Learning the friendly way

There is seldom a dull moment in the cryptosphere. In a matter of weeks, crypto winters can turn into bull runs, high-profile celebrities can send the price of a cryptocurrency to an all-time high and big networks can go from hero to bankruptcy. While we await the next bull run, let’s dissect some of the bigger moments of this year so far. 

In a matter of weeks, we saw two major cryptocurrencies drop significantly in value and later declare themselves bankrupt. Not only did these companies lose millions, but millions of investors lost immense amounts of money. 

As some media sources use these stories as an opportunity to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about the crypto industry, in this article we’ll look at what affected these particular networks. This is not the “norm” when it comes to investing in digital assets, these are cases of not doing enough thorough research. 

The Downfall of Terra

Terra is a blockchain platform that offered several cryptocurrencies (mostly stablecoins), most notably the stablecoin TerraUST (UST) and Terra (LUNA). LUNA tokens played an integral role in maintaining the price of the algorithmic stablecoins, incentivizing trading between LUNA and stablecoins should they need to increase or decrease a stablecoin's supply. 

In December 2021, following a token burn, LUNA entered the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap trading at $75. LUNA’s success was tied to that of UST. In April, UST overtook Binance USD to become the third-largest stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market. The Anchor protocol of the Terra ecosystem, which offers returns as high as 20% APY, aided UST's rise.

In May of 2022, UST unpegged from its $1 position, sending LUNA into a tailspin losing 99.9% of its value in a matter of days. The coin’s market cap dipped from $41b to $6.6m. The demise of the platform led to $60 billion of investors’ money going down the drain. So, what went wrong?

After a large sell-off of UST in early May, the stablecoin began to depeg. This caused a further mass sell-off of the algorithmic cryptocurrency causing mass amounts of LUNA to be minted to maintain its price equilibrium. This sent LUNA's circulating supply sky-rocketing, in turn crashing the price of the once top ten coin. The circulating supply of LUNA went from around 345 million to 3.47 billion in a matter of days. 

As investors scrambled to try to liquidate their assets, the damage was already done. The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) had been acquiring large quantities of Bitcoin as a safeguard against the UST stablecoin unpegging, however, this did not prove to help as the network's tokens had already entered what's known as a "death spiral".

The LFG and Do Kwon reported bought $3 billion worth of Bitcoin and stored it in reserves should they need to use them for an unpegging. When the time came they claimed to have sold around 80,000 BTC, causing havoc on the rest of the market. Following these actions, the Bitcoin price dipped below $30,000, and continued to do so.

After losing nearly 100% of its value, the Terra blockchain halted services and went into overdrive to try and rectify the situation. As large exchanges started delisting both coins one by one, Terra’s founder Do Kwon released a recovery plan. While this had an effect on the coin’s price, rising to $4.46, it soon ran its course sending LUNA’s price below $1 again. 

In a final attempt to rectify the situation, Do Kwon alongside co-founder Daniel Shin hard forked the Terra blockchain to create a new version, renaming the original blockchain Terra Classic. The platform then released a new coin, Luna 2.0, while the original LUNA coin was renamed LUNC. 

Reviewing the situation in hindsight, a Web3 investor and venture partner at Farmer Fund, Stuti Pandey said, “What the Luna ecosystem did was they had a very aggressive and optimistic monetary policy that pretty much worked when markets were going very well, but they had a very weak monetary policy for when we encounter bear markets.” 

Then Celsius Froze Over

In mid-June 2022, Celsius, a blockchain-based platform that specializes in crypto loans and borrowing, halted all withdrawals citing “extreme market conditions”. Following a month of turmoil, Celsius officially announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July. 

Just a year earlier, in June 2021, the platform’s native token CEL had reached its all-time high of $8.02 with a market cap of $1.9 billion. Following the platform’s upheaval, at the time of writing CEL was trading at $1.18 with a market cap of $281 million. 

According to court filings, when the platform filed for bankruptcy it was $1.2 billion in the red with $5.5 billion in liabilities, of which $4.7 billion is customer holdings. A far cry from its reign as one of the most successful DeFi (decentralized finance) platforms. What led to this demise?

Last year, the platform faced its first minor bump in the road when the US states of Texas, Alabama and New Jersey took legal action against the company for allegedly selling unregistered securities to users. 

Then, in April 2022, following pressure from regulators, Celsius also stopped providing interest-bearing accounts to non-accredited investors. While against the nature of DeFi, the company was left with little choice.  

Things then hit the fan in May of this year. The collapse of LUNA and UST caused significant damage to investor confidence across the entire cryptocurrency market. This is believed to have accelerated the start of a "crypto winter" and led to an industry-wide sell-off that produced a bank-run-style series of withdrawals by Celsius users. In bankruptcy documents, Celsius attributes its liquidity problems to the "domino effect" of LUNA's failure.

According to the company, Celsius had 1.7 million users and $11.7 billion worth of assets under management (AUM) and had made over $8 billion in loans alongside its very high APY (annual percentage yields) of 17%. 

These loans, however, came to a grinding halt when the platform froze all its clients' assets and announced a company-wide freeze on withdrawals in early June. 

Celsius released a statement stating: “Due to extreme market conditions, today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, Swap, and transfers between accounts. We are taking this necessary action for the benefit of our entire community to stabilize liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets.”

Two weeks later the platform hired restructuring expert Alvarez & Marsal to assist with alleviating the damage caused by June’s uncertainty and the mounting liquidity issues. 

As of mid-July, after paying off several loans, Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Final Thoughts

The biggest takeaway from these examples above it to always do your own research when it comes to investing in cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency platforms. Never chase “get-rich-quick” schemes, instead do your due diligence and read the fine print. If a platform is offering 20% APY, be sure to get to the bottom of how they intend to provide this. If there’s no transparency, there should be no investment. 

The cryptocurrency market has been faced with copious amounts of stressors in recent months, from the demise of these networks mentioned above (alongside others like Voyager and Three Anchor Capital) to a market-wide liquidity crunch, to the recent inflation rate increases around the globe. Not to mention the fearful anticipation of regulatory changes. 

If there’s one thing we know about cryptocurrencies it’s that the market as a whole is incredibly resilient. In recent weeks, prices of top cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have slowly started to increase, causing speculation that we might finally be making our way out of the crypto winter. While this won’t be an overnight endeavour, the sentiment in the market remains hopeful. 

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BitDAO is building a decentralized token economy open to everybody. Managed by BIT token holders and one of the largest decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs),  BitDAO is committed to growing the DeFi ecosystem through partner projects and a decentralized economy.

What Is BitDAO?

BitDAO aims to create an accessible tokenized economy that provides support, such as research and development, liquidity bootstrapping and funding, to a wide range of partner projects across the DeFi, DAO, NFT and gaming space. Through co-development offers and token swaps, BitDAO aims to attract developer talent and build a sustainable treasury of top crypto coins. 

BitDAO's ultimate goal is to create products that will not only improve BitDAO's efficiency and effectiveness, but also other DAOs. The core product comprises a series of both on-chain and off-chain governance solutions and products; with the latter, DAO treasury management would be able to deploy and monitor assets in order to earn yield.

Moreover, BitDAO plans on providing grants to different teams within the crypto industry for research or development purposes, all of which are voted on by members and given for the public good of cryptocurrency communities worldwide.

Through its DAO structure, the company does not rely on a traditional hierarchy to operate, instead, it is run by a group of token holders that contribute to the platform's development. Token holders are then rewarded in BIT tokens for participating. 

Changes to the BitDAO protocol are proposed to the BIT token holders who then have the power to vote on whether these changes are implemented or rejected. While the platform's vision has been outlined, where it ends up will be decided on by governance suggestions and forum participation. 

To sum it up, the people who hold BitDAO's tokens, investors, and members of its community will help shape BitDAO's vision which includes dedicating both financial and human resources to support DeFi's development.

What is the BitDAO Treasury?

Controlled by BIT token holders, the BitDAO Treasury is responsible for allocating funds as per decisions made by BIT token holders. The BitDAO Treasury also undertakes token swaps with emerging and existing projects with the intention to support them and incentivize the project's contribution to their success.

The BitDAO Treasury allocation was 30% of the projects initial 10 billion BIT total supply. Monthly contributions from Bybit and varying contributions from DeFi partners, determined by smart contracts, also contribute to the DAO treasury management solutions.

Who created the BitDAO platform?

In a unique move, the BitDAO platform has no founders. While being supported by big names such as Bybit, Peter Thiel, Pantera, Founders Fund and more, the project is entirely run by contributors holding BIT tokens. Bybit is recorded as being an early contributor and is believed to have contributed over $1 billion in funding to the initiative.

Taking the notion of decentralization to a new level, the project has no teams, leaders or companies behind its operations. All changes are proposed by individuals within the community and then voted on by BIT token holders.

How do the BitDAO core protocols work?

BitDAO is governed and administered by the holders of BIT tokens. It works on the DAO mechanism, a common governance structure within the crypto space. The DAO framework gives BIT token holders power over BitDAO decisions and actions through a system of voting on proposals.

The platform supports the following measures, which will only be executed if the proposal receives a positive vote through the DAO system.

• Financing or milestone development grants for development teams and R&D centers who create BitDAO solutions or assist partnered existing and emerging projects.
• Upgrades to BitDAO's fundamental protocols, notably governance and treasury management.
• Token swaps for current and new initiatives.
• The Treasury will deploy funds based on various tactics.
• Grants will be made available for blockchain technology projects, educational programs, as well as other services related to blockchain.
• Support in the way of cash flow through existing assets will be provided to partner initiatives.

There are three ways to get involved with BitDAO: contributing to the project, becoming a partner, or holding the tokens. Contributors and partners can be any DeFi or CeFi project looking to build the BitDAO ecosystem while token holders are considered to "own" the platform as they have the power to recommend and vote on BitDAO's growth strategies as well as the allocation of BitDAO's treasury resources.

Non-token holders are defined as community members and can have their say through the forum and social media channels. Here they can pitch their ideas, which BIT token holders can then choose to embrace. 

What is the BIT token?

The BIT token is the native token of the BitDAO ecosystem. The governance token allows for off-chain vote aggregation and delegated voting and provides the opportunity for switching to on-chain governance in the future. The BIT token can best be compared to the COMP token in the Compound Finance ecosystem. 

There is a maximum supply of 10,000,000,000 BIT tokens, with the BitDAO Treasury allocation accounting for 30% of these. Token holders technically possess these treasury tokens based on their share of BIT. I.e. if someone holds 10% of the total BIT supply, they have ownership of 10% of the Treasury's 30% supply, equating to an additional 1%. 

How BIT token holders can leverage Tap

You can now easily incorporate BitDAO (BIT) into your crypto portfolio by using the Tap app. The Tap app has recently added BIT to the list of supported crypto tokens, allowing anyone to conveniently and securely access the BitDAO market and safely store their BIT tokens.

Users can buy BitDAO (BIT) with fiat currency or engage in token swaps with other supported cryptocurrencies on the platform, or they can use traditional payment methods like bank transfers. The integrated wallets on the platform also make it easy for users to store and manage their BIT cryptocurrency.

We are delighted to announce the listing and support of BitDao (BIT) on Tap !

BIT is now available for trading on the Tap mobile app. You can now Buy, Sell, Trade or hold BIT for any of the other asset supported on the platform without any pair boundaries. Tap is pair agnostic, meaning you can trade any asset for any other asset without having to worries if a "trading pair" is available.

We believe supporting BIT will provide value to our users. We are looking forward to continue supporting new crypto projects with the aim of providing access to financial power and freedom for all.

BitDAO is building a decentralized token economy open to everybody. Managed by BIT token holders and one of the largest decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs),  BitDAO is committed to growing the DeFi ecosystem through partner projects and a decentralized economy.

BitDAO is governed and administered by the holders of BIT tokens. It works on the DAO mechanism, a common governance structure within the crypto space. The DAO framework gives BIT token holders power over BitDAO decisions and actions through a system of voting on proposals.

Get to know more about BitDao (BIT) in our dedicated article here.

We are delighted to announce the listing and support of Synthetix (SNX) on Tap!

SNX is now available for trading on the Tap mobile app. You can now Buy, Sell, Trade or hold SNX for any of the other asset supported on the platform without any pair boundaries. Tap is pair agnostic, meaning you can trade any asset for any other asset without having to worries if a "trading pair" is available.

We believe supporting SNX will provide value to our users. We are looking forward to continue supporting new crypto projects with the aim of providing access to financial power and freedom for all.

Synthetix is a groundbreaking decentralized asset protection protocol that permits users to mint, hold, and trade derivatives across different asset classes such as commodities, fiat currencies, stocks, and even cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Synthetix provides a decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant platform that allows users to gain exposure to both crypto and non-crypto assets without the need for ownership of these assets. This enables anyone with an interest in DeFi to join the industry through the use of synthetix assets regardless of whether they hold the actual assets or not.

Get to know more about Syntheticx (SNX) in our dedicated article here.

We are delighted to announce the listing and support of Enjin (ENJ) on Tap!

ENJ is now available for trading on the Tap mobile app. You can now Buy, Sell, Trade or hold ENJ for any of the other asset supported on the platform without any pair boundaries. Tap is pair agnostic, meaning you can trade any asset for any other asset without having to worries if a "trading pair" is available.

We believe supporting ENJ will provide value to our users. We are looking forward to continue supporting new crypto projects with the aim of providing access to financial power and freedom for all.

Playing an important role in the adoption of Web3, Enjin provides a platform of software products designed to allow anyone to harness the power of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) through the development, trade, monetization, and marketing of blockchain assets.

Powering the ecosystem is the Enjin Coin (ENJ), a token used to back the value of NFTs and other assets minted on the platform. When an asset is minted it locks ENJ tokens into a smart contract and effectively removes the tokens from circulation.

Enjin Coin (ENJ) is the native token of the Enjin ecosystem. Built on the Ethereum blockchain and compatible with multiple gaming platforms, the Enjin Coin is an ERC-20 token that allows the in-game items created on the platform to be traded with real-world value. The ENJ token has a maximum supply of 1 billion coins.

Get to know more about Enjin (ENJ) in our dedicated article here.

We are delighted to announce the listing and support of Chiliz (CHZ) on Tap!

CHZ is now available for trading on the Tap mobile app. You can now Buy, Sell, Trade or hold CHZ for any of the other asset supported on the platform without any pair boundaries. Tap is pair agnostic, meaning you can trade any asset for any other asset without having to worries if a "trading pair" is available.

We believe supporting CHZ will provide value to our users. We are looking forward to continue supporting new crypto projects with the aim of providing access to financial power and freedom for all.

Chiliz is a fintech company that uses blockchain technology to create new ways for fans to support and engage directly with their favorite sports teams. The company's goal is to be the leading provider of fintech solutions for sports and entertainment businesses around the world. Chiliz enables its users to trade tokens to show their support for professional sports teams.

Chiliz fans can buy their favorite team's Fan Tokens using the native Chiliz token " CHZ " on socios.com, the crowd management platform that Chiliz uses. Sports fans staking $CHZ on Socios.com also have opportunity to receive new Fan tokens as well as a up to 10% $CHZ bonus yield.