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Chasing the Meta: January 2022
analyticali.substack.com

Chasing the Meta: January 2022

Tracing the "meta" stories across the crypto space

Ali
Feb 8
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Chasing the Meta: January 2022
analyticali.substack.com

Introduction:

It is both very fitting and somewhat ironic that the concept of chasing Crypto narratives & “The Meta” was in fact, introduced through a narrative called “Trading the Metagame” by Cobie that coined this term in the end of Dec (2021). As Cobie so astutely put it,

As with video games, using the metagame in crypto gives the player the maximum chance to win. Identifying the metagame allows you to figure out the easiest and most lucrative opportunities at any given time.

Why did this resonate with so many people? Every crypto discord, group chat, or team starting in 2022 - had some reference to finding this “meta” narrative? Cobie literally hit the nail on the head, because he took an abstract concept that everyone involved in Crypto recognized, and cemented it into something concrete, almost palatable. We all knew back in 2021 that narratives were shifting left and right, month by month, whether it was Defi Summer, NFTs, ETH/BTC ratio, Metaverse, or the L1 wars. We just did not know that the narrative of narratives was in fact the actual “meta.”

Jan 2022 Month 1:

Because this concept is so powerful and easy to follow, I decided to start tracking the Meta stories of 2022. My hope is that we can look back at the end of 2022 and try understanding the Who? What? Why? of these “meta” stories in the hope that this helps us understand the crypto space even more. For we know that history repeats itself. Without further ado, introducing the “meta” concepts of January 2022:

1. Writing

Who? Cobie & Blknoiz06 & Adam Cochran. These are required readings for anyone actually serious about Crypto.

  1. Cobie - Trading the Metagame

  2. Blknoiz- Quarter I 2022

  3. Adam Cochran: Monster Thread

What? Cobie kickstarted the meta narrative with his blog post. Read it and you will realize how entwined the Crypto space is with this concept. Blknoiz06 came out with his predictions for 2022 - even today more than half of his predictions are being discussed at large with the community, whether it is $JEWEL, $POKT, or even composability & data layers like Celestia. The power of writing is that you can set “meta” narratives and this is the highest level of Alpha one can generate. Adam wrote a crazy twitter thread himself with some of the his top performers with ETH, YFI, CVX, KP3R - note 50% of these tokens (CVX & KP3R) are meta-related narratives for Jan. discussed below.

Why? Writing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with people across the space. As Kyle Samani from Multicoin said

It's extremely unintuitive that you can take a billion shots on goal by writing something one time…it's a real superpower to leverage one -to->many communication in that way

Just read through the three articles I linked above and then look at the January narratives for 2022 and see how powerful writing becomes. This is what sets the narratives and hence unlocks the power of writing.

2. [Mega-Narrative]VE-Token Wars & Token Design

Who? Multiple parties including Curve Wars, Convex, Tokemak, Saber, Sunny, TribecaDAO, FTM, Andre & Daniele, Platypus & 3AC

What? This has been a pretty huge category for 2022. Initially a lot of the narrative was focused on the Curve War narrative (including Convex, Tokemak, OHM & Redacted Cartel). Convex was a clear winner in 2021 and people took notice. Other narratives started popping up at the end of 2021 including the Saber Wars with Saber and Sunny, as well as Andre Cronje deciding to launch an ve-Token (Solidly) on $FTM. This was a combination of ve(3,3) so a Narrative within a Narrative 🤯. Interestingly enough, Andre decided that the top 20 or so protocols by TVL on $FTM would get airdropped a veNFT with snapshot happening on Jan 23, 2022. There was some fascinating game theory plays that took place when Andre announced his project, notably veDAO vs 0xDAO.

veDAO is an experiment with a single purpose: capture enough TVL to qualify as a top 20 project on Fantom, meeting the snapshot requirements to receive one of Andre Cronje’s ve3 NFTs.

Basically veDAO was bootstrapped and created right after Andre’s announcement to lock in enough liquidity to make it into the top 20 TVL projects on FTM. 0xDAO was created shortly after to “fight back”:

While this has been a net positive for the Fantom Foundation, a new phenomena has begun to emerge, one that seeks to bootstrap purpose-built DAOs with intensive capital for incredibly short periods of time, specifically, the veDAO.

0xDAO felt that new DAOs like veDAO, hurt the FTM ecosystem because taking a top 20 spot was unfair to protocols that have been building in FTM since day 1.

On the other hand, Saber also made a token design update in its ve-Token model to build in voting and staking. This was similar to the veCRV model where Solana players can also accumulate the Saber token and decide on which pools get the emissions. Additionally, they also announced bribing coming soon very similar to the Curve War narrative.

Twitter avatar for @AlexCoffmanSolveAlex Coffman 🚢⚔️🌞 @AlexCoffmanSol
The #SaberWars have officially kicked off. . . what does this mean for you, Twitter Soldier? (Not Financial Advice)! Read on 👇

January 19th 2022

12 Retweets43 Likes

Avalanche also had its own start of a native stableswap with ve-tokenomics:

Twitter avatar for @CryptoSeqSeq 🔺 @CryptoSeq
1/ Platypus $PTP, the innovative native stableswap on #Avalanche with investment from Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital is 🚀 $PTP: 15 Million market cap $CRV: $1.7 Billion market cap See why Platypus looks set to play a vital role in the Avalanche ecosystem 🧵👇

December 18th 2021

120 Retweets390 Likes

Why? The veToken design has been thus far been very successful with Curve and its ecosystem. This token model makes sense for stableswaps and it will be interesting to see if other types of protocols adopt it as well. Rewarding participants more and more for locking tokens for longer periods of time, and giving them the ability to vote on where emissions go - is a model to align incentives across all players in a protocol. This narrative is a Mega-Meta narrative that is going viral across all chains.

3. Community Airdrops

Who? $SOS, fees.wtf, $LOOKS, $GAS

What? Next on the list we have community led airdrops. Granted some of these happened in the end of December, we are still seeing more community airdrops for the month of Jan. SOS was one of the first to airdrop tokens to users of OpenSea. SOS created the OpenDAO and one of its core contributors is @9x9x9eth. The token was created by the community for the community. It had a fair distribution with 0 tokens reserved for the founding team. No private or public sale, just a free airdrop. They went on to create a DAO for governance for this token and project.

fees.wtf was more of a failed airdrop that tried awarding users based on ETH gas usage. Issues ranged from botched liquidity to botting activity. In a nutshell, an airdrop that did not go well.

$LOOKS launched a pretty successful airdrop and allowed users to stake immediately on their NFT platform with some healthy yield. Probably one of the only airdrops that has actually appreciated in value since it dropped. LooksRare is the community-first NFT marketplace with rewards for participating - where you get rewards for buying or selling NFTs.

Why? Community. Who hates free money? SOS has a strong community member backing. LooksRare wanted to reward users for their NFT activity. The one thing to be aware of, is to always be cautious with some of these free airdrops - because they do not always work out.

4. The $11M (3,3) Narrative

Who? OHM, BTRFLY, TIME, Sol Invictus

What? The (3,3) concept flooded the crypto community. OHM started this year with migrating to its V2 gOHM followed by working on its next product: Permissionless Olympus Pro. Redacted Cartel (BTRFLY) took the (3,3) narrative to the next level by creating a “complimentary subDAO for OlympusDAO”. Redacted Cartel also created the Thecosomata Treaty which is a bilateral agreement between REDACTED CARTEL & Olympus DAO to increase liquidity of the OHM:BTRFLY liquidity pair on Sushiswap. Additionally Redacted Cartel made a bold acquisition of VoteMak in collaboration with TokenReactor which would help place BTRFLY as “not only a leader, but the facilitator of the $TOKE wars”.

Sol Invictus (◎,◎) = (3,3) of Solana also got more aggressive with integrations and partnerships across the Solana ecosystem. INV also had an Agora proposal from the Luna ecosystem.

Twitter avatar for @terra_moneyTerra (UST) 🌍 Powered by LUNA 🌕 @terra_money
1/ A new Agora proposal by ETB (@ezaan_) is live, detailing Degen Strats Part 3, including various pool and briboooorrr incentives for $UST across @OlympusDAO, @RariCapital, @InvictusDAO, @ConvexFinance, and @TokenReactor.

January 6th 2022

90 Retweets453 Likes

Unfortunately, as fun as this narrative initially was, everyone playing the (3,3) meta was in for a rude awakening mid-Jan. OHM price plummeted to its ATL Jan 17, 2022. TIME another (3,3) fork announced that it was also moving away from the OHM model.

Twitter avatar for @danielesestaDaniele 🐸✊ @danielesesta
1) It is $TIME to move away from the $OHM model, as everyone saw is good exclusively to fundraising but as much as we try to make it sustainable it becomes unreasonable.

January 17th 2022

434 Retweets2,945 Likes

However, there were some clear winners (cough cough $11M):

Twitter avatar for @shotta_skel sk @shotta_sk
Derisked some of my OHM to ensure my family can weather any economic outcome. Remaining risk on with the rest indefinitely
Image

January 17th 2022

35 Retweets742 Likes

Why? (3,3) works well when Up Only, but when it crashes you don’t want to be left holding the bag. @shotta_sk played this narrative like a fiddle, went all in both OHM & BTRFLY early on, but made sure to de-risk OHM for his familia. Great lesson on playing the narratives and like Cobie said in his article, “Of course, identifying the meta early, buying the meta coins and selling them into meta exuberance is the ideal and obvious way to use the meta”.

5. Defi Kingdoms & Jewel

Who? Defi Kingdom - $JEWEL token

What? Jewel has been picking up steam since end of last year, but had a huge breakout early Jan. With talks of Heroes, summoning, Avalanche cross-chain, Crystal airdrops - this token had a meteoric ATH rise ($22.52) and subsequent pullback in end of Jan.

A lot of what drove this narrative was DFK’s gamified version of Defi as well as the comparison to Axie Infinity. A lot of big accounts picked up on the $JEWEL trend as well. With that said, we will probably see some interesting trends for DFK this year and some further drive especially because of the gaming narrative talking shape this year.

Why? One of the craziest things to happen was the OTC market sale of locked Jewel - where players with huge bags of locked Jewel were selling it at huge discounts to the market via a private unofficial discord. There was a huge disconnect between current $JEWEL prices and locked $JEWEL tokens. Will be very interesting to see what DFK develops.

Twitter avatar for @CryptoTickersCrypto.Crew👑,👑 @CryptoTickers
A 16 year old kid kid made $900,000 on a $3k investment after selling his $JEWEL at a 90% discount. Imagine this was the absolute pico top? Either way he is a winner

January 12th 2022

5 Retweets127 Likes

Twitter avatar for @mgnr_iomgnr @mgnr_io
0 / fucked around and found out some well endowed devs (not me) at @mgnr_io and @sizemarkets went on a sidequest for few days and created
dfk.market a safe and secure smart contract for the escrow / transfer of locked $JEWEL
Image

January 19th 2022

76 Retweets612 Likes

6. SolLunAvax → FOAN → Privacy?

Who? Fantom, ONE, Atom, Near

What?

Near started picking up steam in December - with many new protocols launching on top of Near and Aurora (Bridge + EVM Scaling Solution for Ethereum). Near hit all the main narratives including NFTs, Alt-L1s, Stableswaps, (3,3), DEXs. 3AC also added $NEAR to its Twitter profile. Near also had the Tri-narrative with ROSE, PAD, Trisolaris being touted as the next big things.

ONE / Harmony has been driven in large part by Defi Kingdoms and its native $JEWEL token. Defi Kingdoms has been one of the top up and coming games as it combines both RPG like gameplay coupled with Defi. The way to bring the next thousands of users into Crypto is through games like DFK that make it fun, competitive, and intuitive for players.

Atom / Cosmos has been a darling child of the crypto ecosystem especially because of IBC. Cosmos has captured a few narratives including being multichain as well as modularity. Popular tokens within this ecosystem remain OSMO, JUNO, and EVMOS among others.

FTM also picked up steam with a big push by both Andre & Daniele for this chain. It is under owned by VC, retail friendly, undervalued vs other L1s. This was coupled with Andre’s narrative for his VE(3,3) project Solidly, so another narrative within a narrative.

Why? The thesis of a single chain to rule them all seems to be losing popularity. Whether we move to a multi-chain world vs. a cross-chain world is still yet to be seen but this is most likely where we will end up in the future. SolLunAvax → FOAN → Question is what will the next rotation be? Possibly Privacy &/or ZK Rollups.

7. NFTs & SimpDAOs

Who? Ghozali Ghozalu followed by IreneDAO

What? Gozali’s NFTs took the crypto space by storm. He took pictures of himself every day for 5 years (2017 - 2021) and sold them via NFTs on OpenSea. It was trending across discords, telegram and Twitter. This NFT had volume of 391 ETH traded - so yay for royalty fees!

Twitter avatar for @Ghozali_GhozaluGhozali_Ghozalu @Ghozali_Ghozalu
It's been 3 days and left 331 NFT sold out now because for the next few years I won't be listing You can do anything like flipping or whatever but please don't abuse my photos or my parents will very disappointed to me I believe in you guys so please take care of my photos.
Image

January 12th 2022

4,898 Retweets27,146 Likes

Shortly after this, IreneDAO was created and also launched NFTs with Irene’s photos. We saw some crazy price action on OpenSea as well and this was trending for some time during January. The NFT started around 0.07 and reached an avg. price of 2.4ETH (34x) overnight and has 2.4K ETH trade volume as of today.

Twitter avatar for @ercwlEric Wall @ercwl
The SimpDAO liberates the simp. It Simply Integrates Meaning and Purpose (SIMP) His sexual desire now becomes his financial potential. The hornier he is, the more he will work! The horniest simp shall inherit the earth, not just the thot!

January 19th 2022

10 Retweets132 Likes

Why? Everyone loves a feel good narrative especially with Ghozali - people were happy to support this project. For IreneDAO - well horniness always wins.

8. Frog Nation Controversy

Who? 0xSifu & Daniele

What? Controversy regarding 0xSifu’s past that rocked the Frog Nation - which had downstream affects on most Frog nation tokens including MIM, Spell, TIME / Wonderland. Alameda ended up removing their $500M+ of liquidity at a loss in the Curve MIM pool and MIM ended up depeg-ing.

Why? ZackXBT doxed 0xSifu on Jan 26th in a twitter thread. Thread went viral and was shocking for the community.

9. Modularity

Who? Celestia

As blknoiz06 put it

My favorite project focusing on building a piece of this modular blockchain architecture is Celestia. They are building a blockchain dedicated to being the most efficient and decentralized data-availability layer and will be able to connect to other execution and settlement layers to complete the full modular stack

What?

Twitter avatar for @analyticalaliAli (🦇🔊 , ◎ ◎) @analyticalali
Modularization: Dividing system into modules that are interchangeable - flexible enough to make different configurations, while reducing the number of building blocks Compose mainly about cross-chain / cross-app communication Mod. is more about the tech stack itself @musalbas

January 1st 2022

4 Likes

One of the biggest projects that has a lot of narrative forming around is Celestia which is a pluggable consensus and data availability layer.

Why? Celestia separates Consensus and Execution. Celestia provides a very simple base layer blockchain that only does consensus and data availability. This in turn, allows developers to define their own execution layers on top of this in the form of their own customized blockchains. You can compare this idea similar to the evolution of the web where in the early 1990s each website had its own physical server whereas today, we have VMs and the cloud where anyone can spin up their own servers (AWS, Google Cloud) etc. Celestia aims to be a pluggable layer for up and coming blockchains.

10. NFT Flippening

Who? NFTs & the Metaverse

What? BAYC not only flipped Crypto Punks but also hit a 100 ETH floor end of Jan. There have also been a lot of great women-led NFT projects that started to gain traction in January including World of Women, WomenRise, and Boss Beauties among others. Other notable projects this month included Azuki, CloneX and Fluf.

Why? NFTs starting to gain popularity as well as an easy way to bridge new comers to Crypto. Some observers mention that when crypto markets trade flat or down, people rush to NFTs: BTC/ETH Pump → Alt Coin Pump → NFTs → Rinse and Repeat. Yet to be confirmed if this trend holds, but something to watch this year.

It is also interesting to note that in the short-term lindy effects for NFTs don’t seem to hold; however, long term we will see how strong lindy effects matter.

Conclusions

Meta Conclusions (especially if you are trading Narratives / Meta):

  1. You either create the Meta or you are part of the Meta. Just make sure you understand which category you are in.

  2. Metas & Narratives are getting shorter and shorter spanning from quarterly narratives → monthly narratives → daily narratives. It is critical to understand what narrative cycle you are in, especially if you are trading the meta narratives.

  3. Narratives within Narratives - we are starting to see narratives form within other narratives. A lot of time the top narratives have many different arms - so it is critical to understand what, who and how deep is the narrative.

  4. Pay attention to people setting the narratives - they are fewer than you think

  5. Narratives are important but what is more important is your conviction and long term thesis. Before you start chasing narratives, figure out your own thesis first, which can be Bayesian and change over time.

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Cee
Mar 3Liked by Ali

what's ur twitter handle broski?

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