like goldfish where it's like, Hey, feed them, keep them alive.
They're kind of fun.
Then they kind of turn to cats cause they do some stuff then they're like dogs because they're a little smarter
and then they eventually turn into like actual people and you like have conversations once you
start playing video games with your kids it's like cool once they start beating you in video
games it's not cool anymore um that's cool that's cool when it gets there it's like oh how adorable
my son beat me one time i remember i i like aggressively shit talked to my
like at the time he was like eight he beat me in mario kart in like one round and i was like
oh that's cute yay and then he beats me the next round i'm like haha yay and then the third round
i'm like and by the third round when he beat me i'm like i apologize because what i'm gonna do
to you on the next round is gonna be embarrassing and he beat me he swept me and i was like oh my
god this is like so yeah it gets it gets there I can't remember. Do you say son or daughter?
It's a sign. We've got a sign and we've got another on the way. I don't know.
We don't know what, what the next one is. So that's, that's exciting.
Yeah. A little, you're a little perpetrator. I'm excited to see,
see how that goes down, but look, well, let's get it going.
I know we got about 56 people in here. I'm sure we'll get a lot more.
For people out there, do us a favor.
Like, retweet, comment on the room.
Super excited that you offered to do this.
Because look, I mean, just to give the context of it,
I have been in crypto since 2016,
but I was kind of buying on like, you know,
like Coinbase or whatever,
the classic Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum guy.
Got an NFTs in 2020 and 2021.
Really focused my sights there.
And the whole way along with DeFi,
people are using language I don't understand.
And I'm not an idiot.
And I always felt like I was just behind the eight ball.
But I was almost afraid to ask,
which is like, I've never been afraid to ask questions.
But in this space, I didn't want to be that guy.
And then I just see that the train has left the station.
And I'm like, oh, well, I guess I'm never going to be a DeFi guy.
I literally just made the decision this weekend that I'm going to get more into it.
Like I've LP'd like a couple times before and I've done some, you know, some staking and things, but I really wasn't super into it.
But, you know, finally getting into it, it's one of the more exciting things.
And it's not just profitable because you can literally earn money and, you know, obviously there's contractors and things, but, and put yourself in position for airdrops.
So I have a pretty NFT focused audience in my, in my follower list.
So I wanted to, you know, give some like really basic stuff and just ask all the dumb questions
I've been going through and let you, who's been doing this for a while.
I mean, you talk about DeFi being the final boss, the end game.
So before we get all into that, like, when did you start getting into DeFi in the final boss, the end game. So before we get all into that, like when did you start getting into DeFi in, you know,
and what got you to actually dive into it?
Yeah.
So I guess that kind of goes all the way back to why I got into crypto in the
first place.
And the thing about, like I got into crypto in 2017.
So I felt like I'd missed the bus with Bitcoin,
which is kind of hilarious thing.
I think I saw it in August of 2017 run to like 6K and I was like, wow, I missed it.
I was going to guess like, oh no, it's $7,000. You missed Bitcoin.
Yeah, exactly. I missed it. And so I started looking around for something else like, oh,
cryptocurrency. That's a cool name. That's how dumb things were back in 2017 is it was like,
what color is the logo of the coin? And like, does it sound cool?
Like that, no joke. That's what got people into stuff. So like, if it had a nice color gradient,
boom, smash buy. If it had like a funny picture on the light paper, boom, smash buy. If like,
the thing about it was called cryptocurrency, that sounded like mysterious and like,
kind of cool. So like Mr. Robot was a big show back then. So, oh yeah, let's buy cryptocurrency. That's cool. But so I got into it because of the concept of programmable money. And like that idea that smart contracts are these
like indelible code snippets you can deploy and do things with your money that you can't do in
like in normal financial systems. I just found that really interesting. And Ethereum at the time
was like the smart contract platform. It still is the smart contract platform.
And that's really what got me into it.
Back then, we didn't have proof of stake.
We didn't have AMMs yet, which is kind of crazy to think about.
It was like most of the trading was done on spot exchanges.
And like you could send stuff back and forth and like you can mint things sort of and you could have ERC20s and all that but there really wasn't a ton of a ton of defi like defi got really big in 2020 during the summer
which humorously enough i didn't actually really participate in um i was super concerned about
taxes and didn't realize that like oh if you're paying taxes that means you're winning um like
that means you're you're making money instead of oh crap i have to pay taxes like that means you're making money instead of, oh, crap, I have to pay taxes. Like that sucks, which it still does suck.
But it's like it's a badge of honor at this point.
Like, oh, OK, I actually did OK.
But I really got, I think, super interested in DeFi once the merge happened.
Proof of stake and like the ability to unlock both liquid yield from assets you had on chain already.
And then this like concept of LPing stuff,
like people got super into that during DeFi summer.
I missed that.
But then I started to realize like the value of grabbing fees from swaps
and like watching where velocity on chain is
and how fast money is switching hands between people.
And you can just be the middleman.
I think that's really interesting.
And so for me, I think like I got super into DeFi on Solana
with Meteora and DLMMs over the last year and a half.
And I think that's a really cool, like, Solana is kind of like my playground as far as on-chain stuff goes.
That's where I like to try things.
It doesn't work quite the same as the EVM in a lot of ways.
But in my mind, it's all like fake money because in my head, Sol salon is still $10, even though it's like it ran up to almost 300.
So I like, don't worry as much about getting rugged there,
like doing something bad.
And so it's like,
it gives you the freedom to play around with things and see what works and
what doesn't.
So I spent a lot of time over the last 18 months playing with,
with DeFi tools and things on salon.
And then I've been branching out to various chains since.
It's so funny.
You say that.
Like when I was, when meme coins were like hitting last year,
I was like throwing, I was like throw a Solana.
People like you threw a whole soul at that.
I'm like, dude, it's like 30 bucks.
They're like, it's $200.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Cause like Solana, like you say 10 bucks.
Like I have this like baseline of Solana being $30 in my mind.
So it's so funny how like your brain gets warped and
sort of like you know doesn't keep up with that stuff but i actually solana's the first place
i started actually as well uh in just this past weekend the first thing i did was an lp on meteora
and kind of uh figured that out which is a pretty cool thing to understand but let's let's get down
to like the basics and by the way our friends at flow just dm me and said they they're starting to
get like much more deep into the DeFi streets. I'm started playing
around on theirs. They have a fun little rewards program.
They said five people can get
I think 25, I forget the exact
number, so I'll go back to their DMs and check
it out. But they're giving away keys
which are like part of their rewards program. So
ask questions. If you have a
question that you maybe are embarrassed to ask,
didn't want to ask, you want to know, you want
Beast to answer it, you want me to attempt to stumble around it, put it in the
comments, or even feel free to come up and throw a hand up and ask it, and we'll pick
five of them to give away the flow keys to, so appreciate flow on that.
But let's talk about the different types of DeFi.
So the most basic is probably staking, right?
But talk about there's staking, there's LPing, there's liquid staking.
Talk about the different sort of like, and I know there's probably a lot to go down,
but like sort of the basic high level categories that people might hear and sort of what they are.
Like let's start with staking.
Explain staking.
Yeah, so staking is like an incentive and economic model for security of a chain generally.
I think there's like, there's probably two different paths for staking.
So one is staking just for like incentivized pools. And that's like used to incentivize getting like a higher TVL on
a chain, or you've got like some emissions programs, like user acquisition strategy. And so
some, some chains and some projects use like, they just lock your tokens and they'll give you some APY
back in the token. Generally, that's not really, I think it's,
that's more of a side shoot of what staking was intended to be. That's more like a locked rewards
program. Staking as like an economic model is intended to prevent, prevent people from being
able to disrupt the network. So you, you basically put your, your assets up as collateral. And at the same time, having those
assets there allows you to run a validator for the network. And you're allowed to propose blocks
or slots or whatever your chain runs on. And consensus of the network decides if your proposals
are valid or not. And if they are valid, you earn small rewards from the network. And if they are
invalid or the majority consensus decides that you're a bad actor, then your stake gets slashed.
And so the idea is there's game theory there that if you try to do something bad on chain or you try to act outside of what the actual chain requests are, then you'll lose the assets that you had staked.
So there's an economic risk to being a bad actor and trying to take over a chain and put false blocks on it.
So that's ultimately what it is. You have to have some skin in the game in order to validate the chain.
So in the old world where it was all proof of work, basically it was just a race to get the first correct solution for the next block in the chain.
And there weren't really adverse incentives there because you couldn't put a fake block on.
But with proof of stake, since you're not doing mathematical proofs and like you're not grinding for those or mining them, somebody could
theoretically try to put a fake block on there. And if there weren't like, if there weren't some
kind of risk to doing that, then you could get away with it or you could just try it and eventually
like you might succeed. So I think those are kind of the two ways. One is, is this just purely
locking assets either to prevent cell pressure
or to attract people's interest or grow your TVL.
And then the other side is this like economic scarcity
and economic security model
that I think really kind of gave rise
because of the concerns about energy consumption,
which I think that's like largely fallen away.
People don't seem to care that much
about energy consumption of Bitcoin
or other like large proof of work networks anymore. that that justification has gone out the window some and i
guess it does make it cheaper to secure the network because you're not having to expend these crazy
amounts of energy so like the emissions for the network it allows you to have a much lower net
issuance of the native asset uh but those are the like at a high level the two kinds of ways that i
would look at staking yeah and and generally speaking to your point, like, you know, they have like the
really basic ones where it's become sort of almost this secure the network, get yield on a very high
level, on a very high level, right. Where it's like, and that's sort of what people do when
they're on a Coinbase or another place, right. If you stake your Ethereum, you're sort of getting
yield back from that. Or for example, I staked on Polygon yesterday because it gets me access to like three
airdrops and I'm helping secure the network. And as a result, they gave me a little bit of Polygon
because I'm helping secure the network through somebody else's validator.
Yeah. Delegated staking, that's been a model for quite a while. I think BNB is kind of like the
apex predator of delegated staking.
There were a few that did it back during the ICO years.
But BNB has, I think, I don't remember the number,
but they have a few validators that have basically a large majority
of the float of BNB associated with them, delegated.
And they're the ones that operate these high-powered machines
that actually run the network.
And so what happens is the operator of this supercomputer will end up running the validator node for you.
And they'll return, like they'll take a commission of 5 or 10% or something and then return the rest of the validator rewards proportionally to everybody that's delegated assets to them.
So it's the same as proof of stake ultimately.
But you're able to like access it by allowing somebody else to operate your things and break a little bit of a fee.
Yeah. And that's like one way I think for people basic to get, if you're looking for the basic
entry point into getting your money to make more money, cause like my buddy, I know you've, I've
seen you interact a little bit with warp Joe in the timeline. He's been telling me for a long time
when it comes to my crypto, he's like, if you're not doing anything with it, it is losing money, which is like a good way to look at it,
because you can stake and, you know, and make it, you know, work for you. And then, you know,
simply, again, staking to somebody else's validator, delegated staking, and then you get
these little percentages of rewards, whether it's 5%, 7%, those rewards tend to be a little bit
lower than some of the other options that we'll talk about today. But would you say that's like the most basic, easy entry?
If someone is really confused and they really want to start something, obviously we'll advocate
for certain sites and places to stake.
We'll talk about Jido and other places like that.
Jido, I actually don't even know the pronunciation correctly.
But like Coinbase, you could literally just stake on Coinbase and it's not the best yield,
but it's a place where you can at least start if you're not self-custodying your assets and you want to earn more money on it. So is that,
would you say it's like the most basic and easy place for people to start?
Yes. And no, that's a really unequivocal answer or equivocal answer that I actually think that
stable coin yields are the, like the simplest, um, access point for DeFi for, for the everyday
consumer.
And I mean, you can do something like that through Coinbase or through Coinbase Wallet,
or even if you're a little bit more willing, I think that it was Moonpay, I think, or Robinhood,
one of the two, they added yield bearing accounts for stables pretty recently.
And ultimately, that's DeFi as well.
So the assets you're holding in your wallet for many of these providers,
but functionally what they do is they either buy short-dated treasuries or some other yield-bearing, pretty secure, but also pretty liquid
investment that normally is reserved for banks or other institutional investors.
And they'll take a little bit of the interest off of that and return the rest of it to you.
And I think that is really the big unlock. And what people are going to realize is I can get more money holding my
money as a coin on chain in some kind of custodial wallet or non-custodial wallet.
And I can get a better percent APY on my assets and basically have less of my buying power degrade
by keeping it in crypto than I can by storing it in a 0.01% APY savings account.
And that to me is the unlock.
Yeah, that's well said.
First of all, your answer,
you said yes and no equal on both sides,
balance like a proper liquidity pool there.
I appreciate that.
But it's funny because like, yeah, it's like banks,
think of it like, you know,
they basically do the same things as banks in a lot of ways,
but banks are like, okay, we finished our lobster meal.
You get to have the shell.
And the providers here will say, hey, we finished our lobster meal. You get to have the shell. And the providers here will say,
hey, we finished our lobster.
Here's a little piece of it
that you can actually eat and enjoy
versus giving you sort of the scraps,
the way banks earn really small on that.
And that's a good point.
I mean, I had this conversation with a friend
where it's like, again,
even if they move their money into USDC on Coinbase,
it's four and a half percent.
I'm not just trying to show Coinbase,
but I know it's an easy entry for people.
Let alone, I was talking to a friend who's in crypto and I was like, yeah, man, like
10, 15% yield that I'm getting on stables, like very low risk outside of the contract
and protocol risk.
So, um, you know, I actually liked that the idea of just simply letting your stables work
for you, because if people have money in savings that they're not using, uh using and they don't plan to use, you can earn more money with that the same way people do in
S&P 500 index funds. So it's a opportunity, I think, for sure there. Along the same lines
of staking, though, you know, I, again, this is like relatively new to me and a lot of other
people. There's staking where you sort of, you know, whether it's delegated staking or whether
you're just kind of securing the network and getting a fee. There's also liquid staking where you sort of, you know, whether it's delegated staking or whether you're just kind of securing the network and getting a fee.
There's also liquid staking, which I was, again, I had never done before.
And I, you know, I had heard of it.
I kind of had the idea of it, but I didn't play around with it.
Also recently ruled that it doesn't fall under security laws by the SEC.
So there's a lot of opportunities that opens up.
Talk about what liquid staking is for people who maybe don't understand that.
Yeah, so liquid staking is this like, it's like a Matryoshka doll if people are familiar with those little russian nesting dolls
um basically you you give your assets so eat soul whatever it is um to to some protocol
whether that's that's gito i don't know if it's called gito also i i that's what i like mentally
call it but i've never actually talked to somebody from there so i don't know if it's called Gito also. That's what I mentally call it, but I've never actually talked to somebody from there,
so I don't know.
But you give it to Gito or you give it to Aave
or you give it to Lido,
and you can basically get this voucher back from them
that says, hey, I'm owed X number of this token
that is currently staked with you.
And so there's a few ways
that those tokens end up accruing value.
Either they rebase and they end up being worth more of the like the base asset over time, or they just emit more of the base asset to you over time in accordance with the rewards rate for staking. or you'll get WSTE or AETH or LEETH or LIDO stake, LSTETH.
So there's a bunch of like funny prefixes
that come before the base token.
And that basically means you can take this asset
and redeem it for some like amount of staked asset
at whatever company or protocol is running the liquid wrapper.
Yeah, and it's functionally what that does for you
is it means you can spend this asset
while it's still earning interest so that's like that's the unlock normally like previously when
you stake something your eth is stuck in a validator and that is stuck in the queue like
it's stuck in the network building blocks hopefully over time and you can't use it if you have a
liquid stake d it's the it's the ability to still have that asset earning interest for you or earning
rewards for you by by like securing the network but you can also use it and so that's that's the
unlock is it it allows you to continue using your assets while they're working for you yeah like
there are sites um uh i believe it's um uh kinetic is an example on hyperliquid where it's like i
got liquid staking but then i restaked it on the site again.
And so it's now earning six,
7% on that hyper liquid,
which I'm more than happy to hold.
And part of that,
which we'll get into is a farming strategy too,
because there's,
you know,
one of the things I'll,
I'll talk about throughout.
And one of the things that I found that I immediately decided over the
weekend was I want to optimize for a few things.
I want to get yield,
obviously number one, like I want to earn my money back, but earn yield and be in a place where I could
potentially get an airdrop because, Hey, you may earn 15% over the course of, you know, a six month
period of time or a three month period of time on your money. So your money is better than it was
before. And then you get a several thousand dollar airdrop on top of it. So I think that's one of the
unlocks and the opportunities that we'll, we'll, we'll hit on today as well. But, um, so we have staking
liquid staking. Um, and, and, you know, there's variations of things like lending, I think is one
of them where it's like, you can just deposit money into a lending pool. That might be the
next logical one before you get into LP, which is a little more complicated. So lending is another
option, sort of lending where you put money into a pool
and then they do the work for you
and you sort of trust them
and earn a percentage of their yield.
Can you just at a high level hit on like different lending,
sort of what that looks like for people?
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways.
So like one we've seen more recently
is like agentic vaults or HLP,
which is the hyperliquid like protection product
for the acronym stands for,
but you lend your assets to these pools
for them to use as collateral
or for them to use as backstop liquidity.
And they claim to give you returns
based on how they use it.
So there's an agent on base called DKing or something,
and you lend assets to it and allow it to bet on sports
based off of a Tau-secured subnet
that runs a bunch of
like machine learning predictions. It's actually got a pretty good hit rate. So that's like,
that's like one example. You've got the HLP vaults, which basically they absorb liquidations
on hyperliquid perps and they pay out to all of the liquidity providers that provide for you,
like performing all those liquidations. Then you've got things that are like a little bit
more vanilla, like Aave, where you just lend your assets. You say, hey, these assets are here for somebody to
borrow. And borrowers will come in and they'll say, huh, I think that I can get 20% APY doing
X, Y, or Z on chain. And the borrow rate, what the lenders are expecting is 5%. So I think I can
actually arbitrage a 15% gain by borrowing this ETH, using it on chain,
and then I'll return it and pay the interest. And I've actually made some money there.
And so it's like, that's, those are kind of some of the like various levels of risk or the hierarchy
of things. And I think that's like kind of the majority of the lending. I think like a DeFi use
case for lending that we didn't mention yet is NFT-backed lending.
So Gandhi is a pretty popular protocol right now, given that you've got a pretty big NFT audience.
But rare one-of-one art, punks, things like that, people are willing to put up pretty substantial capital that's secured by a loan against these NFTs.
And it's kind of like taking out a home equity line of credit on your house or something, which is kind of crazy because a punk is getting relatively close to a
house price at this point. And basically you can say, hey, I want to take a 150K loan out against
this punk. And if I don't pay it back with whatever interest rate we agree on in three months, then
you get the punk and I'll keep the money. So it's effectively like if punk's crashed, then the
borrower gets a great deal,
and there's some ethical questions
about if that's reasonable to do,
but ultimately,
that's the risk that both parties take.
And so that's an interesting unlock as well,
and kind of bring some liquidity back
to previously more illiquid assets.
Yeah, I mean,
lending's a really interesting one,
to your point.
It's a great,
I'll give an example.
When Liquidium first came out, I was basically, I was the, uh, loan shark on that one. So you can go the other
direction too. And it's, it's a good way to earn a little bit of extra money where I found this
arbitrage where on chain monkey, uh, NFTs were, or ordinals were the offer on magic eating the
instant offer. Instant liquidity was lower than the loan price. So if I offered a loan price and I offered a loan on them at like 70% loan to value or whatever it
was, and the person didn't pay it back, um, well then I could go and I could immediately, if I got
stuck with the asset, so to speak, I could immediately get liquid and actually make, it was
almost like I was rooting for people to default. Sounds horrible, but they were letting it fly.
Um, of course it works the other way.
You have people who take out loans on things like,
you know, I had a buddy who famously took out a loan on a Moonbird.
It crashed, and he just let that sucker fly and took the cash.
He sold it.
So you can be on the other end where you can be the loan shark,
and the contract does everything for you.
So instead of going to someone's house and breaking their legs to collect,
they just drop it right into your wallet and you're all set.
So kind of works on both ends there.
And it's one way.
It was a way that I stack sacks like little by little in that way.
So I think it was certainly another option there.
Let's keep going down and tugging on this thread a little bit though.
So we got lending.
We have staking. We have liquid staking. I think at least last, and weging on this thread a little bit, though. So we got lending. We have staking.
We have liquid staking.
I think at least last, and we talked about some of the vaults,
but I think the last major one to go down,
because after this I want to go actionable to people of, like,
where to start, what to do, how they can get involved.
I think last major one to cover, which, you know,
we talked about at the beginning, and it was my first piece,
was LPing, like sort of being the person who facilitates a swap
and watching
how that moves on both ends.
Probably one of the more confusing things for people, but it's actually really easy
to understand once you get it going, especially if you have a wider range, like lower fees,
but more opportunity.
So talk about LPing, what it is and sort of how it works for people.
Yeah.
So this is my favorite variation of DeFi these days, I think.
is my favorite variation of DeFi these days, I think. So LP is a liquidity pool or LP is liquidity
provision or providing. A lot of people put a bunch of different words for the acronyms and
they all kind of mean the same thing. I'm glad to see we've got some LP aficionados in the crowd.
Oxy's been putting out great content lately on things he's doing with LPs. So go check out. I
think he's put out like three or four articles recently on what he's doing. So that's definitely a great place to look for resources. But basically you are
pairing, you don't actually have to pair, but generally you're pairing two assets in a pool
on some pair trade that you think people want to make. So suppose I think that people are going to
trade ETH and US dollars a lot. So I'll take my ETH and I'll take my USDC
and I'll go to Uniswap or find like the best pool on DeFi Llama and I'll say, all right,
I'm going to stick this in a pool and I'm going to expose myself to upside downside risk,
depending on if ETH goes up or down. But I'm going to allow both of these assets to help
add liquidity to the DEX pool. And so I assume people generally
know what Uniswap does. You're going to Uniswap and say, hey, I have dollars and I want ETH.
So I'm going to find the pool that has ETH and dollars in it. And I'm going to give them dollars
into that pool and take ETH out of it. And an automated market maker, we call this AMMs.
It was like a pretty novel invention a few years ago
where there's a mathematical curve
that takes how much you want to buy,
how much liquidity is in that pool.
And generally these pools are stabilized
at the current market price
because there's like a complex net of bots
that operate on chain to balance all these things
based on Oracle prices.
And it gives you the amount of ETH out of the pool for the dollars you put in.
And it also like kind of skews the price up because there's now more dollars
and less ETH in the pool.
And so then if somebody wanted to come along and get dollars out,
they'd sell ETH in the pool and get dollars out.
It balances itself that way.
So that's generally how LPing works.
There have been like, I think,
four different iterations of Uniswap.
Now, I used Uniswap just because they were kind of like
the big name, like the first big name on the scene.
I actually don't even remember what Uniswap V1 was
at this point, but V2 was kind of the gold standard
for a while, and it basically required
to pair equal amounts or almost equal amounts
of the assets.
And you were pretty exposed to impermanent loss,
which is this feature where if the price of one of the two assets
like gets way out of whack,
then the value of what you pull out of the pool,
like plus your fees ends up being less than you put in,
which is not great.
That's one of the risks of using DeFi in this manner.
But V3 is really where it got super interesting
because it allowed for you doing one-sided pools
or like different weights on your, your like pairs. And I think that allows for some really interesting liquidity strategies.
177 USDC.
And as more people are buying
sole, you get more
USDC because theoretically you are selling
them your sole and they're giving you the USDC
and vice versa. But if you have a
wide enough range, you basically collect fees
as long as it's in the range. So for me,
anywhere from, I have a relatively wide range.
If sole goes down to 160, I'll collect
fees. If sole goes up
to 196, I'll collect fees. So I have a
pretty wide range, but i'm getting
something there and you know it's it's funny because i don't know about you like in until
i started lp more i've never in my life rooted for chop and then if i'm doing ufdc especially
now if you pair like eef and bitcoin and they go proportionally great that sounds awesome and
you're just kind of like going back and forth there usdc pools you got to babysit a little more so um let's actually dig straight in there like
if you're lp-ing if you're telling someone they're going to open their first lp my first one on
meteor was soul and usdc because i thought about the impermanent loss like losing bitcoin for
ether vice versa and i figured i'd regret it either way because i'll overthink it so i'm like
i'm just going to do usdc the money is going to outpace on the fees. And then I'll occasionally
rebalance my pool and, you know, go back in there. If you were selling someone to start today
on liquidity pools, where would you tell them to start? What recommendations would you give them
as far as a range, like wider range to babysit less, shorter range to keep an eye on it?
And what sort of pairs would you, would you tell them to do? advice as always by the way uh my friends but uh just you know throwing
it out there where would you start yeah i think i honestly think the easiest place for somebody to
start is meteora on on solana um i think that their interface allows you to see in real time
what's happening um the dlmm bins are like really great for understanding how fees are accrued
as price moves. And so I would, again, this is not financial advice. I'm not giving you any of
this as investment advice, but I think if you're wanting to learn, I would take a small amount of
Sol and a small amount of Fartcoin, which is really funny that we're going to recommend Fartcoin
as the way to learn. I recommend this because it's one of the highest volume tokens on chain um it is regularly one of the top five um alts that's traded on solana
by volume and i would go to meteora and i would look at the different pair offerings and the fees
um so like i think there's probably the point point one percent or point oh five percent pool
is probably the highest volume and i would go in there and see what the options are
for setting ranges and just take a Sol and $200 of Fartcoin and set up a range and watch how the
price fluctuates over a couple hours. If you've got some time on the weekend, just watch it.
And you'll see in real time as the price moves, the bins will fill and empty based on which asset
goes up or down.
And you'll see your fees accrue in real time.
And you'll get fees back in both Sol and Farcoin.
And so that'll give you an idea of kind of what motion on the coins actually does for you as you're raking fees.
And I think that's a great place to start. Use some small amount, whatever makes sense for your bankroll, and just kind of test it out and see.
small amount, whatever makes sense for your bankroll, and just kind of test it out and see.
I really do feel like particularly LP side of DeFi is really a learn by doing. You can watch a video
like Easy Eats has some good videos on it. Like I said, Doxy's got some good articles on it.
There's a lot of cool resources out there, but you have to have this aha moment where you try it out
and you see what really happens in order to fully – I think you probably experienced this over the last week.
You were like, aha, I get it now.
And that's ultimately like it takes doing to really understand.
I think that's why you don't see a lot of people talking like a lot of the KOLs or the popular figureheads.
like popular figureheads, there's not a lot of people that really talk about this stuff in depth
There's not a lot of people that really talk about this stuff in depth because they haven't done it.
because they haven't done it. And so that's, that's, I think, I think really you have to try
this stuff out and get like a functional understanding of how to do it. And then it
really clicks and you're like, boom, why was I not doing this all the time?
Dude, that was my, it will go to Oxy here in a second because I know you threw your hand up and
Oxy is one of my faves who I've definitely followed very closely, been really happy to
hear him on the modern market a lot more recently, actually given some tips but i um yeah it was it's you that's perfect description i did it and i'm like
i looked at it and on not that much soul i'm like man i might clear you know 50 60 dollars in fees
experimenting around in a week just playing around on this thing um and simply rebalancing my soul
and my usdc regularly and then you start to realize, wait a minute,
like Pete Project X is going to be doing an airdrop.
That's on Hyperliquid.
I like Hyperliquid and I like Solana.
So I could pair those together and I can make this pool in half
and have another pool and watch that.
And so suddenly you have a much more robust strategy.
And the nice part about liquidity pooling, again,
once you start to do it, and I'll probably do a video on it too,
just because like you said, easy has some good ones
and oxy's got some good ones.
And I know we don't have all Venn diagram crossover
in following.
So I'll probably, you know, put one out as well,
but it's really simple in the sense that
if you want to make a really wide range,
you can babysit it a little bit less,
knowing that you're going to slide
one way or the other over time,
unless they trade pretty in lockstep,
or you can make it really tight
and be super active.
And I think a lot of people think, oh my my god i need to babysit all my positions what
i found is i want to babysit all my positions now that at first i was afraid to babysit all my
positions now i want to babysit all my positions and i want to do more of it um and i find myself
again staring in the mirror saying i wish i had done this when you know you know i see warp joe
again in the crowd when warp joe is calling me you you know, in a nice way, as a friendly way.
He's like, smooth brain, dude.
Can you get into, you know, you're like, you're trading JPEGs, you know, get your smooth brain over into DeFi.
So been thinking about this for a while.
So I think you're exactly right.
It's like you just need to experience it.
And I've gone in a week from being almost afraid to hit the button to just wanting to do more and more.
So, well said there.
But, Oxy, I know you threw your hand up, so go ahead and get in here.
Oxy's like the cave.
If you're not following Oxy and you're in this space,
then you're missing out.
Oh, man, you guys are too kind.
I appreciate it.
No, I mean, I see how you nailed it, right?
You find something that's easy to follow, like Fartcoin and Solana.
That's an excellent one.
If you guys aren't super into the solana side um i guess my advice would also be find two
two coins that you wouldn't mind ended up holding like the full bag of so for instance if i'm like
i like hype you know hyper liquid or hype and ethereum so what i typically will do is set up
an ethereum and a hype pool because at the end of the day
if I'm out of range one side or the other
I'm either holding 100% hype or 100% Ethereum
and I don't really mind doing that
so there's obviously a lot of different ways to get a cat if you will
but that's just another piece of advice
just find two tokens, you're like, alright, you know what
I don't mind holding 100% ETH, 100% hype
so I'll set up a pool like that find two tokens, you're like, all right, you know what? I don't mind holding 100% ETH, 100% hype.
So I'll set up a pool like that.
Yeah, well said.
And by the way, again, just as a reminder to people as we're going,
we'll kind of give some more actionable strategies for sure as we keep going.
But our friends at Flow are giving away some keys to their loyalty program.
So ask questions in the chat or comment on the chat.
Give the room a like and a retweet.
We'll pick five people to win that.
We'll just get your ETH address afterwards or just tag you and get your ETH address and they'll be able to deliver those and you can get started on the Flow Rewards program as well, which is,
I've been excited because I basically started doing a little Flow DeFi and I don't know,
I'm working my way towards like an iPad, which is kind of crazy on top of like the yield of
money and things. So pretty interesting in there. So you said you'd get started.
Just go to Meteora, Solon Fartcoin.
I love the fact that in the year 2025,
we're like, hey, go get yourself some fart.
Like it's crazy.
Like go tell yourself this 10 years ago.
So LPing, that would be, I think, to your point,
that's the biggest unlock for me was LPing
and figuring out how to properly manage a liquidity pool and some learnings there of when I rebalance and what I want to do.
And to Oxy's point, you can do it so that you're holding one asset or another that you find valuable.
So more sort of the one-on-one stuff as we go into it.
So you mentioned Sol being your playground.
Again, Gito, Jaito, we don't know.
Could be anything.
It's Barcelona, Barth-Felona. playground again uh Gito Jaito we don't know could be anything um it's uh Barcelona Barcelona
uh but with uh with Gito and Jaito like I I'm I'm you know staking there as well it's like
what are your thoughts on people getting involved with a liquid staking on
with the staking on a Jaito or uh or some other places again I have Anchor is a place I'm using
for flow I know they do some other tokens so what are your thoughts on people getting involved in
either staking or liquid staking like where are the best places to start for flow. I know they do some other tokens. So what are your thoughts on people getting involved in either staking or liquid staking? Like where are the best places
to start for that? Yeah, I will say I'm not a huge liquid staking guy. That's not an area that I've
spent a ton of time on mostly because I don't, I don't hold a large amount of assets on Salon
these days. If I think if I was, I would, I would have Jita staked sold for like the vast majority
of my stack. But I like the way. But the place I saw this being really useful
was actually Blast, which is kind of funny
because everybody loves to dunk on Blast.
I still think it's one of the best DeFi innovations
we've had in the last few years.
But their concept was literally liquid yield
for anything on the chain.
So the way that it worked
is you deposited your assets into this multisig
and they then deposited all of those assets into either Aave or Maker or Lido and earned yield on all of that TVL.
And what they would do is every day at UTC turnover, they would actually just on-chain issue you the yield that was earned by your part of the total assets that were on-chain.
So that meant that you had ETH on BLAST, but it wasn't this liquid-staked wrapper IAU token.
It was just native ETH on BLAST.
And so it was liquid-staking and a liquid-staking token,
but you didn't actually have to then go and exchange it back for anything.
The reverse exchange happened when you bridged off.
And so I think that was a cool implementation. I think there's something there to having liquid
yield without having to deal with a wrapper. But I think it's worth doing if you've got idle
assets. Liquid staking versus putting it in an instant withdrawal lending protocol,
they're pretty similar to me. because you can get pretty comparable yields,
whether you've given it to Lido or whoever that's going to stake it on your behalf,
or if you're just going to let it be borrowed. Just because the arbitrage that exists there,
if it gets too big, then pretty comprehensive bot networks are going to end up arming that
value difference to where the difference is negligible between the two because people are
always seeking the best rates. And so if there's like a huge disconnect somewhere
it'll get closed pretty quickly by active scanners so you hit on bots there for a second
one thing i think is important to hit on for sure that we haven't um that we haven't uh touched on
is look you're getting yield but you know you know there's never any such thing as a free lunch and
even in the best scenarios there's always a little bit of risk it feels like we see one contract get
hacked at least every six months that's a major thing so talk about the risks like how they scale
on defy on the various types of things like the different risk curves of things obviously like
doing perps is going to be the highest amount of risk and lending is going to be a high risk but
talk about the different risks with that with stakingaking, with LPing, because that's the thing I want people to be like hyper aware of.
If we're talking about these things is it doesn't come without risk and you need to pay attention.
Yeah, I think the largest risk is, well, there are probably two that are like the biggest risks.
the biggest risks. One being contract exploit risk. So if you are using a protocol that is
One being contract exploit risk.
pretty new and doesn't have a ton of visibility, I would be super cautious. Aave is very battle
tested at this point. There's a few other smart contract platforms and lending platforms or
DeFi platforms that have been around for a long time and have weathered storms and have been around
long enough that you would expect if there was an obvious exploit or like an easy vector, it would have
been taken by now.
So if it's new and you don't really know who's behind it and there's not like a lot of people
that are like deep in the DeFi weeds that are either using it or talking about it, definitely
be careful there.
And you want to check for having appropriate contract audits and like proof of those.
And the other one is like
actual just protocol risk, which is kind of like a backdoor rug risk, which again is similar. If
it's a brand new protocol that offers you like some inexplicably high APY, that's something that
should cause you to have questions. So like a lot of times when I make Polkadot DeFi content,
you're like, how are you getting 30% APY on idle
Bitcoin? And I'm like, they're like, isn't that like Luna or like, isn't it just a Ponzi? And it's
like, well, I mean, in a sense, a lot of this stuff is a Ponzi because like prices don't go up or down
if people like sell. But the way, the reason it's not like a Ponzi Ponzi is because the APY is
subsidized by emissions. And in tradition, like in Luna or Terra Luna, that whole situation,
the emissions were actually like an algo stable coin
that was paired against the assets.
And so that was problematic.
In the case of like Bitcoin on Polkadot
or ETH on Polkadot, any of these things,
the asset that you're getting is not tied to Bitcoin.
It's not tied to ETH.
It's the protocol tokens.
They're emitting you gigadot
or they're emitting you hydration's token.
And so the APY there is based on like that token itself
not going to zero,
but you don't have the same kind of like DPEG risk
because like in the Luna case,
what happened is their backing ran out
and the stable became unpegged.
And so those are some of the big risks
is contract exploits
because it's like not a very well-tested smart contract
or the protocol itself being untrustworthy.
I'd say those are the two big ones.
And then, I mean,
we talked about this a little bit earlier,
but impermanent loss.
So if you're LPing two separate tokens, like we'll say Fartcoin and Solana,
suppose that you deposit $100 of both.
And then suppose that Fartcoin went straight to zero.
You would end up with your bag being entirely Fartcoin,
and it's no longer worth anything.
And so that's a pretty big risk vector that's why you don't want to lp things that you're not like pretty comfortable
with having oxy mentioned this like if you wouldn't be okay having all of the asset then it
might not be a good target um especially while you're learning um that's that's something to
consider um depending on how the prices fluctuate compared to each other, that can introduce what
is called impermanent loss and that you end up with less of a total value for your assets when
you withdraw from the pool than what you put in. The math behind that's a little bit messy and
definitely not something that I would be able to navigate live on audio. But the papers are there.
People have written about this for a long time and a lot of different protocols have tried to
figure out ways to protect against that, some with greater success than others.
That's actually what caused Bancor to get smoked a few years ago.
But yeah, so those are the risks that I would be looking at.
I mean, Meteora feels pretty safe at this point.
Gito feels pretty safe at this point.
I feel comfortable with Aave.
I feel comfortable with Aerodrome.
The big names in DeFi, I feel pretty safe with.
And you can kind of look and see if they have institutional backing too, because
that's generally a decent indicator. Yes. Yeah. Especially if they're not only
are they safe, but if they have the ability to potentially make it right with that backing,
I think that's a huge thing. And to your point, like that is, you know, it's like, I generally do the sole USDC with as much soul as I'm willing to get completely thrown into
dollar cost averaging in the USDC out, uh, because I don't want to, uh, I don't want to find myself,
um, at a position with certain other assets where it doesn't balance quite as well. And,
um, so I makes a lot of sense and it's good record from Oxy. Mack, you saw your hand fly
up. Feel free to get in here with a question or a thought. Oh, I have many thoughts. DeFi 2.0
comes to mind. This is the Ohm Forks situation from a couple of years ago.
ICO Beast, you mentioned APY rates being way too high. We were talking billions of percentage points at some moments.
I fully expect this DeFi meta that we're going through now to rebirth those things.
Stay away.
If you were going to play in them, you have to be in and out before exactly what ICOB just said happens to you, where the impermanent loss switches you to a token that is then worthless.
That happens.
And a lot of it was actually just staking back then.
So you would stake and it would say, you know, a billion percent.
It was literally like seven fingers long.
And I was telling friends about it in real life.
And they're like, bro, you're nuts.
Like, what are you doing?
Like, this can't be real.
I'm like, no, man, it's super cool.
It's super great.
And I lost a lot of the winnings that I had in the last cycle to that.
So do not, at least I will not be touching any sort of,
oh, we're the next DeFi 2.0.
We're going to do OMFORKS again.
So don't just, if you see any of those words, OM, O-H-M,
really, really, really consider the situation
before you pour your hard-earned crypto and money
into LPing on such a platform.
Yeah, agree. Like always, if it sounds too good
to be true, usually it is, or there's a very, very big catch. And I've, I've had this conversation a
bunch of times. It's like people saying like, Oh, wrecked drinks are going to be able to give you
a thousand dollars for a hundred dollars of purchases of cases forever. I'm like, no,
they cannot know that they did that can only go so long, but it can still be a great rebate system
as it goes up. But, um, you know, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
And it's a good way to get your normal friends to look at you sideways, just like they used to when you said Bitcoin.
But not so much anymore. Now they're not saying quite the same there as well.
So, you know, Beast, I want to talk about your strategy.
So when you're going in, or I guess maybe your strategy,
as well as the strategy for anybody who is checking this out,
would you say look for airdrop opportunities and start simple there?
Like Meteora hasn't had a juicy one yet, but there's supposedly one coming up.
Would you say spread yourself out to a variety of things and try different stuff?
Would you say concentrate and go really hard in one area?
What's your strategy, and what would you say the strategy for someone starting out should be?
Yeah, I think there's two answers here. So the general overall strategy really depends
on your bankroll size. So for somebody with a pretty small starting bankroll, we'll say like
low five figures is their total bankroll, right?
It's tough because everybody's position is very different in crypto.
You're going to see returns no matter what if you're using DeFi effectively.
But the question of is an extra $10 or $20 every couple of months,
is that worth locking up your assets in DeFi?
I don't know.
It gets to be different if you're working with mid six-figure portfolio or seven-figure portfolio where a 10% APY can actually be a
substantial amount of money, potentially even a living just from passive yield. And so that
kind of informs some of your strategy. If you are aggressively trying to grow your bankroll really
hard, you're going to chase probably higher APYys and like there there may be more risk associated with that and you may you may have to
tell yourself or decide if you're willing to to bite that bullet and expose yourself to bigger
like platform risk or other other risks because you're trying to grow that nest egg whereas you're
probably going to opt for safer um like more tested, like lending things, or even like
delta neutral farming using Athena or like liminal on hyperliquid where you're basically
farming the funding rates of perps with stables. I think that's a really interesting use case,
especially for larger bankrolls. Because I mean, you can get somewhere between 10 and 20%
on stables just because people want to borrow money to play perps and they want to like have
directional exposure and you get paid for being the counterparty to that. I think that's a really interesting case once you've got
kind of some more money to throw into things. The strategy, I think that especially with a,
I mean really probably with any size bankroll, finding a high value airdrop while you're earning
yield is probably like a really great thing to do.
I think Project X on Hyperliquid is going to be one of the surprise
bigger airdrops of the next 12 months.
I think Hyperliquid and HyperEVM are huge.
I think they're going to continue to grow.
I mean, I think they just crossed a billion in swap volume,
and they released three weeks ago.
So that's crazy.
I mean, they're generating like 100K in revenue a day from swaps, which is pretty nuts for a protocol that just opened.
So I think that's worth getting exposure to.
Shameless plug.
I definitely have a ref code there.
But I think it's a great protocol.
I know the guys that are building it. I've like i think it's a great protocol i know the guys that that are
building it i've been friends with them for a long time i mean the product works they basically have
taken this concept of what do people like about lps and how do we put that on on hyperliquid and
then how do we like expand that even bigger um and so they they've taken a lot of like inspiration
from the the meteor like presentation of of l LP like options and then what things look like there.
And they've implemented in a really nice way. And you've seen like Hyperswap and a few others on Hyperleague basically copy their user interface, which means they're doing something right.
So that's that's one that I think is really worth doing. Meteora I wouldn't go too hard on right now because I actually think the airdrop is coming soon.
go too hard on right now because i actually think the airdrop is coming soon um and i expect that
season one airdrop points um which ended i think in like december or january are going to be heavily
weighted compared to season two because basically when when trump came out the trump token the the
points inflation went nuts on meteora because of the like anytime you get a 70 billion dollar runner the volume um
the volume is just going to be totally outsized compared to other prior coins and stuff that
topped out at one or two billion and so if they had left it as just all points are equal the only
people that would have gotten any meaningful airdrop would have been Trump LPers and obviously
people wouldn't have been very happy with that so i i expect that season
one points are going to be worth a lot more um and with them having like the like contributor
forum that just closed and then teasing the airdrop coming pretty soon like definitely
use meteor to learn but i wouldn't aggressively farm it and hope you like recoup any kind of
impermanent loss stuff on an airdrop at this point. Yeah. The, uh, Phonix, who's like one of my DeFi gurus from my,
one of my private discords, uh, in the chat actually asked what your favorite
hyper EVM strategies are. And if you think that's like, and, and,
and follow up, you think like that is one of the better places to be right now.
If you're farming airdrops and looking for yield,
you obviously mentioned project X. Um, so what are you doing on,
on hyper EVM if you're playing around on there? Yes, Hyper EVM. I haven't looked at Felix.
I'd like to. It's just one of those I haven't gone to. It's got some lending stuff. I also
haven't looked into HyperFi. I've got a partnership with Mercury that it's like an iOS native mobile
app that's looking to push all of the or or most of the HyperEVM projects into a
unified interface for a mobile app.
So I'm looking forward to testing
those out and kind of seeing how easy they are
to use. But right now what I'm doing is I've got
stuff in Project X.
I've got kinetic exposure, so I think
K-Hype is really worth having exposure
to. So if you've got Hype, toss it in there, get some K-Hype.
I'm also
using Liminal. Liminal money, I've got a few tweets got hype, toss it in there, get some K hype. I'm also using liminal,
liminal money. I've got a few tweets about it, but it's how you farm those
delta neutral funding rates. So basically you take a short position on some asset and you also take
a spot long position on that same asset. I think I've got that right. And you collect funding fees
based on those positions. Like when you're holding a PERP position, either the longs pay the shorts
or the shorts pay the longs. And if you take a short position, generally you get paid because
normally net funding goes from longs to shorts. And it's interesting because you can do that with
the unit assets. So on Hyper EVVM and HyperLiquid Core,
the way that you get native assets there
is through the protocol called Unit that Shoku has developed.
And there might be an airdrop for that at some point.
So having exposure to like UnitBTC or UnitSol or UnitFartcoin or UnitEth,
like having some volume there and having used those could
potentially qualify you for an airdrop there. That's the like hardest part about Hyperliquid
is it's not really clear how to maximize your like returns on some of these airdrops. And I
think that's by design. It's kind of how Hyperliquid's original airdrop was. Like you knew
you were getting points, but it wasn't really clear the best way to maximize it. And I think
that's probably good because when like the criteria are like a hundred percent abundantly clear, people engineer the best ways to farm it
with like the least effort, the least value added. And so, so I would say just try things.
Stick to like protocols that people that you would consider reputable are talking about on
the timeline because most of the time that's like a pretty decent social signal. And like the farther
out you go from things that people are talking about, yeah, you might find some higher upside, but you're also probably exposing yourself to more
risk. Because if, if you can't, if things been out for a little bit, and you can't find anybody
reputable talking about it, either it's the best opportunity to ever exist, and people are
gatekeeping it, or it's too good to be true. And like, people are avoiding it, because it's,
it's actually very risky. And I think more often than not, you're going to find that's because
it's very risky, and people don't want to be associated with it.
Yeah, no, it totally makes sense.
And I think, yeah, like kind of
on Hyperliquid in particular,
like I'm kind of going with some tried and true things,
knowing my airdrop isn't going to be massive,
but I'm, you know, spreading a little bit everywhere.
And as much as anything, it's just to learn.
Because I think like, you know,
especially being kind of newer to it,
like I had some base knowledge, being kind of newer to it, like I had some base knowledge,
but like being newer to it,
the way to learn is by doing.
And it's like, you can read all the textbooks
in the world on throwing a football.
And if you don't throw a football,
you're not going to learn.
So love that.
Probably try to wrap here in the next like five or 10 minutes,
pretty here, pretty soon.
But Mackie, I saw your hand go up. Let's go in there and then we'll hit a couple more questions here from the next like five five or five or ten minutes uh pretty here pretty soon but maki i saw your hand go up let's go in there and then we'll we'll hit a couple more questions here from
uh from the big brain beast yeah i am uh i am using beast's referral code so i'm gonna show
mine since i am beneath him my referral code for project x is maki m- M-A-C-K-I. And my strategy is there right now.
I'm in three pools. I'm in the UPump hype pool, UPump being the unit version of pump, which
ICO was just talking about. You can deposit things via the units, via unit, is it hyperunit.xyz or
something? Definitely verify the website on their Twitter page before you do anything. But we're pretty sure that's the URL. You can deposit assets through that.
When it comes to hype, getting khype, kinetic hype, you can deposit hype through their website
to get khype. You can also swap for khype on Project X directly i see the project x play as like a three-tier stack of
potential airdrops being the project x points the kinetic points which you may need to stake into
the kinetic vault to get they have a vault on their website, an earned spot on their page, and you get VK hype for that.
And then also the potential unit play, which has not been confirmed or denied.
Project X, I think, is pretty likely to do an airdrop, considering who's running it, and the fact that points are already running.
A unit is murky, just like ICO said.
A unit is murky, just like ICO said.
So yeah, it's a lot of fun.
So yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Steve, I really want to echo the sentiment you had earlier
where you said something along the lines to like,
a week ago, I was afraid to hit the button.
And now today I am checking every day
and managing it regularly,
like enjoying babysitting it almost.
It's like a job.
It is farming.
So it's, yeah, I'm having a lot of fun with it and just wanted to relay
my strategies for project x and stuff so yeah really appreciate you having this space steve
i think it should be a weekly thing personally no i might do it more often i love this sort of
stuff and i love going through like what the latest things are because it's funny because
again we dove dove into and again we're going to give away i i think i've already tapped three
people i'll find a couple more um some, some of those flow codes, because again, I just started doing DeFi on flow because it was really easy to
do liquid staking. And then there are more markets. There's a 15% USD vault. And I just,
I have keys, I have boxes and I'm earning towards real prizes while I'm also earning yield. And
again, my suspicion is there could be airdrops coming there as well as some other places. I know
Polygon's been pushing Katana and some other ones. So I'm trying to look for some places that maybe
not many people are looking,
but there are still some good yields because the more people that get involved,
the more yields tend to go down.
So I'm trying to pay attention to those and at least kind of dip my toe in.
Really boring question, Beast.
Like sort of tax implications.
When you're talking to your crypto account and when you're looking at it,
is there anything we should be considering in this? Because like,
I'm going Leroy Jenkins full speed in, and then I'm realizing that I want to keep track of some
stuff. So anything I should be thinking about as it relates to that? Or is it just, you know,
do you know, just sort of like Awaken or other places do it pretty safely and take care of it?
How do you approach that? So for 2024 and before, pretty much every protocol was extremely bad at being able to figure out how to report this stuff.
All of it was terrible for 2024 and earlier.
I know that Awaken has put a lot of effort into making it much better, especially for Meteora LPs.
So I'm hopeful that 2025 is a lot better.
2025 is a lot better. Ultimately, that is going to be my accountant's problem and not my problem
because it is a behemoth. And yeah, looking at my 2024 stuff, I was like, oh man,
what have I done? Because it's tricky because we haven't gotten super clear guidance
on what exactly LPs should be treated as. There's a pretty good argument that income could be the fee raking.
That seems pretty usual.
But then the income itself, what exactly is the value of it?
Because you can get stuck with illiquid assets immediately.
It doesn't seem very fair.
But also the tax code doesn't care if it's fair or not.
There's a lot of complexity there.
And if you're going to really go hard on this stuff as a power user, I would absolutely recommend getting an accountant.
Just because the thing I've always said is if you're going to make it in crypto, there is no like you didn't actually make it if you have to look over your shoulder for the next 10 years.
that's like for me that's kind of the the true north of the like the north star is if i can't
figure out like i'll overpay my taxes just to feel a little bit more like comfy um and that that
applies here that applies to other like to airdrops and like all this other stuff because again if you
can't get away with like you can't get away we can't get out with the assets like feel good
about it and not be like worried about a knock on the door at 6. AM or like IRSA,
just busting in with guns.
Then you,
you didn't actually make it.
Yeah,
I'm with you.
I'm,
I'm the nerd who like people used to get mad at during like the unclear
guidance and not doing things or saying like,
just pay your taxes,
kids.
And people be like,
you're so boring.
I'm like,
I have kids,
man.
I just,
I got it.
I have a house.
I have a family and like,
you know,
not worth it to not pay
a little bit extra off the top so pay attention to that stuff i similarly too i got a crypto
accountant probably three years ago and i remember when i was like talking to different accountants
and they seemed like like a lot of them they didn't seem to know what they're talking about
and this crypto accountant he seemed like a little bit of a bro which actually like you know like as
far as crypto goes like at that time especially like okay and then um he uh he jumped in and was like, he jumped in and was like, he jumped in and he was like, yeah, this other guy who sold like 14 mutant apes and
he had this much eight coin. I'm like, okay, this guy knows a thing or two about a thing or two. So,
um, love that dude. Um, go to warp Joe here and then we'll, we'll kind of finish out there
probably and maybe do it again soon, but want to be just going to be respectful of everyone's time.
And I'll wrap at the end with like, sort of like some beginner summary stuff based on what I'm sort of
compiling in my brain from beast.
And as I was always appreciate you,
sir,
for,
for joining us,
but Joe,
go ahead and get in here.
Yeah.
So you guys can hear me.
Gotcha.
First it's first it's Gito.
We've sat with them people and uh that's what they call it
uh secondly um if you're gonna do this your attack strategy should be basically on chain offshore
and like in the second year you should figure out what island you want to set up a holding entity at and then you should utilize that island as
your offshore and uh make yourself an employee of it and um that's kind of the the next level of
removing yourself from um from jurisdiction since you're dealing in global capital, you should be a global citizen. So
that's what I would say. And you can get those things started for under $3,500. It just depends
on what your risk tolerance is when it comes to offshore. So that's my advice.
Joe's always a step and a half ahead of me on this sort of stuff.
No, it's just if you build anything regarding a token, you
have to be offshore simply because you run a different level of risk and, um, you need
asset protection.
Um, if you're doing this, you're acting with the same tools that the federal reserve has,
except you're doing it at an
independent level. There's no way to determine what exactly you're being taxed on because the
tax authorities haven't put out clear guidance on that. So I can understand what I'm going to be
taxed on if I'm an employee of something. But if I have an offshore entity that's doing business in token, then that's simply machines and code talking to digital money. And then that's paying me either as a consultant or as an employee of the entity, which there is some sort of a breach or a hack
i want to choose where i am being represented best for either my data exposure or for uh
what courtroom i end up in when i'm suing so that's that's kind of how i go yeah oh i would
also say one other thing if you're dealing with with an AMM platform, your assets aren't live. They go into a vault, into a vault, and then into a vault. And then what's represented in your wallet is actually, you know, we could call it shadow. ICO knows about that conversation.
um ico knows about that conversation uh we could call it a virtual we could call it a hologram
but it's not really your live assets because security so you're you're you're being issued
an nft version of your position and then your assets are actually in safety until you withdraw
and uh that's how come those platforms are being sued by me so they just need to pay up so that's how come those platforms are being sued by me. So they just need to pay up.
So that's all.
Hope you guys are well.
DeFi lesson of the day, getting a DeFi.
Joe has a 14% chance of suing you, I think, is what we got.
Just pay me my license fees.
That's it.
I mean, look, I know you well enough to know that I would never,
I'd never be on the wrong end of that one.
No, appreciate the thought process there,
especially when it comes to sort of the tax and liability stuff. That said, I'd never be on the wrong end of that one. No, appreciate the thought process there, especially when it comes to
sort of the tax and liability stuff.
That said, I know we're at around 11.
We've been running for about an hour.
Let's do this.
So just as a summary,
I think we got a good summary.
If you go back and even
from the beginning of the space,
you can listen to sort of
what the different types of DeFi
that you could potentially
get involved in are
if you don't understand those.
You know, Teacher Katie was asking
some of the best places
to read up on it.
It is pretty dispersed, but again, people like Beast, i'm probably going to be doing some more beginner based content
oxy has some really good explainers who's on stage so again if you're not following oxy and
checking out oxy's content that's really good easy's on some really good beginner videos um but
a lot of times it's protocol specific again like flow where i've been getting involved a little
more and again people uh I gave away some keys,
but drop some wallet address in the comments as we finish out
and we'll pick some more people.
The, you know, Flow, their account team has explained it to me.
Polygon, I talked to some people over there about how they are,
you know, whether it was Katana or just staking to earn against multiple airdrops.
I would say take away from today if you are getting involved.
Again, not financial advice.
Don't play with the money you can't lose.
Markets are exceptionally risky.
LPing with Solana on Meteora
and finding a pair that you're comfortable with
would be a good place to start.
Choose a wider range
so that it doesn't always go one way or the other
so you can pay attention to it.
So again, a fart coin and Solana bet
might make sense because of the volume there.
I do Solana and USDC because I don't mind it sort of DCAing in there.
So that's one place to actionably start today.
If you are interested, you could go to Meteora,
take one sole and the equivalent USDC,
half a sole, whatever that number is,
or one sole and the equivalent fart coin and put that into a pool and just watch it.
Watch it for 48 hours.
Check it every few hours and just kind of see what it's doing
and then you'll know how it's sliding.
So that will get you into LPing, which is a huge unlock,
as Beech mentioned, one of his favorite, one of my favorite.
Jito, I believe, as Warp Joe said it was,
although I believe it's GIF, not JIF,
and the creator said the otherwise because it's graphical interface,
so I'll still say Gito or Gito.
I'll make my mind up there.
But it's another easy place where you put your Solana, it stakes and earns money.
I mentioned a couple on Flow, because again, I appreciate them providing some keys for people.
So, you know, Anchor is a place where you can stake Flow.
More markets where I have USDF.
I press two buttons.
My USDF is staking earning 15% and also earning me towards the rewards program.
So those are some very easy places to start.
I would say Katana on Polygon was another one I think is really interesting
because, again, you just go.
They have a native swap right there for any vault you want to use.
So that's a good place to start if you're looking.
So I think LPing on Meteora.
I mentioned a couple on Flow there.
Jito and Katana are some very easy places to start.
I would say Hyperliquid, at least for me, is more 2.0
because the chain doesn't play well with MetaMask,
which a lot of people use.
You know, there's Rabe that plays a little better there,
maybe even Phantom.
But I do think, Funky says it's definitely Jito.
There you go.
I do think, though, I would say Hyperliquid,
if you're listening to this space and you're like me
and you're just sort of getting into it,
the only reason I'm playing around in Hyperliquid
is because I have people like Phonics and other friends and Mackie
who are actually helping me walk through this step by step.
So I would say that's probably a more 102 stuff
or even level 200 stuff versus the ones I mentioned before.
Just learn how to do it.
If you're in this space, you should learn how liquidity pools work.
You should learn how to use them.
And simply going on with a small amount of money,
you can see how the money moves
and you can start to get used to it.
And the only way to get better is starting.
But Beast, anything else I missed
before we kind of wrap and let everyone get out of here?
And by the way, I appreciate your time as always.
And you jumping in to say,
we should do a space on this
because I think it is an undereducated thing, especially at the beginner level. Yeah, no, I appreciate your time as always. And you jumping in to say we should do a space on this because I think it is an under-educated thing,
especially at the beginner level.
Yeah, no, I think this is great.
I think that the one thing I'll say to look out for
is cool projects and cool companies
implementing DeFi into their products
in ways that are very accessible.
And that is all that I will say on that at the moment.
Sounds like we just got maybe a little bit, tiny, tiny, little bit of alpha.
But look, appreciate everyone who came through today.
Appreciate Flo for, you know, hitting me in the DMs and offering some keys.
We're going to give those away to some folks as well.
So we'll find some folks to give out some keys to,
to start that rewards program. And the nice part about the keys,
we want the keys because they have keys, boxes, and points.
Every box has points
every key opens a box uh and so in order to get boxes you kind of need to participate in a little
bit of defy and they have some really good beginner easy stuff on there also some low-hanging fruit
points on there so we went with the keys from flow because the things that require the way you get
boxes tends to be you know putting money into a vault on more markets, for example, will get you that.
So the last thing I'll say,
actually very last piece of advice
I'll give actionable advice.
If you're curious, one, ask friends,
find a good group.
Your crew in any bull market
is so fucking important.
Like who you're talking to,
like I spend most of my time
in the DJ network discord
and in the modern market telegram,
that sort of my stack of like really good,
I'm learning from people on top of DMs.
Number two, if you don't have that
or can't find that yet,
listen to shows like Modern Market,
get involved in ones like those.
And then number three,
you have the world at your fingertips
in that six inch screen you're holding in your hands.
ChatGPT has been a wonderful resource
and you can ask it all the stupid questions
and it won't judge you.
So ChatGPT is a a wonderful resource and you can ask it all the stupid questions and it won't judge you. So, um, ChatGPT is a great resource, um, you know, for that as well.
So I guess with that said, let's let everyone sail off into their day for the rest of the day.
Um, and, uh, yeah, let me know if you get involved in this.
I'll find the people for the flow keys, look for those EVM addresses.
But, um, if, you know, you get involved, let me know, like tag me if you're starting to do stuff or if you have questions.
Like, I'm excited because I know a lot of people who are in this room.
And I'm just excited to see more people get involved in this.
Because I flat out was completely clueless a week ago and a week into it.
I'm obsessed.
And I don't want to go and see the sun and my friends anymore.
Because all I want to do is learn more.
So thanks everyone who came through this morning.
We will talk to everybody.
Maybe again in the future.
Maybe we'll do it again soon. But thanks everyone who came through. morning. We will talk to everybody maybe again in the future. Maybe we'll do it again soon.
But thanks to everyone who came through.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day, everybody.
