Summary and TLDR for the seasoned experts so you can either add/correct/ignore post:

• The "ideology" (controversial - conspiracy)
• Historical deep dive into (defi) dApps uses and how to use them
• Crypto cycles
• Insights from being in the market for a few cycles
• Current Macroeconomics
• Advise for Do's and Dont's (it's controversial as everyone has different opinions)

^{Important Note}

^{I am not a CFA, nor am I an accredited investor. I am a dApp builder who had a little bit of success in DeFi. I am just giving my insights and this does not reflect any certified financial advisor's advise. That being said, CFA cannot give you money making advise either. Always read between the lines and always do your own research.}

Start

The year is 2024, you are seeing bitcoin and crypto coming into your timeline more and more. USA just elected a president who is pro crypto. Elon Musk is jumping up and down on Trump rally and he's also pro crypto. You are wondering "is this just internet magic money? Is this a ponzi scheme? Why the heck would I use a currency , fiat already exists. There are no additional use cases"

The Ideology

^{You can ignore this part if you are already tired of reading similar summary over and over again. Remember this is MY opinion and does not reflect everyone's opinion. This part also has a lot of compiled conspiracy theory and not my own.}

1912, Titanic just sank and took down old banking system. The Rothschild bankers and few others who happened to be off the boat, has now gripped the world financial system. Federal Reserve which can indefinitely print money supply in exchange for gold was established in 1913. WW1 and WW2 followed shortly which introduced massive amounts of temporary tax (we still are in that temporary taxation system). Till 1970, we had this certificate (now fiat money) , that was printed and backed by Gold, oil and few other global commodities. The more commodity a country had, the more value it's printed certificate (dollar, rupee etc.) had. Gold and oil was the "native liquidity currency". Remember this: "native liquidity currency". USA being the new super leader, decided to hoard as much gold and oil possible by dealing with as many countries as possible. US dollar or any other fiat currency had this pair ($ Country's money / Gold)

1971, USA has a significant amount of gold, and oil, and a grip on the world. USSR (now Russia) was and still is it's arch rival. By now, USA has already made a few great decision for itself by establishing itself as a world native liquidity currency. USA decided to depeg the gold from it's native liquidity.

Which means before it was ($ USD / Gold ) but now it's ($ USD / ____). Where as the rest of the world was ($ Rupee / USD), ($Yen / USD). Trades were and still happens in USD, even now. If you want to send a shipment of paint from China to Bangladesh, it's done in USD. Not yen, not taka.

Now the question is, if my country's currency has a US dollar reserve and USD is being treated as one of the major liquidity currency, what about USD? What is USD's own native liquidity pair? :)
I will leave the history of 1971-2000s fill out your imagination.

From the 1900 - 2000, the old banking system has significantly shifted from being Gold backed to US dollar backed. USA is also printing as much as it wants out of thin air with nothing but war behind it's liquidity backing. Any country that is trying to get back to gold or oil standard has been uprooted. So paper money is literally being made from trees.

Fiat currency supply keeps going up, value keeps going down. If USA prints, your country's currency is gaining strength but that all depends on whether they are NOT printing themselves. This macro economics majorly affects us and crypto every single day. The key for your country is to stop printing while USA prints.

Your parents have immediately felt the affects of this depegging over 1970s - 2000s. Everything inflated fast. Their salary was not that far off of inflated value of homes, cars, food. Taxes were not that bad, it was supposed to be temporary but it was acceptable.

You were born in the 80s - 2000s, now you are either in your 20s or your 40s. You are in this subreddit trying to figure out how do you get rich via crypto and how to get out of this rut. Where's this get rich quick scheme?

2009 - Satoshi (a person or group of people or psyop by the banking system), invented BTC Bitcoin. Digital currency that can't be printed. The idea that one day it will become a native liquidity currency like gold or oil. Unhackable because you'd have to hack all the mining computers all at once. Mining means you use your computer to act as part of the ledger system that keeps transactions all in sync and calculated while solving a formula to SLOWLY mine 21 million bitcoin (total). All of a sudden you can send money overseas without any issues, albeit transaction fee is expensive af. However, this is the only thing banks and feds cannot touch or tax(However, we all know decentralized - they cannot, centralized - they can, we will dive in to this later). You can hold on to it and battle this unlimited printing of fiat. You know rest of the usual story that people say so we won't be diving more into this.

Deep dive into Defi

Decentralized is a word that gets thrown around every where. Everyone claims to be decentralized in crypto and btc subforums. However, 90% of the people are just buying and holding in CEX (centralized exchanges like binance). They are then selling it for USDT for profit or loss, and sending it back to their banks for fiat. They were never decentralized. They don't use bitcoin for anything. They don't use ethereum for anything. They don't use solana for anything.

So what can you use these coins for? Is it just for silk road like the early bitcoin days? I pay someone in btc and someone gives me the limited edition pokemon card on ebay? Sure, but no.

DeFi truly started during introduction of Ethereum by an alpha centauri alien called Vitalik. It didn't have a max supply like bitcoin, it was exactly like fiat in the sense that you can print it. However, printing was not controlled by the ETH foundation, it was printed by miners. You had to mine it. Why would we buy eth if it's still being printed?

ETH had 3 tricks up it's sleeve.

1. dApps (decentralized apps - it's what apps are to smart phones - whaaaat?)
2. Layer 2 EVMs (make your own network - wow!)
3. tokens (its like a coin, you can attach a name to)

If Bitcoin is gold , Ethereum is silver. Gold is a store of value, where silver is a tool

2018 - The birth of Uniswap:

dApp builders like myself started scrambling and figuring out what to make. What can we all make in this brand new finance world?

One of the first key things that came out was Uniswap. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange. Anyone can make a token and upload it with eth as it's native liquidity pair (token/ETH). In return Uniswap gave that user a liquidity pool token which is like a key that you can use to unlock the pair and pull out the money if they wanted.

No more applying to CEX like binance for listing your own project, no more accredited investor status required for buying and selling things, no tax (controversial), and definitely cannot be frozen by banks.

You can buy and sell any token that you want, you can make your own token (if you knew how to code in ethereum smart contract language called solidity), and you can make your token tradeable via uniswap. All you had to do was go on subforums and talk about your own tokens. What you needed was a wallet like metamask with actual ETH (not in CEX), you needed to press wallet connect on uniswap, and spend that ETH to buy tokens, or sell tokens to get some ETH. There were no middle men. No one can hack uniswap.

Now what happened really? Our core degenerate mindset got us to start building shitcoins by now. 99% of the tokens on uniswap are scams, the users just unlocked and withdrew the liquidity (ETH) with the liquidity pool token. What if the token smart contract was a scam by itself? I will put a list of things for you to see before you buy any shitcoins directly on uniswap.

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2020 - The birth of DxSale, and other launchpads

Ah, this is something that takes you to some of the golden age of shitcoins. DxSale and Unicrypt made it easy for anyone to make a token. You didn't need to know how to write contracts anymore, those defi apps made it for you and you own it. Your wallet owns the token as the creator. You can make a token within seconds without knowing how to code, and raise funds in those same apps. Once the funds are raised, it automatically uploaded the token/ETH as a liquidity pair on Uniswap. Uniswap returned the liquidity pool token to the Launchpad smart contracts which automatically locked the liquidity pool (LP) token (key). This solved the number one issue with Uniswap launches, which is scam by unlocking LP and disappearing in to thin air.

Great, now all you had to do was marketing and you have a token on ethereum, you could either try to launch it hard and make your coin go 100x or if you were a scam - you would've just found another way like dump the team tokens or perhaps add "fee system"

Out came the rebase tokens, fee tokens, burn tokens etc. People started making custom tokens with some sort of fee at every buys and sells. Scammers decided to make buy fee 1% and sell fee 99%. You can buy but not sell, even if you buy it on launchpads like Dxsale or Dex like Uniswap. Scammers just like to abuse the system in deFi. It's the wild west. You either made a 83500x (yes it happened), or you lost it all. You probably lost it all if you were there in the wild west of 2021.

dAPP builders though sold the shovels by making these apps in Ethereum and other L2s. The great part is, when we made these apps for Ethereum, it worked on Layer 2 networks like coinbase's Base network, so when another network became popular because of degenerate gamblers - these dApps already supported it. For example Binance smart chain network (BSC) was really popular around 2021-2022. Instead of using eth, people would use BNB to use these apps or make any transaction, BNB was the native currency and liquidity currency of BSC.

Was it all just financial or were there other use cases for Ethereum apps?

NFTs: The type of token we never wanted but we still got

Out came NFTs, ah NFTs... the middle child no one wants to talk about any more. NFTs were tokens that were not divisible. You cannot divide them like a regular token. Which means they had a different use case. You cannot really make it uniswap tradable because you had to buy a full NFT not a 0.00000001 of an NFT. All you can do is list your NFTs and some one else purchases it.

Instantly, it became synonymous with art (jpegs). dApps like Rarible came out and started trying to be a marketplace for making and listing your NFTs. Some of you paid 100k for a ape's picture. I myself was not into NFTs except for my attempt at building an NFT fighting game.

Eventually scammers found their way into NFT world as well. They used it to sell NFTs but never build anything else after that. Other ways they've used it is to launder money that they've made from scamming from traditional tokens. NFTs died as fast as they came.

Farming

One of the best use cases of dApps was farming apps like Beefy. You can earn an apy by using providing liquidity to Beefy farms. You can make a 6-11% by using USDT or a variation of USD (stable coins) which was a safe-ish way to make money. (Luna usd was not safe as we all know). My own experience with farming was subpar at most, but it's my fault - i was scared of flash crashes of any coins whether they were a good coin or not. However, this is much safer than the shitcoin wild west of launchpads and uniswap. Farming is sort of like managed savings account, you manage the farm you want to gather apy from and hope nothing crashed and wiped you out.

Till 2023, Ethereum and EVMs (Layer 2 networks) looked like it had all the game on their hands. All the app developers are on it. "There are no other ethereum killer". Plenty of different networks came and went. I remember trying to learn a different network's code and it just was not worth learning at the time... it was going great for us until... fire nation attacked (Solana).

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2024 Solana and it's golden child Pump fun with it's dex Raydium.

Solana is a different network. It's not a layer 2 of Ethereum. Holy smokes its fast, holy smokes it doesn't work sometimes but when it does, im not spending $10 when i buy or sell a shitcoin. What's uniswap? Raydium is here. Dxsale? Nah son, it's pump fun. No more putting token amount, and calculating how many tokens I get as a developer, and how much for marketing yada yada yada. All it took on pump fun was $1 worth of solana and my solana token was live. I can just live stream on twitch and market my shitcoin. Just last night (relative to when im writing this on nov 24), some guy had his girlfriend inside a cage on twitch and raising funds on pump fun. No more locking liquidity, we burn the liquidity.

Scammers are no longer only using technical tactics to scam, scammers have gotten dumber but bolder. They're scamming on live stream and showing their face.

Solana started getting hot, it went 10x within a year due to so many people switching from ETH and other EVMs to play on this hot shiny new tech. Out with solidity coding, Rust is my new best friend. Ethereum killer? Yet to find out, but this is the only network that came this close.

You want to be in this new wild west? All you need is Phantom wallet with Real Solana (not CEX solana), connect to dApps like raydium or pump fun and start your degeneracy. Just like 2021, either you make 80,000x or zero. Most of the time you lose everything.

I was one of the loser dApp founders who decided not to sell shovels in this new wild west of Solana. I am now outwitted by Solana companies.
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Bridge:

So how do you stay decentralized while moving funds from ETH/EVM L2s to the new wild west solana? Thats where bridge "dApp" came from. The reason I put quotation is because they are not quite decentralized. They have some sort of code in between to move funds from one network to other for you with a fee. However by doing this, you avoid putting large sums of money into an exchange and getting it stuck due to whatever reasons. Perhaps you wanted to avoid identification (KYC) and linking it to your bank. deBridge is a very good bridge that everyone uses. Very easy to use.

Bridges have been prone to be hacked due to their centralized nature in between the networks. Cross chain bridges are easier to hack than any dApps.

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How do you avoid getting scammed or hacked or just in general lose money in Defi?

• If you are diving into the old world of EVMs, remember the tokens can have variable fees like I've mentioned before. Use tools like tokensniffer to see if it's something similar. If a coin has 99% sell fee, it means you can buy but cannot sell.
• Check dextools or dexscreeners for the shitcoin to see how much liquidity is there, whether it's locked on Dxlock or Unicrypt, or whether it's burned.
• Check if it's a honey pot. Many times, a hot token on these chart apps will have 150k liquidity but only 500 holders. If it's 150k liquidity, assume it should have over 3000 holders.
• Check if it's a CTO (Community take over coin). Many scammers now a days rug pull their own coins, and perform a CTO with another telegram or twitter account. They pretend to be community member who's hell bent on getting this shitcoin up and running again. They rug it for the second time. Avoid CTOs.
• I highly suggest checking solana based token's advice on how to check for scams as I am not the best person for Solana based shitcoin scams.
• Never connect to unknown dApps. Defi is a world where YOU are responsible. Some dApps out there can drain your wallet. Do not connect or sign things on your wallet that you don't know what it's for. Always do your research on the dApps.
• If you are new and not used to trenches, be prepared to lose 99.99% of your sol or eth on shitcoins. That's how you learn what to look out for, honestly..
• Do not buy NFTs at the moment, they are dead.
• If you are not within the first 10 buyers of a hot shitcoin, you are last. You will be exit liquidity. Many marketcaps reach 10 million market cap then back down to 100k. It is what it is. Buy high sell low logic applies almost every time.

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2027 and beyond - Has bitcoin become a dinosaur? What's next for DeFi?

This is a very good topic and maybe an insight that you'd like to know for the next in this crypto wild west of Defi. Yes bitcoin is old, bitcoin is slow. However, bitcoin has and always will be king. It does not print like eth or solana.

But what about making shitcoins on Bitcoin? Can Bitcoin have something like Eth or Sol?

There already is something like that, it's called "Runes". Runes is a HOT new protocol that uses Bitcoin's messaging system to let you make tokens (they're called runes on bitcoin). It's a slow protocol currently which takes about 10 minutes to 30 minutes for a transaction and costs alot. It congests bitcoin miners.

Crypto is all about the hot new thing. The hot new thing always comes one cycle earlier and gets popular in the next cycle. I will explain the cycles in the next topic. One hot shitcoin equivalent of runes is called DOG*GO*TO*THE*MOON ($DOG). It's the biggest rune currently on the bitcoin ecosystem. Its around 1B mcap already.

Why am I mentioning Runes? I am not sure whether Runes will be the next big thing. However I do know one thing, bitcoin has the biggest maxis and biggest share of the market. Runes protocol opened up DeFi for bitcoin. If you want to make your own runes, you can download Magic Eden Wallet or Phantom Wallet, and use Magic Eden Wallet to trade runes.

Using the same messaging system, there's also an NFT equivalent called "Ordinals". I would not buy Ordinals , it will suffer the same fate as NFTs.

The beauty of Runes is that the native currency is Bitcoin. There are no other coins that you need to buy before you dive into Runes shitcoin narratives. Could it beat 2024 Solana world? Who knows? All I know is, a few dApp builders are racing to solve a few problems with the runes ecosystem including myself.

What about SUI? My crypto friend was talking about SUI at work

Do your own research about SUI. It could also very well be the next Solana. SUI is much faster than Bitcoin Runes so it's easy to use. Only time will tell whether a slow titan (Bitcoin) or a small chain like SUI will win the next cycles hype.

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Narrative advice

Every cycle, check for the next narrative. You can buy and hope that your picks become the hot new topic in the next cycle. Something that is brewing now like bitcoin runes shitcoins or dapps OR sui native coin, sui shit tokens or dapps might be the winner in 2027. It's upto the dApp developers to come up with the hot new shovel that will drive these type of narratives.

Crypto Cycles and Insight

I am sure you've heard about the bitcoin halving cycles and have learned that majority of the people use these cyclical nature to buy low and sell high. 6 months post halving is when bull run tends to start. A few months later Alt season where the alt coins (ETH, Solana etc.) start to run and it ends with a bang with memes.

However, in 2024, we've started with memes. There was a huge pump before halving and some people are saying that the cycle is left shifted. Others are saying that this is a super cycle. No matter what happens and have already happened, if you look at the chart, 2022 was the lowest point that your crypto expert friend have DCA'd through. They have already expected that halving or around halving will be the bull run. So far they look like geniuses, but a dump will come again eventually. It's your job to understand how the previous cycles worked and how this cycle is so far. Find similarities and differences between the previous cycles and this cycle.

Some example of similarities:

• Halving again called the bull run (controversial I know - you may have another opinion)
• BTC climbing before alt season truly starts
• We are in phase 4 of bitcoin cycle (again controversial)
• We are in Belief or Thrill stage in psychology of market (controversial)

Some examples of differences:

• Meme season started first this time around
• Pre halving pump
• Institutional acceptance (American and Global ETFs)

With these differences, you must make your own judgement. Does institutional acceptance mean a super cycle? Do these new boomers who buy the ETFs pull out fast because they think a gain of 20% is a gain of 2 years ? But crypto is used to 300% - 400% minimum.. what happens now?

No one knows honestly, and everyone's entry point is different. It's up to you when you want to enter. You can either enter now in this part of cycle or enter during a bear market in 2 years. What if the bear market does not come for 4 years? Do you just sit on fiat?

Only YOU can make your decision, I am just here to provide you with some history and narrative.

Okay I want to enter now, what are my options? What are the narratives? I understood Defi and bitcoin cycles but what about meme , AI or gaming narratives?

Meme season is a very risky season, the pumps will come without any build up and dump before you can pull out. The pumps usually last 1 day before a 90% dump

AI and Gaming are a hit or miss, you can do your own research to see whether any of those coins pumped right before halving. If they did, perhaps they are the winning horse you want to take on.

Overall, do your own research into the winning horses and sit tight. If they're already in All time high (ATH), perhaps avoid it since it's in "price discovery". Once it's in price discovery you must be ready to DCA out (take profits), instead of timing the top. No one knows where the top is. Currently Alt Season has yet to start. Bitcoin needs to stop before Alts pump.

Macroeconomics

This is another controversial topic as others may have other opinions but aside from halving where the supply is cut, interest rate of Global liquidity (USD) still has a large part to play with bitcoin price. When they print USD out of thin air for cheap (low interest), investors tend to put it into stocks , real estate and crypto. With halving cutting the supply of fresh bitcoin, and interest rates dropping - bitcoin price against USD is climbing hard and fast.

ETFs in the west have also put a strain on the demand. Demand has outweighed so much that every day the boomers are purchasing 40 days of fresh supply of bitcoin. Currently they're buying OTC (over the counter) in bulk from bitcoin holders who held for years. They're not buying from the exchanges.. if they did, the price would've shot up much more. However, there will come a time where OTC dries up and they either tap into cex, and dex or their ETF prices start to climb. This will make bitcoin price go up regardless.

When Bitcoin and it's ETFs have climbed to a significant amount of market cap, they will jump into ETH ETFs. That will signal the alt season and alt coins will start to climb.

There are 2 rumoured Solana ETF filings in 2024 as well.

^{I am sure, you guys are very well versed in macro economics, it would be great to have more additions into this chapter here. This is a deep topic that requires your help.}

Do's and Don'ts

1. If you are new, do not have expectations with memecoins or shitcoins. DYOR. If you are not first 10 you are last.
2. If you are new, avoid price discovery coins. Buy coins that climbed before halving (winning horses) but not yet ATH from earlier. They will reach their ATH and go past ATH into price discovery. Examples below:
   1. ETH - Not yet price discovery
   2. SOL - Just flirting with price discovery and ATH
   3. BTC - Well into price discovery
3. If you are in Defi wild west, please read the DeFi section to understand the game. Start with money you are okay with losing. Get into X spaces, X and telegram / discord groups before you buy blindly. Read the smart contracts or use token sniffer or charting tools to look at tokenomics and metrics.
4. If you are getting into building, look at new narratives rather than current narratives. You are already too late.
5. If you are a shitcoin owner, please know that scamming will get you caught. I have seen too many getting caught and its well deserved.
6. Do not believe X influencers or Youtubers, when they're shilling something, they're usually in on it.
7. Do not blindly believe any thing you read on Yahoo Finance, and any other crypto news outlets. Yahoo finance and other news outlets have paid articles ranging from $500 to 25k.
8. Do not blindly believe a new shiller DMing you about this next new hot coin thats launched, they're paid shillers on X or telegram.
9. Do not connect to any unknown dAPPs.
10. Do not keep your money in CEX, or hot wallet keep it inside ledger. I am guilty myself of this and might get screwed any time.

Bonus if you made it thus far,

If your uncle or no coiner co worker is asking you about bitcoin, let us know in this subreddit. We would like to sell and get the f out. We need a top signal.