August 25, 2023 - Daily news and crypto updates for the terminally online

Welcome to Eden, your favorite on-chain trap house.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Had a lovely drive to our national obelisk this weekend.

I pronounce it however it fits best in the sentence that I'm putting the word within.

Yeah, I like to change the way I say certain words, depending on the surrounding words.

I like my sentences to have a certain vibe to them.

Someone managed to find out the vulnerability within the balancer pools.

Luckily, they kind of gave everyone a week at start.

However, this is still, it baffles me that, if you're like, hey, these pools are affected, you should remove your liquidity and yet 900, 000 still gets exploited.

Honestly, I think it's a mix of a few things.

1, just like people not paying attention and not knowing that they were affected.

2 people that are long-term quote-unquote investors, ones that stuck it there and didn't plan to look at it for a long period of time, maybe like 4 years or something like that.

Maybe they were lining it with like a lock.

And then the third kind of people being brainless.

I'm going to chalk it up to a good old summer vacation, all right, and they didn't have their ledger.

If that was a single provider, like you're probably traveling with your ledger, even though you're not saying you are, because you trust no 1.

But maybe no, maybe it was a larger institutional firm.

They didn't have the data to move it fast enough.

If the more the more signs you got on a multi-sig, we know better than most that exponentially more time it's going to take to get that transaction signed.

Once you get over like 8, 9 signatures that are needed, that's just going to take 2 weeks

It's not just that I remember when Eos was going through it it's a migration period and I was actually I was pretty nervous Because of the like position like the the position I was working at the time.

I was really nervous for the general public Because There weren't any recovering tools.

There weren't any I should I don't know if you call it recovery, but there weren't any migration tools for after the claim period ended.

So as their kind of migration like claim for mainnet tokens, what happened was when EOS launched everyone got ERC-20 EOS and it was essentially like a claim token to claim mainnet EOS when their mainnet went live.

But there was a like claim slash migration process to essentially, you know, lock, burn, freeze your ERC-20 EOs and get distributed the mainnet EOs.

And I want to say there was like, at like 2 weeks left, maybe, you know, before the time, there were still like close to

And because of the market conditions, I was really nervous that if that amount of capital was locked up or lost, that it would make huge media cycle hype news and would cast this kind of negative light on crypto.

Because it would have been like you know, billions, you know, X amount of billions lost in you know cryptocurrency migration and would just look like you know we're a bunch of amateurs.

So I was really worried I was going on tons of podcasts at the time and talking about this And a lot of it was just that it was my first thing that people weren't paying attention or they had purchased it like they're in the ICO and they didn't plan to look at it again for like 5 years.

So it wasn't until someone kind of nudged them or someone they knew close to them was like, hey, I know you got into EOS, you have to do this thing.

And if the block producers wouldn't have come around and come up with some different unique tools, It would have been a problem.

But yeah, TLDR, I think a lot of it is people just not paying attention.

Are you familiar with the unclaimed assets, unclaimed property process for traditional finance?

So I think it's like 3 years or something, but the amount of money that hits unclaimed assets is staggering, right?

So I think it's like roughly, let's say you open up a bank account and you put a bunch of money in it.

And then we see like if, you know, a traditional finance bank sees that, you know, you haven't really touched the account or we, you know, the bank has been paying, you know, maybe you hold property or like stocks and bonds and stuff, and you haven't touched the account, you've been getting paid interest, you're getting paid dividends, eventually you get to a point where it's like, what's going on here?

You reach out to the contacts that you have on file.

If they, you know, There's a period in which that, I don't think it's like 2 weeks or something, and which they, if they don't reach back out and say, hey, yeah, actually I'm still around, then they move it, usually it's to, in the US anyways, they move it to like a state unclaimed account.

And I forget how long it sits in unclaimed.

Maybe it's 7 years Maybe it's 10 years or something like that.

And if no 1 comes and claims that money then they just actually like donate it But it's donate it's billions of dollars that that just people forget about it's crazy to me I

or like people get you know, obviously like the line of secession, like when people pass away and like next of kin, sometimes it's difficult to track down, They didn't know that these accounts existed.

But like a lot of the times it's, that's not the case.

Yeah, I'm not sure how they acquire additional money from me, but I have had in 1 of the states I lived in, unclaimed assets I was able to reconcile.

A friend of mine's brother brought that up to me not that long ago.

He was talking amongst his family, his other siblings that are around my age, about going on to some site in the state they were in to go check for assets the state owed them.

When you get to the institutional side, like, okay, institutions like suck at accounting.

So like you open up 1 institution, like there's literally hundreds of accounts that are in our institution, right?

So it's like 1 institution opens up another account at another institution, maybe they're both banks, maybe it's so they can facilitate some sort of business.

I only know from the traditional finance like securities world, but yeah, and then like traditional forget about those accounts or they you know, there's something that happens or The account process breaks down on 1 of the sides and they forgot that they have this account and this money.

It's like and it just gets written off and we're talking like a ton of money just getting written off.

Yeah, the amount that gets written off with some of these low-case it's it would make people sick.

But yeah, I mean employee time is expensive.

It's like I used to work at I used to when I was working in that space, this is like anything less than like, or dependent on the use case, but like anything less than 1000, like, analyst level is all you needed.

Like you just write that off, like typically anything less than like 3000.

And let's just fucking just just uncut, move it to unclaimed account.

And yeah, it just it's just staggering to me.

And then you get to like larger numbers where it's just like, you know, I especially broker to broker, I owe you this money.

I'm like, I don't see you owing me this money.

My accounting doesn't say that you owe this money.

I'm sorry, I can't take it if I don't see it on my accounting.

Just you move it to an unclaimed account.

I mean, that's rare, $2 million, but sometimes a lot of these smaller transactions add up.

Especially if you're in the dividend space, where there's constantly small amounts of dividends being accrued.

Anyways, all right, let's move on back to crypto stuff.

So Glassnode reports that we have hit a 5 year low on exchange held balances of Bitcoin and ETH.

But I'd be interested to see what order book depth is.

Because obviously, idle assets on-chain, for the most part, I don't think the yield opportunities in centralized exchanges are that great.

There's better yield opportunities on chain.

But I don't think a lot of these are being actively, there is no 1 trusts centralized exchanges anymore.

You know, like people are trading on Binance.

It's crazy, because like people have resorted to, It sounds bad saying it like this, right?

Because Bybit, I think, has done a good job over the last, I don't know, 2 years or so, being quote unquote respectfully reputable.

But you had Binance, and you have Binance kind of right now.

But like, where else are people like trading spot?

You know, it seems like everywhere else is like, either doesn't have the liquidity to satisfy what people are looking for or there's so much going on kind of with regulatory different like government stuff that people don't want to hold their assets there or trade there.

Because everyone's pretty much like, if you're allocated, you're allocated, right?

Like, if you're gonna trade, just gonna trade, right?

But if you're more longer term oriented then your positions are in.

You're DCAing based on your normal salary that you're getting, or you've already allocated what you want to allocate in your portfolio and you're just kind of sitting on it with no volatility and very little price action.

Just hold it in your ledger, hold it in your treasure.

Doesn't make sense to keep it on centralized exchange.

It's been centralized exchange, bear market, on-chain bull market.

It's always been hard for me to kind of, that's 1 set of metrics that I've always been kind of like jaded by and skewed by because after my first, I guess you could say, like job with crypto stuff, I kind of moved out of the centralized, I guess, arena and have been like purely on-chain or non-custodial type stuff.

So I've always kind of found where there's activity, right?

Like you can always find little pockets of on-chain activity and things going on.

So if you're in crypto to have fun and make money, then I don't really know what you'd be doing like on a centralized exchange.

There's nothing to try out, you know, there's no tools or toys or games on a centralized exchange for you to play with.

There's no like catalyst events in which they would bring new people to essentialist exchange either.

So Tuesday through Friday should have some macro data.

I think I read somewhere it stayed 490 in the bear market.

1 of the longest bear markets, if not the longest bear markets.

You know, it's gone by a lot faster than I would have thought.

When you're in it, it always feels like it's actually going by pretty fast.

Looking back at certain events, whether just kind of attention gravity or different like mini run catalyst events it always blows my mind when like you see a protocol that gives you deja vu of 1 of those and they're like celebrating their two-year anniversary or You know some NFT artist is posting about how this mint happened 3 years ago And you're just like where the fuck did the time go?

Number 1 number 2 like how am I still holding that thing?

I read it today that SEC delayed the GPTC ETF.

I don't know, maybe that was 1 of those watcher guru posts you never quite trust.

Anyways, I still don't think that the ETF is gonna get approved until January, but that's neither here nor there.

However, you're familiar with the saying, sell me and go away, right?

It's such a shame we don't listen every year.

So we're as we're ending up curving the end of August, we got 1 month, Maybe we'll see a little bit more action.

All right, 1 thing that I saw Zach post, but it's an interesting take, not take, but an interesting counterpoint to Elon Musk saying that the cost for a gold check mark for an organization is a thousand per month and That should deter away the scam and spam accounts from posing as you know real organizations However,

Elon doesn't know how lucrative NFT scams and DeFi phishing scams are.

We discussed this earlier, but you probably want definitely 1 organization like you get you get 1 board a polder, right?

Like, $1, 000 a month is, like, sure, it's a lot to anyone who is just a casual user, but any company,

a month is, you know, a minuscule calculated marketing spend.

a month isn't too much for an individual to get a gold check just to promote their own personal brand in a lot of cases.

So if you have a scammer that, like you said, even phishes like 1 bored ape, they're set to set up gold accounts for 20 accounts for the next year, no problem.

And all they have to do is hit 1 more for it to be be worth it to them yeah I don't really know I think he has this like obsession with getting rid of bots So he's just like trying all this like anything that comes to his mind that could like deter bots He's like, yeah, let's implement that and it's just like a lot of them are terrible terribly thought-out ideas

Yeah, I am I'm actually kind of writing this piece on influence ops.

Maybe I'll release it under the Eden newsletter.

But InfluenceOps, similar to PsyOps, it's how memetics are used, how you can, especially with botnets nowadays, a lot of the botnets are getting pretty sophisticated.

With that said, a lot of them, it's costly to run like a Twitter botnet, but nonetheless, if you have a centralized org that kind of runs a little bit of a botnet to kind of expand reach, but then also using large language models nowadays, like you can make them sound semi-human.

The fact that Elon Musk upped the price of the API, I think it hits a lot of them.

But yeah, like to drive a narrative is something that I think is like relatively, if you're a determined actor, I think it'd be relatively easy to set up an influence on.

Have you seen any of the any of the young nudie AI like videos?

They have like 1 they have ones with Elon Musk like Michael Jordan a bunch of people and they they're pretty good they like they make their They change their voice and the words they're saying to talk about 1 of his songs.

And then they'll play some cuts and edits.

They're some of the better ones that I've seen, but you just made me think about it when you were talking about Elon trying to deter some of this stuff.

You know, what's funny is I was playing around with 1 of them recently.

I think I'm gonna have you know someone like Warren Buffett read our financial advice disclaimer before we put our videos on YouTube.

Warren Buffett reading disclaimers I've got some some funny example videos we could use for different different topics I've got a, not a folder, but a little collection of some good AI, like deep fake ones.

All right, but moral of the story, Double check how you're getting to a certain platform that you're trying to reach.

Our recommendation, if especially, we typically would say go to the Twitter that you're already following and use the links that they have.

However, an alternative that I've been using a lot lately is something like CoinGecko.

Go to CoinGecko, look up what you're trying to find, then use the links that they have.

Those are vetted, pre-approved links that are not typically easy to change.

And so if you're going to a platform, it's best to not hit up the reply guys, the fake reply guy scammers, if you're trying to get to the platform, because you're going to get phished.

And you know, after you've gone to it the first time, there's this lovely feature in every browser called a bookmark and then you never have to search for your favorite site ever again.

So, Not Gonna Make It from Defilama posted the other day that there are, obviously ads have always been a space in which that there were scams, right?

But usually it was like MetaMasky, right?

Like it'd be like, you know, a little bit different than the actual URLs but what they were using is they use a third-party like content delivery network or Like an ad network to actually say that hey, we're actually gonna this is this is actually for defy llama and then when it hits the ad link that is usually used for deep linking or attribution, that it actually will reroute you to the scam site.

Which I don't know what I forget what I was doing.

I was because I had, you know, I use ad blockers myself.

So I'm not I'm not going to be a hater on that or hypocrite.

And I was looking up something and that happened.

And I'm like, this isn't, this doesn't feel right.

But It wasn't Defilemmo, it was another site.

I try to limit the sites that I use generally.

Like on my computer I'm doing crypto things on.

And whenever I go to a new site, I just kind of have like a, I have my own strategy, I guess you could call it.

I just go to the, I always look up, even if it's just a fucking like regular web 2 product, I'm so used to it now, I just look up their Twitter, make sure that the Twitter's legit, I scroll through it real quick for a few seconds and then I link from there.

The link tree thing has me fucking weirded out like when I Absolutely hate it when like protocols reach out and they're like, yeah Yeah, you can check out all of our links here in our link tree and I'm like, I'm not clicking that Yes, all right But you You lost all chances of us having a partnership talk when you directed me to a link tree rather than just sending me your fucking docs.

It's just like so much additional clicking too.

And it's like additional reading and additional clicking and I'm just like you know we don't got a lot of time everyone's busy

I'm just like scam averse you know so like anytime someone does something like that it like it sets off maybe a yellow flag that they're at least they're like comprehension of like basic like formalities, security formalities or etiquette like that they don't have.

It's like not giving anyone any pretense of what you're messaging them and then dropping them a PDF in Telegram and that being like your first message to them.

You'd be like, who the fuck is this guy and why is he sending me a PDF?

He's trying to steal money from me, clearly.

I mean, PDFs, especially in Macs, I think PDFs are mostly okay.

See, there was a recent WinRAR exploit that, I mean, not the case, I don't think for Macs, but where you would unzip the winrar file, and all you would see was like a PDF, like an own PDF.

And then if you like, looked at the PDF, you scan the PDF, it wouldn't show his malware.

But essentially, there was like, the way that it was unzipped, it would not see the file appropriately.

But the second you open the file that was in there, the legitimate file, and it was like maybe a deck or protocol overview or whatever it was, it would run a small piece of script that would then download the malware into the machine.

And it was like, unpacked it like existed for like years.

See all Eden Aesthetix transcripts on Youtube

Eden Aesthetix : Episode #04