It’s been a bit since I last posted. I know I say this a lot, but this time it’s true - it’s been over a month and a half. The last time I put something out, crypto was cooked. Dead, abandoned, ruined, destined to fail, disaster from the start. Today? We’re alright.
Sure, we almost crashed an air traffic website tracking Pelosi’s flight in hopes she’d land safe so BTC could go up 1.5%, but we’re holding out just fine. Tomorrow we’ve got another CPI announcement, because we definitely care about that sort of thing. In about a month we’ll probably be entering WW3 after China invades Taiwan, but right now? We’re good.
I’ve struggled quite a bit over the summer to put any of my thoughts into words. The days blend together, the nights are long and my window AC unit doesn’t keep me cool enough to sit down and write coherently. I was on a tear for a while, writing about god only knows what. Curve Wars, on-chain options protocols, some guy named Dani; it all started to blend together after a while, before I realized I was doing too much flamboyant writing and not enough research.
I took some time away, came back and wrote about DeFi 3.0 (hahaha), narratives and cyclicality, some new protocols and then UST blew up. I came back in June, wrote three articles in the span of maybe two days and retreated away. I’ve learned a lot this summer, or I’d like to think that I have. Paying attention to crypto everyday is a chore, but it’s worth it. Whether you’re obsessing over charts or refreshing your curated Twitter lists every ten minutes to see what Sisyphus tweeted from his 17th alt, you pick up on things. Will the information you absorb translate to success in the next golden bull run? Doubtful, but there is a sliver of hope.
After some deep thought, I’d decided anything I wanted to write was never going to be good enough. It wouldn’t be analytical enough, it wouldn’t have enough substance or it wouldn’t be anything that someone other than myself would enjoy - so why am I writing now?
I had an epiphany last night.
Maybe a minor one, maybe some kind of enlightened brain fog or some inexplicable split-second connection to the universe, but I had one. When I first created this substack, I did it out of boredom. I hadn’t expected anyone to read it, just as I’d never expected anyone but my parents to read my articles in the school newspaper my junior and senior year of high school. But then the worst thing imaginable happened for someone who was trying to fly under the radar - people began reading what I had to say, spreading it on the internet to anonymous frogs and anime characters. Suddenly, I was an armchair expert on a niche internet topic called the Curve Wars. How did this happen?
Well, I think I got pretty lucky.
The stock market had interested me, a way to conjure money out of thin air. I saw crypto as a 21st century evolution of this, a way to make and lose money in an easier way. When I started engaging on Twitter, I realized there was a pretty cool community behind it. I guess there was a story to be told in-between the tweets and I jumped on it. I didn’t know a ton about the underlying mechanisms of Curve or Convex at first, so I took a lot of notes. Within days, I was hooked.
Since then, I’ve realized it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of Twitter attention. You like the dopamine boost when you see a tweet get 10 or 15 likes in a minute, so you keep saying things that people will like so they’ll engage with your tweet. After a while, you forget what you were on Twitter to do in the first place. I’d even gotten distracted over the amount of views or comments my substack articles were getting, obsessing about when to post them so the most people online could see them.
No more.
From now on, I’m going to treat writing like I used to. Before I was hounding Twitter for six hours a day, scouring Telegram chats and reading 30 useless Medium articles in one sitting, I was writing for fun. I’m going to start doing that more often and quit the obsession I once had with gaining attention online. Sure, I’ll still tweet pointless things for fun, but that’ll probably never stop.
When you’re plugged into crypto for most of your day, it can feel like nothing is happening because you see the same topic rehashed over and over and over again. If I’d have stopped to write my thoughts down each day and condense the things I’ve seen, I would probably be feeling much better about everything. I don’t have a schedule lined up for what I want to write about or how to go about releasing things, so I think the plan is to just post more frequently but whenever I feel like it. There are only a couple of topics that interest me at the moment, these being the merge and Layer 2s. Aside from this, I haven’t felt a draw to write about a narrative or subset of crypto in a fun way, because it just hasn’t felt fun.
While I can say that I won’t be treating my substack as a personal blog or stream of consciousness swamp like my Twitter, I will say that I’m going to stop being so selective about what I put out to the world. Admist the mess of personal updates and my thoughts on random events that occur in the crypto world, there will still (hopefully) be alpha and well-written longer posts that make even the boldest of substackoooors fall asleep in their armchair.
If I had to guess, I’d say there will be a report on the merge done by end of the week. There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter, most notably from Galois. I think it’s time I throw my hat back in the ring and remind people I’m more than a cartoon grim reaper who tweets Apple Music screenshots and engagement bait. I’m grateful to have an audience of any size who enjoys reading what I say, so thank you if you’ve made it this far. I promise the next one won’t disappoint.
Glad to have you back bud! always enjoy when your name pops up in my email.. keep em comin at your own pace and i will continue to soak up the knowlege given to me..Thanks!
looking forward to your thoughts on the merge and beyond thanks man