In a way, it was, because they could go super large tubes without the weight penalty. Kleins and the Cannondale 3.0 and 2.8 were the first to really crank the dial on stiffness, when a lot of the other bikes were running normal or +1 oversized tubes.
They were super harsh because they were aiming for stiffness, and the material allowed them to do that.
Luna/UST was a completely degenerate & risky design; they were allowing 1:1 redemptions between the value of Luna in USD & the UST stablecoin.
As the market cap of Luna skyrocketed it allowed for the minting of massive quantities of UST, and then as the price of Luna declined the value of the tokens backing UST was less than what was in circulation and contributed to the death spiral.
No amount of demand for Luna block space was ever going to keep this thing pegged. The only thing defending it was open market moves from extremely well capitalized trading desks which is uh decidedly not "algorithmic" nor "decentralized".
There's other stable coins with similar mechanisms like Synthetix / SUSD which are also risky, but AT LEAST in their case they require 400% overcollateralization in SNX to mint SUSD.
What's shocking is how many people, who ostensibly should be in the top 1% in terms of finance IQ, (e.g., Mike Novogratz, Raoul Pal, etc.) were seemingly unaware of these risks and never examined how it worked while shilling it to retail investors.
> What's shocking is how many people, who ostensibly should be in the top 1% in terms of finance IQ, (e.g., Mike Novogratz, Raoul Pal, etc.) were seemingly unaware of these risks and never examined how it worked while shilling it to retail investors.
Not shocking at all, it’s answered in TFA:
> Many of the large firms that invested in and marketed this coin were able to exit before the crash occurred, escaping with massive profits. Strangely, some of these whales felt the need to share this in their comments following the crash. Pantera Capital CIO Joey Krug admitted that they had sold 80% of their Luna position before the crash. Furthermore, Pantera Capital partner, Paul Veradittakit, seemingly bragged that they had turned their $1.7 million dollar Luna investment into around $170 million dollars. Galaxy Digital CEO, Mike Novogratz, wrote in a letter that Galaxy had “booked profits along the way” before the Luna collapse happened.
> There's other stable coins with similar mechanisms like Synthetix / SUSD which are also risky, but AT LEAST in their case they require 400% overcollateralization in SNX to mint SUSD.
Apples and oranges, really. There is no redemption mechanism in sUSD that results in uncontrolled printing (i.e. devaluing) of SNX (the underlying collateral), unlike UST/LUNA.
sUSD is more akin to DAI (i.e., over-collateralized debt-based stablecoins) than to UST.
Something that rarely gets addressed in these discussions is why Ethereum even has fee market to begin with instead of a cheap FIFO model which ideally would be more fair.
To answer that I would invite anyone to try using a blockchain under heavy load without any way for users to prioritize transactions. What you will find is the network becomes vulnerable to transaction spamming; possibly to point of breaking consensus making it so nobody can transact at all.
MEV is a consequence of a design decision to address this. And that's not to say Ethereum has everything figured out and a better FIFO model can't solve this, but afaik this is the current state of things.
FIFO? First in first out? The blockchain is essentially the timestamping machine. The timestamp of a transaction are untrusted until mined into blocks, even then a fork can rid them.
The blockchain is essentially solving the ordering problem, one big timestamp machine. The solution you propose would require a timestamp machine in the first place lol.
The source(s) of the yield they were promising were extremely dubious and unsafe, the same can be said for Celsius.
When they tell you your crypto is being lent to "institutional investors" what they really mean to say is they're gambling with your crypto in defi protocols, and you can see this happening on-chain.
It's refreshing to see someone actually roll up their sleeves and not immediately descend into reactionary takes.
The criticism here is excellent; I think something people outside of this space never see is that despite all the boosterism there are web3/crypto proponents who have been airing these same exact grievances for some time now, particularly regarding metamask, infura, ipfs, & opensea, but there's alternatives to all of these.
Decentralization is a spectrum, and while I think Moxie's probably right in that this all trends towards consolidation, at the same time there's founders trying to to change course and move in the opposite direction, Joe Lubin being among them.
