Market Update for Week 2022-05-23

Published: 2022-05-30


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All of the round data referenced below can be downloaded from here. The data is part of a project that downloads round data periodically and uploads the csv.

New UST and LUNA will fail

The big story over the last few weeks was the spectacular collapse of UST stable coin. We talked about it a bit two weeks ago but the short story is that UST was supposed to be a stable coin backed by a floating coin (LUNA). If UST strayed above its intended price, more UST is minted and LUNA is burned (you can convert UST to LUNA at a favorable exchange). If UST strays below its intended price, UST is burned and LUNA is minted (you can convert LUNA to UST at a favorable rate). As a kicker, you can earn 20% yield on your stable coin, basically a risk free return. What could go wrong?

Well the price of LUNA went to shit along with the price of UST. So there's no amount of LUNA you could mint to support the UST peg. In fact, the more you minted, the lower the price of LUNA got so the less effective it was. In total, the collapse wiped out $45 billion of market cap over a week.

This doesn't pass my smell test. For one how could you yield 20% on a stable asset? How is that sustainable? No one gives you 20%, that's unheard of in traditional finance. One of the riskiest things you can invest in without being institutional investor is stocks and historically they have yielded 8% and varied wildly. If someone is promising you 20% risk free, they're either dumb or scam artists.

Which brings me to the Do Kwon. He's not dumb and he's certainly not taking the L. He's re-launching a new coin, doing an airdrop to some people that lost some money and hoping to spin this up again. His coin collapsed less than a month ago, and you can trade version 2.0 today. What'll be different this time? Absolutely nothing. UST/LUNA lasted about 4 years, I imagine his new project, if it takes off will last less than half that time. And then he'll just spin up another one. At a certain point you have to ask whether this person is nefarious. He knows what he's doing is wrong and will result in the most gullible people losing a lot of money, but he doesn't care. Of course the bag holders will be for this new proposal because they'll have some share. But it's still messed up.



I wrote that every day I become more of a Bitcoin maximalist and scum bags like Do Kwon are the main reason why. He didn't so much as miss a beat. Basically call his old coin "classic" and launch a new one. It's also not entirely clear what he did with the Bitcoin and other crypto reserves he had to support UST. When it started hitting the fan, some UST holders were able to redeem their token supported by the reserves. I've read that those luck enough were insiders (why wouldn't they be?).



Shame on everyone involved. All the exchanges that will list this shit coin. All the developers working on it. And especially Do Kwon for having the nerve to run the same rug-pull twice in a row. I'm going to explore ways to short both new LUNA and UST. The hard thing is its usually expensive to short. If UST is yielding 20%, borrowing it from someone and dumping it will cost you at least 20% because the person lending it out could just use Anchorage protocol to earn 20%, so why would he let you borrow it?



Anyway, I'll keep everyone posted if I find something and hopefully enough people will end this before it gets out of hand.

Action

Volume was respectable although fairly variable with much of the week above 30 BNB



We did have a number of big rounds:

epochstartpool
732252022-05-26 12:18:22120.240818
732242022-05-26 12:13:15111.248566
732272022-05-26 12:28:40102.455781
728892022-05-25 07:28:5093.971531
736012022-05-27 20:35:4391.032824
726792022-05-24 13:27:4589.234260
732232022-05-26 12:08:0989.195118
732292022-05-26 12:39:0186.540732
729442022-05-25 12:12:0280.831439
726592022-05-24 11:44:5076.497711


Winners and Losers



Placeaccountgames playedwonwon USDWinnings Even MoneyAverage bet size
10x9b371993da2ed6f32b8ceda6491c0c326d0e4da2 124 128.98 38,695.0 25.03 4.41
20xfc26b3be9d11b93dd1aa932969dd2e55fec3681d 128 69.19 20,758.0 31.47 1.47
30x8d8aa4f2390dd31add06ce6a9374542020272d6b 99 44.93 13,480.0 18.73 1.95
40x6067d0f351d8fd0306d3bc15468a8c7f65d67e6c 120 39.32 11,795.0 12.68 2.01
50xda412c59e0683d3da4e61dd607f2cfc9911856eb 53 38.0 11,401.0 19.84 2.09
60x59a6d2b9bb2b04a09b84c315e64620d1250a01a9 38 37.62 11,285.0 4.49 8.16
70xc489811e853e10195365228575aeeb7a1c9ff875 285 32.62 9,787.0 3.08 2.23
80x7bb055421f56e28432767eb7e75e479f0a9dcdfa 431 31.56 9,469.0 19.22 1.14
90xcd8346b1d68751b17af213f972df50371cb3baee 157 29.39 8,818.0 2.25 1.77
100x02532860709f4df8682a8b0a715f0006517b00fb 110 21.93 6,580.0 12.98 1.35

We had our first 100 BNB weekly winner in a few weeks. The bet size was very big and the account was inactive until this week. Its initial funding came from a binance hot wallet and eventually the person transferred their entire balance to an aggregator. It's definitely a sophisticated outfit since the few accounts that were funnelling money made a killing on the markets, all with big bet sizes too.

Let's look at the losers

Placefromgames playedwonwon USDWinnings Even MoneyAverage bet size
1 0xad483dc8c4482eafdbebbc98ea66a89e461cfbd9 779 -68.01 -20,404.0 -52.92 0.98
2 0xd9c72e454ceb25cc53a864f190fe2896249718e1 48 -65.46 -19,637.0 -11.08 6.47
3 0xa8decb37e9a0dbde16d7d781ffa44ff1ebb84c2c 108 -64.61 -19,384.0 -25.02 2.06
4 0xd4682c8b567fd987682d8cd7d2d599bdf526c156 38 -62.96 -18,887.0 -8.75 2.61
5 0xc1f265e222c5a4b6c8c536f9cc138c648518b6ac 527 -61.31 -18,393.0 -23.53 2.59
6 0xb55b2f2061048c6240e77f32cff1d2eac70cf317 129 -57.03 -17,110.0 -20.82 0.9
7 0x78105a92ef54072e6b37d251644879f7d0009a4d 24 -52.67 -15,801.0 -5.36 6.03
8 0x2563e690da0b98d1d3e4d03a99d8b2a75c2a7e32 491 -47.95 -14,384.0 -39.88 0.91
9 0x1dfc050456623570ba698ce9412d7bcd34913af9 234 -47.37 -14,210.0 -19.41 1.33
100xe3d89cded7cff330d5dbc2ddc9595fcc4735d3f3 263 -45.87 -13,760.0 -15.48 1.44



After a few crazy weeks with losers, we return to somewhat normalcy. Our top loser is an algo-bot and a fan favorite. This marks like 9th time making the leaderboard, almost always as a loser. He was last on the board last week in 9th place losing 37 BNB. He was also #4 on the top loser board of all time, and I'm happy to say that this week he rose to #3 biggest all time loser with total losses of nearly 780 BNB. And because this is BSC Predict, and we love our losers, we're sending some extra love to 0xad483.



As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments or want my to highlight anything different on my weekly market recaps. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.

Good luck and bet responsibly!