Most of you know me as a pretty active person, and 2025 was the year where I really doubled down on my diet and fitness. At 44, I’m objectively in the best shape of my life, and that kind of uptrend gets pretty addictive when you’ve spent most of your adult life as a skinny-fat, alcohol-dependent, chain-smoking nerd.

So in what can only be described as a classic case of over-leveraging, I’ve been training ever harder to accelerate my growth. Recently I’ve been using exercise routines designed for one-time calisthenics *competitions* as my *daily* workout. This included muscle-ups, pull-ups, dips, toes-to-bar, etc. all rendered under strict time pressure.

When I wasn’t doing that, my training volume was often excessive: a hundred pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 400 crunches, etc. And when I wasn’t doing high volume, I was adding 20kg+ in weights to make every rep even harder.

Even during my “recovery” days, I was still aiming for 10,000 steps on the treadmill, or 1000m in the lap pool.

I’m sure the fitness professionals reading this are already shaking their heads.

All these bad decisions finally came to a head on the morning of Dec 26th. I woke up feeling like I had been hit by a truck. My head was fuzzy and I was palpitating for no reason. Because I’m an idiot, I powered through the day and still completed my competition-level workout routine while feeling like absolute shit.

When you train a lot, you hit false walls like this every now and then, where you feel utterly demotivated but really just need to press on. That’s why CrossFit and Hyrox have all those inspirational quotes in their social media about “never quitting” or doing “just one more set.” That vast majority of people need an emotional boost, otherwise they’ll never even show up.

My plan was just to make it through the day, then be so exhausted that I’d just sleep through the night and feel better when I woke up.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

My resting heart rate that night was at an unbelievable 90bpm. (My average throughout most of this year is 50!) I tossed and turned all night, the palpitations did not subside, my headache did not go away.

When I got up the next morning, I drove myself straight to the doctor.

I was instructed to get an EKG and, just to be safe, a couple of tests for pre-diabetes and hyperthyroidism. Puzzlingly, everything came back normal … well, everything except for the fact that my heart rate was at “Zone 2” (a light workout) while I was sitting there doing absolutely nothing.

I had to get on a 22-hour flight to Europe that same evening, and my biggest worry was that I wouldn’t be cleared to fly. But my EKG reading came back as “Unclassified”, meaning that it wasn’t quite normal, but also wasn’t Atrial Fibrillation or some other life-threatening arrhythmia.

I didn’t have any chest pains, difficulty breathing, or lightheadedness. I wasn’t feeling exhausted or experiencing a substantial difference in my energy level. I felt tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well, but I wasn’t particularly stressed or emotional about anything.

My biggest stressor was really my inexplicably high heart rate and a dull headache from lack of sleep.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared though.

By the time we arrived in London, I had developed a real anxiety around checking my heartbeat … which of course kept making it go even higher every time I measured it. I would unconsciously hold my breath waiting for the numbers to come in, and let out a massive sigh of disappointment when I’d see results like 105bpm.

My Oura ring was going nuts trying to make sense of my vitals – it couldn’t tell if I was ever asleep because my heart rate was never dropping. My Sleep Score was in the 40-50 range for several nights in a row, down from an annual average of 83.

I bought a medical-grade pocket EKG in London and started measuring daily. The readings kept coming back as “Unclassified,” just like at the hospital back home.

I was on vacation, so thankfully it was pretty easy to avoid all of my usual travel workout routines and focused on rest and recovery. Over the next several days, I watched my average heart rate inch downwards by an achingly slow 10 bpm per day.

Throughout this entire experience I had been feeding my data to Claude.ai for a second opinion. The diagnosis, coupled with the test results from the human doctor back in Manila, was pretty straightforward: I was over-training and under-recovering, and I had accumulated such a high recovery debt in 2025 that my body was now in autonomic overload.

So all I needed to do was rest and de-load. Don’t do anything strenuous other than walking. Wait for my resting heart rate to go back to the low-50s before attempting a gym visit. It felt weird to consciously avoid the gym, because I had spent the last 6 years rewiring my brain to seek out exercise opportunities daily.

It took 8 days to fully recover.

As I write this, my sleep score is in the low 80s, my resting heart rate is a flat 50bpm, and other than the guilt of eating too much haggis and not being able to work it off, I’m feeling pretty good again.

I returned to the gym on January 4th and tentatively pumped out a few muscle-ups to see where my energy level was at. My timing was a bit off, and I could feel myself struggling, but it was mostly all still there. My grip was strong, albeit slightly nervous.

2025 was supposed to be a breakout year for my health and fitness, and although I did indeed hit some new personal records, I guess I didn't know enough about proper recovery. As we kick off 2026, I’m going to need to be a lot more careful with my workout schedule. The new plan will enforce two days of real rest and recovery each week, and only allow a maximum of two days of heavy “competition-level” work.

Most people in my age bracket struggle to find the motivation for regular exercise, but due to my own vanity and hubris, I ended up pushing myself to the opposite extreme. I’d developed an addiction to strength-building, and this experience last week was a humbling reminder: what I should have been aiming for was balance.

I’ll get right to the point: blockchain can’t prevent fraud within the Philippine government.

The blockchain industry has never been able to prevent fraud within its own ranks, and there is no evidence that it could do so when applied at the scale of a national budget. Over the last decade, there has been widescale fraud at the level of centralized blockchain platforms (FTX, Celsius, MtGOX), at the level of smart-contracts (the decentralized pyramid scheme Forsage and all its clones), at the token level (OneCoin, Bitconnect, EthereumMax), and at the level of blockchains themselves (Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision). All blockchain advocates are aware of these stories so I won’t go back and explain each one.

But it’s fun to talk about this stuff, and I did have a few silly ideas on how you could use some existing blockchain tech to combat fraud. (Note that I’m saying “combat” instead of “prevent.”)

So without further ado, here are a few free silly ideas:

1. Mint every budget document as a 1/1 NFT and transfer them as soulbound tokens to EVM-based wallets representing the various departments and agencies.
   
   Why NFTs? Minting an NFT is so trivially simple now that there are multiple Wordpress plug-ins that allow you to do it. The idea here is to turn these public documents into NFTs so that they can be viewable by all compatible tools, including your Metamask wallet. It would allow watchdog groups to review what’s happening and could establish a timeline of approval and utilization.

   
   Why soul-bound? Because we don’t want the department or agency to be able to destroy evidence, so we need to make the NFTs non-transferable once it’s been received.

   
   The biggest problem with this idea? The fact that an NFT is simply a pointer to an external resource, so if you were clever enough to swap out the underlying binaries (a PDF, for example) then you could alter the document it was pointing to. This was a constant problem back when NFTart was super popular, and as far as I know, there’s no real fix for it other than trusting the benevolence of the issuers.

   
   Cost of Implementation: Less than P10,000,000
   Fraud Prevention Level: Minimal, but a fun exercise for academics
   

2. Force high-ranking officials and decisionmakers to convert their personal assets into stablecoins and stake them for the duration of their public service.
   
   Why stake? Because public trust is at an all-time-low and the only way you win it back at this point is with painful, over-corrective transparency. Note that staking doesn’t mean freezing — they are still free to withdraw some or all of their assets as needed, but everyone will see it happening on Etherscan and Nansen.
   
   Additionally, it generates as much as 12% annual yield for them (also fully withdrawable) and is a win-win for both the staker and the industry at large! Who says you can’t get rich from politics, right? 🤪
   
   The biggest problem with this idea? You can’t guarantee that all of their personal assets were actually declared … which is a nice segue to my final free idea below.
   
   Cost of Implementation: Nothing, and is actually revenue-generating
   Fraud Prevention Level: Debatable, but will really put blockchain in the spotlight
   

3. Force the entire country to shift to a peso stablecoin, and make all cash-based transactions illegal or heavily discouraged (e.g., with P500,000 cash withdrawal limits at banks).
   
   This is the real nuclear option. It will make every transaction — be it legitimate or illegitimate — potentially censorable. Most people don’t know that established stablecoins like USDT and USDC can arbitrarily freeze the funds and wallets of their holders, and they do so quite regularly based on law enforcement requests.
   
   A peso stablecoin would enable that same level of censorship, and under this truly dystopian system, the government wouldn’t need to send orders to the banks and mobile wallets to freeze a wayward politician’s accounts. The programmability of stablecoins would allow them to freeze or seize the actual units of money that that person holds. (This is great if you’re thinking about criminals, but it’s not so great if you’re thinking about the free press.)

   
   In case it’s not obvious, I’M NOT ADVOCATING FOR THIS IDEA. I’m simply illustrating the level of integration that blockchain would have to have if you want to fight fraud and have a chance of winning. We would have to place our entire economy on top of a blockchain, and abdicate all control over our money to the very entity that we are finding so hard to trust.
   
   Cost of Implementation: your freedom
   Fraud Prevention Level: theoretically quite high, but it also prevents everything else :-(
   

CONCLUSIONS

I wrote this article as a way to highlight that blockchain technology doesn’t really work in the way that many people think it does. The biggest misunderstanding stems from the idea that blockchains are marketed as a “source of truth” by a lot of crypto founders and advocates.

That is NOT true in most cases, and is ONLY true in the narrowest sense.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a “source of truth” for its own native token, Bitcoin, and we can trust that it can truthfully account for every satoshi ever mined and every wallet it has ever generated. Why? Because all that information was borne from within that chain itself.

As soon as we start attempting to bring in data from the outside world (public documents, art, music, etc.), we run into the classic “data oracle” problem. This problem means that although the blockchain can preserve data well, it can not verify the data it receives from outside, and must therefore blindly trust a data oracle.

We know that the data oracle problem has NOT been solved at scale.

As a recent example, bettors in the popular blockchain prediction market Polymarket have been shown to override the real-world results of their bets by tampering with the oracle. All that was necessary was a running bet larger than the economic value of the oracle itself.

Apply that to the Philippine context: how powerful must your oracle be if the national budget is in excess of $100B?

In the current meatspace regime, multiple bribes need to be made in order to facilitate ghost projects. With a blockchain oracle, you would only need one bribe. (Let it never be said that blockchains aren’t efficient.)

Blockchains are powerful in a self-contained vacuum but they are no more trustworthy than a PostgreSQL database when the data is coming from outside. All you’re doing is spending a lot of money on a tech implementation that will become a convenient scapegoat when things inevitably go awry.

Stay safe out there, cryptofam!

Exactly 1 month ago, I kicked off an ambitious experiment. The goal was to demonstrate an alternative path to earn from crypto — something different from the far more popular speculative trading, or airdrop hunting. My proposed solution was LP farming, and over the last 31 days, I’ve generated over 6% yield from ₱5M ($89k) in capital via this semi-passive investment strategy.

Now, the LP farming strategy has existed since 2020, but it's only been more recently that the technology and support tools have matured to the point where (I think) you can now do this professionally.

So how does it work?

It's actually quite simple: decentralized exchanges are basically online marketplaces, requiring both customers and suppliers.

Customers are the regular users who want to trade BTC for ETH, or USDC for SOL, and pay a percentage-based trading fee accordingly (0.04% to 0.1%, typically). In order for those transactions to be possible, someone needs to supply the other side of the trade — the ETH, or the SOL, or whatever the other token is.

Those suppliers earn the fees that result from the trade.

Those suppliers are us — the Liquidity Pool farmers.

So on August 1st, I split a total of ₱5M ($89k) worth of crypto between a BTC/ETH position on Aerodrome and a SOL/USDC position on Orca. Every day since then, I've been writing about the earnings, the challenges, the drawbacks, and the solutions. I can't really summarize the whole journey here, but if you want to see my farming diary, I've made my Google doc publicly viewable.

After 31 days, the yield is over ₱360,000 ($6,300) in fully-realized gains, which is a bit over 6%. (Or 72% gain, annualized.)

The principal ₱5M is still intact, plus or minus a few hundred dollars. We're talking about volatile assets here, so the principal has gained or lost as much as 10% throughout the month, and it will continue to fluctuate whether I keep it in the farm or not. That’s just the nature of crypto.

We were lucky that, as of this writing, we're nearly back at the exact principal amount that we started at, but I don't expect that to happen when we revisit this again a month from now. I also don't expect us to hit the same 6% profit next month because the earnings are based on how much trading activity there actually is on the DEXs we’re supplying.

The best thing about having an LP farm is that you harvest a little bit everyday. In my case, ₱11,000 ($200) on average everyday.

I was looking at a friend’s Potato Corner franchise recently and thinking about how fun it must be to have cashflow at the end of every business day. LP farming is somewhat similar — you can also harvest your yield daily, or even hourly — although it’s admittedly lacking the fragrance of deep-fried carbohydrates. Did you know that a Potato Corner franchise costs ₱800,000? If you can net ₱2,000 per day, it actually outperforms this LP farm by a bit, but I’m not sure I would enjoy all the real-world logistics. I’ve always been more of a click-buttons-on-the-screen kind of entrepreneur.

As you can probably guess, the LP earnings are relative to the size of the principal. If you came in with ₱500,000, then you would average ₱1,100 daily (assuming you did exactly the same things I did).

… Or you could be bringing in ₱110,000 daily, if you were a DPWH contractor and supplied ₱50M. 😅

For many people, 6% earnings in a month is insanely good. That's 11x better than the best peso savings instruments we have in this country. For some crypto people, it seems small, because they could've traded that ₱5M aggressively and generated a heck of a lot more profit.

(Of course, they could've lost most of it also, so there's that.)

To me this feels like a solid way to generate revenue from the capital you already have. It’s not a totally passive investment because you do have to make some quick decisions every now and then, but it’s nowhere near as stressful as day-trading. I’ve spent a lot of time documenting my process this month, but if I were just managing the farm, I’d say it’s only 2 hours of work each week.

This was supposed to a one-month experiment and my original goal was just to hit at least $1,800 (₱100,000) in order to call it break-even. Given that we blew past that point very quickly and are now in a very profitable range, I'm going to just keep going and see how far we can take it.

Critically, I'm not going to compound my earnings back in to the principal. This seems counter-intuitive, but my instinct is telling me that compounding would destroy the earnings in the event of a multi-day downturn. It's a complicated issue, and I'm sure many farmers will argue the other side of that easily. But for now, all I do is harvest my earnings as USDC every day or so, and then stuff them into a 12% p.a. yield account on Nexo, and that's it. Seems to be working fine so far.

Catch you all in the next one, cryptofam!

🎉 To celebrate Ethereum’s 10th Anniversary, I’ve compiled 10 fascinating facts about the world’s most popular smart contract blockchain 🎉

1. Ethereum was conceived by Vitalik Buterin at age 19, back when he was still a contributor to the Bitcoin open-source project, as well as working as the editor of Bitcoin Magazine. He argued that Bitcoin needed a built-in scripting language that would allow developers to create apps natively on its blockchain. Although Bitcoin does have a basic scripting language (literally just called “Script”), it intentionally doesn’t support loops or conditions, making it nearly impossible to write abusive code. Ethereum’s own scripting language is called Solidity and is a Turing-complete language, allowing an infinite number of both useful ideas and scary exploits to be created.

   

2. None of Vitalik’s original 7 co-founders are still working on Ethereum. These include Mihai Alisie (now working on Akasha), Anthony Di Iorio (now working on Jaxx), Amir Chetrit (left in 2014), Charles Hoskinson (now working on Cardano), Gavin Wood (now working on Polkadot), Jeffrey Wilcke (now working on Grid Games), and Joseph Lubin (now working on Consensys, creators of Metamask).

   

3. The name “Ethereum” is inspired by the Hayao Miyazaki film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” which features a magic crystal that extracts energy from the air, called “Aethereum.”

   

4. Ethereum was launched through a crowdfunding campaign in 2014, raising $18M worth of Bitcoin, making it the original ICO. The ETH token sale began on July 22, 2014 and for the first 14 days, you could buy 2,000 ETH for 1 BTC ($500-600 at the time). The amount of ETH you could buy would fall linearly for the rest of the sale, with the final amount being 1,337 ETH for 1 BTC by the time the sale closed in September. Ethereum’s sale legitimized the “premine” issuance strategy, because prior to this, most premined tokens were considered scams.

   

5. Ethereum’s price against Bitcoin has gained significantly since that earlier 2000:1 ratio. These days, it ranges from 30-35 ETH per Bitcoin, although for a few months in mid-2017 it was as strong as 8 ETH per Bitcoin. Its weakest ratio in the past 5 years was literally just this April 2025, at 57 ETH per Bitcoin.

   

6. Ethereum’s testnets are all named after transport terminals around the world: “Sepolia” is in Athens, “Goerli” is in Berlin, “Ropsten” and “Rinkeby” are both in Stockholm, and “Kovan” is in Singapore.

   

7. In 2016, a unique organization was born on the Ethereum network called “The DAO.” The idea was to create a decentralized venture capital fund where all the participants democratically voted on projects to invest in, and then share in the subsequent profits. It raised $150M from over 11,000 participants in April, only to be hacked later that year in June. The DAO lost a third of its funds in minutes. The community voted to rollback the transaction that stole the funds … a controversial decision that was opposed by a small contingent that wanted to uphold the principles of decentralization. As a result, the Ethereum blockchain forked for the first time, with the original, hacked version continuing on as “Ethereum Classic” (ticker symbol “ETC”), and the rolled-back version retaining the Ethereum name. (The following year, Bitcoin would undergo its own civil war, resulting in a network split that gave birth to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.)

   

8. Ethereum was always envisioned as a “proof-of-stake” blockchain from its inception, but it took the Foundation 7 years to make the transition from the earlier “proof-of-work” consensus mechanism. This transition was called “The Merge,” and went into effect in September 2022. Amongst many improvements, the Merge reduced the Ethereum network’s electricity consumption by 99%, introduced native staking, and allowed the overall circulating supply to get smaller year over year, potentially increasing the value of the remaining tokens.

   

9. Ethereum Foundation’s visually distinct posters and covers are created by Liam Cobb, Will Tempest, and Viktor Hachmang. You can find the whole collection of gorgeous visualizations in Ethereum Foundation’s Brand Assets page. As a personal sidenote, I’ve always been a huge fan of French artist Moebius, and much of Ethereum’s visual identity feels like an extension of his style and vision.

   

10. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Ethereum created an NFT Torch that would be passed from one person to another every 24 hours before being permanently burned on July 30th, 2025. You can follow the torch’s path on-chain or on its official page … which coincidentally also has a list of 10th anniversary parties happening all over the world today!

    

    
    

As the major alts begin to re-heat this month, one category that isn't being discussed as much is the web3 gaming tokens that were so critical during the 2020 cycle. I'm talking about Immutable, Sandbox, Decentraland, Illuvium, Bigtime, Gods Unchained, latecomers like Hamster Kombat, and of course Axie Infinity.

Most of them are down about 95% from their ATHs. Immutable is up almost 30% since July began, but that still puts it at -93% from the ATH it printed in November 2021. It's the same story for most of these gaming tokens and their associated brands.

As someone who worked in this corner of the industry for 2 years during its peak, I wanted to share my thoughts on the phenomenon.

🧐 In my opinion, the games industry didn't actually need crypto as much as we thought, and blockchain-specific innovations like NFTs only had a marginal impact.

Let me explain.

Not all games need mainstream success: there are tons of traditional indie games that do well enough on Steam to support a small dev studio. If you sell 10,000 units at $25 each, you've got enough to produce the next one and keep yourself alive. And if you don't have enough capital to produce your game, you can even offer "Early Access" and start accepting money from your future gamers up front. Maybe you get a couple thousand Early Access supporters and their money keeps you going until your game is ready for launch. That's fine too.

📈 The problem with web3 games is that the crypto hype machine inflates expectations to such a point where the only way to win is to be a global best-seller. Consider that at its peak, Axie Infinity’s marketcap was almost twice as big as Square Enix, the makers of Final Fantasy. That’s not necessarily bad – the market was truly excited about the potential of play-to-earn – but eventually you need to deliver something incredible to justify that $15B valuation.

⚡Aside: This is the kind of theater that Tesla is very good at. At $1T valuation, they’re worth more than the 9 other biggest automotive brands combined (Toyota, BYD, Mercedes, Volks, etc). Tesla’s stock is currently trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 170, which basically means that their marketcap is 170x greater than what their earnings can justify. Why is that? Because Elon is spinning a futurist narrative where Tesla is both a robotics and automated-transport company, and the crowd is hyped.⚡

I think the web3 game industry’s biggest problem is that the improvements it can make to the existing game industry are pretty modest. Yes, NFTs do allow for real ownership over game assets, but this is not a thing that gamers have been clamoring for. On the list of top gamer concerns in 2025, I’d say “wen GTA VI” is probably way, way higher than digital ownership.

💰 Much higher on their list of priorities though is the dream of being able to earn as a gamer. Of course, not every player is good enough to win tournament cash, or entertaining enough to make a living on Twitch. That’s why the play-to-earn hype was so great … and just as disappointing when it proved to be unsustainable. I’ve seen enough variations on the P2E tokenomic model to say that no one has cracked it for a sustained period of time.

So where does all that leave us? Like many other innovations from previous cycles, NFTs and web3 games will have their own place in the overall landscape. (NFTs are useful in other high-value scenarios, like representing your equity in a liquidity pool, and games will always have some entertainment value.) But I don’t think the web3 games category will grow substantially in market cap, or occupy much mindshare anymore.

For now, that game is over.

1. A few days ago, Senator Migz Zubiri filed a bill imposing a nationwide ban on online gambling. Although a bill like this takes many months to go through the various readings and reviews, affected industries are already anticipating the bill’s successful passing. When I say “affected industries,” I’m not just talking about the fintech industry. I’m talking about everyone from the billboards on EDSA to the influencers on Tiktok to the 32,000 people currently employed by the online gambling providers. It’s like the 2024 POGO ban all over again, but even more intense: POGOs only catered to overseas gamblers, while this new bill seeks to ban online gambling for Filipinos. Recall that the POGO ban was first discussed publicly in July 2024 and formalized by the President in November. The deja vu in 2025 is palpable.

2. Many have talked at length about the consequences of gambling addiction and its social harm, so I won’t spend much time discussing that angle here. I’ll just say that I am generally against online gambling, and I think that celebrities and influencers who use their reach to promote it should rethink their life choices. Moral outrage aside, promoting online gambling is like promoting cigarettes — eventually you run out of customers because they don’t tend to survive very long. But let’s dive in to the analysis!

3. PAGCOR brings in about ₱100B a year in online gambling tax revenues, which is roughly the size of our national budget for the Department of Transportation (₱120B). It’s not a massive amount in the grand scheme of things, as our national budget is in the ₱6T range, but the new bill doesn’t really propose any ideas for how to make up for this lost revenue. One of its main talking points though is that the funds lost by citizens to gambling addiction could have been used for household spending, which also implies some tax revenue generation. (Mall operators like SM claim that they’ve observed lower-than-average spending over the last year, allegedly due to online gambling.)

4. In the Philippine stock exchange, Digiplus’ price chart is looking like a rug pull, dropping 40% since the month began. They own BingoPlus, ArenaPlus, and GameZone, amongst others, and are responsible for 60% of the local online gambling tax revenues. You would think that the casino stocks like Bloomberry (Solaire) and Belle (City of Dreams) would be the biggest beneficiaries after Digiplus’ apparent demise —they would be amongst the last gambling strongholds in the country— but their stocks aren’t doing well either. To be fair, they both also own some lesser-known online venues, so it’s likely that they’re being sold off by portfolio managers in a category-wide de-risking. Why isn’t Digiplus dropping further though? They coincidentally announced a ₱6B share buyback program on the same day as Senator Zubiri’s press junket to boost investor confidence in their stock. (Additionally, they had plans to expand overseas to Brazil, which may now end up becoming their life raft.)

5. Where does crypto become relevant here? Before we had Bingoplus, Bet88, King.ph, etc., the only way to gamble online if you were a Filipino was through overseas platforms. I’m not going to list the names of the biggest ones here, but let’s just say it’s a $78B (₱4.4T) industry globally. The average Filipino had no direct path to get their money on to these platforms, so for a long time, cryptocurrencies were one of the few ways to do it. Of course, any regulated crypto exchange already knows that letting their customers deposit directly to the wallet addresses of overseas gambling platforms is not a great idea — the proposed bill prohibits this without mentioning crypto specifically.

6. So what happens instead? Well, this is where the black market takes over. In the late 2010s, there was a thriving cottage industry of crypto vendors here in the Philippines whose sole purpose was to get your pesos on to these overseas platforms via stablecoin. A few of them are the same folks powering the popular P2P crypto marketplaces today. I suspect that a nationwide online gambling ban will breath new life into this old activity. Instead of transferring your pesos to a local online gambling platform, you’d be sending it to Some Guy on Viber, who would then transfer stablecoins to your overseas gambling account. It’ll cost more (probably over 5%), and there’s some probability of scams and fraudulent vendors, but that’s the consequence of prohibition.

7. Does all that make the ban useless? No, not really. Prohibition generally works because it makes non-compliance very expensive, so a nationwide ban will drastically reduce online gambling volume in this country. It will just never completely eliminate it; the Internet itself makes this an impossibility. That being said, the biggest boon to online gambling here in the Philippines has always been its ease-of-use, so maybe it’s enough that this bill is removing its most convenient on-ramps.

8. Of course, we don’t know if the bill will pass, but if the POGO experience last year was any indication, the chances are good. This administration doesn’t seem to like the gambling industry, and the business sector is already repositioning itself in anticipation of the change. It’s going to be a fascinating second half.

Stay safe out there, cryptofam!

Welcome to your Saturday morning crypto conversation. Let’s talk through the most common community reactions about the Orb, World Foundation, and the WLD token.

1. “You’re allowing your personal biometric data to be collected for a measly 3,500 pesos!”
   This statement is probably the one I see the most often, and my short answer is always “No, you’re not.” The real answer gets a bit technical, and we’ll cover several other common questions while we dissect this whole process. When you get scanned at an Orb, it calculates an IrisCode for you based on the unique structure of both of your eyes. Assuming your IrisCode is unique and valid, a new WorldID is issued for you based on that IC, and it’s that WorldID that actually gets written to the blockchain. For easier visualization, think of this WorldID as your public key, and the IrisCode as your private key. So just like your private key, your IrisCode is not stored on-chain at any point; only your WorldID ever appears there. (It’s not a *perfect* analogy, because the WorldID is also encrypted and anonymized before getting stored on-chain, unlike a traditional public key.) As you’re standing there in front of the Orb, you are also notified as the machine deletes any images of your eyes from its memory, so your IrisCode can not be recreated by anyone else. With all that in mind, it’s inaccurate to say that your data is being collected, because that implies that there’s a permanent record of it somewhere under the control of the World Foundation. There isn’t.

2. “How can World Foundation check if my IrisCode is unique? Doesn’t that mean they do have a copy of all the IrisCodes ever created?”
   After your IrisCode is first generated, it gets broken up into fragments and sent off to separate nodes on the Worldchain. Each node will process the fragment it receives to check if it’s already been witnessed before elsewhere in the world. The technical term for this is Secure Multi-Party Computation, which is a well-understood method for verifying fragments of data without ever revealing the entire data structure to any single party. (Best-in-class crypto infrastructure providers like Fireblocks use a similar technique to secure the wallets of the world’s largest exchanges.) SMPC prevents anyone, including the verifying nodes, from reconstructing your IrisCode.

3. “If the World Foundation is hacked, my data could be stolen!”
   The World Foundation never sees any of your data, and it has no record of you other than what is on the blockchain, i.e., your WorldID. (Remember that even this piece of data is anonymized so they can’t directly link it to you.) They don’t even know your name unless you provide this information voluntarily, and giving it to them isn’t required in order to receive the WLD reward. There’s literally no centralized database to hack. There’s also no way for hackers to get to your iris data unless they take your phone, unlock it, unlock your World App, and then enable the Backup functionality. Sure, this kind of in-person attack is entirely possible, but those are the exact same risks we all accept with our mobile-based wallets everyday.

4. “But if someone steals my phone with my WorldID in it, they can authenticate as me! That’s a lot more dangerous than them gaining access to my crypto wallet!”
   This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what WorldID actually does, and it’s probably the biggest reason people overreact to the Orb. WorldID’s purpose is to prove that you’re a human, not that you’re a specific human. When I get scanned by an Orb, all I’m doing is proving that I’m a real person (because of my unique iris patterns); I am NOT proving I am Luis Buenaventura from Taguig. Your name, email, personal information, contact information … these are all extraneous bits of data that will only become part of your World profile if you voluntarily add them. If you don’t, then it is literally just a blockchain-powered checkbox that says “I am not a robot.”

5. “If that’s all it does, then why is it such a big deal? We already have CAPTCHAs!”
   We’ve known for awhile now that CAPTCHA technology is compromised, and no traditional web verification strategy is going to withstand the next wave of AI agents. World Foundation’s most high-profile partnerships include Razer and Tinder, because gaming and dating are two areas that are rife with abusive bot activity these days. Those partnership announcements sound impressive, but in reality, all WorldID really does is guarantee that the person you are competing against, or swiping right on, is in fact a real person. It doesn’t know anything else about them other than that, because the rest of that person’s information is held at Razer and Tinder, respectively. So in the scenario where your phone is stolen and is somehow unlocked, WorldID is arguably the least valuable thing there because your personal info is stored with all of the other apps on your device.

6. “The people lining up to be scanned haven’t given their consent or don’t understand how their data is being managed!”
   Everyone who goes to an Orb location here in the Philippines is asked to sit through a workshop explaining what the Orb is for and how their data is handled. Prior to being scanned, each person confirms that they are there of their own free will and are consenting to the scanning process. As they stand at the Orb, an assigned staffer talks them through everything that is happening and answers any questions they might have. Although it is entirely possible that some Filipinos may still come away from the experience without fully understanding what they’ve signed up for, it is certainly not for lack of trying. Characterizing the Orb activity as predatory or exploitative is a silly emotional argument that falls apart as soon as you see how it works in reality.

7. “You’re giving away long-term control of your data to the same people who are giving your jobs away to AI!”
   The fact that World Foundation is cofounded by Sam Altman, the cofounder of OpenAI, certainly raises eyebrows. In many ways, he’s the progenitor of the problem that World is trying to provide a solution for. My thoughts about the ethics of AI are enough to fill multiple essays, so I’ll just focus on the one aspect of this complaint that is incorrect. You aren’t giving any control over to anyone, because World App is a decentralized solution — all of your personal data is sitting on your personal device under your personal control. If you don’t want to use WorldID anymore, you can delete your IrisCode from your device, which is the conceptual equivalent of destroying the private key of your crypto wallet. This will effectively lock you out of the World ecosystem forever (and no one will ever be able to authenticate as you) which some people might prefer if they are strongly against what the Foundation is doing.

8. “We don’t even really need technology like this, it’s just hype!”
   This question is worth pondering, because I can totally imagine a future where we don’t need this at all. If AI were outlawed, banned, or somehow severely diminished by regulations, then proving you’re a human in the digital realm is probably not necessary anymore. I doubt that will actually happen though, but I do think there’s a small possibility that all the work on LLMs will prove to be a dead-end. In that scenario, we would have to start over from scratch, resetting the AGI milestone to some indefinite point in the future, and making World App temporarily unnecessary.

9. “I don’t want to be 100% reliant on WorldID for all my transactions in the future, that sounds like a Black Mirror episode!”
   It’s hard to imagine a future where World App is the only human-verifier technology available. I mean, that’s not even the case now, and World is only 3 years old. There’s already a competing project called the Humanity Protocol launching its mainnet soon and I suspect we’ll have many of the same debates about them as well. (All I know about them is that they scan hands instead of eyes, and currently have 6M verifications on their testnet.) If there’s one thing I know for sure about the crypto world, monopolies can’t really exist because the rewards for building competitors are typically better than trying to maintain the leader position. Will WorldCoin continue to lead here? Hell, I don't know. I couldn't even tell you if they'll survive all the regulatory or community backlash. What I do know is that it's way more likely that we’ll be scanning eyes, hands, ears, faces, voices, DNA, and any other uniquely identifiable body parts before you know it. Now THAT would make for an intense Black Mirror episode.
   

   Keep your eyes open, cryptofam!

1. With the EDSA Rehabilitation project kicking off in a few weeks, a new odd-even traffic scheme is set to be implemented to reduce the volume of cars on the nation’s most popular thoroughfare. This aggressive new policy has drawn a lot of fire from motorists — it’s complicated and inconvenient — but it’s also thrown an unwanted spotlight on one exempted category: EVs. Now, I'm not gonna lie, coding exemption was one of my reasons for switching to EVs fully back in 2023. The EVIDA law of 2022 encourages the adoption of EVs by exempting them from traffic schemes and allocating parking slots for them in malls, as well as giving dealers a reduced tax obligation. (The free electricity was also a plus!)

2. To be frank, I've never been a fan of these traffic schemes, and owning an EV just allowed me to avoid them in a legitimate way. Global outcomes have shown that these schemes have not really done a very good job of alleviating traffic. What happens instead is that households are incentivized to accumulate more cars by not selling their old one (their "coding car") when buying a new one. The net effect is that the vehicular volume on the roads are the same, but the number of older, heavier carbon emitters increase. One would argue that is the opposite of what the traffic scheme was attempting to fix.

3. We can see the ineffectiveness of the current traffic scheme in EDSA’s own statistics: The ideal daily capacity for our nation’s main highway is only about 250,000 cars, but after 30 years of coding scheme enforcement, it currently sees … over 450,000 cars. The aggressive new odd-even traffic scheme that goes live in mid-June is basically attempting to drop that volume down to about half, i.e., the ideal amount of cars 😅 But it has generated a ton of anger amongst motorists, and at least some of that anger has been directed towards the EV exemption. The arguments range from emotional (“EVs are for the elite”) to the tangential (“we should be fixing public transportation instead of focusing on better cars”). But like a lot of online outrage, it's pretty misplaced. This new EDSA scheme will not singlehandedly impact EV sales, and neither will it be causing silent, odor-less EV traffic jams on EDSA.

4. Let's look at the numbers! On average there are about 150,000 new cars purchased in Metro Manila each year, so over the 2 years of EDSA rehabilitation we can expect 300,000 new cars to start plying these roads. How many EVs do we expect within that same period? There are currently only 15,000 EVs registered across the entire country, with the majority of them purchased over the last 18 months. (In case you’re curious, my estimate for Tesla units sold is around 800.) Because of the growing availability of charging stations here, we can assume that roughly 80% of those EVs are here in Metro Manila. We can also assume that the adoption curve will accelerate over time — perhaps 30,000-40,000 EV purchases in NCR over the next 2 years of EDSA rehab.

5. Now, 40,000 EVs over the next two years might sound like a lot, and since these will all be coding-exempt, it sounds like we could be potentially creating a monster of a traffic jam on EDSA. However, this is also not likely to happen, because not all of them will actually use EDSA. There are currently over 3 million registered cars in Metro Manila, but as we already know, only 450,000 vehicles travel on EDSA every day. We can use that same ratio (7:1) to evaluate the impact of those 40,000 new EVs. What we end up with is an estimated 6,000 EVs using EDSA daily.

6. Bottom line: by 2027, EVs will likely only account for 1.5% to 2.5% of EDSA’s current load. This number is small enough that it won’t measurably affect traffic congestion. Should they repeal the exemption for EVs anyway? I feel like it won’t matter either way, as it takes a lot more than a traffic exemption to uproot these legacy consumer habits. There will always be a minority of online critics who will call for fairness for all vehicles, and there will always be another minority that will advocate for greener policies. At the end of the day, it’ll take hundreds of separate decisions to solve the traffic problem, and focusing on the exemption debate alone won’t get us there.

I've been driving electric cars exclusively for 1.5 years now and wanted to do an overview for the EV-curious folks out there. I'm not a car expert but I have a ton of real-world experience: I currently own a 2024 MG4, a 2024 Tesla Model 3, and a 2025 Tesla Model Y, and I've tested and reviewed cars from BYD, Hongqi, Seres, and GWM. Let's dive in!

1. “I'm scared that I'll run out of power in the middle of the road!”

   This is by far the most common concern I hear from non-EV drivers — nobody wants to get stranded after all. But although it sounds scary, in reality it's also the least problematic part of being an EV owner. At the heart of this worry is the fact that we're not used to the idea of being able to “refuel” in our own homes, because that's never been a possibility with gas cars. This is the most important mindset shift when switching to electric: you can always top up your battery whenever you want in your own garage. You could even plug in every night when you get home, the way you charge your phone, because modern EVs have an automatic limiter to prevent overcharging. In reality though, you will rarely need to charge more than once a week. The average Metro Manila driver doesn't do more than 70km a day (that’s twice the distance of SM Fairview to SM Mall of Asia) and even an older EV will support 350km on a full charge. And even if you somehow find yourself at 0%, you can squeeze out another 8-10km of travel before your car finally shuts down.

2. “I live in a condominium so I can’t install my own wall charger!”
   EVs aren’t for everyone just yet, and condo residents will probably find it challenging to charge their vehicle. That said, the DOE reports that there are now over 900 charging locations across the country – including in some condos and office buildings – so it's getting easier by the day. The government's target is to increase that number to 8,000 locations by 2028. My problem with this rollout though is not in terms of accessibility, but in the overall cost to the consumer. Most commercial charging stations charge over 25 pesos per kwH, which is double of Meralco pricing, so until competition drives that cost down, I’d say that EVs only become viable if you are living in a house with a garage, where you can enjoy a cheaper rate. (Tesla superchargers only cost 19 pesos per kwH, which is a lot more reasonable, but there are only 4 stations nationwide so far.)

3. “EVs are just as polluting as gas cars!”
   Many people consider switching to EVs because they believe that they have less of an impact on the environment. However, you've probably heard the counter-argument that the production of EV batteries is equally as bad for the environment as gas cars. This is factually correct, but there's some nuance here that deserves to be clarified. The way to think about this is that EVs have a big upfront cost to the environment, because battery manufacturing has a big carbon footprint. Gas cars meanwhile have an environmental cost that starts low and goes up over time. After their second year of use, both EVs and gas cars will have roughly the same carbon footprint, but gas cars never stop increasing their carbon emissions, and get steadily worse as they get older. Most importantly, EVs don't spew out carbon monoxide, so they don't contribute to the worsening air quality in our cities. If you live with kids or elderly folks, this is an important consideration. And EVs also don't contribute to noise pollution because their motors are essentially silent.

4. “The electricity we use for EVs is generated by coal and gas power plants anyway!”
   In the Philippines and in many other less industrialized countries, this is almost certainly correct. However, electric cars at least make it *possible* to use renewable sources. We’ve got so many other options now — solar, wind, hydro, geothermal – and they’re arguably more efficient than sucking oil out of the ground and venting methane into the atmosphere and creating thousand-mile-long pipelines to deliver petrol that then gets burned up at the rate of 97 million barrels per day. For reasons both geo-political and logistical, it is a lot better to generate electricity in our own locales than it is to harvest oil remotely and ship it to our petrol stations. (And let’s not even talk about the wars that get started over these oil fields.) Now, if this stuff really mattered to you, you could make a personal choice and install solar panels on your roof right now and generate your own renewable energy today. You don’t have that option with a gas car. They’re a legacy invention, and while our reverence for them is not entirely misplaced – they’ve served us well for a century – it’s time to start planning for a change in direction.

5. “EVs are a fire hazard!”
   This is also factually true, but only in the sense that, yes, EVs can catch fire. The people who repeat this issue conveniently forget that the “combustion” part in “internal combustion engines” literally also implies fire. The real-world statistics tell us that gas cars are 60 times MORE likely to catch fire than EVs, and the reason we don’t hear about it is that the media doesn’t bother to write about it anymore. The numbers are pretty stark: for every 100,000 electric cars sold, you can expect 25 fire-related incidents, but for every 100,000 gas cars sold, you can expect over 1,500 to catch fire. Because EVs are new and relatively rare, headlines about EV-related fires are still considered news-worthy, but gas car fires apparently happen so often it’s not even worth writing about anymore.

6. “You can’t drive an EV through a flood!”
   This is just false, and I’ve tried it myself in the Tesla Model 3 when I had to drive through 2-foot-high flood water along Osmena highway during an unexpected thunderstorm. An EV will perform better than a gas car in these situations because there’s no tailpipe for water to enter through, and the entire bottom of the vehicle is fully sealed. Of course, no car manufacturer will ever recommend that you do this often, but it’s good to know that it can. Other than the car looking a bit gross afterwards, it was completely fine.

7. “You should just get a hybrid so you get the best of both worlds!”
   If you’re regularly traveling more than 150km in one trip, a hybrid is currently the better option, but this is the only situation where I would recommend a hybrid instead of an EV. My biggest issue with hybrids is that you don’t actually get the best of both worlds – what you really get is the worst of both worlds. First, you get a far smaller battery so you can’t really rely on it for anything more than a few dozen kilometers of travel, and second, you inherit all the maintenance issues involved with having a traditional combustion engine under the hood. Additionally, hybrids are 2.5x more likely to catch fire than gas cars, at 3,500 accidents for every 100,000 units. (Note that I’m not talking about EREVs here, because there’s not currently enough data to evaluate their fire safety, although if I were to guess, they’d probably be similar to hybrids.)

8. “EVs are too overpriced!”
   EVs are somewhat more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, but we’ve got EVs on sale at just 700,000 pesos now (the Changan Nevo is a new interesting option), so I’m not sure how long this argument will hold water. You also need to take the operational savings into account: whatever your fuel costs might have been for an equivalent gas car, you will save 70% by switching to electric. So for example, if you were normally spending 5,000 pesos on fuel every month with your Ford Territory, you can expect to spend around 1,500-2,000 pesos on electricity every month with a BYD Atto 3. Over a 3 year period, you’re saving over 110,000 pesos easily, and the savings keep growing the longer you keep your EV. Now, a mid-range Ford Territory is 1.6M pesos while a BYD Atto 3 is closer to 1.8M pesos, so on paper it looks like the Ford is still a better deal in the medium-term, but remember that it’s also 25% less powerful, at 158 horsepower against the BYD’s 204hp. EVs are always faster and more powerful than their gas equivalents. It’s also worth mentioning that there are no oil-change costs with an all-electric drivetrain, and your brake pads last twice as long because the motor itself helps with deceleration, so the long-term maintenance costs are also substantially less.

9. “You’ll get a nasty bill when your battery dies!”
   This concern stems from an old notion that battery packs eventually fade in capacity, and a replacement will cost basically the same amount as a new car. Most EVs now have an 8-year battery warranty specifically to address this. But let’s talk about the actual lifespan: the degradation rate for an EV battery is less than 2% per year, so even after 10 years of driving, your range will only have dropped to approximately 80% of its original output. Coincidentally, gas cars see about 30-35% reduced fuel economy over that same time period, so they’re substantially worse from this perspective as well. You are in fact more likely to swap out your car as a whole than to swap out your battery pack. But even if you did need a replacement, EV batteries are becoming steadily cheaper as the industry becomes more competitive and the technology improves. From 2012 onwards, we’ve seen a cost reduction of about 75% in battery pack replacements (from $400 per kwH to now just $111), and the expectation is that this will continue to become more cost-efficient over time.

At the end of the day, switching to an EV is a personal choice, but in my opinion, the critical decision point is whether you have a garage. If you do, then an EV is the better choice for the average driver on nearly every level: overall cost of ownership, vehicular performance, environmental impact, and safety.

Stay safe out there!

1. Every crypto cycle brings with it new buzzwords and new narratives to draw in a new generation of investors, and with the impending death of Pump.fun and Solana memecoin season, I thought it’d be interesting to reflect on past cycles and how we’ve seen similar trends crash and burn many times before.

2. But let’s take a step back and talk about what made all this even possible. For those of you who weren’t around yet back then, this all began with an Ethereum invention called ERC20, which is a protocol that allowed anyone to mint their own cryptocurrency token without needing to launch their own blockchain first. Remember that, prior to 2015, anyone who wanted to start their own crypto would need to somehow convince other people to operate independent nodes to power their blockchain — this was a basic requirement for blockchain security. Ethereum changed all that by simply letting you launch a token on their network, and immediately benefit from the existing Ethereum security. This is essentially how “blockchain ecosystems” began.

3. By 2017, we had already begun seeing how much of a gift and a curse this invention was. The ERC20 standard allowed for a new style of startup fundraising: the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Blockchain projects could immediately create their token on Ethereum and sell that to the retail public. In theory, it allowed normal investors to get in on the ground floor, and it supercharged these young companies with more cash than they knew what to do with. The 2017 batch of ICOs include some blockchains that are still around now: TEZOS, TON, FILECOIN, and to a lesser extent, EOS. In total, close to $6B were collectively raised by about 1,000 ICOs that year.

4. Unfortunately, by 2018, the ICO industry had gone full-retard. Not only were there dozens of ICOs launching each week, but there were now opportunistic marketing firms, overpriced consultants, and desperate-looking roadshows specifically designed to promote ICO projects. The vast majority of tokens that launched during this period are now nowhere to be found: BASIS was an algorithmic stablecoin that raised $133M and disappeared later that year due to regulatory uncertainty. ENVION wanted to build a solar-powered crypto mining rig and attracted $100M in funding before evaporating the following year. DENTACOIN wanted to create a blockchain specifically for dental records and payments, and inexplicably raised $42M before shedding 99.9% of its token value. And then of course, BITCONNECT is from this era too — I guess I don’t have to explain that one.

5. After the dust had settled, the total amount of money raised by over 2,500 ICOs was in excess of $35B … nearly 5% of the entire crypto market cap at the time. By 2019, as the seasons shifted to crypto winter, the majority of them were already dead. But while ICOs were drawing their last breath, another narrative was shaping up from an unexpected corner of the crypto universe: NFTs. In many ways, the NFT wave was a direct response to the greedy corporate vibes of the ICO world — here was something that was instead built by the community to celebrate the culture of crypto. It was a breath of fresh air … until it wasn’t.

6. Like with ICOs, NFTs were also made possible by an Ethereum innovation: ERC721. This standard was literally the technological opposite of ERC20. Instead of minting a token where every unit was exactly the same (which is what you need for a currency or a stock), ERC721 described a way to create a token where every unit was unique. This paved the way for digital collectibles, which was pioneered by projects like Cryptopunks and CurioCards, and then later brought into the mainstream by Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, Pudgy Penguins, etc.

7. By 2022, the NFT market was at its peak — $20B in size — with nearly every brand and celebrity attempting to launch their own personal NFT collection. I won’t bother listing all of the NFT projects that have failed since then, this happened recently enough that most of you still remember. But I will talk about Opensea, which was the leading marketplace for NFTs throughout most of this period (before they were overtaken by Blur). At the start of 2022, Opensea was a $13B company. Today, it is estimated to be just north of $1B — a drop of over 90%. I couldn’t find an exact number of NFT collections launched during this era, but I’ve seen some estimates in the 5 million range. Since most of these collections contained more than 5,000 pieces, there are literally more NFTs available today than there are humans in the world to buy them. The industry estimate is that about 95% are now worth zero.

8. The demise of NFTs in 2023 left many retail traders hurting. Few missed the colorful art of those collections, but many of them had grown addicted to the dopamine hit of watching your investment go up 10x or 100x in value overnight. Fortunately/unfortunately, crypto already had their fix ready and waiting: memecoins.

9. Remember that in 2023, the Solana ecosystem was in the doldrums. After having lost nearly 95% of its market price due to the FTX disaster the year before, morale was at an all-time low. But community-created memecoins like BONK and WIF sparked new interest in a struggling ecosystem. By early 2024, mainstream interest around the Bitcoin ETFs drove the crypto-natives to memecoins in anticipation of the coming bull run. (In a bull market, nothing moves faster than a memecoin investment.) It was somewhat premature — the bull run itself didn’t fully materialize, but memecoins on Solana became the hottest conversation amongst the existing community. Pump.fun became the leading platform for launching and promoting memecoins, because it allowed project owners to mint a new memecoin with zero smart contract knowledge.

10. Conceptually, modern memecoins are like the stripped-down version of NFTs — they do away with all the theater around branding, token utility, and roadmap, and simply focus all their energies on NGU (Number Go Up). A total of 6 million memecoins were launched on Pump.fun alone in 2024, with a combined market cap of around $25B. By January 2025, the frenzy was starting to subside, owing to an incredibly high rate of retail losses — 97% of buyers appear to have either lost money or barely broken even on Pump.fun. By February 2025, the three-hit combo of $TRUMP, $MELANIA, and $LIBRA decimated the Solana memecoin ecosystem — Pump.fun’s daily volume was now just under $100M, from a peak of over $3B/day.

11. I’ve spent the entirety of this newsletter describing the losses and failures of the last 3 cycles, so I’ll end with this. Crypto’s biggest narratives always involve some kind of breakthrough in making blockchain tech more useful or more accessible. ICOs allowed every founder to launch a crowdfunded startup. Opensea allowed every creator to launch and distribute their NFT collection. Pump.fun allowed everyone to launch and promote their own memecoin. On paper, all of these ideas sound fine: they democratized the technology so that literally everyone could use it. The problem of course is that literally everyone did use it. This caused over-saturation, which caused over-promotion, which caused over-investment. Basically, greed took over and our critical-thinking got thrown out the window.

12. These technologies are groundbreaking, but ultimately they are just tools. As we witness the demise of Pump.fun and the Solana memecoin ecosystem, it’s good to remember that it’s called a cycle for a reason. We’ve seen this movie enough times to know that this is the nature of crypto, and we can either avoid the wave or attempt to ride it. Let’s just try not to get steamrolled by it.

1. In a 2021 paper "Bitcoin and Portfolio Diversification," researchers found that you could reduce the impact of volatility on your portfolio by as much as 50% by holding about 20 tokens. This assumed that you were mixing in heavyweights like BTC and ETH and the rest of the coins were mostly uncorrelated (e.g., you weren't holding 18 memecoins or a dozen AI agent tokens). Beyond 20 tokens, the benefits appeared to be not as pronounced. I wish I'd read this paper before putting together my 2024 portfolio, which had over 40 tokens in it. As I review the original lineup, I realize now that there were a lot of "duplicates" that fulfilled the same purpose.

2. For example, I have TIA, INJ, and ATOM, when really I could've just picked ATOM and had exposure to roughly the same Cosmos ecosystem. The allure of Celestia was that it was modularizing blockchains in a novel way, but I realize now that if it was optimizing an ecosystem that hadn't yet proven itself to be worthy of the optimization. (In software engineering, we often refer to pre-optimization as one of the biggest sins!) None of these Cosmos tokens have done well over the last year, although TIA is the one that I eventually made some money on.

3. I also had GRT, RENDER, and AGIX -- all AI-related 2024 plays -- that were all highly speculative and moved together in lock-step. Any one of them would've been fine. AGIX was the winner for me because of how low my entry price was, although many saw success with RENDER.

4. I bought all three big 2024 L1 contenders: APT, SUI, and SEI. Although they all performed well enough, SUI was the one that really broke out — even at its current low price, I’m at 300% on that. Now I'm just waiting to sell off my APT and SEI tokens so I have fewer wallets to manage.

5. Finally, I held multiple Ethereum L2 competitors: ARB, OP, and MATIC. The big irony here was that Base overtook all of them in 2024 without having its own token, so none of those bets really mattered.

6. So what were the notable wins in 2024? Apart from the ones mentioned above (SUI, AGIX, TIA), the ones that are continuing to look strong include my lone RWA bet ONDO (200% up), my next-gen stablecoin bet ENA (200% up), and my silly gold bet PAXG (50% up lol). And then of course there’s all the majors, which was really where the bulk of my 2024 gains came from: BTC (250%), SOL (400%), BNB (150%), XRP (400%), ADA (50%). You don’t have to be a believer in any of these major coins in order to understand that their network effects and cult-like communities mean they always have a shot at an unexpected rally, which is what we saw with XRP and ADA.

7. ETH was the big laggard throughout all of this, but one reason why I never thought of divesting was because its mindshare on Twitter has never dropped. Good or bad, Ethereum continues to be at the center of the crypto conversation, so we know that its slow price movement is not a result of disinterest. In a world driven by narratives, chain-death can only really occur when people no longer talk about you.

8. So yeah, the new strategy for me is to place more eggs (money) in fewer baskets (coins or sub-sectors). This will take time to execute though, because I do want to wait for better exits. Depending on how much of a one-coiner you are, you might end up doing the opposite by splitting your capital up into more areas while prices are depressed. Just keep it under 20 baskets!

   Next week, I’ll talk about how I’ve been positioning in the new Sonic ecosystem, which is feeling like a real breakout right now. Stay safe out there, cryptofam!

1. In my 2024 year-ender essay, I wrote about my realization that I didn't particularly enjoy day-trading crypto. So over these recent holidays, I've gone back to farming ... YIELD farming, that is. For the unfamiliar, this is the act of placing your funds in financial instruments that produce profits slowly over a given time period. Some of you are already doing a simple form of yield farming when you deposit your money in any of the Philippines' new digital banks, earning 4-5% per annum. Of course, in the crypto world, finding and farming the best yield isn't simply a matter of comparing interest rates (more commonly referred to as the APR or "Annual Percentage Rate") — there’s a lot more to it than that.

2. Which brings me to my newfound obsession: Aerodrome. As you may or may not know, Aerodrome is the primary exchange of the Ethereum Layer 2, Base. Base was itself one of the rising stars of 2024, and Aerodrome is one of its cornerstone projects. Before we go any further, let’s do a quick refresher on how decentralized exchanges like Aerodrome work. Unlike their centralized counterparts, DEXs begin their lives as little more than a gaggle of smart contracts, and have to bootstrap their exchange operations from nothing. In order for a DEX to be able to execute even the most basic conversion of ETH in exchange for USDC, for instance, some generous users have to first lend their tokens to it. We call these user contributions "liquidity pools," and they're organized in terms of the trading pairs they handle: ETH/USDC is a pool with both Ether and USDC in it, BTC/USDT is another. You need a pool for every crypto you want to be able to support, so most DEXs will have hundreds of them in varying sizes.

3. So when you sell your ETH on a DEX, you're actually being paid with someone else's USDC from that liquidity pool, and you’re being charged a small trading fee. It's this trading fee that makes being an LP worthwhile. If my contribution to the pool is 1% of the total size of the pool, then I earn 1% of all its trading fees. On any given day, Aerodrome's ETH/USDC pool by itself sees over $500M in trades, and its LPs receive about $200K in fees (~0.4%). Across the entire Aerodrome DEX, daily trading often reaches a billion dollars, paying out over a million dollars in total fees to its LPs.

4. Those earnings are further boosted by incentives paid in $AERO, Aerodrome's own token. When combined with the earnings from trading fees, it is not uncommon for Aerodrome's liquidity pools to advertise APR in excess of 100%. Yes, you're reading that right. It's basically estimating that you could double your money in a year's time. Now, the operative term here is "estimating," because the APR is dynamically calculated minute-by-minute depending on how much trading activity is actually going on. Over the weeks that I've had money in these pools, I've seen the APR estimates go as low as 60% and as high as 800%. You can claim your Aerodrome rewards in real-time, and you can also cancel and withdraw all your funds whenever you like. Because I prefer my gratification to be instant, I've been withdrawing my profits everyday at 5pm and squirreling them away as USDC.

5. Over the last 2 weeks, I've earned more from this farm than from my full-time job during the same time period. Yes, I realize that that is a very limited timeframe, but I’ve also run a dozen different trials since December, and I wouldn’t be writing about this if I wasn’t confident that the yield was real. You've probably guessed that the size of my rewards means that I made a pretty big deposit … but it wasn't as big as you might think. Without sharing the actual numbers, I deposited LESS than a year's salary, but I'm currently earning MORE than a year's salary if we extrapolate the daily rewards I’ve been harvesting. (In other words, the effective APR was greater than 100%.) I know that that sounds too good to be true, so I need to emphasize this: the daily rewards are dynamic and will change over time.

6. So now let's talk about downsides. The most obvious one is that both Aerodrome and Base are young, and we can't draw any long-term conclusions about how sustainable this all is. Beyond just the blockchain risk and the protocol risk, there's also varying levels of price volatility risk since you're holding two separate cryptos … although in my case, I’m working with just ETH and USDC, so I’m less worried about the price movement. I experimented with six other Aero pools, but found that ETH/USDC is the best balance of risk/reward for me. If you were LP-ing a bunch of memecoins, the rewards would be much higher, but your risk would also be exponentially greater. (And I imagine your stress levels would be much higher as well.)

7. But of course the biggest downside is the DEX-specific phenomenon of "impermanent loss," which is the term we use to describe how the pool rebalances itself and affects your original deposit. In DEX LPs, your deposited cryptos will continually adjust their respective amounts while mostly maintaining the cumulative dollar value of your original deposit. Every LP deposit must include equal amounts of the two cryptos in the pool, so let’s say you deposited 1 ETH and 3500 USDC. That means that the total value of your deposit was originally $7000. Let’s pretend the ETH price went up to $3600, what happens then? Well, the pool will rebalance by giving you less ETH and more USDC, such that the total value of your deposit remains the same at $7000.

8. If you withdraw your funds from a pool, you won’t get the same amounts of crypto back, but you will usually get the same dollar value back from when you first opened the position. I say “usually” because if the price of ETH dropped drastically (greater than 4-5%) and you weren’t paying attention, then you would lose at least 2%. If you already have some familiarity with IL, you know that I’m oversimplifying here for brevity’s sake. But if you’re not familiar with IL at all, you need to spend a lot of time reading up on it before making any moves. Overall, I think IL is manageable if you’re keeping a close eye on the market, but you can’t afford to just let your assets sit there without monitoring them.

9. Before I sat down to write this newsletter, I debated whether I should even be featuring this yield farming strategy. It’s far from a “passive investment” because of how closely you need to monitor it. I think I’m spending at least 30 minutes each day on this farm, which makes it a fairly “active investment.” Now to be fair, that is more due to my deposit size — it isn’t small, so my paranoia is high. But in the same way that real-world farming involves a regular interaction between the farmer and his crops, this kind of yield farming also requires frequent monitoring and a steady hand. I’ll admit that it feels like walking a tight rope, and my confidence level is not yet high. However, I am emboldened by the fact that I can cancel anytime and get my funds out of there at a moment’s notice. Importantly, I wanted to lean into the Base ecosystem hard this year, and this seems to be the most direct way for me to participate for now.
   
   Also, the yield is pretty nice.
   
   Be careful out there, cryptofam!

1. As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve been pondering some long-term questions. Having recently gotten engaged, I’m rethinking how I want to spend the rest of my life on this planet. One thing I’m finally starting to accept: I really don’t like trading crypto. Although I’ve managed to grow my portfolio by a lot this year, I disliked how seasonal the earnings were. I don’t like how I spent most of 2022-2023 living modestly, only to start splurging like crazy when the bull market hit. It’s not a particularly healthy way to live, and it makes you extremely vulnerable to externalities like illnesses or accidents. As I venture into starting a family in the coming years, I don’t think it’s an ideal situation to place ourselves in.

2. I’m sure I’m not the only adult who thinks this way. There are quite a few people in my age bracket that look at all the crypto bros screenshotting their 10x gains and instead of being really envious, are probably thinking, “Wow, I wonder how much sleep this dude gets.” I’ve largely stopped caring about these engagement-bait victory screenshots, because they’re just momentary glimpses of an always-fluctuating state of gains and losses. What this game is really about is how quickly you can take all of those gains and use them to hit (the extremely subjective goal of) Financial Freedom and Security.

3. So in 2025, my goal is to dial down the trading and work on a steady wealth accumulation strategy that builds up my cash position over time in a predictable way. The goal is to generate at least 12% yield per year without sacrificing security and flexibility. In other words, I’m looking for reliable, consistent financial instruments where my capital stays liquid and generates yield that I can claim whenever I want. For the sake of easy math, if we have a starting capital of a million pesos, we want to find reliable instruments that will give us 10,000 pesos per month consistently without being locked up or frozen. In the traditional finance world, these numbers are basically impossible without venturing into the realm of high-risk investments, but in crypto they’re “reasonable” … if you know what you’re doing, that is.

4. So yes, basically, I’m lazy and don’t want to work hard for my money. And yes, I know that I sound like a privileged prick for even daring to write those words. But look at it this way: if you’re in your twenties right now and staring hungrily at charts until the wee hours everyday — with tired eyes and sweaty palms from the countless stop-losses and over-leveraged liquidations — you probably want to know that you won’t still be doing that when you’re 40, right? Well, my goal is to work out a long-term strategy that’ll get you (and me) to “Financial Freedom” with the least amount of energy expended. Essentially, I want to work hard on this so I can afford to be lazy in the long run.

5. One important caveat: I’m not including any high-volatility coins in this strategy. This strategy is entirely going to be based on stablecoins. There’s a strong narrative around how the next wave of innovations will happen in the stablecoin sector this cycle, and keeping ourselves updated on these new projects is a good idea. (One truism in the crypto world: wherever there is hype, there are airdrops, and nothing helps pad your earnings like free money.)

6. So let’s get started! The laziest version of this strategy — and really, the first stop for anyone who is experimenting with this stuff — is Nexo.com, arguably the world’s largest centralized crypto bank. These guys have been operating for 6 years now and have over $7B in assets under management. You can get 9% per year on your USDT or USDC deposits from them, and you can boost those yields to 12% by voluntarily locking your funds up for periods of 3 months at a time. I park a lot of my capital in Nexo while I’m looking for better instruments because it’s so convenient. The yield comes from the fact that, like a traditional bank, Nexo lends your funds out to other crypto organizations and/or users. For this reason, you can earn yield even on Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., although those yields are much more modest — between 2 to 4% p.a.

7. Of course, Nexo is centralized, so there’s some custodian risk — they could get hacked, debanked, or regulated out of existence. Remote possibilities, to be sure, but possibilities nonetheless. If these are the kinds of things that worry you, then your next stop would likely be the decentralized version of Nexo: Aave.com. Unlike Nexo, Aave is not a company but a lending protocol. The Aave website is merely a marketplace of those who have capital (i.e., people like you) and those who want to borrow capital (i.e., everyone else). The Aave protocol manages about $32B in collective assets, and dynamically adjusts yields and rates based on the availability of funds. It can’t promise 12% p.a. yield on your USDC deposit, but it is usually within 2% of that. It is extremely flexible in that you can withdraw your funds at any time and you’ll still keep whatever you’ve already earned. It is worth mentioning however that although there is no custody risk here, there is instead a technological risk: the protocol could unexpectedly fail or the various vaults that the protocol uses could be attacked. That said, Aave has been around for 7 years and is considered one of the cornerstones of decentralized finance, so I’m not too worried.

8. These next two are what I consider extreme-high-risk because of how young they are. They haven’t been battle-hardened in the same way that more established protocols have. The first is the real-world-asset protocol Usual.money, whose website defiantly claims “Together we are bigger than BlackRock.” The Usual project issues a stablecoin called USD0, which is backed not by dollars, but by US Treasury bonds. (Basically, you are lending your money to the US government and they are paying you back with interest.) This is a very standard mechanism for generating profit — it’s the reason why Tether and Circle make so much money each year from their respective stablecoin offerings — and Usual’s innovation is that they’ve directed those Treasury profits to the holders of USD0. Because the Usual project is young, their yields are heavily incentivized right now — their annualized rewards are currently sitting at over 30%. I don’t expect that reward level to last, and it’ll likely settle to the low teens within the next few months, and eventually approach the true yields of US Treasury Bonds, which are at ~4% as of late 2024. That said, Usual’s recently announced partnership with the BlackRock liquidity fund makes this an interesting project to keep an eye on in the long term.

9. My last example is Ethena.fi, which is a stablecoin project that launched in 2023 with an interesting stabilizer mechanism: if you simultaneously opened a long ETH position and a short ETH position, you would earn zero dollars because each position neutralizes the other. That sounds dumb if you’re a trader, but it’s genius if you’re trying to synthesize a stablecoin — your net dollar value never changes. This is called delta-neutrality, and it’s at the heart of what keeps the Ethena dollar USDE stable. Since it uses ETH and other cryptos as its stabilizers, it doesn’t need to rely on banks like USDT or USDC. It can theoretically maintain its $1 peg for as long as both its long and short positions stay open. I was initially skeptical of Ethena, but it has weathered enough rallies and drawdowns in 2024 to indicate that it’s probably not going to collapse overnight. If you choose to stake your USDE with them, you currently get 12% p.a.

10. When I sat down to write this newsletter, I decided that I was only going to cover platforms where I felt confident enough to deposit at least a million pesos. Everyone has a different tolerance for risk, so you’ll have to calibrate that against your own comfort level. Importantly, I don’t know if 2025 will allow me to fully abandon speculative trading — it’d be stupid to completely ignore a rising market. As things stands right now though, I’m in full sell mode, and I’m directing all of my profits into the yield-bearing instruments above, along with a few others (Hyperliquid, Pendle, Aerodrome) that are a little too risky or complicated to recommend here. Good luck out there and hope you all have a great 2025, cryptofam!

1. gm, welcome to October. Or Uptober, as the crypto world likes to call it. If you’ve been hanging out with the community recently, you’ll probably have heard the term “Uptober” at least once, referring to this interesting phenomenon where the Bitcoin price always goes green during the month of October. As with many things in crypto, this nickname is both hyperbolic but also rooted in some statistical truth, so let’s dive in to the data!

2. Here’s the main idea. Since 2017, every October has closed with a positive month-on-month price gain for Bitcoin. The gains have ranged from a modest 5% in October 2022 to a whopping 48% in October 2017. There is just one exception: October 2018 saw a lowly -5% dip overall. Six out of seven years is a pretty strong pattern, but what’s most fascinating about this data is that there is no other month in the year that shows such consistency. It is a statistical anomaly, which is why it got the “Uptober” nickname. The precise reason for Uptober is heavily debated but the simplest one is just that the US summer has ended and investors are returning to work and making their biggest bets of the year. The meta reason is that people have started to anticipate Uptober because of previously established patterns, and thus take long positions, which drives the price up, which manifests the returns they were anticipating. Self-referential markets sure are fun.

3. So what can we expect for Uptober 2024? Let’s discuss the prediction mechanism first. Based on the historical data, we know that Uptober doesn’t stand on its own — it’s actually somewhat momentum-based. What that means is that the relative combined strength of August and September tends to predict the outcome of Uptober. In 2017, August saw a massive +65% rally followed by a -8% dip in September, which resulted in our strongest Uptober with +48% gain. In 2018, both August and September saw losses (-9% and -6% respectively), which gave us our weakest Uptober with -5%. Our middle-of-the-road sample is 2020. August was at +3% and September was at -7%, and Uptober ended up with +28%. Remember though that 2020 was an election year, which tends to amplify investment trends. Neither August nor September need to be strong in order for Uptober to print big numbers, but the closer they are to positive numbers, the better.

4. As a reminder, August 2024 was at -8% and September ended at +9%. So with all that in mind, we can probably expect the October 2024 Bitcoin price to be close to the 7-year-average of +22%. It’s $63,500 as I write this, so the most likely Uptober outcome for Bitcoin is in the $75,000 range. There are several caveats here: the biggest one is that the Uptober data only looks at the monthly closing price, meaning that it ignores the highs and lows within the month itself. It’s entirely possible that we’ll see a meaningful ATH breach in the high $70k or low $80k range, but it’s less likely that it will sustain till the end of the month. Two more caveats. We’re in an election year (which usually has a positive price impact) but also in a quasi-recession (which usually has a negative price impact). It’s not clear which of these will win out, they might even cancel each other out.

5. The USD/PHP exchange rate is making our ATH calculations a little weird. Recall that our last price peak in July 2024 was $69,800, which is far below the ATH. However, that dollar amount was equivalent to 4.1M PHP because of the sky-high exchange rate (58.6 at the time). This time around, the USD exchange rate has softened by nearly 5%, so we’ll need to be at $72,000 levels before Bitcoin will start trading over 4M PHP again. It’s gonna be a weird 4th quarter, cryptofam!

1. On Friday August 2, Bitpinas published a press release with the title “The Philippines Chooses Venom for Groundbreaking National Blockchain Initiative.” (link) The specific government agency involved is the National Printing Office, and it appears that they’ll be preserving the country’s “accountable forms” on the Venom blockchain. The first wave of community comments were exactly what you’d expect: what’s Venom? What is the National Printing Office? How did they end up picking Venom? Well, I did the research, so you don’t have to.

2. First, what’s Venom? It’s ok if you’ve never heard of them; I hadn’t either. Venom is a tiny blockchain protocol that’s less than a year old. Its Twitter account was registered in 2022, and its token $VENOM was launched just 4 months ago. Its blockchain currently handles only 5-6 transactions in every block, its daily trading volume is under $5M, and it’s not even listed on Binance yet. I say all this not to make fun of Venom, but to provide context to one of the most critical statements in the release: “Venom Blockchain proved it is superior to other blockchain platforms like Hyperledger, Ethereum and R3 Corda.” Given that the Venom blockchain has near-zero real-world usage, I find that claim to be questionable, at best.

3. But let’s dive into the technology. Looking at Venom’s code repository on Github, we find that their tech is copied from the work of a third-party called EverX Labs (link). If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because EverX Labs used to call themselves TON Labs. So what we’re actually looking at is essentially the same blockchain implementation as the TONchain. (If you don’t know what TONchain is, it’s the blockchain protocol borne out of Telegram, the crypto community’s most popular messaging app. It’s the home of Hamster Kombat and other trending tap-to-earn games.) Even Venom’s blockchain explorer, Venomscan, is just a re-skinned version of Everscale’s explorer.

4. The critical thinkers in the audience may be asking: Isn’t the spirit of blockchain to be fully open-source? And yes, you’re absolutely correct, every public blockchain is expected to share their code freely with the world. But what is strange about Venom is that they do not mention their reliance on TON technology anywhere on their website or their whitepaper. The Venom whitepaper describes its “Dynamic Sharding Protocol” at length, but does not mention that it’s cribbing from the TON whitepaper’s “Infinite Sharding Paradigm.” There’s a lengthy comparison between the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Venom’s TVM in their developer guide (link), but they never explain that the TVM was not created by Venom Foundation. TVM used to stand for “TON Virtual Machine,” but it has since been renamed to “Threaded Virtual Machine,” probably around the same time EverX Labs changed its own name. These rebranding gymnastics always give me a migraine, and it seems to be particularly prevalent in the Telegram/TON/TVM ecosystem.

5. Currently, there are 3 active blockchains using the same underlying TVM technology: $TON itself, $VENOM, and Gosh. But maybe that’s all fine. Maybe none of this matters, and I’m just overthinking the situation. But here are some of my open questions: Why does $VENOM and its blockchain need to exist if $TON already does? Blockchains derive their security from the size of their network, and if you had a mission-critical use-case like preserving the Philippine government’s documentation, why wouldn’t you go with the largest network for the highest possible security? TON is validated by 385 nodes globally, Venom has just 48.

6. How did Venom even end up on the radar of the Philippine National Printing Office in the first place? Digitizing the country’s paperwork is a good idea — no arguments here — but in order to select Venom you had to skip over a hundred other far more established protocols. Even if you disagree that Ethereum or any of its Layer2’s are a good fit, why ignore TON? It’s the actual battle-tested version of Venom and it’s in the Top 10. It’s hard to miss it.

7. One possibility is that NPO didn’t select Venom at all; it was the software vendor Miquido that did. But that just transfers all of my questions over to them. Based on its previous clientele, Miquido appears to be a pretty strong developer (Skyscanner and HelloFresh are not small projects), and they do have an existing blockchain practice. I’d be really interested to see how their technology selection process ended up with Venom as the leading choice. It seems obvious that TON — or even a vanilla implementation of EverX’s open-source chain — would have been a stronger recommendation.

8. It’s hard to tell if NPO’s “digital transformation” project will actually move forward. The press release is effusive in its praise of Venom and Miquido, but rather noncommittal with its actual plans: “Looking into and possibly using the Venom Blockchain and the Miquido technology stack, the NPO can transition to the issuance of electronic forms.” The wording makes the situation feel quite soft — it sounds more like they’re exploring the possibilities. In contrast, the follow-on statement from the Venom CEO makes it sound like the project has already been fully launched: “This project demonstrates the massive utilization of the Venom blockchain in the form of hundreds of millions of Venom tokens annually […] We are honored to play a pivotal role in the Philippines’ digital transformation journey.” I get that he’s pumping his token price, but wow, what a way to get your present-tense and future-tense mixed up.

9. One last thought to end this discussion with: No matter which protocol they select, the NPO would need to buy and store those tokens in order to pay for network transaction fees. With that in mind, I find it absolutely hilarious that the first crypto to be officially held in treasury by the Philippine government just might be a random alt called $VENOM.

1. In his recent State of the Nation Address, the President announced a ban on all Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) “effective immediately”. The statement was met with thunderous applause and I admit that I initially thought it was all just regulatory theater, given that PAGCOR had only a few months prior debuted its new “Internet Gaming License.” The IGL framework was positioned as a replacement for the current POGO license and, as your average cynical Filipino pundit, I jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that POGOs were not being banned, but rebranded.

2. It turns out that that is not the case, and PAGCOR’s earlier efforts to save the Chinese-led online gaming industry have in fact been overridden by this executive order. (link) On Thursday July 24th, Malacanang issued a follow-up statement, declaring that the POGO industry had 60 days to pack their bags and head home. Big yikes. (link)

3. As of 2023, there are about 22,000 foreign workers and 25,000 locals employed by the POGOs. (link) The industry generates about ₱166B in “economic benefit” for the country, which includes everything from direct taxes to indirect spending. That sounds like a lot of money, but the Dept of Finance says that it’s costing the country ₱265B (!) to host the POGO industry, so we’re actually at a net negative. Supposedly one of the consequences of having an online gambling industry is that it creates a chilling effect with other foreign investors, which was one of the reasons given for the high cost.

4. Let’s look at some of the possible impacts. For years now, the presence of well-paid POGO employees in our mixed-use districts has caused substantial inflation in rent and cost of goods. Living in BGC for over a decade, I saw this happen first-hand. By the time I left in 2022, nearly all of the other tenants on my floor were Chinese migrants, and keeping up with the rent increases was untenable on a “normal” salary. My first BGC apartment in 2012 was a ₱25,000/month 1-bedroom. Nowadays, a smaller studio unit in that same building is going for ₱45,000. Inflation is a bitch, and it’s magnified further by the presence of a transient high-income class that can hoover up all the supply.

5. Without the POGOs, will we see rent prices come down in popular districts? Theoretically, several thousand landlords across BGC, Makati, Resortsworld, and other areas would all lose their high-paying tenants simultaneously over the next 8 weeks. The last time we saw an exodus of this scale was during the opening months of COVID in 2020, so that provides a good comparative for rental prices we can expect in the coming months.

6. And then there’s USDT trading volume. The POGO presence is the single biggest driver of USDT volume in our P2P marketplaces. Even with Binance now out of the picture, Bybit, OKX, and Bitget all maintain their own thriving black markets for trading PHP for USDT and vice versa. Chainalysis last year estimated Philippine crypto inbound volumes to be around $80B, nearly 20% of which was gambling-related, and nearly all of the rest heading for one of those top centralized exchanges. If the POGO exodus is indeed imminent, there could be an initial surge in USDT buying as POGO businesses and employees alike convert their remaining pesos into stablecoins.

7. The biggest victims here are the 25,000 Pinoys who now find themselves just 60 days away from the welfare line. DOLE has been assigned the thankless job of relocating these workers, but it’s hard to imagine an equitable outcome here. With no transition period and no support program from the government, it’s unlikely that the remaining land-based casinos can absorb that much new manpower. More than any other consequence of this ban, this is probably the one we are least prepared for.

8. Here’s the killer: I think this ban will increase Chinese online-gambling business activity in this country as it will force the POGOs underground, where they can operate freely without all the compliance theater. PAGCOR had about 298 POGO entities under its supervision, but only 43 ever qualified for their new Internet Gaming Licenses; those 255 other unlicensed businesses didn’t all just evaporate into the ether. It’s far more likely that they just found new rocks to hide under. Importantly, they can continue to exploit a near-infinite supply of underemployed locals to run their operations … only now with even less government oversight than before.

9. Unless the government crackdown is hard enough and consistent enough to make these illegal POGOs extremely unprofitable, they will flourish underground. And what about those other impact areas we talked about above? Rental prices should still come down as fewer foreign workers would want to live in highly visible districts if they’re employed by an illegal operation. We’ll see volatility in the USDT black market over the next couple of months as sources and fund flows reconsolidate, but over time I think we’ll eventually see a gain in overall trading volume. With no traditional banking support left, these POGO/IGL businesses have nowhere to go but crypto. And those 25,000 locals? Assuming they are unable to find work on their own, their options are to either wait for DOLE to find them a legitimate job, or be informally employed in a criminal enterprise. I don’t think this is the industry change we were praying for, but in some ways, I guess it’s the one we deserve.

1. Earlier this week, CoinsPH announced that it had received BSP approval to launch a PHP-backed stablecoin, and planned to kick off the whole project as early as June 2024. CoinsPH is calling their stable “PHPC,” and as the fourth or fifth attempt at a peso stablecoin, it’s not really a new idea. It is however the first viable attempt from an industry player who ostensibly knows what it’s doing. So for this week’s Cryptoday, let’s talk about how a stable-peso might work, because when it comes to big ideas like this, it all comes down to the execution. (To be clear, I have ZERO insider information on how CoinsPH operates or how they intend to offer this stablecoin, so this essay is speculative.)

2. The only stablecoin variant that the BSP would ever approve would be a *fully-backed* stablecoin, ala USDC. Regulators want full transparency, auditable reserves, and detailed monthly attestations. Circle basically established the playbook for this, which is why USDC has become the stablecoin benchmark nowadays. (I don’t think that USDT and Tether Foundation are acting in bad faith, but I do think their earlier gung-ho approach is simply too loose for regulators in 2024.)

3. There are of course many other variations of stables: the “pegged” stablecoin uses over-collateralized crypto deposits as its treasury (DAI). The “algorithmic” stablecoin uses spot-market-trading as its stability mechanism (UST, FRAX). And the new breed of stablecoin popularized by Ethena uses the fascinating delta-neutral derivatives-based strategy (USDe). Ultimately, I don’t think any of these variants would have met the BSP’s standards for safety … not because they don’t work, but because they’re simply too bleeding-edge. Regulators need a lot of time to get comfortable with new innovations. So we’re left with the most traditional stablecoin: every peso deposited at the issuer will mint an equivalent token, and all those pesos must be accounted for at an approved custodian bank.

4. Now typically the issuer makes money from its stablecoin in two specific ways. The easiest way is by using the deposited customer funds to invest in other financial instruments. Since PHPC is modeled after USDC with the blessing of our local regulators, only half of the peso deposits will likely be invested, and it would only be invested in approved instruments like Treasury bonds. Nowadays, you can buy those bonds at a 4% p.a. interest rate, so if the stablecoin issuer uses half of its reserves in this manner, then the entire pile earns 2% annually. If CoinsPH hits a 1B peso market cap with its stablecoin, it will earn about 20M pesos annually. (If 1B pesos sounds far-fetched, consider that the XSGD stablecoin out of Singapore is currently at 2.3B pesos equivalent, and they have far fewer crypto users than us.)

5. What’s the second way the issuer earns? Exchange fees. As the primary issuer, you can charge whatever you want for the privilege of swapping fiat pesos for crypto pesos, although you probably want to keep it as close to 1:1 as possible. So let’s assume 0.1% in fees, meaning that paying 1000 pesos will give the user back 999 PHPC. There’s no volatility risk so there’s little reason to charge more than that. In fact, you could make the argument that the conversion fee should be free, since the issuer earns from the deposits themselves. And in any case, the real money isn’t in the initial exchange.

6. In order for that stable peso token to be useful, you want to set up liquidity pools in every DEX and every chain that you can. You would want to start with Ronin, Tron, BSC, Solana, and Polygon, and have PHPC/USDx pools in all of them. Here, you could earn 0.3% or more, but the expectation is that liquidity pool farmers will eventually join in too. You could probably even incentivize the LPs by offering some extra points as a reward. You would then leverage all that on-chain activity to convince the big CEXs to list your token.

7. But the Filipino crypto investor is probably asking: what’s the point? Why can’t we just keep buying crypto directly with our normal fiat pesos? The biggest impact of a stable-peso is that it allows the Filipino public to transport all of their trading activities directly to global exchanges (CEXs or DEXs) and bypass the local businesses entirely. Yes, the most interesting outcome of a well-established peso stablecoin is that it will render the local exchange industry irrelevant. The issuer of the stablecoin would still be relatively profitable given its treasury earnings and LP fees, but having an on-chain peso eliminates the need for other local exchanges. Think about it: as a Pinoy crypto enthusiast, why wouldn’t you just swap your PHP for PHPC instead of dealing with local exchange fees? After all, once you’re holding a stable-peso, you could send it anywhere you want, or trade it for anything you want. CEXs, DEXs, regulated or not, legal or not, scam or not … they all become instantly accessible once your peso is on-chain. I estimate that the savings would be greater than 50% in most cases, so the benefit is large enough that even if you didn’t want to use it, you’d probably at least try.

8. How would PHPC achieve mainstream acceptance quickly? If you’re launching a new token, your biggest concern is always how to reach mass adoption, and the fastest way to achieve that would be to force it on your existing customers. When a user deposits pesos into the CoinsPH app, those pesos could automatically get converted into their stablecoin counterpart. After all, both your peso balance and your stable-peso balance are just entries in a database, so there’s no real difference from a technology standpoint, and very little difference from a customer experience standpoint. It would only be at the point of withdrawal that your funds could intelligently transform into either fiat peso or crypto peso, depending on your intended destination. (Naturally, there would need to be some substantial customer-education initiatives to make this possible.)

9. Of course, this all creates fascinating regulatory challenges. As of 2019, VASPs are required by law to report both the origin and destination of their customers’ crypto transfers, and putting the peso itself on-chain will make that even more critical. Suddenly, sovereign money will flow in and out of the Philippine economy without passing through the banks, at a velocity that has never been possible. If you wanted to say, donate to Hezbollah factions in Lebanon, buy abortion pills from Delhi, or send birthday money to your lola in Vancouver, you can now do it directly, without resorting to a proxy currency like BTC. Suffice to say I suspect that there will be a lot of growing pains as this gets rolled out. The worst version of this would involve some kind of clampdown, i.e., users can only transfer their PHPC to “authorized” exchanges. Hopefully they don’t go down that road though, as it would render PHPC about as useful as a testnet token.

10. As I read this essay back to myself, I realize that it sounds somewhat negative. I am a big believer in putting the Philippine peso on-chain, but maybe I’m also hyper-aware of how many challenges and pitfalls there are for it, because I’ve been thinking about its possible impact for so long. I believe that it’s the only way to achieve sustainable cost reductions in crypto trading fees for Filipinos. I think that that is a future we all want, and so the idea of a stable-peso is something I am very supportive of, in principle. But as I said above, it’s all about the execution.

1. On 4/20, the Bitcoin blockchain went through its fourth scheduled halving, officially entering its 5th era at around 8am Manila time. The evening before, I hosted a meetup in the GCash offices (together with our friends at Bitpinas) where I charted the history of the halvings and where I thought we were heading next. Today’s newsletter summarizes my talk and as a bonus includes the immediate aftermath of the 24 hours after the halving event itself.
   

   

2. The first halving happened in Nov 2012, when $BTC was around $20. There was nothing to report for the next few months — just a generally flat price with a small bump in early 2013 — and then out of nowhere, a massive 50x run-up that would peak at over $1100 almost exactly a year after the halving itself. This was followed by the well-known collapse of MtGOX (that era’s Binance) and a faith-shaking, year-long price slide which eventually bottomed out at $180 (-86%) in January 2015.
   

   

3. The 2016 halving had a very similar shape as the first one: a generally flat price in the months surrounding the event itself, but this time the climb took a lot longer. We would eventually find our new peak in December 2018, a full 18 months after the halving. At $20k, it was a 30x gain from the halving price. It was followed, rather ironically, by another exchange collapse — this time it was the Japanese exchange Coincheck. The price would spend the next year in a slump, eventually finding the cycle bottom at $3800 in January 2019 — an 81% drawdown.
   

   

4. By 2020, there were enough new market participants to materially change the shape of the price movement. The halving event hit in May 2020, and the price began to climb later that same year. It would hit two peaks in 2021 — one in April at $61,000 (700%+) and again in October at $69,000 (780%+). The drawdown between these two heights was as low as $35,000, large enough for some to conclude that the bull run had already ended in June. But the true conclusion of the bull market happened in mid-2022, with a series of industry collapses: 3AC, Celsius, and then eventually FTX in November. At the time, FTX was the second or third largest crypto exchange in the world, and the price would plummet to $16,000 (-76%) as a result of their shutdown.
   

   

5. Which brings us to 2024. Not only is there a lot more capital in the space now, but much of it is institutional capital from the Bitcoin ETF providers in the US stock market. With three halvings under our belts, there’s now enough collective intelligence to make moves that will alter the shape of our chart so that it becomes unrecognizable. The bottom line: if you knew that the halving events historically induced price pumps of 700-800%, wouldn’t you try to buy as soon as possible? This simple idea drove the market upwards so fast in 2024 that we breached the previous ATH in March — a full month before the halving was even scheduled to happen.
   

   

6. So what comes next? Obviously, we don’t know. But here are some ideas. The US-based Bitcoin ETFs have slowed down in their buying and the data is telling us that there hasn’t been a material change in their aggregate positions since April began. In the near term, any positive price movement is likely going to come from Asia then, with the newly approved Hong Kong-based ETFs. On the downside, the US Federal Reserve has signaled that they will not be reducing interest rates in their upcoming meetings, which is already causing the markets to contract in anticipation. One of the most obvious effects: the USD-PHP exchange rate has hit its yearly high at over ₱57.50. (Easiest way to think about this: the US is offering you a whopping 5.5% annually to just sit and hold your dollars instead of investing it. Most people would take that deal. This consequently makes it even less desirable to hold PHP, which in turn causes the peso to slump against the dollar.)

7. In terms of the Bitcoin price, I think that we could see another double, or perhaps even a triple, peak in the 2024-2025 timeframe. I’m still optimistic about the price and am targeting $100,000 to $130,000 as the cycle ATH. This would be a 700% gain from the absolute bottom, which as I write this, does feel a little ambitious. On the other hand, it’s only 100% up from the previous cycle’s ATH, so it’s a justifiable target from that perspective.

8. And what happened immediately after the halving hit? People always fantasize about how halvings will herald a price pump, but it’s historically never been the case. Instead, what we saw yesterday was a truly massive 2000% increase in network fees. In the days before the halving, the average block of transactions would cost about 1 bitcoin in fees to transmit. Yesterday, I was seeing blocks that cost over 20 bitcoins to transmit. What was causing the pump? The new Runes protocol. This is a community-built idea that allowed people to create memecoins and Bitcoin’s version of NFTs in a more direct way on the chain. The hype was so great that the Bitcoin blockchain was unusable for most of the day, with individual transaction fees in excess of $150. As I’m writing this, the network is still congested, with individual fees in the $10-20 range, but it looks like the initial insanity has settled down. We’ll see what happens on Monday evening when the US market comes back online.

Keep safe out there, cryptofam!

1. Yesterday I liquidated about 2M pesos worth of my 2024 altcoin portfolio. Quick recap again: I started accumulating alts in late 2023 (original portfolio is here) with a target of 250-300% growth during the 2024-2025 cycle. With a little luck, I was going to use the proceeds to build our farm house in Cavite. For this reason, my internal label for this portfolio was our “Farmhouse Fund.” Now, because the bull market was nothing but a fantasy back when I started building this port, I cast a very, very wide net. I was taking positions in all the big narratives: AI, RWA, games, DeFi, DePIN. Because of how early I started buying, I got great entries on basically everything, and as of yesterday morning the total portfolio was at 110%+ profit. This essay unpacks my justification for selling, although I should probably start by saying that I only sold off a portion of the portfolio. That portion, for reasons that I’ll get into later, was at a 25% average profit.

2. So why did I do this? Well, we had a two-day holiday in the Philippines and I spent most of that time reading and looking at market data. Specifically, I was looking at market data from every April over the last 8 years. I found that in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2019, the crypto marketcap dropped in the two weeks between April 10th and April 24th. The average drop during those four years was 7%. In 2017 and 2020, the market was sideways, and in 2016 and 2018, the marketcap went up. Note that I’m referring to the general crypto marketcap, and not any specific coin. Bitcoin itself dipped in mid-April in 2023, 2022, and 2021, but the five years before then were a grab bag of ups and sideways.

3. The reason for the dip has largely been attributed to the US tax filing deadline on April 15th. Everyone from normal retail traders to the biggest corporations are subject to this deadline, and I found a few examples where it may have affected stocks and commodities too. The further back you go, the less pronounced the effect is, because the US market didn’t have as big an impact on crypto in the early days (i.e., 2016 and earlier).

4. At 48 tokens, my Farmhouse Fund was getting very unwieldy. I knew which ones I really liked, and which ones I had taken positions in just to join the bandwagon. (AIOZ?) I couldn’t realistically monitor all of them, and every week recently there have been new project launches vying for time and attention. (I’ve been studying Ethena closely as well as the Ether.fi Liquid project.) As of yesterday, I was in the green on 43 out of the 48 tokens I’d picked, so if I was going to take profit, it seemed like a good time to do so. At the very least, I could free up some headspace!

5. Although my tax-dip data is not *definitive*, it showed that there’s a 50% chance that the marketcap would drop and a 25% chance that it would be harmlessly sideways. There’s also a 25% chance that I’ll be totally wrong, but I feel like that’s pretty good odds in the crypto world. Worst case scenario: I needlessly gave away some profit. Hardly the end of the world.

6. How did I decide which alts to sell off? My logic was super simple: everything that was under 100% gains went out the door. Everything that was over 100%, I’d keep. It helped that my biggest gainers were category-leaders — SOL, RON, TIA, SUI, PRIME — and nearly all had some kind of staking mechanism that incentivized me to hold on to them.

7. In total I sold off 30 tokens, simplifying the Farmhouse Fund down to just 18 positions. My basic strategy for the next two weeks is to just sit and wait with my USDT proceeds, and buy the dip if/when it comes. I also want to take bigger positions in fewer tokens, so I can focus my energy on the stuff I actually have an interest in. My ideal number is 30 alts total, and I’m going to try to be more disciplined in picking them.

8. To be absolutely clear: I didn’t sell BTC or ETH. (Those weren’t part of my 2024 altcoin portfolio anyway, as I bought them as far back as 2017.) I also held on to the airdrops I received (OP, ENA, YGG, PIXEL) because those are zero-cost, infinite ROI. Overall, I’m still incredibly bullish about 2024, but I wanted to see if I could apply simple macro logic and optimize my holdings even further. My current portfolio is in the pie chart in the cover image for this post :)

Stay safe out there, cryptofam!

1. In the distant past — and by that I mean, February 1st 2024 — Bitcoin was at $42,000. Then several eons elapsed — and by that I mean, 28 days — and Bitcoin found itself cruising over $61,000. It's February 29th as I write this and the price briefly touched $64,000 before retracing to the mid-$61k range. Analysts, short sellers, and those folks still waiting for $12k shook their heads in collective disbelief. Even the survivors of previous cycles couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the velocity. It wasn’t just the overall size of the jump — it was the fact that the last $10,000 leap occurred over just 48 hours.

2. A 10% leap in a single day is impressive, but if it feels like you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you have. Many times, in fact. If you look at the last 8 years worth of daily Bitcoin prices, you’ll find exactly 50 instances where the price jumped by at least 10% from one day to the next. Within those 50 days, nine days saw jumps greater than 15%. Within those nine days, exactly 2 days exhibited 20% gains. Both of those magical moments happened in 2017: the first was on June 20th, when $BTC went from $2270 to $2900, and the second was on December 17th, when it went from $14200 to $17800.

3. But of course, the converse is also true. From 2016 onwards, there have been 36 days where the Bitcoin price dropped greater than 10% from one day to the next. Interestingly, there was only one instance where it dropped greater than 20%, and that was much more recently. Between March 12th and 13th, 2020, Bitcoin sank like the Titanic from $7913 to $4970 ... a heartstopping 37% crash. Two years hence and we still refer to the moment as Black Thursday, triggered by the global COVID panic.

4. You may be thinking, surely this is volatility from the old days. Bitcoin has stabilized so much more in recent years, right? That’s not entirely accurate. Looking at the numbers, we find that bull market years (2017, 2021) show an average daily volatility of between 2.8% and 3%, whereas all other years are between 1.4% and 1.9%. (When I say the “average daily volatility,” I mean that the price could go either up or down by around that much from one day to the next.) We don’t have enough data to be conclusive about 2024 yet, but based on the 60 days we have so far, we’re approaching 2%.

5. It’s interesting to note that although Bitcoin has not broken its true ATH of $69,044 yet, it has actually already broken its ATH against the Philippine Peso. On November 10th, 2021, the PHP exchange rate was 50.4 to a dollar, meaning that the equivalent Bitcoin ATH price was PhP 3,479,817. We broke that just a few hours ago when we hit PhP 3,600,000+ or the $64,000 equivalent. Throughout the Southeast Asian region (and likely the rest of the developing world), Bitcoin has been breaking its ATHs against local currencies this week, because these secondary fiats have all taken a massive beating against the USD over the last 3 years.

6. So does this put us in a bull market yet? In the midst of all the commotion, we might have missed that a lot of other coins are rallying too. Ethereum itself is up 55% this February. $BNB remembered that it existed and is up 30%. $UNI is up 60%, $APT up 35%. $PRIME is up 97%. In general, there have been a lot of winners, just 60 days into the year. And of course when we step out of the crypto world, it does appear that everything else is going up as well. Big tech like Nvidia, Meta, and AMD are are all up by double-digits, but there are chunky gains in other sectors: notably, the leading weight-loss pharma Eli Lilly is up nearly 50% so far this year.

7. Given all of these signals, I have to concede that the bull market is here … much, much earlier than expected. In previous cycles, the Bitcoin halving triggered a pump several months after the fact. 2024 is the only time the rally has ever begun over a month before the “inciting” event itself. But then again, 2024 is a year in which we’re seeing a confluence of macro factors all working together. There’s the aforementioned halving, but it’s the intense growth of the Bitcoin ETFs coupled with easing Fed interest rates that are driving the markets to a feeding frenzy.

8. We all need to remember though that just because the bull market has begun, doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more big corrections over the coming months. In the 2017 bull market, we saw seven days with drops greater than 10%, and in 2021, we saw five. There’s still ten months left in 2024, cryptofam, so be vigilant and stay sharp!

PS. If you found this newsletter useful, please do me a favor and check out GCrypto in your GCash app. (Look inside the GInvest folder!) We’re the easiest way to buy your first small BTC stash and we’d love to have you on this journey.