Wooooo doggie! No better feeling than starting out your morning with a fresh dose of Brendan's 🔥 Threads. This time around, our boy Brendan takes a shallow dive into the incestuous world of ICO investing and the faulty valuations that are able to surface in an asset class dominated by a group of people who could all fit comfortably in the shared studio space in my apartment building. Funds investing in token projects which print "value" out of thin air and take that money and invest it in other token projects which print "value" out of thin air with the funds that invested in the first token project also taking part in a lot of cases.
1. Valuations of SAFTS overinflated compared to liquid tokens
— Brendan Bernstein (@BMBernstein) April 5, 2019
Most funds don't have the sophistication to manage a long / short liquid book and are more comfortable with VC like deals
ICOs also need somewhere to put the $$ they raised and the easiest thing to do is buy more
Check this out:
— Brendan Bernstein (@BMBernstein) April 5, 2019
1. crypto fund invests $10m into project YY for 10% of tokens. This creates $100m MCAP and $90m of YY tokens held in reserve
2. project YY has plenty of tokens so doesnt need all $10m. They invest that $10m BACK into the fund
3. Voila. $100m of phantom MCAP pic.twitter.com/cgYsNkobvG
As Brendan points out, this overinflates the actual value of these networks by orders of magnitude, leaving the overall state of the ICO and VC (at least those that are token focused) landscape within "crypto" extremely fragile. This makes me wonder if some of the thot leaders out there standing on stages at conferences pushing these pipe dreams on unwitting masses have a deep existential fear hiding behind the veneer of their smiles and promises of a utopian future. This does not seem sustainable nor healthy for a budding "industry". Though, it wouldn't surprise me if this charade lasts for a while, especially if we enter another bull market at some point in the near to medium term.
So is the nature of an open source technology that allows people to easily spin up "value" behind a lofty idea. The Scambrian Explosion that has followed in Bitcoin's wake is part of the double-edged sword that comes with this "space". It has some of the best minds working hard to build out a system that could give an immeasurable amount of power and freedom back to the individual, but it also comes with nauseating opportunism disguised as "innovation".
With that being said, I certainly do not think everyone participating in some of these projects are nefarious, just misguided.
Final thought...
We need more modern funk bands. Can never have too much funk.
