Welcome to the Flarnchain Newsletter, brought to your inbox, each and every week, like an atomic clock (except for the 35 week "dark times" which recently ended of course).
This week I'm back with a short one. Bitcoin just dipped below $90k. That's not great if you bought Bitcoin above $90k. The price of a single Bitcoin is still quite a bit higher than it has been for the vast majority of its existence, but that still doesn't mean a whole lot for people who are actively investing in this market. Things are grim out there.
Why did the crypto markets tank this week? It's anyone's guess. My guess is it has something to do with the macro economic environment coupled with an uncertain political climate. Pretty vague, but that's how I like it. This newsletter's tagline is, after all, "an ocean of knowledge, one inch deep"
Maybe in future newsletters I'll muster up the charisma to go in depth about why I think crypto markets are shaky right now, and could be this way in the near future. But not tonight.
The markets
The total crypto market capitalization plummeted 4.4% today to just below $2.9 Trillion. A sizeable drop for a single day. Bitcoin ($BTC) is currently $85,674 and Ethereum ($ETH) is $2,337. Crowd favorite, Cosmos Hub ($ATOM) is at $4.63.
Market animal
This week's market animal is a blackswanberus. I'm not going to draw one of these. I'll just post a link to the blackswanberus I drew many weeks ago:
Mint Market Animal 167 | Stargaze
This is the Market Animal from Flarnchain newsletter 167. It is a Blackswanberus because last week's market experienced a triple black swan event and this week is the launch of the Puppy Cerberus collection. Royalties and proceeds go to the Proto Towers collab wallet.
What does "black swan" even mean when referring to financial markets? It means that something unusual happened. Just like it's unusual for a swan to be black... most swans are white. To be honest, it's not unusual for the crypto markets to tank by 4% in a single day. It just seems to be really interesting to talk about right now. Let's look at the market cap of crypto during the previous bull run:
All that said... there's a chance that crypto markets are exceptionally bumpy this time around. I won't go into too many details, but the macro economic and geopolitical environments are not super stable, and they are getting less stable by the day. What to do in these circumstances? Well I can't speak for anyone but myself.. in my case, I'm in learning and discipline mode. What better to learn and exercise discipline than to try and recreate the lightning in a bottle that I had with "52 weeks of wads" an experiment where I bought Wadsquad NFTs every week for 52 weeks.
Wadsquad NFTs are a collection of silly looking ball / blob shaped objects with faces on them. They were super cheap so I bought at least 1 every week and kept track of all of my transactions. Here's how it played out:
Anyways, I'd really enjoyed doing that back in 2023. It gave me something specific to talk about each and every week, and so I'd like to do something similar. This time, for an entire Layer 1 blockchain called Coreum.
52 weeks of Coreum
Coreum is a Layer 1 blockchain connected to the Cosmos Ecosystem via the Interblockchain Communication Protocol. It's an interesting ecosystem because it also connects a totally unrelated ecosystem called Ripple / XRP / XRPL through some bridging tech that I'm not familiar with and I don't really understand. XRP has a pretty intense cult following, and I'm kind of a Cosmos Network fanboy so it seems like an interesting combination of two worlds.
To start, I'm just going to buy some Coreum tokens, and stake them on the network. The Coreum staking rewards are absurdly high right now, north of 20%. That should be fun to monitor over the course of this 52 week period. As like last time, I will collect data about my activities, and gradually improve the quality of the data visualization for what I'm doing. This may or may not result in me making money. I'll be spending between $1 and $10 worth of other crypto each week. Basically I'll sell some of my other crypto to buy some Coreum. I will not sell any Coreum related to this initiative until the end of the 52 week period, and I likely will never sell any ever...
Here's some base information about Coreum from one of Coreum's block explorers:
Alright, this week, on week 1, I bought 5 OSMO worth of or about $1.58 worth of OSMO. This yielded 10.37 Coreum. I staked 10 Coreum. I'll put together a little data visualization of my actions after a few weeks have transpired. My hopes and dreams suggest that by the end of 52 weeks, I'll have spent between $50 and $100 worth of other crypto and my Coreum portfolio will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.... the reality is more likely that I will have spent between $50 and $100 worth of other crypto and my Coreum portfolio will be worth between $50 and $100. Expecting number to go up is a fool's errand at this point. I am not investing. I am simply developing a habit. If you think this is stupid, or asinine... I completely understand. I don't know why I do this to myself. But... I do it nonetheless.
Okay then... if you made it this far, thank you for reading the Flarnchain newsletter.
I used to say this at the end of my newsletters, I should probably get back into the habit of it - CRYPTO CAN BE VOLATILE. NEVER INVEST MORE THAN YOU ARE WILLING TO LOSE 100% OF YOUR INVESTMENT. I've made money in crypto... but I've also seen stuff that I've purchased drop by 99%. And then drop by 99% again. And then drop by 99% again. That's called "going to goblin town" and is a topic for a future newsletter.
Hope you have a fantastic rest of your week.
over and out ~
~ flarn
🤘🤘
