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DeFi Markets

10 published posts.

Why on-chain options keep dying

Perpetual futures took over crypto trading; on-chain options have died several times over. The reason is structural: an option is not one product but a grid of strikes, expiries, sides and sizes, and pooled designs split that grid into thin markets and sell to better-informed traders. What the numbers show, where options actually trade, and the request-for-quote design I am building instead.

Crypto

Nine minutes to a private key, read from a qubit lab

Google now estimates that a superconducting quantum computer with fewer than half a million qubits could recover a Bitcoin or Ethereum private key in about nine minutes, and it backed the claim with a zero-knowledge proof that Trail of Bits then forged. What the numbers assume, how close today's hardware is to them, and what it means for Solana, from someone who spends her days on superconducting qubits.

Crypto

Swap is not repay: two ways a CDP took my coins

Ten months apart, two collateralised debt positions took my coins without a hack. On Sui, a redemption halved my position and raised my collateral ratio; on IOTA, I was liquidated within minutes while trying to leave. The arithmetic of both, and the order of operations I now follow.

Crypto

Made whole in a unit I never held

FTX is about to pay my claim, nearly three years after the collapse: in dollars, at the price of ETH on the day it went bankrupt. A Sui protocol exploited this month is doing the same. Why a recovery of 100% or more in dollars is a short position on the coin you held, with the arithmetic.

Crypto

I learned finance in the wrong order

I learned to use wallets, swaps and bridges years before I ever sent a bank wire. This month I did both, two days apart: a Swiss bank froze a ten-euro transfer, a tokenised Nvidia share quoted $77 in fees, and a bridge page tried to send my dollars to the wrong kind of address, so I didn't sign. What each system charges, and what each one checks.

Crypto

The week my ETH turned out to be an IOU

I never held much on FTX, so I thought the collapse would pass me by. Then I learned that the ETH in my Solana options vault was soETH, a token backed by FTX and Alameda. What happened this week, what a wrapped token really is, how to read its price as a recovery estimate, and the rules I am keeping.

Crypto

Impermanent loss looks a lot like a covered call

Working through impermanent loss with SOL at $30, I realised I had seen that payoff before, in the covered-call vault holding my ETH. The maths: where a liquidity pool and a covered call are the same trade, where they are not, and why concentrated liquidity makes the resemblance stronger.

Crypto

Solana before Phantom

Three weeks of moving onto Solana in the spring of 2021: a farm migration on Raydium, a wallet that had to be abandoned, one secret that opened three different addresses, and the constant-product formula behind my first liquidity position.

Crypto

DeFi Summer from the cheap seats

This summer DeFi went from a niche to a mania: COMP, YFI, CRV and now UNI. I watched it from a student-sized wallet, where a fixed fee per transaction turns the headline yields upside down. The arithmetic of who can afford to farm, and what I'm taking from the summer.

Crypto

Three months on-chain

In early March I bought my first crypto, moved it into a wallet I control and made my first swap on a decentralised exchange, all in one afternoon. Three months later I own a sliver of a rented house near Detroit and have learned what gas costs. What the first quarter on Ethereum taught me, with the screenshots.

Crypto