RCIF II - Five bullet Friday - Issue # 17

    Crypto markets continue to be very depressed after the china scare. China's firewall is now blocking all major Crypto trading sites like Uniswap or Sushiswap. This caused a lot of market panic and forced selling from bitcoin miners in China.

1. China tried multiple times to kill bitcoin and failed. I remember the China scare from 2017, which pushed bitcoin from $3000 to $1400 when China tried to stop bitcoin trading. It pushed the largest crypto exchange, Binance, out of China. It is no secret that authoritarian governments do not like Bitcoin. They want to have full control over their populace and are worried about losing tax revenue. All the missiles of the government are useless against solving the mathematical problems of cryptography.

2. The US Government is planning on presenting a annual budget of $6 trillion this year. If the Federal Reserve was on the Gold standard, the government would have to raise $ 6 trillion dollars of tax revenue and then buy gold with that $6 trillion and then print $6 trillion US dollars to spend. Now, they ignore the first two steps and jump to printing money with no backing. I think this is great news for bitcoin and ethereum. The effect of this money printing can be clearly seen in commodities.

3. Last year I remember writing about the DeFi market finally reaching total value locked in protocols to $1 billion. Today this value is $60 billion. No other industry is growing at this rate. Last year Coinbase trading volume in May 2020 was $11 billion. In May 2021, Coinbase trading volume was $182 billion so far. The total trading volume in May 2021 in all the crypto exchanges is $2 Trillion dollars. Many people have not yet realized how disruptive DeFi technology is against traditional commercial banks.

4. One of our positions, Rari Governance token (RGT) , took a beating last week. One of the pools which is integrated with Alpha Homora protocol got hacked and the pool was drained. This brought the price down from $25 to $5 very quickly. However, the team has worked around the clock to fix the smart contract bug and asked the stakers to vote to reimburse the wallets from the fees generated from the protocol. They have handled the situation really well and increased my confidence in the team.

5. OHM token is trying to build a decentralized Federal Reserve. Olympus DAO is expected to release their next version of smart contracts in June.  OHM currently has a treasury of $30 million.  After the new version, the treasury will have a larger asset base. The individuals who staked their tokens are constantly receiving 0.6349% increase every 8 hours. Most banks in the US cannot even provide that much interest even on a yearly basis.

Please whitelist my address. Some of you have complained that my messages are going into the SPAM folder in Google, because I have attachments in my messages. I am including the latest article from Wharton about DeFi.

Have a wonderful weekend!

warm regards,

Sam Ikkurty