Richard Chen
@richardchen39
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General Partner @1confirmation . DMs open
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Here's a fun one people aren't noticing:
SBF quietly lobbying to get the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA) bill passed which gives the CFTC power to kill DeFi but benefits FTX
Since covid ive realized:
Everything is corrupt & most ppl don't notice
ie,
- Fed printing money & giving it away
- SEC attacking crypto vs solving systematic TradFi issues
- Gov closing mom&pops during covid but big box retailers stay open
Would rather live in ignorance
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1K
Cats clogged Ethereum in 2017.
Dogs clogged Ethereum in 2021.
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Personal update:
I've been battling mental health issues for the last several months and it's really taken a toll on me now.
So I'll be taking a break from crypto and Twitter for a bit.
Friends, you know how to reach me.
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Anecdotally this is happening with Solana DeFi founders right now. Go back to cushy web2 job, school, or pivot to building on the new shiny Aptos/Sui VC chain.
The culture and soul of an ecosystem is stress tested in a bear market.
(from Jan 2022)
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In case you're curious,
@ConstitutionDAO
members have collectively spent 199.38 ETH ($860k) in gas.
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Biggest regrets as a VC (in order of importance):
1) Not investing enough in winners
2) Getting the category right but picking the wrong company
3) Taking the meeting and passing on a winner
4) Not seeing the deal
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George Carlin on COVID, lockdowns, vaccine passports. 22 years ago.
He sounds like a prophet rather than a comedian.
RIP
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There's a prominent VC who larps on crypto Twitter about being founder friendly but has pulled several term sheets and asked several portcos for refunds in the past year.
But calling them out is -EV. Wat do?
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I'm worried DeFi project treasuries are turning into slush funds.
Just looking at some proposals that have passed and how much is getting paid out with little accountability. Plus most proposals are about using the treasury rather than improving the protocol.
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Underrated winner of the Bitcoin ETF approval? Prediction markets.
@Polymarket
did more volume than OpenSea today. 😱
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THREE MILLION DEFI USERS 📈
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It's that time of the year again!
I recap how I did on my 2021 predictions:
- Cryptoart
- Prediction markets
- DeFi derivatives
And make my 2022 predictions:
- Vertical specific NFT marketplaces
- Trust-minimized cross-chain bridges
- Investment DAOs
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🤑
What are the largest airdrops in history? In terms of amount of $$$ distributed?
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The thing that always amazes me about
@VitalikButerin
is he's able to stay so grounded even after getting hilariously rich.
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Finally started a Substack!
In this piece I talk about:
1) Portfolio construction > picking winners
2) Little correlation between how "hot" a deal is and success pre product-market fit
3) More difficult picking winners in hot narratives and crowded spaces
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OpenSea just surpassed ONE MILLION total users who have made at least one NFT transaction!
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TWO MILLION DEFI USERS 📈🚀
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Usually a big red flag 🚩 I see in pitch decks is when the team page slaps a bunch of good logos: Stanford, MIT, Microsoft, Meta, YC, etc.
The best entrepreneurs don't give a fuck about what the establishment thinks and don't need credentials to feel confident.
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Fun fact:
@HopProtocol
is doing about the same amount of volume as Thorchain before the hack.
No token, no army of shills. Just a missionary team heads down focused on building.
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The MEV industry keeps inventing fancy new words for old ideas.
Intents are limit orders.
Solvers are market makers.
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I just switched to
@brave
from Google Chrome and it's the best thing ever. Now my computer battery doesn't drain all of a sudden bc Chrome uses so much fucking RAM.
Plus it's great to tip websites you support with
@AttentionToken
.
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Excited to launch , a website that tracks artwork and artist data across galleries including
@SuperRare
,
@niftygateway
,
@makersplaceco
, and
@AsyncArt
!
Find the most expensive artworks, top artists, and data on artwork sales.
#cryptoart
#NFT
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One lesson I've learned in VC over the years is founder quality matters more and ideas matter less than you think.
Ideas can change. Founders are more nature than nurture.
Good founders find a way to win and don't blame the market or make excuses why they're not shipping.
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In crypto, when there's smoke there's usually fire.
In the past 6 years working in this space, almost every rumor I've heard behind the scenes has turned out to be true.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎉🥳
It's that time again when I make three underrated product trend predictions for the upcoming year and recap how I did last year.
For 2023:
1) ENS
2) MEV business model for apps and wallets
3) Generative art
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How do I get better at Twitter?
Being one of the very first to call out SBF before FTX blew up last week hasn't really translated into more followers and retweets.
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Excited to announce 1confirmation Fund III, a $125M venture fund to invest in early stage companies, crypto networks, and NFTs!
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Since inception
@NexusMutual
has generated $11.3M in fees: $7.7M from the sell spread and $3.6M from cover premiums.
This means 11% of the capital pool comes from earnings rather than $NXM buyers, making it one of the most profitable DeFi projects (). 👀
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Biggest buzzwords at ETHDenver 2024:
1) Crypto x AI
2) Bitcoin L2s
3) Restaking
Seriously though. At ETHDenver everyone was talking about 1) wallet infra 2) staking or 3) zk tech.
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Everyone is in the business of selling picks and shovels – who is even digging gold anymore?
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.
@opensea
has been an absolute 🚀 in July!
📈 Record daily volume today ($39M)
📊 $325M July volume, double previous ATH
💰 $22M in monthly fees -> P/E ratio of 5.7 🤯
🎟️ 458k monthly NFTs sold, double previous ATH
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One year ago today Loot launched.
The fraudulence of crypto Twitter was never more apparent than all the influencer tweetstorms to pump and dump their bags.
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VCs are hopping on the Cosmos bandwagon now. ⚛️
We at
@1confirmation
:
- Invested in $ATOM in 2018 and
@dYdX
in 2017
- Also
@archwayHQ
(smart contract chain),
@stride_zone
(liquid staking),
@osmosiszone
(DEX), more TBA
-
@NTmoney
sits on the board of
@ignite_com
(fka Tendermint)
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It's the end of the month so the
@SuperRare
numbers are official now.
$29.6M monthly volume
$3.7M monthly revenue
2,609 monthly active collectors
3,179 monthly artworks sold
6.52 ETH average artwork price
🤯📈🚀💎
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1 MILLION NFT artworks have now been sold across all major
#cryptoart
platforms, empowering a new generation of creators.
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What's made me distrustful of mainstream media is being an insider of the crypto industry and seeing what really happens behind the scenes vs the public narrative.
Which makes me wonder what truths I'm not told about other industries I'm not an insider like pharma or defense.
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.
@HopProtocol
may be the fastest growing dApp ever! 📈
It took Hop just over 3 months to hit 10k unique addresses.
Uniswap 8 months. OpenSea 16 months.
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Meebits raised $79.5M (24k ETH) in its public sale in just 6 and 1/2 hours. 💸
Started a Dune dashboard as that's all I seem to do these days:
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Wall Street analysts now doing institutional research for DeFi projects like
@NexusMutual
.
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.
@NexusMutual
just crossed 1% of TVL in DeFi covered! Great achievement but still long ways to go. 🚀
Source:
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Most NFTs will underperform ETH or lose their value over the long run.
I started a dashboard on how average NFT prices have trended over time for projects like
@SuperRare
,
@withFND
, CryptoPunks, Meebits,
@TheHashmasks
,
@BoredApeYC
, and
@CryptoKitties
.
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Lots of media reports of how crypto VC funding has dried up, but in reality new seed investments are still being made all the time.
It's just that there's little investor appetite to bail out projects without PMF that raised during the bull and burned through their runway.
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Two NFT whales borrowed $3.16M across their 147 CryptoPunks (21.5k DAI loan each) on
@NFTfi
today. 🤔
Also looks like
@metastreetxyz
was the sole lender for all of these loans.
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Lowkey I like crypto art because the community is way more wholesome than DeFi chads. ☺️
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October is another record month for NFT digital art with over $1.68M in sales.
@SuperRare_co
in particular grew by 72% from last month! 🚀
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My biggest crypto conspiracy theory:
Many of the DeFi hacks in the last year were done by rogue smart contract auditors.
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Here's a 🌶️ hot take:
MPC wallets are a dead end. Account abstraction is the way to go.
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Ranking of conferences I've attended this year:
🥇
@DuneAnalytics
DuneCon
🥈
@EthCC
🥉
@EthereumDenver
4.
@artblocks_io
Marfa Weekend
5.
@CBRStanford
Blockchain Conference
6.
@ETHLisbon
7.
@consensus2024
8.
@StakingRewards
Staking Summit
9.
@BlockchainAssn
Policy Summit
10.…
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A look at the KPIs of the DeFi insurance space.
@NexusMutual
has by far the most active covers and largest capital pool yet is still undervalued compared to its FDV.
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Who's going to be in Paris for EthCC? Would love to meet in person!
DMs open
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I just published “An Overview of Privacy in Cryptocurrencies”
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This is why I'm generally bearish AAA crypto games.
It takes 4+ years to build, lots of upfront capital, and worst you don't get any product feedback until the game is finished.
And crypto has the average attention span of 3 months.
The crypto industry’s attention span is too short
New themes and narratives are good, but people are too quick to abandon “old” ones just because mass adoption hasn’t happened in 12 months
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Important news not being highlighted:
@NexusMutual
recently paid out $1.04M in claims for Hodlnaut halting withdrawals. 💸
FTX, BlockFi, and Gemini Earn all halted withdrawals so we should see more claims coming in soon.
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Remember all the NFT thought leaders who shilled Loot a few months ago?
Are they still working on the project or have they jumped ship to the next hyped trend?
Remember all the DeFi thought leaders who put "YFI Maximalist" in their Twitter bios last year?
Are they still working on the project or have they jumped ship to the next hyped trend?
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My favorite question to ask in pitches is whether the founder has deep historical context of their space.
Can they talk about project approaches that came before them and what they're doing now that's unique?
It's a bad sign if a VC knows more about the space than the founder.
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It's an open secret that DeFi usage is very whale heavy, or that a handful of users are responsible for the vast majority of usage. In this article, I look at the total number of DeFi users to complement TVL as the north-star metric for DeFi adoption.
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One big lesson
@AugurProject
and
@veil
taught us is how difficult it is to write precise markets. Below is a list of all controversial, ambiguous, and misleading markets so far: 👇
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Number of developers, Github commits/stars, etc. are vanity metrics when evaluating L1s.
Value creation is extremely power law (ask any VC who's been in this business for a long time) so I care a lot more about QUALITY of teams and projects not QUANTITY.
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Seeing lots of survivorship bias.
Keep in mind for every person who brags on Twitter about their 10x return on a coin, there's many more who lost it all to a hack or rugpull.
And the open secret in crypto is almost everyone who's been in this space for years has experienced a…
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Big brains like to get super technical about which next-gen scalable L1s are the best, but historically culture and community are the most important factors for success.
Does the L1 ecosystem and leadership believe in the ethos of public blockchains, or are they driven by greed?
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I'M BACK!
Thanks to all of you who reached out and were supportive.
Spent most of my time outdoors and:
🎾 Improved my tennis from NTRP 3.0 to 3.5
🚴♂️ Tried climbing a 13.5% gradient hill and nearly died
And also sprained my ankle. 😤
Personal update:
I've been battling mental health issues for the last several months and it's really taken a toll on me now.
So I'll be taking a break from crypto and Twitter for a bit.
Friends, you know how to reach me.
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OpSec advice:
A hardware wallet isn't a panacea. If your Metamask is compromised you can still get hacked the next time you plug in your Ledger/Trezor and sign a txn.
I recommend using a separate semi-airgapped laptop for only crypto txns. No emails, texts, Twitter, etc.
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Traders larping as VCs who promise to be "founder friendly" 🤔
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Uniswap v3 creates an ecosystem of projects building active LP strategies.
I started a Dune dashboard on TVL for projects like
@VisorFinance
,
@PopsicleFinance
,
@CharmFinance
,
@sommfinance
, and more that will launch. Note some have deposit caps right now.
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I have never seen a more perfect hockey stick volume graph than
@NFTfi
. 🏒📈
Each month is a new all-time high record.
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.
@beeple
's piece is now the fourth most expensive artwork by a living artist of all time.
I think this ends the debate on if NFTs are here to stay.
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Alpha leak! 🚨
With today's launch of
#shieldmining
, staking $NXM on Keep Network currently returns 236% APY.
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Which one of you Swiss degens just dropped $28.985M on a
@beeple
at
@ChristiesInc
?
Second most expensive NFT artwork ever sold! 🤯
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Is it just a coincidence that the two most hated DeFi projects – MakerDAO and Nexus Mutual – are now like "I told you so" in this bear market?
History is brutal at wiping out bullshit narratives and selecting for survival of the fittest.
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Excited to announce
@1confirmation
$45M Fund II to back exceptional crypto founders fueling the decentralization of web and society!
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In case you want to know who's been dumping their $RARE airdrop:
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Congrats to
@GammaStrategies
for surpassing $100M in TVL! 📈
Big kudos to the team for grinding through the 🐻 market and building the best product for concentrated AMM liquidity.
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Demand for ETH is going through the roof! 📈
More than all of USDC, USDT, DAI, and MATIC combined.
This asset hits different.
Welcome to
@HopProtocol
we hope you enjoy being sent around at lightspeed $ETH ⚡️🐰
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Two years after I was supposed to meet them at ETHDenver 2020, I finally get to meet the OG
@DuneAnalytics
wizards
@hagaetc
and
@mewwts
in person for the first time! 🧙♂️🧢
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Generally the older you get you:
1) Stay more focused and feel less fomo and optionality
2) Care less about what others and the establishment think
Which are the main advantages (other than experience) of older startup founders compared to recent college grads.
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For those tracking on-chain fundamental metrics of crypto projects, here's a great repo I've maintained along with a few others including
@eddylazzarin
,
@ColeGotTweets
, and
@Iiterature
.
Includes
@DuneAnalytics
dashboards and other websites.
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There are many VCs who overpromise on helping founders (e.g. auditing contracts, being market makers, making intros) yet actually do nothing if you reference check their founders and are crickets in investor TG group chats.
Hopefully service DAOs give them a run for their money.
We are on the brink of a revolution in venture capital.
This is
@1kxnetwork
's vision of a future cryptonative venture capital ecosystem that we want to accelerate.
> Investment DAOs
> Incubation DAOs
> Service DAOs
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If there's one lesson in crypto, it's to never play the role of the "main character."
Every main character has flown too close to the sun and crashed back down to earth like Icarus.
Stoicism and epistemic humility are how you survive multiple bear market cycles.
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.
@VisorFinance
TVL going parabolic, even with deposit caps.
Currently
#1
in TVL of all Uni v3 active managers.
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Did a great interview with
@CryptoStanford
where I talk about how I got into crypto, what we do at 1confirmation, and my thesis on web3 and NFTs.
Also some hot takes on crypto Twitter, generational wealth transfer, and surviving a bear market. Enjoy!
1) meet
@richardchen39
, stanford c/o '18 and general partner
@1confirmation
. Richard co-founded the Stanford Blockchain Collective (now
@StanfordCrypto
) before graduating early to invest in web3. he also wrote his freshman PWR paper on
@ethereum
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There are now over 100 crypto artists with over $100k in total artwork value! 📈
When will we see 1000 artists over $100k?
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