Five bullet Friday - issue #102

      Crypto markets started rebounding from the earlier market corrections. Ethereum successfully implemented the EIP-1559 proposal, which started reducing the supply of ethereum continuously. This is massively bullish for Ethereum.

1. The US Senate is trying to pass an infrastructure bill that is 2700 pages long. On the name of infrastructure, they have set aside $250 million to remove invasive plant species, $50 million dollars for extending Amtrak service in Canada, $50 million to see how they tax people based on the number of miles driven by an individual. They managed to sneak in a provision forcing miners and software developers to file reports with the IRS. I request all of you to call your senator and ask them to change this rule: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/actions/stop-the-senate-from-sneaking-through-total-surveillance-of-the-crypto-economy/

2. I am very impressed with the growth of the Axie Infinity game. Currently, this position is not showing in our Zapper portfolio, but shows in Debank. The total number of users jumped from 350,000 to 1 million daily active users in a matter of two weeks. This is a paradigm shift in gaming. In the centralized game companies like Fortnite, Roblox were minting money by selling in-game items to gamers. These are the walled gardens similar to AOL, Compuserve before the Internet opened up to the masses via Netscape browser. Now NFTs introduced the concept of digital property rights in the Metaverse. This is not a different game, but a radically different business model.

3. I think the CNBC stock pundits keep talking about next quarter earnings, while completely ignoring the fact that the Federal Reserve is buying close to $50 billion per week in new bonds. When you and I buy bonds, we are buying with our savings. When the Federal Reserve buys these bonds, it is actually called 'printing money' because they create this money out of thin air. This is resulting in asset bubbles in real estate, stocks and commodities. Price to sales is a good measure to see the froth in the market. Today we are in a bubble bigger than Dot com.

4. We kept adding to our YGG position last week. Most of you understand how Uber works. YGG is an extension of Uber's business model into the Metaverse. Instead of driving taxis, people in the future will login into a game in the metaverse and earn some in-game items. Whatever they earn on that day, can be cashed out immediately into their local fiat currencies. If I extend the Uber analogy to YGG, it is like lending cars to the drivers for a share of his revenue. It is very heart-warming to see that it has lifted 25,000 people out of poverty. Many of the players are using their earnings to put food on the table for their families in the middle of this pandemic.

5. I have staked our YGG tokens in Sushiswap. By providing liquidity to other buyers, we are collecting new YGG tokens. We are earning about 1200 tokens every 2 days. We currently hold 225,695 tokens of YGG. The network effects around YGG are very strong as gamers are a close-knit community. Decentralized, permissionless , digital property-rights enabled metaverse games will enable billions of people to earn a steady living, while staying at home. YGG will own big chunks of this metaverse.

Wish you all a wonderful weekend!

your humble digital  farmer,

Sam Ikkurty