$13 billion oat milk, Wonderful silver lining to the crypto crash (TN09)
Though cryptocurrencies took a big hit this week, decentralized financial protocols proved their resiliency
Happy World Turtle Day! May your portfolios be as resilient as these wonderful animals.
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Oatly IPO
If you still haven't tried oat milk, you should. If you've tried oat milk but not the Oatly brand, then you need to try it again. Oatly tastes really good. But does that justify a $13 billion valuation? Just last July, Oatly sold a 10% stake at a $2 billion valuation. Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman, and even Jay-Z are some of their high-profile investors. Dive In.
Crypto Reckoning
Cryptocurrencies are currently undergoing one of those fun and exciting crashes that happen every few years. It seemed to have started when Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla will stop accepting BTC for vehicle purchases on May 12. Crypto crashed, and then held steady for a bit till, on May 21, China decided to crackdown.
Tolu Salako
There was a lot of hurt, especially as centralized (and regulated) exchanges like Coinbase and Binance failed to keep up with consumers. Decentralized exchanges were the opposite.
"All these sites ran without incident even as some crypto prices crashed by 50%. The website bybt.com reported that 845,000 traders who bought cryptos on margin or leverage, using decentralized sites like Compound, AAVE or Maker, saw more than $9.11 billion of positions liquidated automatically using smart contracts. No decentralized protocol failed or needed a bailout. No regulators had to decide to close anything."
Beautiful. No need for government intervention. No Fed. The system just handled it. When Archegos blew up, prime brokers liquidated and traded the remaining assets within themselves. When a decentralized crypto account blows up, anyone, even you and I, can bid for what's left of the account. It is a good test for how things should work. Dive In.
The trustless lending that DeFi enables is probably my favorite feature of the system. So, for it to work without blowing up? ABSOLUTE WIN!
Weekly Chart
What to Read
Tolu Salako
In case you missed it, I released a new post addressing some of the pros and cons of Cathie Wood's ARK Funds.
Tolu Salako