Yeah, for a beginner's foray into this space, DeFi Dad's vids as well as Finematics are pretty good. Any others that you are finding value in? I tend to shy away from the entertaining shilling ones.
I like Aaron Bennett but he's more on the conservative side of DeFi, like long term savings account, but he covers news and stuff. For ideas on good projects with lots of potential but also lots of risks, I go on Crypto Twitter. Just have to make sure I get 3 or more confirmations of different aspects of the projects and the risks (i.e. admin keys are still not burnt or there's a timelock for deploying smart contract changes that can steal everyone's cryptos, or whether the smart contracts have been professionally reviewed or audited for security, etc. There are mitigating factors such as if the smart contract is a clone of a mature project, they discuss running a diff if the changes are minor or pose no danger to users.
Thanks for the info on Finematics, watched the explanation on vaults, made it easy to decide to add YFI to the "safe" crypto long term holdings.
In the context of going bankless, or more like crypto byob (be your own bank, not the other acronym, lol). Sort of DeFi, but really a combination of Crypto and fiat banking. I took out a loan on BlockFi to test it out using BTC, you don't have to sell your cryptos and when you pay off your loan, you are free to withdraw your cryptos back to your wallet. I guess this is similar to asset-based lending in traditional finance where you put your asset as collateral so you can spend without selling your investments. This is an alternative to cashing out your cryptos on Coinbase where you have to sell your cryptos if you want to have some $ I wish Celsius supported my state for borrowing as they have better rates, but maybe in the future... https://blockfi.com/crypto-loans/ https://celsius.network/
If you've ever used Uniswap Dex, you should claim your Uni rewards worth ~$1,000 for each wallet. I just found out I have 5 wallets that I have used Uniswap on, so essentially $5,000 from air(drop). Crypto is amazing. That's the good news. The bad news is that the Ethereum network is clogged up (only 1 successful wallet claim so far). These Uni tokens are listed on Binance (swap them for BTC if you'd like) or you can use Uniswap itself to swap them for Eth or USDC (other stablecoins). https://uniswap.org/blog/uni/
Yeah, the congestion of ETH sucks. It's throttles and hangs any transactions in queue. I experienced the same myself and it resulted in a lot of slippage on trades that could not be timely executed. However the Uni airdrop was a pleasant surprise.
Yea, Ethereum blockchain got a shock with this Uniswap free stimulus $$$, lol. Lots of good stories on crypto twitter, as to some people, 400 Uni (x $3.38 currently) is a lot of money and if he/she used the Uniswap on more than 1 wallet, it's an even bigger windfall. There's a story of a child who received a small amount of Eth from a relative and used Uniswap last year to exchange for a token, but now she's eligible to receive 400 Uni's. I sold all of my Unis last night at ~$3, ended up using Metamask to speed up the claim transactions on all my eligible wallets using 500 Gwei's (setting it under advanced as the Metamask estimate was not in-sync with the network, estimating too low of Gwei) high $30'sh, low $40's fees. I don't have an interest in the project as it's mostly controlled by Coinbase and VC's and whales which could be a good thing, as it's being propped up in price, but not for me. I appreciate the free money, tho DeFi sector has been taking a beating past few days and that debacle with $SAFE (YFI-related) made it worse. I've lost 10's of thousands of $ value. I'm derisking at the moment, cutting my position on cream, closing out BAL and TRB and moving to non-DeFi cryptos which are doing ok (i.e. btc, eth, and others). I should have kept 1 Uni as a badge of honor, as I read more on Twitter, many people are not getting this airdrop even if they have been in cryptos for a while (think of btc only cryptos who would not touch the Eth erc-20 stuff). If DeFi becomes huge in the future, this Uni token is proof that you participated when it was in infancy. uniswap is DEX. Median Gas price seems to be around 203, currently, which is not bad...
$UNI is close to $8, fml, lol. I was going to farm it, but the yield is down to less than 100% APY from over 2000% APY when it was first announced. Too many farmers, so the market is valuing Uni, highly [edit: $8.5 now, I'm gonna stop watching it, it's painful to watch, sold all my free unis at $3]
It's trading around $5ish now. The initial pump on these new contracts can happen faster or go longer than expected. It's difficult for US traders to hedge or go short since we are excluded from these exchanges that geo-block. It's frustrating to see beautiful set-ups and not have the ability to capitalize upon them. As for the DeFi sector, it has turned into a bit of a joke with all the farming and food meme contracts. Coingecko now has a farming/degen sort. It's good in a convoluted way in that the hype is obscuring some legitimate powerhouses. Although I see a lot of chasing that will yield more rekt traders than anything else. I have yet to find a metric that is better at comparing and contrasting like-to-like. Marketcap and Volume doesn't paint a complete picture since it is conflating price with supply. For example, in debank>dex>24hr user, it shows a better metric on the number of participants using a particular LP. When it compares Uni against it's competitors, it's easier to see dominance.
You bring up a great point and something that I have fallen into myself - a recovering BTC maxi. A lot of the BTC maxi's have closed minds and fossilized thinking. They have entirely missed the boat with the possibilities of smart contracts and the grey space between BTC, fiat and dismissed the whole space as 'rent seeking' with a tone of disdain.