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Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logisticsChris Young reported that Elon Musk: SpaceX will build over 1,000 Starships to move 1 million humans to Mars:
Attributed to General Omar Bradley
The plan is to "build 1000+ Starships to transport life to Mars. Basically, (very) modern Noah's Arks," Musk wrote, reiterating a statement he had made during a recent interview with TED curator Chris Anderson. In that interview, he stated that SpaceX would achieve this goal by 2050.Wikipedia reports that:
SpaceX and Musk have stated their goal of colonizing Mars to ensure the long-term survival of humanity, with an ambition of sending a thousand Starship spacecraft to Mars during a Mars launch window in a very far future.SpaceX's Starship is claimed to be able to "carry more than 100 tons of payload to the lunar surface in a single flight" and, using on-orbit refueling, "up to 100 tons all the way to Mars". The Mars mission depends upon refueling the Starship on-orbit from fuel tankers launched beforehand on the Super Heavy booster.
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TL;DR: DeFi is neither decentralized, nor very good finance, so regulators should have no qualms about clamping down on it to protect the stability of our financial system and broader economy.And also DeFi risks and the decentralisation illusion by Sirio Aramonte, Wenqian Huang and Andreas Schrimpf of the Bank for International Settlements who write:
While the main vision of DeFi’s proponents is intermediation without centralised entities, we argue that some form of centralisation is inevitable. As such, there is a “decentralisation illusion”. First and foremost, centralised governance is needed to take strategic and operational decisions. In addition, some features in DeFi, notably the consensus mechanism, favour a concentration of power.Below the fold I look at new evidence that the process of centralizing DeFi is essentially complete.
A small number of participants are dominating the world of decentralized finance as the crypto sector, which seeks to replicate financial markets without middlemen, still hasn’t recovered from FTX’s collapse a year ago.
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Most categories in DeFi — from peer-to-peer lending to decentralized exchanges — are seeing capital largely held in a few major projects, according to data compiled by crypto-risk modeling company Gauntlet. The firm used a popular measure of market concentration and competition called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.Wikipedia explains the HHI thus:
HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each competing firm in the industry—expressed as either fractions, decimals, or whole numbers—and then summing the resulting numbers ... The result is proportional to the average market share, weighted by market share. As such, it can range from 0 to 1.0, moving from a huge number of very small firms to a single monopolistic producer.
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Based on the metric, the most competition exists between decentralized finance exchanges, with the top four venues holding about 54% of total market share. Other categories including decentralized derivatives exchanges, DeFi lenders, and liquid staking, are much less competitive. For example, the top four liquid staking projects hold about 90% of total market share in that category, according to Gauntlet.
Protocol | Revenue | Market |
---|---|---|
$M | Share % | |
Lido | 304 | 55.2 |
Uniswap V3 | 55 | 10.0 |
Maker DAO | 48 | 8.7 |
AAVE V3 | 24 | 4.4 |
Top 4 | 78.2 | |
Venus | 18 | 3.3 |
GMX | 14 | 2.5 |
Rari Fuse | 14 | 2.5 |
Rocket Pool | 14 | 2.5 |
Pancake Swap AMM V3 | 13 | 2.4 |
Compound V2 | 13 | 2.4 |
Morpho Aave V2 | 10 | 1.8 |
Goldfinch | 9 | 1.6 |
Aura Finance | 8 | 1.5 |
Yearn Finance | 7 | 1.3 |
Stargate | 5 | 0.9 |
Total | 551 |
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abnormal first-significant-digit distributions, size rounding, and transaction tail distributions on unregulated exchanges reveal rampant manipulations unlikely driven by strategy or exchange heterogeneity. We quantify the wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged over 70% of the reported volume.Unfortunately, despite knowing about the manipulation, the CFTC approved Bitcoin futures ETFs. Among the requests that the SEC refused was one from Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Grayscale sued the SEC and, back in August, the panel of judges ruled in their favor:
The court's panel of judges said Grayscale showed that its proposed bitcoin ETF is "materially similar" to the approved bitcoin futures ETFs. That's because the underlying assets— bitcoin and bitcoin futures - are "closely correlated," and because the surveillance sharing agreements with the CME are "identical and should have the same likelihood of detecting fraudulent or manipulative conduct in the market for bitcoin."The prospect of the SEC approving this ETF and others from, for example, BlackRock and Fidelity led to something of a buying frenzy in Bitcoin as shown in the "price" chart, and in headlines such as Bitcoin ETF Exuberance Drives Four-Week ‘Nothing for Sale’ Rally:
With that in mind, the court ruled that the SEC was "arbitrary and capricious" to reject the filing because it "never explained why Grayscale owning bitcoins rather than bitcoin futures affects the CME’s ability to detect fraud."
Bitcoin is climbing for a fourth consecutive week, with the digital token’s price lingering just below an 18-month high of $38,000, as more investors bet that US exchange-traded funds that hold the largest cryptocurrency are on the verge of winning regulatory approval.Below the fold I look into where this euphoria came from, and why it might be misplaced
February 2021, when the Purpose bitcoin ETF launched in Canada. Unlike GBTC, which trades over-the-counter, Purpose trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, close to NAV. At 1%, its management fees are half that of GBTC. Within a month of trading, Purpose quickly absorbed more than $1 billion worth of assets.So why would a US-based Bitcoin ETF be a big deal? The thesis is that by making it easier for US
The number of over-the-counter desks has declined, with mainly the more conservative ones remaining, according to Tegan Kline, co-founder of Edge & Node, which developed a crypto project called The Graph. That, combined with the erosion of leverage, has sapped liquidity.
“Leverage is gone,” Kline said. “A lot of people have pulled money out of the system or they have money stuck at FTX.”
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Quarter | Retail $M |
Institutions $M |
Institutions % |
---|---|---|---|
Q4 2021 | 2,185.8 | 90.8 | 4.2 |
Q1 2022 | 965.8 | 47.2 | 4.9 |
Q2 2022 | 616.2 | 39.0 | 6.3 |
Q3 2022 | 346.1 | 19.8 | 5.7 |
Q4 2022 | 308.8 | 13.4 | 4.3 |
Q1 2023 | 352.4 | 22.3 | 6.3 |
Q2 2023 | 310.0 | 17.1 | 5.5 |
Q3 2023 | 274.5 | 14.1 | 5.1 |
Trading volume is the lifeblood of a crypto exchange — and Coinbase’s is through the floor. The exchange saw $76 billion in total trading volume in Q3, down from $92 billion in Q2. (They did $547 billion in trading volume in Q4 2021, their last profitable quarter.)So volume is down 84% from its peak. No wonder Coinbase laid off staff in June 2022 and January 2023. And why Blockchain.com just raised money at less than half its valuation in 2022.
selling unregistered securities and running an exchange, a broker-dealer, and a clearinghouse as part of the same operation — and without registering any of these.Castor and Gerard point out that:
If the SEC wins, Coinbase may have to stop trading in any cryptos other than CFTC-regulated commodity coins such as bitcoin. There isn’t enough volume in those for Coinbase to live on.Lynn Parramore transcribes an interview with Jim Chanos in Jim Chanos: “The Crypto Ecosystem Is Well-Suited for the Dark Side of Finance.” that expresses the famed short-seller's skepticism:
This is why Coinbase is so insistent on trading blatant unregistered securities — it’s all they have left for a business model.
JC: ... The last iteration that you just touched upon is the hope by aspects of Wall Street that crypto gets institutionalized because the one thing that Bitcoin really has — and we’ve pointed this out to our clients — is ridiculous levels of transaction fees associated with it. So Coinbase, for example, which is one of our shorts, charges customers over 4% per round trip trade to transact in a so-called currency.So, even if there is a flood of retail money into Bitcoin ETFs, the exchanges' fee income isn't going to recover. Chanos' students share his skepticism about the industry:
LP: Why would people be willing to pay that?
JC: Well, exactly. They think the asset price is going to go up. It’s like a Nasdaq stock, not a currency. So they’ll pay, and Wall Street wants the fees. The cost structure in crypto is quite high and so the fees are really high. You need retail investors because institutions aren’t going to be paying 4% per round trip to buy and sell Bitcoin. Mom and Pop are, so Wall Street needs to keep the public interested in the crypto space. The paradox, of course, is that if BlackRock and Vanguard and whoever do get ETFs, it’s actually going to force fees down, not up, because ETF fees will be a fraction of the cost of what Coinbase or Binance charge. It’s like mutual fund fees and stock trading fees: they’ve all converged to zero.
LP: Are your Wisconsin students still excited about crypto?Will the flood happen? Teresa Xie's Former Crypto Day Traders Say No Thanks Even as Bitcoin Roars Back presents some negative evidence:
JC: They were much more enthusiastic in 2021, 2020, 2019. There’s a lot less enthusiasm now in terms of students going to work for a crypto startup or whatever. I had a number of them in 2020 and 2021 who said they were going to work in the digital currency or blockchain space. I don’t hear that as much anymore.
LP: How about your Yale students?
JC: The last two springs, they’ve been skeptical. During the spring semester of 2022, Bankman-Fried’s now-infamous interview with Bloomberg dropped about an hour before my class started. I ran to the audiovisual department to see if I could get the interview up on our screen because to me it was such a bombshell. This was where Bankman-Fried basically called the crypto ecosystem a giant Ponzi scheme. I told the class it was very rare to get an industry leader telling you that his industry is a Ponzi scheme. That was seven months before the collapse.
Craig Murray, who estimates he made almost $200,000 in the market, says he escaped losing everything to FTX by a hair after friends in the industry heard whispers about its imminent collapse. By that point, the 23-year-old — who lives in New York and recently dropped out of Vanderbilt University — had made up his mind.So it seems unlikely that there will be a huge flood of retail dollars into the market. Even if there were, they would go into Bitcoin ETFs, which would present the exchanges with two big problems:
“That kind of put me over the edge,” Murray said. “I just decided it wasn’t worth it. Why would I have my money in this space when there’s a chance that one day it could just all go away?”
Another sign that retail investing in crypto isn’t returning to previous levels can be seen in weekday versus weekend volumes, with the presumption that the typical person trading on a weekend is a day trader.
“It’s not unusual nowadays to see weekday trading volume average 50% higher values than weekend trading volume, whereas in the past this ratio was almost 1:1,” said Fredrick Collins, chief executive and founder of crypto data platform Velo Data.