Stackers looks to have been a rug. Apologies to anyone who entered after reading my articles. I lost 0.5E on this. Some learning to take from this. Alas, we move on.

What if Goat Street isn’t just another productive NFT, but an early bet on the liquidity layer for tokenized finance? Cashmere is starting to connect the pieces. 🐐

The external revenue thesis for Stackers may be starting to take shape. Pons is putting its fee flows onchain, while Stackers is giving every NFT an autonomous agent designed to hunt for real yield across Robinhood Chain. Coincidence? Maybe...

NFTX proved outside infrastructure can feed the Stackers payout engine. Now the dev is talking stock and gold pools, following volume, collecting fees and “cutting Stackers in on it.” This is starting to look a lot bigger than an NFT.

“The engine was never meant to run on trading fees alone.”

0x42c3…cf23 made the City of Stonks allowlist. My city gets built from my own wallet. 3,333 pixel cities, each one built out of how a wallet actually trades. cityofstonks.com/key?a=0x42c…

Stackers: The Asymmetric Bet

Another little breadcrumb in the Pons x Stackers story 👀 Stackers just launched the Fuse Workshop, making fusion more attractive. Fused Stackers can now choose which traits they keep from the NFTs they absorbed. Why does that matter? Because fusion permanently destroys Stackers. Anything that makes fusion more desirable potentially accelerates the shrinking supply. 3,000 original Stackers → supply keeps getting burned → remaining Stackers get more weight → now fused Stackers can customise their traits too. But what caught my attention was who appeared underneath the announcement. @PonsEcosystem: “Keep building 🤝” Stackers: “🤝” On its own? Means very little. But add it to everything else we've been seeing around Pons + Stackers and it becomes another interesting breadcrumb. And right underneath this, Stackers is highlighting $75k+ already paid to holders AND the addition of NFT royalty fees into payouts. That's the bigger picture I'm watching: More revenue sources → more reason to hold → more reason to fuse → shrinking NFT supply → increasing weight for survivors → while the Pons relationship keeps appearing publicly. Still no confirmation of the bigger Pons x Stackers thesis. But the breadcrumbs aren't slowing down. They're getting louder. 👀

@0xSammy @seedphrase @CryptoDjip @0xghostpost @Mike_Ch3k

By the end of this year, it will have been a decade since I made my first investment in crypto. What first pulled me into the space wasn't actually the price action. It was audit. I was spending hours verifying financial information. Tracing transactions back to invoices, checking bank statements, confirming balances and making sure what was being reported was actually accurate. And I remember thinking: surely there has to be a better way. So much money and time is spent simply verifying things. Audit fees, brokerage fees, exchange fees, conveyancing, settlement, ownership changes. Blockchain showed me that you could potentially build systems where a lot of this information could be verified on-chain. That's where my conviction in the technology started. Almost 10 years later, these are probably the biggest lessons I've learnt. Lesson 1: Nobody can give you conviction. You have to build it yourself. This is why DYOR is so important. You can listen to analysts, influencers, friends, Twitter, Discord, whatever. But when your investment is down 70%, 80% or 90%, none of those people are going to give you the conviction to keep buying. That has to come from your own research. In 2022, I managed to buy Bitcoin around the $16k bottom. But I didn't just magically buy everything at $16k. I was buying at $30k, $25k, $20k, $18k, $17k and then $16k. Every time I bought, it went lower. That's where conviction gets tested. It is very easy to say "I'll buy the dip" when markets are going up. It is completely different when you're buying and immediately watching that investment go further underwater. But bottoms are normally a process. You don't need to catch the exact bottom. If you've done your research, your thesis hasn't changed and the asset keeps getting cheaper, you accumulate through that process. The market will constantly try to convince you that you're wrong. Sometimes you need to zoom out. Lesson 2: Buy good projects. Don't build your whole portfolio around getting lucky. Small caps can make you ridiculous amounts of money. I've experienced it myself. I bought SOL below $5 before its massive 2021 run. I also bought TAO around $40 before it eventually ran towards $800. But those are two winners out of probably 30+ smaller projects I've invested in over the years that went close to zero. That part normally gets left out. Everyone remembers the 50x. Nobody remembers all the coins that died. You can absolutely take bets on small caps, but from my experience, the odds are not in your favour if your entire strategy is trying to find the next 100x. I'd rather have the majority of my exposure in projects that have actually shipped something, have users, liquidity, traction and are attracting serious capital. Then if you want to take a few smaller bets on top of that, fine. But don't put all your eggs in the lottery-ticket basket. Lesson 3: Take profits. This is probably one of the hardest lessons in crypto. Greed can destroy you. You watch something go 3x and think it can go 5x. Then it goes 5x and suddenly you're waiting for 10x. Then 10x comes and now you want 20x. Before you know it, the entire move has retraced and the profit you once had only exists in a screenshot. Have a strategy before the euphoria starts. Set levels where you're going to take some money off the table and actually execute when those levels are reached. You don't need to sell the exact top. You just need to make sure a winning investment actually becomes a realised profit. Lesson 4: Have a long-term investment horizon. This space moves ridiculously fast day to day, but the real changes take years. When I first got interested in blockchain, a lot of the use cases were mostly theoretical. It has taken almost a decade, but we're finally starting to see the infrastructure and regulatory environment develop around it. Governments are becoming more accommodating. Regulatory frameworks are becoming clearer. Institutions are participating. Tokenisation is becoming a serious conversation. These things don't happen overnight. If your investment thesis depends on something happening next month, you're probably going to spend most of your time frustrated. Sometimes a good thesis just needs time. Lesson 5: Don't put all your eggs in crypto either. Conviction doesn't mean everything you own needs to be in one asset class. I've invested across crypto, equities, gold, silver and property. If every investment I owned was in crypto, I'd be feeling very different right now. Different asset classes lead at different points in the cycle. Money rotates. Sometimes equities are leading. Sometimes commodities. Sometimes crypto. Sometimes defensive assets. If you can understand those rotations and position yourself accordingly, there are opportunities far beyond just picking the right coin. That's something I've increasingly been trying to do. After almost a decade in crypto, I still have a lot of conviction in where blockchain is going. But the way I invest today is very different from how I invested when I started. Do your own research because nobody else can give you conviction. Buy good projects and don't rely on getting lucky. Take profits. Think in years, not weeks. Diversify. And most importantly, zoom out. The crypto market has already come an incredibly long way. But compared to global financial markets, it's still small. I still think there is a lot more ahead.

One thing I think people are missing with Stackers is what the flywheel could become. The obvious question is what happens to the hourly payout if trading volume dies down. Fair question. Right now the pot is mainly being fed by trading activity. The new contract adds another source because every secondary Stacker sale on OpenSea can now pay royalties back into the hourly pot. So you start getting: Trading activity → fees → pot Stacker sales → royalties → pot Bigger pot → more demand for Stackers → potentially more activity But I think the more interesting part is the tokens themselves. Some Pons ecosystem tokens are already integrated into Stackers. Stackers are constantly allocating into different assets based on their picks. Now think about this from the side of a new token launching. Every new token wants people buying it. The problem is getting attention after the initial launch hype dies down. Launch day is easy compared to keeping people buying your token 2 weeks, 1 month or 3 months later. That is where Stackers could become valuable. If Stackers grows to the point where meaningful capital is constantly flowing through these picks, projects are going to want some of that flow. You could eventually get something similar to the Curve Wars. Projects could compete to get integrated, offer incentives, contribute revenue or somehow reward the Stackers ecosystem for directing flow towards their token. Why? Because instead of paying for another marketing campaign and hoping people buy, you are plugging into a system where capital is already being deployed continuously. More Stackers → more capital being allocated More capital → more valuable that flow becomes More valuable flow → more reason for projects to compete for it More project incentives → bigger pot for Stacker holders Bigger pot → more demand for Stackers That is the potential flywheel. At that point Stackers is not just dependent on organic trading fees. You could have: Trading fees NFT royalties Project incentives Potential revenue from integrations Obviously none of this is guaranteed and some of it would still need to be built. But if Stackers gets enough users and enough capital flowing through it, the most valuable thing might not even be the NFTs themselves. It could be the flow. New tokens are always looking for buyers. Stackers could potentially become one of the places they compete to get them. $Stackers @StackersXYZ @MEADGod @0xnobi