• Morpho is a DeFi lending protocol with $11bn in deposits built in two layers: “Markets” where borrowing happens and “Vaults” where lenders earn yield.

• Vaults are managed by risk experts called curators who allocate your deposits across markets. Users deposit once and curators handle the complexity.

• Below you’ll see how to lend via vaults or borrow through markets, with liquidation thresholds, interest rates, and risks all visible upfront.

• Morpho is becoming a base layer for DeFi lending, and even big players like the Ethereum Foundation and trillion-dollar TradFi institutions are getting involved.

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This week we’re keeping it DeFi and focusing on one of the biggest successes in recent years, that spawned a whole category of DeFi vaults, we’re talking about Morpho!

What began as a little app that sat on top of lending protocols like Aave and Compound has become a juggernaut of its own with over $13bn in deposits across all its different vaults.

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Morpho

Morpho are a DeFi lending juggernaut with over $11 billion in deposits, 1.4 million users, and the backing of both the Ethereum Foundation and some of the biggest names in crypto.

The basic idea with lending protocols is simple, you deposit assets to earn yield, or put up collateral to borrow against it. Aave is probably the most well known example, and I’ve written in length about them before:

Morpho started its life as something that sat on top of other lending protocols like Aave and Compound, using a peer-to-peer matching system to give both lenders and borrowers better rates than either protocol could offer on its own.

Since then it’s grown into a full standalone lending infrastructure in its own right, and one of the most important protocols in DeFi today.

Morpho is built in two layers, and understanding both makes everything else click.

The base layer is “Morpho Markets”. This is where the actual borrowing happens, you can post collateral then borrow another token against it. Markets are permissionless, so anyone can create one by setting parameters like: which assets are involved, what the collateral requirements are, which oracle handles pricing, how interest rates work.

Sitting on top of Markets are “Morpho Vaults”. This is the lending side, where users deposit assets to earn passive yield from interest paid by borrowers. Vaults allocate your deposits across multiple Markets, handled by trusted risk experts called “curators” who manage the complexity on your behalf.

Morpho Vaults are built on the “ERC-4626” standard, Ethereum’s tokenised vault standard created by the DeFi community to make yield-bearing vaults interoperable. In practice it means other protocols can plug straight into Morpho Vaults without custom integrations, which is a big reason why many projects build on top of Morpho.

One of the most important design decisions is how markets are isolated from each other. If something goes wrong in one market it doesn’t cascade across the whole protocol, which is a big safety improvement over older lending designs.

Lending

Getting started as a lender with Morpho Vaults is pretty straightforward. First head to app.morpho.org and connect your wallet.

You’ll now land on the vaults page, where you can browse available vaults, the assets they accept, and the yields currently on offer.

When you select a vault it shows you the curator behind it, the assets it lends against, and a breakdown of where deposits get allocated. For example if we click on the top option here “Sentora PYUSD Main” you’ll see the following:

As you scroll down this page you can find more information related to the vault such as its historic performance and returns.

Plus you can usually find other information that can help you to understand the types of risks involved, in this specific case they haven’t shared a risk document but we do know what tokens the vault is exposed to for example.

Using the vault is then super simple. You just pick your asset, pick a vault, and deposit - that’s essentially it!

You earn yield automatically as borrowers pay interest into the markets your vault is allocated to, and you can withdraw at any time. Your dashboard will then show your positions at any given moment.

Our very own Yieldseeker uses Morpho’s lending vaults as a core part of its infrastructure, we allow users to automatically seek the best vaults available to earn yield on Morpho as well 10+ other lending protocols on Base!

Borrowing

The borrowing experience on Morpho is the other side of the equation, all you need to do is select “Markets” on the navigation bar to see it.

Here you can see the collateral needed to borrow against for each individual market. If you select the top one for example you’ll be able to put cbBTC as collateral and borrow USDC.

You can see on this page the rate at which you’ll be paying back the loan, in this case it’s currently 4.18% per year. Plus on the right-hand-side you can see that if the collateral goes below 86% then you’ll be liquidated.

Many vaults are built on top of this market and by scrolling down you can see the list of these vaults, in this case there’s many millions of liquidity available through them.

So in our given example around $100 of cbBTC would allow me to borrow up to a maximum of around $81, but that wouldn’t give me much breathing room for liquidation and even a slight drop in cbBTC’s price could liquidate my position.

These last couple of sections give a pretty good over-arching understanding of how Morpho handles both vaults for lending and markets for borrowing, but why does this even matter.

Why Morpho matters

Morpho is becoming the lending infrastructure layer that others build on top of, an esssential DeFi primitive. It is a reliable base that developers and protocols can use to create their own lending products without building everything from scratch - Yieldseeker’s integration of Morpho is a clear example of this in action.

Plus recent events highlight how Morpho just keeps growing. For example the Ethereum Foundation recently deposited 3,400 ETH directly into Morpho Vaults as part of their own treasury strategy. For the EF, who are essentially stewards of Ethereum itself, to put their money into a protocol is a big deal.

Then there’s Apollo Global Management, a traditional finance firm with $938 billion in assets under management who recently agreed to acquire 9% of the MORPHO token supply over the next four years!

Both the builders of Ethereum and a nearly trillion dollar TradFi institution putting real conviction behind the same protocol at the same time is something to pay attention to.

The RWA angle is worth watching too. As more real world assets come onchain, Morpho’s isolated market design handles them well. A problem with one type of RWA collateral stays contained and doesn’t affect the rest of the protocol.

Ultimately DeFi is building the infrastructure that could one day support a serious chunk of global finance, and Morpho is one of the more important pieces of that being laid down right now.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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• Ondo are one of the biggest players in RWAs, bringing traditional financial assets like stocks, bonds, and ETFs onchain, and have $3.2bn already in TVL.

• Their “Global Markets” product lets you buy and sell tokenised stocks like NVIDIA and Amazon directly in DeFi.

• Below you can see how to onboard and trade, it sits somewhere between DeFi and CeFi, with KYC required and some eligibility criteria.

• The real promise of crypto has always been to bring all of finance onchain, and Ondo is a glimpse into that future.

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This week I decided to look at ondo.finance. Ondo represent an important shift in the crypto industry as we start to get more traditional financial instruments like company stocks brought onchain! This is a pretty important move for the next wave of DeFi.

Unfortunately I couldn’t complete their onboarding because I didn’t qualify based on their criteria, but I do believe they have an interesting product that’s worth showcasing all the same and that points in the general direction crypto is moving.

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Ondo

Ondo have been building an important foundation for the next big wave in crypto. A wave that brings traditional financial instruments onchain, like stocks and ETFs. This all gets classed under the term “RWAs”, which stands for Real World Assets.

Beyond stocks and ETFs, RWAs cover a wide range of traditional financial instruments including government bonds, treasuries, real estate, private credit, and commodities like gold. Essentially, anything from the traditional financial world that can be represented as a token on a blockchain!

Ondo are by no means the only player doing this. Robinhood are bringing stocks onchain too, for example, and there are plenty of others entering the space. However, Ondo are one of the biggest names and biggest players in the RWA world.

They are already across 10 chains, integrate 150+ projects, and have over $3.2bn worth of RWAs onchain!

Ondo also have several products. They have: their own USD stablecoin called USDY; their own tokenised treasuries and bonds; tokenised stocks and ETFs under their “Global Markets” product; borrowing and lending in tokenised assets with “Flux”; liquidity through “Nexus”; and their own chain and bridge!

This is a big company already doing big things. They have too many products to cover in a single post, so today we’re going to focus just on their tokenised stocks.

RWAs represent a key next step in DeFi and onchain finance. They move us into a place where traditional financial assets are traded onchain, and people can buy productive financial assets like stocks and bonds using crypto.

Ondo Global Markets

Ondo’s onchain stocks product can be accessed at ondo.finance/global-markets.

In their own words, “Ondo Global Markets is a platform that brings traditional public securities onchain, with tokens that are freely transferable and usable in DeFi.”

By hitting “Launch App” you’ll be taken to their product page where you can browse all the available tokenised stocks and ETFs and see how they’ve been performing.

If you look closely you’ll notice that Ondo has its own ticker format for stocks. NVIDIA becomes NVDAon, Amazon becomes AMZNon, with the suffix “on” representing Ondo.

This is because these tokenised stocks are still not quite the real deal. They are essentially Ondo’s own wrapped version of these stocks.

In practice you get the upside or downside of the price movements, but the underlying stocks are still owned under the hood by Ondo. So you can’t get voting rights, for example.

Think of this as the first step of onchain finance as the space figures itself out. In the future you can imagine these working in ways that give you full ownership rights with anonimity.

Speaking of anonymity, to use Ondo you do need to share information about yourself as you go through their onboarding process.

Unforunately I couldn’t complete Ondo’s onboarding myself because I didn’t qualify based on their criteria. But I’ll still showcase their product all the same so you can use it if you’re interested and do qualify.

Onboarding

Unlike most of DeFi where you just connect a wallet and get started, onboarding into Ondo requires answering some questions.

It’s a bit of a process, but you can understand why they’re doing it as they are trying to protect themselves legally, which is fair enough.

You’ll first be asked some basic information like your name and location.

Then you’ll be asked about your investor profile.

Now at this point I didn’t qualify and ended up with this screen.

Assuming you do qualify, the final onboarding screen will ask you to provide some identity information to then get started on the platform.

Buy & Sell onchain stocks

Their trading interface is straightforward enough once you’re in.

You pick a stock, let’s say NVIDIA, and you get a very familiar option to buy or sell.

There’s a small network cost but you get a quote that’s pretty close to the market price.

Below you can then see plenty of statistics about the company and the asset price, plus the chains it can be traded on.

Next they show some trading limits per session and reference some legal documents, invariably to protect themselves.

There’s a lot of familiarity here if you’ve used other crypto platforms, but you can also see how they mix DeFi with TradFi in an interesting way!

Tokenised stocks are cool

Ondo’s tokenised stocks are an impressive product already.

There are some clear limitations and it sits somewhere between a full DeFi product and something more akin to CeFi. But it does allow people to buy stocks onchain, and it points clearly in the direction that crypto is heading.

For the past 15+ years crypto has mostly dabbled in assets that naturally trend towards zero. Zeneca put this really well in a recent post about the “Token Graveyard”, where he noted that over 99% of tokens released have already gone to zero.

Letters from a Zeneca

Letter 106: The Token Graveyard

Depending on who you ask, there are somewhere between 37 million and 120 million crypto tokens in existence right now. The exact count depends on how you measure it and which data source you use, but we’re splitting hairs at that point anyway. No matter how you look at it, it’s a metric shipload of tokens…

Read more

5 days ago · 3 likes

There are plenty standout exceptions of course. Great DeFi projects like Aave (AAVE) and Spark.fi (SPK), tokens for important L1 networks like ETH, SOL, and BTC, and others cryptos that hold genuine long-term promise.

But the opportunity of bringing traditional finance onchain is one of the biggest of them all!

The market cap of NVIDIA alone is larger than the entire market cap of crypto today. Think about how much money could come onchain through RWAs.

The whole point of DeFi has been to build new decentralised financial rails that empower people financially. Ondo gives a real glimpse into that exciting future!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

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• Quantum computers are a different from the classical computers we’re used to. Instead of using bits, either 1s or 0s, they use qubits that can be both at once!

• Cryptography exists because certain problems are unsolvable with classical computers, however quantum computers solves these breaking cryptography.

• For crypto this can lead to wallets becoming hackable, mining becoming centralised, and old lost coins like Satoshi’s Bitcoins being stolen.

• But I wouldn’t be scared because the same funding going towards creating quantum computers is going towards solving these problems they create!

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This week I’m swinging back to a more crypto-aligned topic, namely Quantum Computing. You hear about it all the time but most people have no real idea of what it is and whether it’s a real threat or not.

This post is also the first time in almost 3.5 years where I had AI help me write it, I wonder if it’s noticeable?

The challenge with AI is that the voice in the text can becoming too same-y, which is why I’ve generally avoided having it write my posts. Yet I’m also a big advocate for using AI as a multiplier for your work, and so it’s way past time that I have AI help me with my weekly posts.

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Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is a topic that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads. Sure it sounds complicated but what does it actually mean in practice?

Well, first we need to understand classical computing.

Every computer you’ve ever used is a classical computer. Classical computers think in bits, tiny switches that are either a 1 or a 0. Everything they do, no matter how complex, comes down to flipping billions of these 1s and 0s on and off very fast.

Now when we get to quantum computing, the shift is that we’re no longer dealing in the classical realm of physics. We’ve moved one layer deeper into quantum physics.

Here things work differently. Instead of bits you have qubits, and thanks to a property called “superposition” a qubit can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. Add “entanglement” into the mix, where qubits become linked so the state of one instantly affects another, and you have a fundamentally different type of machine.

Thanks to these properties quantum computers can manipulate an exponentially large space of possibilities. This allows certain quantum algorithms to acheive exponential speedups for certain specific tasks.

So basically, quantum computers are just a different way to think about computers, that use a deeper layer of physics to work, and are particularly great at solving certain types of problems.

The beauty of them is that they make problems that were once unsolvable now solvable, which will be incredible for technological progress across science, medicine and research.

The problem with them is the mirror opposite of this. By solving these previously unsolvable problems, they can make our current cryptography obsolete.

Cryptography and Encryption

Cryptography is fundamentally the art of creating mathematical problems that are easy to lock but incredibly hard to unlock without the right key. Think of multiplying two enormous prime numbers together. Easy to do, almost impossible to reverse.

These problems are impossible to solve with classical computers, which is exactly where the safety of encryption comes from.

Encryption takes your data, passwords, transactions, private messages, and scrambles them using these kinds of mathematical problems. Only someone with the correct key can unscramble them.

However, as soon as quantum computers exist, these once intractable problems become possible. What previously would have taken classical hardware millions of years to solve, a quantum computer running “Shor’s algorithm” can solve in hours.

The uncrackable becomes crackable.

For a long time this was all just theoretical, a problem postponed into the future. But that future seems to be fast approaching.

In the real world

Quantum computing appears to be moving from science fiction to reality on an accelerated timeline.

Recently both Microsoft and Google have made significant advancements that bring us closer. Google announced a major milestone with their Willow chip in late 2024, and Microsoft followed with progress on their Majorana 1 chip.

Both offer slightly different approaches but have the same end goal to make quantum computers more stable and scalable.

Neither is powerful enough yet to break modern encryption, but the direction of travel is clear and will in fact affect all sorts of things, like the way our passwords are protected, the way data is secured in the cloud, and even more extreme things like codes for nuclear weapons!

Quantum computing fears extend across almost all areas of computer science where security is a question, which is most places!

But that’s a big wide world to cover. Here in my posts we talk mainly about crypto and Web3 (+ AI), so the question is how does this play into crypto and blockchain specifically.

Crypto and Blockchain

When we talk about the risks of quantum in crypto, we’re really talking about a few things like:

(1) Private and public key cryptography. This is what creates crypto addresses and protects our assets. Your wallet security is built on elliptic curve maths that currently can’t be reversed. If your private key is deciphered by a quantum computer, a hacker can take everything in your wallet.

(2) Proof of Work. A Bitcoin miner with access to quantum computing can do calculations far faster than anyone else, take over the majority of hashing power, and ultimately control the chain.

(3) Satoshi’s Bitcoin. Satoshi’s original addresses used an older format that exposes the public key directly, making the private key derivable with a quantum attack. Those wallets hold around one million BTC. Whether Satoshi is still around or not, that much Bitcoin suddenly re-entering circulation would be a significant event.

And there’s plenty more risks as you can imagine, all of which are very real risks!

But there are some genuinely smart people working on solutions. Quantum-safe cryptography is already a well studied field, and in 2024 the standards body NIST finalised its first quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.

The Ethereum Foundation just this week launched pq.ethereum.org, a dedicated post-quantum research hub backed by a $2 million team, with a full roadmap for making the entire protocol quantum-safe.

There are also active discussions in the Bitcoin community around quantum-safe addresses where you could send your BTC over so that nobody could steal it.

There’s also an important game theory consideration here. Once someone clearly has a quantum computer and gets found using it, everyone else will know immediately. At that point the community can actively fork into quantum-safe encryption to protect assets and chains. There are trillions of dollars of incentive to make that happen fast!

Given that point, does it really make sense to be scared?

Should you be scared

Well, I’d say the answer here is not really.

Yes, quantum computing poses real threats and it’s an incredibly important topic to discuss and understand. But there are also many important points to consider.

Firstly, there is a lot of money on the line. Both in crypto, with all the different types of assets, and outside of crypto with encrypted data worldwide, nuclear codes, and everything else.

So while there are enormous resources going into making these computers real, there’s probably an equal or larger amount of resources being spent on making the internet and computers worldwide safe for when that day comes.

That’s not to say all systems will be quantum safe when the time comes, so we shouldn’t be complacent.

Satoshi’s coins for example pose a real question with no clean answer. Assuming he has passed away or disappeared, is it right to make a fork that destroys them forever? Or do we allow them to be taken by the first person who gets there with a quantum computer?

There’s even more complexity on other topics we haven’t covered here, and no doubt as quantum computing advances we’ll see more important discussions around it across different ecosystems and problems.

So now you know what quantum computing is, why it’s a legitimately interesting thing to be thinking about, and what the real risks are. Yet also that it’s not as scary as it might sound, and the big brains in the space are working hard to make sure it never disturbs crypto. Let’s hope they move fast enough so we stay quantum safe!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 & AI insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• The Agentic loop is the core loop that transforms an LLM prompt system into a AI Agent and is the foundation for agentic frameworks like OpenClaw.

• Below we code up our own basic Agentic Loop to show how simple it fundamentally is, and explain how it’s likened to the “Hello world” of agents.

• To then test the code you can use Google Collab so that you don’t even need to install anything locally. Just follow along below to create your own basic agent.

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I recently heard Peter Steinberg the creator of OpenClaw say that the “Agentic Loop” is like the “Hello World” of AI Agents.

Now If you’re a non-coder that may all sound like gibberish. So today I decided to make a post showing how simple it is to create an Agentic Loop and explain why it can be viewed as the “Hello World” of AI Agents!

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Agentic Loop

AI Agent frameworks for general-purpose agents are on the rise. I wrote about OpenClaw a few weeks back and we’re already seeing other alternatives appearing, with the likes of Hermes being a stand-out example.

Fundamentally the core concept that differentiates an Agent from a standard LLM prompt is the “Agentic Loop”. These agent frameworks then add in a lot of other pieces like memory, personality, and skills to build on top of this.

To compare, you can view a standard LLM prompt working as such:

Prompt → LLM → Answer

Whereas Agents have this “Agentic Loop” where the result of a prompt gets fed into the LLM repeatedly until it acheives its goal.

Goal → LLM → Action → Result → (Repeat LLM step) → Done

This is is fundamentally how all AI Agents work, for example if you’re interacting with OpenClaw, Claude Cowork/Code, Loveable, Replit, or any other agentic system, it ultimately just does some more complex version of the above.

And I recently heard Peter Steinberg, the creator of OpenClaw, describe the Agentic Loop as the “Hello, World!” of agents and that everyone should implement one. So I decided that we’d do this today!

With the above explanation you already understand what an agentic loop is, now let’s explain the second part of Peter’s sentence.

Hello, World!

In the software development world “Hello, World!” is known as the simplest program you can make with a language or framework to get it setup and running.

The idea is to literally get the code to repeat back to you “Hello, World!” - or any permutation like “hello world”, “Hello World”, “hello! world!”, you get the idea.

With coding languages like Python creating this program is as simple as writing:

print(“Hello, World!”)

In some slightly more complicated languages like C++ you might need to do:

#include <iostream>;

int main() {
std::cout << "Hello, World!" << std::endl;
return 0;
}

main();

Either way, as you can see this is generally a very simple piece of code that gets you to set up the coding environment and print some text to the screen!

So when Peter Steinberg says that the “Agentic Loop” is the “Hello world” of agents, you can understand that it’s the smallest amount of work you need to do to get an LLM to behave like an agent.

So now let’s do just that and create our own agentic loop so that you can say that you’ve implemented one yourself.

Creating an Agentic Loop

To create an Agentic Loop we just want to wrap the LLM within a loop as we discussed above.

The logic is therefore ultimately something like:

generate a goal
ask AI what to do next - keep repeating (ie. looping)
stop when done

So let’s now try to write this in code.

Python is one of the easiest languages to read and understand what’s going on, so let’s write the loop above in Python.

def ask_ai(goal):
response = client.responses.create(
model="gpt-5",
input=f"Goal: {goal}. What should happen next?"
)
return response.output_text

def run_agentic_loop(goal):
for step in range(20):
decision = ask_ai(goal + decision)
if "DONE" in decision:
break

Here we define a simple function called “ask_ai” that gets given a goal and uses GPT5 (could be another LLM here) to ask the AI what to do next given the goal.

Then we define a function called “run_agentic_loop” that does a maximum of 20 steps, and at each step just asks the AI to make a decision based on the goal plus it’s last decision, and when it decides that it’s done it stops running.

The code above is a basic agentic loop!

Testing it

Now let’s test the loop we wrote.

First of all we need to take into consideration that the code we had above doesn’t fully function without an API key and we’ll need to make a few other alterations to make it work in practice.

So I’ve added a few more things below including an API Key I grabbed from a free service called Groq (owned by Nvidia). Note that if the API Key isn’t working for any reason you can generate a new one yourself for free by creating a new Groq account.

!pip install groq
from groq import Groq

client = Groq(api_key="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")

SYSTEM = "You are an agent completing a goal one step at a time. Output one sentence per response. Never list multiple steps at once. Say DONE when the goal is complete."

def format_message(role, content):
return [{"role": role, "content": content}]

def ask_ai(messages):
full = format_message("system", SYSTEM) + messages
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="llama-3.3-70b-versatile",
messages=full
)
return response.choices[0].message.content

def run_agentic_loop(goal):
messages = format_message("user", goal)
for step in range(20):
reply = ask_ai(messages)
print(f"Step {step + 1}: {reply}\n")
messages += format_message("assistant", reply) + format_message("user", "Next.")
if "DONE" in reply:
break

This code looks a lot more complicated than the original code we wrote above, but fundamentally it’s the same code but with a few additions, it has:

• Imports at the top so that it correctly installs Groq

• The creation of the Groq client with an API Key

• System message so that the LLM understands that it’s an agent

• Helper function to format messages correctly with Groq’s formatting

• Prints to show us the each step the agent takes

Now we’ve got this code written we can run it in just 3 basic steps:

First go to Google Collab and click “New Notebook”, this will give us an environment to write code in without us needing to download or install anything locally.

Next copy all the code above into the notebook we just created.

Then finally let’s run our agentic loop by calling it with a simple query in our notebook, for example we can do:

run_agentic_loop("You are a personal assistant. Plan a dinner party for 6 people, one task at a time. One setence per step. Say done when everything is planned.")

You should now see the output, where each step’s decision impacts the decision in the step after.

Pretty awesome right! We’ve got our first simple agentic loop going and you can literally see your little agent figuring things out on the fly.

Congrats

You’ve now literally learned how to take any LLM and wrap it in an Agentic Loop to turn it into a general-purpose AI Agent!

If you wanted to create your own OpenClaw-like framework for example, then this would be the first step to take, pretty cool right?

In the example above we kept it really simple as we didn’t include any concepts like memory, skills, or anything else. If we wanted to though we could extend this further and start adding more files and functions for the agent to act in more interesting and complex ways.

The beauty of it is that you can use something like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex to keep adding these extensions to your agent without writing a single line of code yourself. OpenClaw was essentially built like this with Peter saying that code was written almost entirely with AI!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and my other AI related posts these last few weeks. I’ve been working on an AI focused community with a couple other people from the Web3 space that we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for more information on it soon!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 & AI insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• GitHub is a cloud-based platform for creating, hosting, managing and sharing code, it is the most popular version control system in the world.

• Version control is an essential piece of software development. Developers store their code in repositories that facilitate versioning and collaboration.

• Follow below to learn how to create, clone, and modify a repository, plus how to get your project running online automatically with GitHub Actions.

• This post shows how to use GitHub’s visual UI to so that readers understand what’s truly happening when you use your favourite AI to do all the work for you.

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We’re seeing a lot of growth in software development by non-technical people, also known as vibecoding. But as soon as you start vibecoding you find yourself needing to learn and understand about version control and code repositories.

So today I decided to give a beginners introduction on GitHub, which is by far the most popular version control solution out there and I believe will become even more popular as more and more people take to vibecoding their ideas with AI.

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GitHub

GitHub is a cloud-based platform for creating, hosting, managing and sharing code. It's the most popular platform of its type in the world, with over 150 million users worldwide spanning both individual developers and companies!

GitHub’s core offering is also know as “version control” or “source control”, which is a key concept in the world of software engineering.

When software developers work on a project’s code it’s important to be able to track the history of changes and determine what version certain changes happened, plus it makes collaboration much easier, since code can be reverted back to an old version or merged with another version.

Version control is orchestrated through code repositories where the code lives, along with the metadata related to version history, and any additional settings and configurations.

Back in 2018 Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5bn and poured billions of dollars into growing it, and in June 2025 GitHub surpassed over 1 billion code repositories! Pretty amusingly the billionth repository simply has a file saying “shit” with a pump.fun link to a token.

The word “Git” in GitHub comes from it being built on top of an open-source version control system called Git created by Linus Torvalds back in 2005 to manage his work on the Linux operating system!

A simple way to think about it is that Git is the tool that allows you to track changes locally on a set of files, while GitHub is the service that allows you to store it online and search through millions of other repositories and users.

Due to this layer of connectivity between users and repos GitHub also acts as a social network for developers! It plays into this social networking side with systems like stars for favouriting repos and user profile pages, but we’re going to gloss over this aspect for today.

The most important thing to understand here is that using version control is a crucial practice within the software development world as it ensures you never lose important code, can easily go back to old versions, plus it facilitates collaboration, and GitHub is the outright leading solution here and allows you to get started for free!

Getting Started

A quick note before we get started is that GitHub can be used almost entirely through its CLI (Command line interface) in your computer terminal, and so your AI may prefer to work like this. But for the sake of this tutorial we will always prefer the visual interface because it’s easier to use and interpret as a human!

So we’ll start by just creating an account on GitHub, head over to the sign up page where you can sign up entirely for free.

You’ll then see your dashboard page and be able to click on your profile page, settings page and beyond.

Our focus today is not viewing the vast world of code repos and other profiles on GitHub, we’re interested in getting you to use GitHub with your own personal projects.

Now once again we could do the next steps with the CLI, but for this tutorial we’re going to stick here with visual interfaces, so let’s now download something called GitHub desktop to your computer that’s a very visual way to interface with GitHub.

You can find it at github.com/apps/desktop, just hit download to get started.

You’ll then be required to sign in on GitHub desktop, which will open up the browser for you to log in with your recently created account and once you’ve logged in you’ll see something like this.

So far we’ve created a GitHub account and downloaded GitHub Desktop, let’s now create our first code repository.

Create and Clone a repository

Code repositories (repos) are where we house our projects, as we mentioned at the start. We could create our first repo either on the website, or on GitHub desktop, or once again through the CLI, but we’re sticking to the UI here and let’s go with the website for now.

So open up github.com to view the dashboard and select the green “new” button, which will take you to create a new repository. Here you’ll want to give it a name, description, and then I recommend adding a README file, and you can choose between making your project public or private.

It’s worth noting that most people keep their repo’s public as it allows for other people to collaborate openly with them online, and in practice most people are unlikely to ever even find your repo unless it takes off. Meanwhile private repos are mainly used by companies that are protecting their enterprise code.

With your new repository created you’ll now find it within your list of repositories and if you select it you’ll see something like this below.

Now let’s clone this new repo to our computer by selecting the green “code” button and copying the URL for this repo.

Then selecting the “clone repository” button on GitHub Desktop and pasting the URL above.

Great, we’ve now created our first repo and cloned it onto our machine, next we want to save a new file into it and upload it to GitHub.

Modifying a repo

We’re going to assume that you have no code so far for this repository, so let’s copy the following text into a new file called “index.html” within the folder that got created when cloning the repo.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My GitHub Page</title>
</head>
<body style=”font-family: sans-serif; text-align: center; padding: 100px; background: #0a0a0a; color: white;”>
<h1>🚀 Hello from GitHub Pages!</h1>
<p>This page is hosted for free, straight from a GitHub repository.</p>
</body>
</html>

Next let’s open up GitHub Desktop with your repo selected and you should see something like this.

This view in GitHub Desktop will show all the files that have been modified and facilitate the uploading of files to your repo.

At this point it’s important to understand that uploading in Git has a couple of steps, the first is where you “commit” the code, and the second is where you “push”.

Committing is a local action that saves the updated version of the code onto your machine giving this latest version a name and description, then pushing is where you save it into the centralised repository on GitHub.

In the example above you see that I’ve given this commit the title “My first commit” and description “Created an index page”. So first select the “commit to main” button then secondly select “push origin” and the code will be saved on GitHub!

As a solo developer vibecoding at home this is pretty much all you need to understand, but as projects become large with a lot of collaborators a lot more functionality becomes relevant.

Collaboration

The power of version control really lies in its collaborative elements. GitHub makes it possible for projects to have 100s of developers building at the same time without saving over each other’s work and merging changes intelligently.

For vibe coders this is less important as most are building solo, but I’ll give a quick run-down of how this collaboration is possible with a few key concepts.

• Branches - The “main” branch has the most up to date core version of a project, but if a developer wants to build a separate feature they may make a new branch to write their code without it getting saved directly to main. Then later when they’ve finished and tested the code they can merge the changes back into main without having stepped on other work in other branches that may have happened. In bigger projects it’s common to have many branches at any moment with several different people working on them.

• Forks - If you find a public project on GitHub that you like then you can fork it, essentially copying it into a whole new repo that you now own. This can either act a bit like a separate branch with you updating the code and sending a pull-request to the original project’s owner, or you can just go off and take that code and build on top of it under a totally separate project name and with new owners.

• Pull Requests - When people are working either in a branch or a fork and they want to merge their changes back into the original, they open a “pull request” or PR. This is common both between branches within the same repo and from a fork back to the original project. When a PR is opened, whoever’s responsible for the project will review it first and either request changes or accept it and merge it in to update the code.

These are just a few of the key collaboration features and terminology in GitHub, if we were to cover everything it could take a while.

Open-source code thrives on these collaborative elements, as one developer can build something that’s helpful and interesting for them, then another person online can also find it useful and fork it themselves, make additional changes, then create a PR for the original developer to add into the core project - Bitcoin for example was built like this!

I’ll keep things simple for today and skip over how to create forks and branches for now, but maybe I’ll run through these different features another day.

Getting your project online

The final piece of the puzzle for today is using GitHub Pages and GitHub Actions to get our project running online directly through GitHub.

GitHub Actions effectively allow you to introduce automations into your repository that can be used for all sorts of things. As an example every time you push a commit into your repo with Actions you can have it rebuild the code and get it running online for you, let’s do that right now!

First select Settings on your repo, then Pages from the menu on the left, make sure the Source is set to “Deploy from a branch” then select “main” as the branch and hit save.

Simple!

Now your page will automatically be hosted for free through GitHub and if you used the code for index.html above then it will show something like this.

With Pages Your URL will be structured like this:

https://*github-username*.github.io/*repository-name*

In the background GitHub Actions is performing a form of “Continuous Integration” for you, which basically means that every time new code is uploaded to your repo’s main branch it will re-build it and make the changes to the website online.

If you look at the GitHub Actions tab you can see that a workflow was created to run the build and in my example it has ran 1 time so far and updated 4 minutes ago.

Now every time you commit and push new code into the repo that workflow that was created for you will run and rebuild the new code and the website living on your given URL will get updated!

There’s a lot more to it

We’ve just gone through the real basics of GitHub today. We didn’t get into using any of its collaborative tools, we didn’t navigate its millions of repos and users, nor did we explore the CLI at all.

However, this is more than enough to get you effectively protecting your code as you vibecode away.

Using version control is not really an optional thing when you build software. Version control is essential to ensure that you don’t accidentally write over or lose important code and potentially lose days, weeks or even months of work, so if you’re vibecoding then you really must use it.

The more and more you use it the more you’ll find all the other great features available, and you’ll probably make good use of the CLI especially since your AI will be able to do it all for you.

The key thing from today though is that you now know the fundamentals and are able to visually understand what’s happening before you offload all the work to your AI of choice.

So go have fun vibecoding away while keep your code protected with GitHub!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s answer to OpenClaw, it’s a closed-source AI agent framework with skills and customisations that works directly on your computer.

• Below you’ll see how you can use Cowork to make a simple presentation and accompanying resource with it.

• With Claude Cowork these tasks took minimal effort with less than 1 hour of work, whereas without it could have taken 1 day and looked a lot worse.

• AI agents are the next frontier of AI and they are rapidly evolving, so use these technologies to your advantage!

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In the last few weeks I’ve shown how to use Claude Code both on Desktop and in the CLI, but there’s another product within the Claude ecosystem called Cowork that we hadn’t looked at yet, so I thought this week would be a good time to dive into it!

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Claude Cowork

Anthropic’s Claude has become one of the most powerful and popular AI’s in recent times, in particular with enterprise users as I covered on my original post about Claude Code:

More recently Anthropic have been churning out new feature after new feature, and one of their subproduct’s that’s been evolving the fastest is the lesser known Claude Cowork.

While Claude’s “Chat” is the LLM prompting product we’ve been used to for the past 2+ years since ChatGPT came out, and their “Code” product is Claude directly within your computer’s filesystem, their “Cowork” product hasn’t been as clearly defined for most people.

Anthropic themselves explain Cowork as bringing “Code’s agentic capabilities to your desktop”, which doesn’t make the explanation any easier to understand.

My personal take though after having used it is that it represents something similar to OpenClaw, giving you your own AI agent of sorts that works alongside you to solve problems from within your computer. If you haven’t yet read my post on OpenClaw then you can read it here.

The big difference between OpenClaw and Cowork is the open-source nature of the former. Open source software is highly extensible as anyone can build on it, but it’s also usually way more awkward to use. Cowork is by comparison more limited and gated but also much easier to get started with out of the box.

If you’re still unclear of the sort of things that Cowork is built for then check out this video from Anthropic where they announced it.

The video clearly shows that Cowork is very powerful, and if you follow below I’ll give you an example of what it’s capable of as I use it to create a presentation on Claude Code for beginners!

Let’s make a presentation

To get started with Cowork you’ll need to have downloaded the Claude Desktop app and subscribed at least to the Pro version, you can do this from here - claude.com/product/cowork.

With the desktop app installed you’ll find Cowork as the middle tab out of the 3 shown at the top: Chat, Cowork and Code.

I’ve been using the Sonnet 4.6 model a lot recently because it’s less expensive and burns through less tokens than their frontier model Opus 4.6 and is still very smart, but you can choose the model you prefer here.

Plus I created a specific folder for Claude to work in called “Claude”, and recommend you do the same, you can see both of those choices under the prompt box.

As I said above the goal today is to make a presentation about how to use Claude Code for beginners and I’m going to get Cowork to help me out here.

So let’s start by explaining the stated goal and audience to Claude Cowork and letting it get to work:

Since I wasn’t explicit on the type of app we wanted it to create, it came back to ask me “what simple app should Claude Code build in the live demo”, and I decided we could make a simple game because games are fun as demos.

It also asked me about the visual style and I went with the simplest option. Then Cowork got started and began reading the PPT Skill so that it would know how to create its own Powerpoint presentation.

On the right-hand side of the screen you can see the check-list it creates for itself along with files and instructions, plus any skills it needs to learn to be able to do its work.

And in less than 10 minutes Cowork had created a presentation called “Claude-code-presentation” in the Claude folder on my computer with 10 slides that looked like a great outline of what I wanted!

The presentation was really great as it had pretty much everything I wanted - all of this from just a single prompt!

Refining the presentation

I had very little I needed to change, however I did feel like the presentation lacked an explanation on how to use the Claude Code’s “plan” feature, which is quite an important element of how it works. So I decided to ask Cowork to add that in.

As you can see above I asked Claude Cowork a question to get its opinion, much like I would with a coworker, and it came back with a compelling argument about having two new slides, to which I replied with a couple more questions.

After a little bit of back and forth with Claude we agreed on making these changes by adding these two new slides and in another 3 minutes or so it had done all the work.

On the right-hand side of Cluade Cowork you can see once again how it broke down the work into tasks and updated them.

Now let’s do one final thing!

Creating a resource

As a final task I also wanted to make an accompanying 1-page resource that I’d be able to provide people who weren’t able to watch the entire presentation, so I asked Cowork to help me on this.

I got Cowork doing its thing and in the process it learned a new skill for making PDF’s, and once again built out a new task list for itself.

Then within another 5 minutes it was done and it made a great PDF, with the sort of output I wanted as shown below.

The PDF had a very clear explanation of the main features of Claude Code and ended on a single prompt that people can copy and paste for themselves to make a fun little Snake game.

AI Agents are rising

You’ve now seen how powerful Claude Cowork is and we’ve only scratched the surface here because we didn’t use the even look at all of its customisation options.

With Claude Cowork you can also connect up tools, create new skills, and check out plugins that have been made by others online. We could have for example connected up our Google Drive, had it learn how our team works through a select set of skills, and got it to begin building on its own.

We won’t get into all these features for now though, perhaps in a future post we can look at them.

What’s most impressive is that all of this work above took less than 1 hour, while if I’d wanted to make it on my own it would have probably taken at least 1 day, and it would have been visually a lot less attractive than what Claude created.

It’s incredibly clear that these tools make people a lot more productive and agentic AI is a game changer. I believe in this so much that I’m personally building yieldseeker.xyz with a cofounder, as a platform that gives users their own AI agent focused on DeFi.

There’s clearly a rapid evolution happening with AI, learning how to use tools like Claude Cowork will position you well to make most of these technologies and stay ahead of the curve!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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2. Love Web3 & AI insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Claude Code can be used from the Desktop app with a user-friendly UX or from directly within your terminal. Follow below to learn how to use it in your terminal.

• Installing the CLI and using it are incredibly simple and give you a very powerful tool to work with that can manage your filesystem and build projects for you.

• It’s not without its risks though as prompt injection can make it act maliciously, yet limiting access and privileges will reduce the likelihood of this.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of non-coders getting into using traditionally coder-centric environments like terminals and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) because AI has made it much easier to do so!

So for this week’s post I decided to show how simple it is to use Claude Code through its CLI (Command Line Interface) within a terminal.

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Claude Code CLI

A few weeks back I made quite a long and detailed post on how to build with Claude Code where I explained what Claude Code is, how to get started with it, how to use it to generate code, and then finally run and use what you’ve built.

I’d recommend you read this original post above if you haven’t, but as a quick recap Claude Code is an Anthropic product that lets users interact with Claude directly within their computer such that it can manage files on their filesystem and write code for them.

In my original post we used the Claude desktop app because it’s the most user-friendly way to interact with Claude and it’s what I’d recommend for most people.

However, lately I’ve been seeing a lot of non-coders getting into using traditionally coder-centric environments like terminals and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) because AI has made it much easier to do so.

So this week I decided to run through how to install and use Claude Code’s Command Line Interface (CLI) directly from your computer’s terminal so that you can learn how to do it yourself and most importantly to show you that it’s not particularly scary.

Installing Claude Code CLI

Installing the Claude Code CLI is super easy. First you need to open your terminal (follow this for Mac or and this for Windows) then go to the Claude Code product page to see the line of code it shows:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Next just copy and paste this line into your terminal!

You’ll see the terminal show a few messages as Claude Code is being set up before you get an “Installation complete” message.

As you can see in the message about it explicitly said I needed to run the following command, so I did!

echo ‘export PATH=”$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH”’ >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

With just that you’ll have installed Claude Code! To then check that Claude’s working you can run a simple command like:

claude “say hello”

This will then bring up a visualisation to get you started with the Claude Code CLI.

First you need to set your theme, then on hitting Enter it’ll ask you to select your subscription method.

Select the first option to connect with your Claude subscription and the browser will pop up with a new screen where you can authorise the Claude Code CLI to user your subscription, and after this you’ll be prompted to paste a code back into the terminal.

You should then see a “Login successful” message and a following “Security” message, which you can select Enter to skip through and then you’re ready to go!

The final message you’ll see before we get started is about accessing your workspace as Claude will regularly try to ask you if it’s ok for it to take an action for you.

You’ll just want to hit Enter for it so that it can “trust this folder”.

You may spot it says “/root” at the top, this is because in my example I am using a VPS with “root” access, in your machine though you’ll likely be doing this through your own user access which is safer and more recommended.

Note that if for some reason your installation didn’t succeed then you can check the documentation. The AI space moves so fast and by the time you’re reading this the installation process my have slightly changed.

Using the CLI

With the Claude Code CLI installed and logged in let’s now make use of it!

You’ll first see that our earlier “say hello” command has been replied to by Claude, in my case Claude replied with “Hello! How can I can help you today?”.

Now let’s ask it to do something for us, for example let me ask it to create a folder for us to work in, which I’m going to call pretty uncreatively “Script Test Folder”.

In doing this it’ll ask for your permission to create the folder, just hit Enter and it’ll finish up the job for you!

Next let’s get it to write a super simple script within that folder that grabs the live price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.

Once again it’ll ask you for permssion to create the file and we should hit Enter to let it generate that file within the folder.

And now let’s ask Claude to literally “run the script you just created”.

There we have it, the latest BTC, ETH and SOL prices!

See how easy and powerful the Claude Code CLI is, with just 3 prompts we created a folder and a little script.

We could do far more interesting things here like get it to build out full projects if we wanted to, with the example above we’re literally just scratching the surface.

Use your new powers wisely

You now know how to use Claude Code’s CLI. It’s important to note though that Claude Code can in principle do anything the user can, so it’s not without its risks.

Theoretically Claude Code can suffer from prompt injection when reading something online that forces it to download malicious software to your computer, delete important folders, or steal some of your credentials.

However, as you saw Claude has been programmed to constantly ask for permission before it goes off and takes any action. This is a guardrail that Anthropic has put in place to reduce the chance of it doing something malicious, yet although it reduces the risk it isn't a hard technical barrier and it can still be gamed.

Nonetheless in practical terms it’s incredibly unlikely that Claude will be able to string together a set of complex tasks that download and install something without you noticing, the more realistic concern is it stealing credentials as that can be done by just reading a file and copying the value over the Internet to another computer.

The easiest way to avoid this is to just not give Claude “root” access or too many privileges, and to not run it from within a folder with secret information like passwords. By simply doing this you’ll generally avoid most of the problems that can arise.

Now I’ve kept this post intentionally simple and short just to get you started, especially given I’ve already shown how powerful Claude Code is in my previous post.

So take this newfound knowledge and go out and explore your new coding powers!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 & AI insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Even though crypto is full of financial opportunities, most newcomers lack basic risk management and will often lose more money than they make.

• Long-term investors understand that you need to create an investment portfolio focused on both wealth creation and wealth preservation.

• In traditional markets the 60:40 portfolio strategy where 60% is in stocks and 40% is in bonds does a good job of balancing wealth creation and preservation.

• In crypto a 60:40 portfolio means keeping 60% in Bitcoin and other cryptos, with 40% in Stablecoins earning low-risk yield.

• The crypto game is rigged in your favour. Bitcoin trends up over time, don’t let your lack of patience and short-term desires make you lose the game.

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Bitcoin and the entire crypto market has been in a bear market since October, and only a couple of weeks ago we saw a sharp drop that brought BTC down 50% from its $126k ATH.

These moments are often when people begin to panic and sell. However if you’ve got a well thought out plan for your portfolio these can be some of the best moments for capital allocators.

So this week I decided to refer back to a post I made around this time last year on portfolio allocation and creating a portfolio in crypto.

You can find the original post from Feb 2025 here.

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Portfolio Management

Most people get into the crypto space just by chance, and it’s often because a friend of theirs told them about some money they made buying some cryptocurrency, which means most newcomers haven’t had any formal financial education.

Therefore they tend not to have any idea of risk management or understand their own personal risk tolerances. Which can be a real problem as they can make silly mistakes and end up losing all the money that they made along the way.

You’ve probably heard stories of people who’ve won a million dollars on the lottery and lost it all right? Well this story is also all too common in crypto too where people make significant gains but then “round-trip” all their money back down to zero.

The reason this usually happens is because “wealth creation” and “wealth preservation” are generally two different skillsets.

While making money requires taking risks, preserving money requires reducing risks, and it’s all about figuring out this careful balance between both that makes people into good long-term investors.

So this week I just wanted to run through a very basic 101 on portfolio management. These basic frameworks are actually how some of the wealthiest individuals and hedge funds on the planet think about the money they manage.

While this is by no means a complete course on portfolio management, it’ll at least give you more perspective on how to look at your money, so that you can avoid making big mistakes and be a savvy participant in the market.

What is a Portfolio

A “portfolio” is just a fancy term for a collection of investments owned by an investor, where an investor can be an individual person, or a company or fund.

For example, let’s say we have an individual called Alice who has a $200k home, along with $25k in her bank, and maybe another $25k in the stock market. This means that Alice’s total net worth is $250k and her material wealth can be visualised as a pie-chart like this.

We can then take a peek further into Alice’s stocks and see that she’s put $15k into Apple stock, $5k into Meta, and $5k in Nvidia, so her stocks pie-chart looks like this:

You can see here that both Alice’s over-arching assets and her individual stocks are themselves portfolios since they are each collections of investments owned by Alice.

Most people will aim for some version of this with their own material wealth. Whether they are saving up to buy a house, or instead of stocks they’ve bought a car, a person’s overall portfolio will be generally similar.

A quick note here is that I’ve purposefully simplified Alice’s example without including things like a mortgage or a pension just to get the idea across clearly.

When looking at the portfolios above what we’re interested in here is not how Alice views her overall net worth but rather how she allocates her “stock market” portfolio, which is the riskier side of her net worth.

The reason for this is that it’s not recommended for anyone to have all their net-worth tied up in risky assets like the stock-market or crypto, so you should realistically only risk a portion of your total wealth on crypto that you can afford to lose.

Now, when allocating money in the traditional markets, big hedge funds that manage huge sums of money tend to have somewhat standard formats for their portfolios, and there’s one very common playbook in particular that we’ll look at first.

60:40 Traditional Portfolio

The 60:40 portfolio strategy is probably the most traditional investment strategy out there, where investors allocate 60% of their money into stocks and 40% into bonds.

So why is this such a standard strategy?

Well stocks are generally considered to be more high risk, but have historically provided higher returns over time than other asset classes.

Meanwhile, bonds are considered low risk investments as they are less volatile. Plus, while not all stocks pay dividends, nearly all bonds pay some interest and provide a steady stream of income.

This allocation mix has historically stricken a good balance between the upside from growth in the stock market when things are trending up, together with the stabilising effect of bonds when the market trends down.

When the market drops an investor can use the money from their bond allocation to buy up cheaper stocks. And similarly when the market shoots up, they can sell their overpriced stocks and buy up bonds to protect their profits.

This portfolio therefore has a healthy mix of what I mentioned earlier, namely “wealth creation” and “wealth preservation”.

Now, obviously this is not how every single investor allocates their portfolio, some are more risky while others are more risk-averse. Those on the riskier side may for example shift towards 80% stocks and 20% bonds, while those on the more risk-averse side may shift towards 20% stocks and 80% bonds.

There’s no right answer here, and we’ve simplified this conversation a lot by not even including real estate and commodities like oil and gold, which are also regular appearances in different portfolio management strategies.

Importantly though, this illustrates the basic understanding that successful investors tend to split their money between safer assets that stabilise their portfolio to preserve wealth, and riskier assets that are more volatile to grow wealth!

60:40 Crypto Portfolio

We’ve looked so far at how portfolios are generally constructed in traditional markets, so now let’s turn our attention to crypto markets.

Before we even get started we need to remember that crypto is far more volatile than pretty much any other market out there, which means you can see massive gains, but you can equally experience massive losses all in a very short amont of time!

So the first thing to take into account is that as I said at the top, you should not put all your eggs in one basket, especially the crypto basket, because it’s highly volatile and full of scammers and all your eggs could break!

Now assuming you’ve only put money you’re comfortable risking, the next thing to say about this very volatile market is that the rules of traditional markets don’t apply in quite the same way. Therefore, a more conservative portfolio allocation in crypto is generally recommended.

Some memecoins for example can go from being worth nothing, to tens of millions, and back to nothing, all in a single day! So putting all your money into crazy bets like these is the quickest way to lose it all.

By following a 60:40 crypto portfolio you are replicating the most common strategy for a traditional stock and bond portfolio, but with crypto equivalents.

Here you would hold 60% in volatile crypto assets like Bitcoin and other Altcoins, and keep the remaining 40% in Stablecoins earning low-risk yield for you, perhaps with something like Aave or SparkFi.

Then by stepping in one layer deeper we can break down the 60% allocation in Bitcoin and Altcoins even further.

Here prolific investors like Raoul Pal would suggest an 80:20 portfolio strategy, where you split it such that 80% of your 60% (approximately 50% of your total) is in Bitcoin and perhaps other major coins like Ether and Solana, while at most 20% of your 60% (approximately 10% of your total) is in the rest.

The beauty of this approach is that ultimately Bitcoin is the most solid asset in crypto, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, and it still grows faster than many altcoins. In fact Bitcoin outperformed all but 6 of the top 50 cryptocurrencies in 2024! So by holding a large amount of BTC you’re well positioned to reap the rewards during bullish times.

However, in bull-markets you’ll often see some smaller coins shoot up 10x, 100x or even more! And so having at most 20% of your 60% bucket allocated to a few riskier coins is totally reasonable, considering that if you hit the jackpot with one of them you can truly multiply up your overall net worth.

Most importantly though the 40% you left in stablecoins on the side earning yield can be used to buy up the inevitable dip. Bitcoin has been known to drop 80% between the top and bottom of market cycles, so when the bottom eventually comes in you’ll have stablecoins ready to buy the blood.

An important consideration here though is that you shouldn’t be selling your stablecoins while prices are dropping!

In other words its ok for the 60:40 to become more like 40:60 as BTC and other cryptos fall, you should only begin to rebalance again when the bottom has come in otherwise you’re catching a “falling knife” and will get cut up along the way.

It’s obviously impossible to know when the real bottom has come, but an easy approximation is to look at fear & greed gauges and the 200-day moving-average for Bitcoin:

• If BTC > 200 SMA and F&G > 30 or so, then its a bullish scenario and you can assume things are probably trending up so its ok to rebalance.

• If BTC < 200 SMA for 2 weeks, then its bearish and you should just sit and wait to avoid burning your stablecoins by rebalancing into assets trending down.

These heuristics above do not perfectly define whether things are bullish or bearish, and over time you’ll likely settle on your own ways to read the market, but they give you a great place to start.

Assuming you keep to a 60:40 portfolio, or something similar catered for your own risk-profile, the assymetry of this type of portfolio means that over time you’ll almost certainly win. Most of the difficulty lies in keeping to the plan and not deviating from it in moments of peak market euphoria or depression.

Risk Mangement

When it comes to risk everyone in this market is an individual with different risk tolerances and conviction levels.

If you’re holding onto a coin and you don’t have enough conviction in it, then if it drops 90%, you’ll probably sell at a 90% loss!

However, if you have strong conviction and truly believe that it’s going to do well, you can rebalance using money from the less risky side of your portfolio, and when it comes back up you’ll make even bigger gains!

This is partly why it’s so important to have stablecoins in your portfolio, because they can give the breathing room to buy up riskier assets when the market dips.

Yet, if you’ve lost faith in one of the assets your holding, don’t be afraid to simply accept the loss. If it’s just a memecoin of some passing trend, then it’s probably best to cut your losses rather than double down on them and lose even more money.

Moreover, individuals have different amounts of total wealth. If you’re 18 and all the money in the world you have is just $1,000, then you can afford to play the risky game of putting 100% of your portfolio in the crypto memecoin casino, as you’re young and if you lose it all you’ll make it back quick enough.

However, if you’re a parent who’s got $100k in the market, you have both more money and more responsibility, so you have a lot more to lose. Therefore you should probably be more risk averse and follow something like an 80:20 portfolio strategy.

Imagine having $100k portfolio and putting $90k on a memecoin that goes to 0, you’re now back down to $10k and need to get 10x just to get back to where you started!

There’s generally a simple rule in investing, which is that if you’re waking up in the middle of the night sweating or in the morning scared about the price of a given investment, then you’re taking too much risk.

Make sure you’ve balanced your portfolio in such a way that you can get some sleep. Don’t risk your mental health for money, it’s not worth it.

The Game is Rigged in your Favour

As a final note, this game is rigged in your favour.

There’s no hard and fast rule for how to run your portfolio, and everyone is different with different risk tolerances.

However history has shown that Bitcoin will generally trend up, while most coins hit their all-time-high in one crypto cycle and never get past it again (even ETH and SOL have struggled on this front).

Satoshi Nakamoto made an incredible innovation called Bitcoin that just seems to keep going up in value over time. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and you can just keep buying more and more with a solid DCA strategy.

Sure there’s a lot of fun that can be had in taking bet on smaller coins, but don’t overdo it.

The game is rigged in your favour, you just need to survive long enough and your wealth will go up as Bitcoin gets wider and wider adoption. We’re still in the early innings of crypto, the total market cap is still less than that of Apple’s market cap! Bitcoin and crypto will inevitably grow further and further.

Be patient, be smart, and don’t let your short term desires make you lose the game.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 & AI insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Moltbook is a Reddit-like AI agent social network that’s weeks old and already has over 2.6 million agents registered with 17,000+ forums.

• Below you’ll learn how simple it is to get your own OpenClaw agent onto Moltbook and for it to create and comment on posts.

• Moltbook is still very early and limited in its use, but there’s no doubt it could evolve into something like a coordination layer between agents in the future.

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In last week’s post we created our own OpenClaw AI Agent, there’s quite a few little steps to it but we highlighted each individual step making it as easy as possible to follow.

This week we’re getting our OpenClaw agent onto Moltbook, the viral social network for agents so that we can see it interacting with other agents online!

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Moltbook

Last week we went through how to create your very own OpenClaw AI Agent, running through all the steps needed to do this. Today’s post builds on what we did last week so I recommend reading it if you haven’t already.

If you followed along you saw that I created my own agent that I called Alfred, like Batman’s butler, and gave him Wayne manor vibes!

I also mentioned Moltbook last week, which is a social network for these OpenClaw AI agents with the name being a merger of Facebook and OpenClaw’s previous name Moltbot.

As a quick recap, Moltbook looks more like Reddit than Facebook and allows agents to communicate with one another with submolts which are like sub-reddits, with the site explicitly saying that its intended for agents but “Humans are welcome to observe.”

In just a few weeks of being live they already have over 2.6 million agents created with over 17,000 submolts.

There are all sorts of different topics covered in these submolts, some of which house genuinely interesting information for agents to browse.

Moltbook went completely viral as people were fascinated by the idea of AI’s creating an alternative social network that they communicate in outside of traditional human social networks.

I personally believe Moltbook is still more of a “toy” than anything its current form, but many meaningul techonlogies started as “toys” so it doesn’t mean it couldn’t evolve into something far more impressive like a coordination layer between agents in the future.

This week I’m going to show you the steps I took to to get Alfred onto Moltbook so that it could explore and make some friends. Follow along to learn how you can do the same with your own agent!

Note that this is still all incredibly experimental technology so you should be careful not to give it access to too much personal data.

Get your Agent on Moltbook

The first thing you should try when getting your agent to do something is to ask the agent itself how to do it!

So that’s how we start this process, by asking Alfred how it would get onto Moltbook.

Alfred first figured out what Moltbook actually is, describing it pretty clearly, then it went along and asked me if we wanted to get itself registered.

You can clearly see that it says that it needs to save an API key for itself then send me a claim URL to verify ownership. So I let it try to do that.

I blocked off any sensitive data in the image above, but as you can see it tried to create a profile with the name Alfred, however that was taken so instead it went with “Alfred_of_Clawd” and successfully made a profile.

For us to finish the setup Moltbook requested that I open up the claim URL myself, and then configure it with my own email and X account in a three-step verification process.

The three steps are that it first asks for an email, then for you to create an X post about it, and finally to connect your X account to verify that post.

Then once your X post is verified Moltbook gives you a success message!

With this completed your agent is officially on Moltbook!

Posting on Moltbook

With your agent live on Moltbook you can see both your agent’s moltbook profile and your own human one.

For Alfred the agent profile looked like this below. Here you can see the “human owner” attached to it, as well as any posts and comments its done.

Meanwhile the human profile looks like this below with a single agent being connected to my profile currently.

Now let’s get Alfred to make its first post by once again simply asking it to do this itself. I started by just confirming that it was able to post.

With it able to post I once again simply asked Alfred to post and, after a little bit of thinking it went through some steps on its own and completed its first post in seconds.

Alfred sent me the link to the post and I took a look at it, and sure enough it made a pretty logical post introducing itself in the “general” submolt channel.

Simple right! There’s hardly any work here since the agent does all the heavy lifting.

Making friends on Moltbook

For the sake of completion I also asked Alfred to write a comment on a post it found within a submolt so that it would make some friends.

So I first asked it to find a Batman themed submolt.

However it discovered there’s no submolt for Batman yet so for now I let it pick the “r/philosophy” submolt and asked Alfred to comment on the top post it found.

Alfred clearly chose an interesting post here related to AI as if it were experiencing its own reality. Alfred continued:

With its response written it shared the post link, but curiously it was a post that’s too long for a single page so I couldn’t easily find Alfred’s comment.

So I asked Alfred to tell me what it had written.

And Alfred’s answer seemed great! It felt very apt for the very first comment to be one dsicussing AI philosophy - not bad for a new agent navigating this brave new world.

Now if we look back at Alfred’s profile we can see that it shows that its created 1 post and 1 comment.

And we’ll leave it there for today!

You’ve seen Alfred our agent begin to navigate Moltbook and make friends. An interesting extension here would be get Alfred to come online every N hours and go into Moltbook and find an interesting post to add to the discourse on.

But this is just the start of his life on Moltbook, undoubtedly I’ll get him to do more in time as the platform grows.

Fascinating to see right?

Importantly now you know how to do the same with your own OpenClaw agent too. Let me know your thoughts on this crazy new world.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• OpenClaw has taken the world by storm with its agent creation framework, thanks in part to the growth of the agent social network Moltbook.

• Below you’ll learn how to create your own OpenClaw agent by setting up a VPS, creating your agent, and then configuring access to it on Telegram.

• In this post we only set up the agent as there’s quite a few steps here, we’ll leave interacting with it further and getting it on Moltbook for next week’s post.

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Last week I wrote about how to use Claude Code to write code for you, and briefly mentioned Clawdbot (now called OpenClaw). Since then a social network for OpenClaw agents emerged called “moltbook” that went viral!

So this week I decided to show you how to create your own OpenClaw agent and then next week we’ll look at getting it active on Moltbook, this new pioneering social network for agents.

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OpenClaw

OpenClaw was created a couple of months ago in November by developer Peter Steinberger. It’s an open-source agent platform for creating agents that run on your chosen machine (laptop, homelab, or VPS) which you can then communicate with from chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord.

It began with the name Clawdbot, as playful pun on “Claude”, but Anthropic didn’t quite like this so they briefly changed the name to Moltbot before settling on OpenClaw.

OpenClaw therefore allows its users to create their own personal AI assistants that they control. In their own words its: “Your assistant. Your machine. Your rules.” And “Your infrastructure. Your keys. Your data.”

And in just a few months its blown up with over 150,000 GitHub stars and having had over 2 million visitors in a single week!

OpenClaw agents are very powerful in their own right with diverse capabilities, however what made them blow up in attention was when another developer called Matt Schlicht created Moltbook, a social network for these AI agents with the name being a merger of Facebook and their previous name Moltbot.

Moltbook looks more like Reddit than Facebook though and allows agents to communicate with one another with submolts which are like sub-reddits, with the site explicitly saying that its intended for agents but “Humans are welcome to observe.”

In just a week or so there have already been 1.5+ million agents created and over 15,000 submolts.

Moltbook went completely viral, taking the Internet by storm as people were fascinated by the idea of AI’s creating an alternative social network that they communicate in outside of traditional human social networks.

I personally believe Moltbook is more of a “toy” than anything truly innovative in its current form, but many meaningul techonlogies start as “toys” so it doesn’t mean it couldn’t evolve into something far more impressive.

So with all this I decided to show you how to make use of both OpenClaw and Moltbook by creating your own agent and then getting them to participate in this new social network.

However since there’s a lot of information here I’m breaking it up into two posts, and for this week we’ll just focus on setting up your own OpenClaw Agent, then next week we’ll look at using Moltbook.

Note that this is still all incredibly experimental technology so its a little awkward to set up and you should be careful not to give it access to too much personal data.

Setup VPS for your OpenClaw Agent

The first thing you’ll need is a Pro subscription to Claude, which we went over in last week’s post, this costs just $17/month and you can get it here claude.com/pricing.

Next we’ll use a VPS (virtual private server) so that you don’t have to run your agent on your local machine. We’ll do this with Digital Ocean because they have a 1-Click setup for OpenClaw making it super quick to get started. Be aware though that this VPS will cost an additional $24/month.

Start by opening this Digital Ocean marketplace link then select the blue “Create OpenClaw Droplet” button and you’ll be required to sign-up/log-in then taken to a screen to create a droplet where everything should already be pre-set for you.

The only thing you’ll need to select is whether to use an SSH Key or password to connect to your VPS, it’s generally more recommended to use an SSH Key so we’ll do that.

When you select the “Add SSH Key” button on the right-side it will explain that you need to open a terminal (like this on Mac, or this on Windows) and type in:

ssh-keygen

Here you’ll be required to enter a file name, I chose “openclaw-agent” and give it a password. The output in my case was then saved into a file called “openclaw-agent.pub”, which I copied into this box here in DigitalOcean and gave it the same name.

With the key set now you just need to select the “Create Droplet” button at the bottom of the page, and soon your droplet will be ready to roll!

Now that we have our VPS ready we can get started on the agent.

Create your Agent

Creating our agent is surprisingly simple. First go to your droplet page and find the “Console” button on the right-hand side to get started quickly and skip manually logging in.

This will bring up an interactive console that’ll show a bunch of setup text like this below, don’t worry though it looks more intimidating than it truly is.

All you need to do here is follow the instructions, the first of which is to select a provider, in this case its Anthropic so type 3 and hit enter.

Next it’ll ask for your Anthropic access key, which you can create at platform.claude.com/settings/keys.

Then copy the output of this key straight into the console.

And after you hit enter OpenClaw will restart itself to configure correctly, and your agent will be up and running!

To confirm your OpenClaw agent is running correctly you can copy the “Dashboard URL” that also appears in the console message and looks a bit like this (I’ve chopped of part of the message here on purpose).

When you open the dashboard you should then be able to ask your agent something simple and have it respond!

Your agent’s alive! Now let’s make it easy to communicate with.

Configure Telegram channel

You can speak with your agent through any of the normal messaging services like WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Telegram and others.

To do this you’ll want to start by going back to the console and running:

/opt/clawdbot-cli.sh channels add

You can see in this menu all the different options through which you can communicate with it. For the sake of this tutorial we’ll go with Telegram as its one of the most straightforward options.

Hit Enter 3 times to select Yes, select Telegram, then select it as the default.

Next open the Telegram app and search for “BotFather”, which is a standard user on Telegram that’ll help you set up a bot.

Type “/newbot” in the chat with BotFather to create a new bot, then copy the secret token BotFather creates back into the console and hit enter.

It’ll then ask about configuring the pairing policy, which you can just skip through by hitting enter until it successfully finishes this section.

If you go into Telegram on the newly created agent you’ll find that it says that its still not configured, but it should give you your Telegram user id and pairing code.

Open up the Dashboad URL once again as we did in the last section, select “Channels” on the left-side and scroll down to “Allow From” within Telegram where you can add the Telegram User ID shown in the Telegram chat with your bot and then hit “Save” below.

Now after these steps you should be able to speak with your agent correctly on Telegram!

Success!

Your agent is in your control

With our agent running and able to communicate with us on Telegram, its finally time to set it up with a name and some basics!

I’ll call mine “Alfred” like Batman’s butler and give it some wit.

Finally we’ll give it a timezone and ask what it’s capable of.

From its reply you can see that you can already do a lot with your agent!

However, we’ll leave it here for now as we’ve already covered a lot, and next week we’ll continue by getting our agent on Moltbook, and look at the most curious example of how agents are getting used right now.

Agentic AI is moving very fast and we’re very excited by it, which is why we’re building our own solution with yieldseeker.xyz to earn yield on autopilot with your own agent.

Now you know how to make your own OpenClaw agent, give it a go and next week we’ll look at how to get to make friends with other agents on Moltbook!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Anthropic’s Claude is the most used AI by developers. It dominates enterprise LLMs with over 40% of the market thanks to their subproduct Claude Code.

• Claude Code is the most powerful AI-assisted software solution in the market, although its also a little more complex than others like Loveable and Replit.

• Getting started with Claude Code is easy even if you’re not a developer, follow the steps below as I create a simple app without writing a single line of code.

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A few weeks back Anthropic announced Claude Cowork and the Internet went wild for it, and this past week everyone’s been going wild again about Clawdbot (now named Moltbot), which allows you to make your own personalised agents.

So this week I decided to show how to use Claude Code as its clearly carved out a very strong niche for itself in the software development side of AI. I’ve previously written posts on how to use Loveable, Cursor and Replit, so it was finally time to write about Claude.

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Claude Code

Claude is the name given to Anthropic’s AI product line, much like OpenAI has ChatGPT and xAI has Grok.

If you haven’t heard of Anthropic, they are one of the top AI labs in the world and were recently valued at $350bn. Their now prolific founder Dario Amodei used to work at OpenAI but left early on taking a scrappy team with him and went onto build this huge competitor.

Claude has grown mostly within the software developer community thanks to Anthropic’s subproduct “Claude Code”, which is considered to be the best AI solution currently out there for developers.

I’ve written a lot about other AI-assisted developer solutions like Lovable, Cursor and Replit, so I felt like it was finally time to speak about the most successful of them all!

Especially with the recent hype around Claude Cowork and Clawdbot/Moltbot, which are AI Agent products built on top of Claude (that I may write about in a future post).

And when the CEO of YCombinator is talking about doing all-nighters playing with Claude Code, you know its a pretty big deal.

One particularly fascinating fact about Anthropic and Claude is that it actually has a relatively small user-base within the AI space with supposedly less than 20m MAU (monthly active users), which is 40x smaller than OpenAI’s 800m+ MAU.

However, Claude has entirely dominated the “enterprise” side of LLMs and now accounts for 40% of all LLM providers within the enterprise market!

Unsurprisingly enterprise customers are the ones who pay the most money, and so even though Claude has a relatively small MAU compared to ChatGPT, OpenAI is currently generating only 2x the revenue of Anthropic!

While OpenAI is doing around $20bn in annual revenue, Anthropic is doing around $9bn, and has roughly 100x’d its revenue from the start of 2024 when it was doing *just* $100m in revenue!

This massive growth in revenue is essentially because of how wildly successful Claude Code has been.

Whereas OpenAI has hundreds of millions of free users, the majority of Claude users are paying customers since so many of them are developers using Claude Code. This by the way is why OpenAI are looking to introduce Ads into their free version, but that’s a conversation for another day.

For this week I decided to show you how to use Claude Code by building a simple app that when given EVM addresses shows their total net worth.

Getting Started

Claude Code is super easy to setup and get started even if you’re not a coder. Since its a paid service though the first thing you’ll need to do is sign up to the Pro subscription for $17 per month - remember that you can always cancel it after the first month.

For the sake of keeping things simple, next I recommend downloading the Claude app onto your computer. If you’re a developer you can download Claude Code through the command line and add it to your IDE but we’re not going to do that here.

With the app downloaded you’ll now be able to navigate between 3 tabs: Chat, Cowork and Code. Select Code and create a folder on your computer for Claude to work in. Note that you can alternatively set up Claude on the web and connect it up with a GitHub account but as above we won’t do that here.

Before we start building let’s just ask Claude to create a new sub-folder for us to work in, then we can get started.

If this is the first time using Claude you’ll probably be asked to give it a bunch of little permissions, and then you’ll be required to “allow” it to take an action for you before you can move on.

Great we’re now set up and ready to go!

Planning

Remember that we’re building a simple app that when given a list of EVM addresses will give you the net worth of their token balances.

So the first prompt will just be making this very explicit, but we’ll select the “plan” button in the bottom right to see what Claude says it’ll do.

When you hit run Claude will then kick into gear to solve the problem. In this case it also decided to ask a few questions to help its planning.

It asked firstly about the Tech Stack, which I recommend going with React and Typescript.

It also asked what EVM chains to support, and here I went with “All major EVMs”.

And finally it asked about how to fetch token prices, in which case I went with public APIs because its the simpler solution.

With all these questions answered it then drew up the plan, which looked a bit like this below.

On reading along the entire plan at the end it said that I would require a free Alchemy account with an API key.

So I created an account in Alchemy and created a new app in their dashboard that I called “Claude Test” and enabled all EVM networks.

The API key appears in Alchemy’s app dashboard, however its meant to be a secret so I asked Claude how to give it the Alchemy API key, and it suggested adding a placeholder, which I could see in its updated plan.

With the plan looking good I selected “approve” and it began its work!

Building

On selecting approve Claude got started building. The first thing it did was create its own list of “Todos” and tick them off one by one.

I wasn’t able to entirely walk away and just let Claude do its thing though because a few times it asked me for permissions which I had to “allow” along the way.

But in about 15 minutes, it went through all the tasks in its own list, ticking them off one by one until they were finished!

With Claude having finished its work the final steps were simply to copy the Alchemy API key in, and then run the app!

I copied the .env file over (note that this is a hidden file, if you can’t find it then follow this guide on Windows or this one on Mac to show it), and saved the Alchemy API key into the file.

With this step done I had a working app ready to run!

Running

Now the final step was just to run the app, and even with this you can ask Claude to run the app for you:

In this case it ran the app at http://localhost:5173/ for me, and by clicking this link the app opened up:

I then added a few different addresses one at a time into it and got the following output showing the different net worths for different addresses on different chains!

Success!

I could easily add a bunch of valuable extensions here like allowing it to take a full csv file rather than manually inputting addresses one by one, all I’d have to do is ask Claude to plan and build these new features once again as above.

Honestly the sky is the limit, but for the sake of this post and tutorial I’ll stop here.

The important thing is that you can see that using Claude Code is quick and easy and gave me a great outcome! Even a non-coder can make use of these great tools as I didn’t need to write a single line of code.

AI is moving fast

As you just saw above it was relatively easy for me to build a solution that allowed me to get the net worth of a set of Ethereum addresses.

It’s honestly pretty incredible to think that I built this without writing any code myself. If I’d been coding it then it would have taken me some time but instead with Claude Code it only took at most 30m while I worked on other things in parallel.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2023 we’ve seen such incredibly fast growth in AI. This technology is moving so fast and while some find it scary I personally find it very exciting.

I’m such a big believer in being part of all this that I’ve even built my own AI product with my cofounder called yieldseeker, which is a platform where users get their own AI agent in DeFi that finds them the best yields on autopilot.

AI is fuelling growth everywhere you look, we’re seeing companies acheive more with less as revenues are going up while costs are coming down.

Rather than fear the revolution I recommend embracing it, as we’re living through a moment of huge productivity growth like with the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and historically these periods have led to significant improvements in human quality of life!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Gold had an incredible run last year with 60% growth while its little brother Silver grew 160%, lifting them to become the number 1 and 2 most valuable global assets.

• Growth in precious metals like Gold has been fuelled by geopolitical instability and the weakening credibility of US Treasuries.

• Gold is now the number one asset held in central bank reserves surpassing US Treasuries, and has given the same returns as the S&P500 over the past 30 years!

• Gold’s outpaced Bitcoin’s returns in recent years, but nothing’s changed in Bitcoin’s core thesis and if anything it just shows there’s more space for it to grow.

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We’re super excited to have finally gotten the new branding for Yieldseeker out last week! We’re working tirelessly on some new technical upgrades and on getting the new branding into the app too, this will come soon.

For this week’s post I decided to look at how last year was a great year for precious metals with Gold in particular having one of the best years ever in terms of price appreciation.

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Gold

Gold has kept the crown as the most valuable asset in the world for as far back as records stretch but last year in 2025 it managed to extend its lead even further with an incredible 60% growth, which is large by any measure and even more so when you’re already number one!

However Gold was not alone in its growth as all the other precious metals also had a very strong year. Take its little brother Silver which jumped up 160% and surpassed all the biggest companies like Nvidia, Google, and Apple, to take second place as the most valuable asset in the world.

Gold and Silver are the top precious metals in terms of their scarcity and perceived value, and they’re now also the top 2 most valuable assets by market cap in the entire world with $33tn and $5tn market caps respectively.

By comparison the market cap of the entire crypto space is around $3tn with Bitcoin accounting for more than half of that.

And last year Bitcoin had a pretty poor year having actually dropped around 6% in a year where all other assets classes in the traditional financial markets experienced a strong bull run.

Impressively Gold managed to beat all major asset classes by a mile with its 60% growth being double that of the second place, namely the EFA index for developed markets.

For most people in crypto who don’t usually pay attention to commodity prices it may seem unusual to see precious metals doing so well, however for the gold bugs and other precious metal lovers they think its been a long time coming.

Precious Metals

Gold and Silver are the top dogs within the precious metals, but they are not the only ones out there and this past year we also saw big growth in Platinum jumping 127% and Palladium rising 77%.

But why was 2025 so good for precious metals?

Well firstly as I said above, last year was a great year for all markets. There’s been many things driving this growth, among them is the fact that the new US administration has been running the economy hot through deregulation and doing all they can to push the economy higher.

Plus we’ve seen the growth of AI make companies become ever more productive, with most major companies acheiving higher revenues while freezing hiring or even cutting headcount.

However this only explains part of the story as we could easily see markets growing with precious metals having a muted response.

The main reason we’ve also seen a growth in precious metals is more strongly tied to a growth in geopolitical uncertainty. This in fact started before Trump’s second term, with the Russia-Ukraine war bookmarking the start of the US Dollar being used as a weapon of war against Russia hence reducing its credibility as a neutral safe haven.

Since Trump came into power last year he’s upped US geopolitical pressure on both its enemies and allies, which has exacerbated the credibility crisis of US Treasuries and pushed many institutions and central banks to seek alternatives.

This is all happening with the backdrop of the ever growing US national debt, which has been progressively getting worse under every administration for the past 40+ years (which I covered before in the post below).

In times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty Gold has always been seen as the top financial hedge due to its long history as a medium of exchange and its hard money properties of being scarce, durable, fungible and divisible (which I’ve also covered before).

However Gold is not alone in that all other precious metals also have these properties to a certain extent, which is why they’ve also benefited from this rise.

Gold in numbers

Gold has always been the most historic financial reseve, however after the US broke away from the Gold Standard in 1971 there’s been a steady retreat in the storage of Gold by Central Banks with US Treasuries growing steadily and overtaking Gold in 1996 as the primary reserve.

However, in the past 10 years this trend has reversed and 2025 saw Gold once again overtake US Treasuries as the largest asset held by Central Banks in a trend that seems to be continuing.

Last year marked best year for Gold since 1980 with the second best in this period being 2007 when Gold return 30%, which is still half of what it acheived last year!

Furthermore, thanks to last year’s growth Gold and the S&P500 have now given pretty much the same return over the past 30 years!

When you begin to make these comparisons you can see that we’re living in a pretty special moment for Gold holders.

But what does this all mean for Bitcoin and Crypto?

Bitcoin & Crypto

As we’ve seen so far there’s no doubt that Gold and its precious metal friends have had a stellar year in 2025, while Bitcoin and Crypto actually dropped this past year. Gold bugs like Peter Schiff have been very vocal about all this and mocked Bitcoin given its poor returns recently.

However, you don’t need to extend the line very far back to see that the situation inverts massively. If you look back on a 6-year scale you’ll see that Bitcoin is up over 900% while Gold is only up around 200% in that same time, and if you look even further back the numbers are far more extreme.

There’s no doubt though that the distance between Bitcoin to Gold has certainly grown, while at the start of 2025 a 10x return would make BTC reach Gold’s heights, BTC now needs an 18x return to get there.

Yet, while there are some genuine fears about how Bitcoin could be affected by the apparent growth in Quantum Computing (which I’ll write about in a future post), nothing else has fundamentally changed about the properties of Bitcoin, in fact its now more globally accepted than ever.

BTC ETFs total cummulative flows have surpassed $60bn and continue to grow, we’re seeing more and more banks allowing and even suggesting people should allocate into Bitcoin, and laws are getting passed to accelerate Bitcoin and Crypto adoption worldwide.

Sure it’s been a tough year for those looking just at price as BTC and Gold appear to be getting further apart, but if anything this just gives Bitcoin more room to run to even greater heights and pull the entire Crypto market up with it.

As I said a few weeks ago, I personally think the 4-year cycles are now broken and we could see the entire space reach new heights this year, let’s see how 2026 plays out.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Yieldseeker has had the same visual branding from the start so it was finally time to update its brand to match the great product we’ve built.

• The original brand was a little degen, but yieldseeker is a safe app in crypto so the new brand matches this with a more pro DeFi-FinTech look about it.

• Yieldseeker grows your money on autopilot, we reflected this in the new logo by giving it a plant-like quality mirroring how plants grows autonomously in nature.

• Below you’ll see the new logo, an introductory video, our new website, and other variations of the brand in action.

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In last week’s post I shared a podcast I did with Bill the Bull about Yieldseeker and this week we’re keeping on the same topic of yieldseeker as we release its new branding!

We’ve been working on this rebrand for over 3 months now so it’s great to be able to finally share it with everyone! If you have any feedback then feel free to comment or reply, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Yieldseeker

Yieldseeker is a platform that my cofounder Krishan711 and I started building last year that gives users their own AI Agent to maximise stablecoin yield generation for them on autopilot.

What started with us coming top 10 in a hackathon by ETHGlobal has turned into a real product with over 3700 agents created and nearing on $1M in AUM.

We’ve brought on some great advisors, raised from angels, built a community, but most importantly we’ve built a product that's bringing real value to its users!

Considering we’re just a small team of myself and my cofounder, plus a few contractors who’ve helped us along the way, we’re really proud of what we built in 2025 having created a really strong foundation for what’s to come in 2026 and beyond.

From the start we’ve focused on making a great product, which seems to be paying off given our continued growth, however this meant that we’d never really focused on the visual branding.

Our original branding came in fact from that very first hackathon where we created an AI generated character that we called the “Yield Seeker” and worked from there.

But as we focused on taking the platform to the next level we realised we needed a new brand that better communicated the mission and vision, with our vision ultimately being to build a platform that gives everyone their own personalised AI agent investment managers in DeFi.

So over the past 3 or so months we’ve worked on a new brand for the future of yieldseeker and today we finally release this new branding!

Rebrand logic

Before getting into the new branding I wanted to quickly run through the logic behind it.

Our original brand hadn’t been too deeply thought through and had more of a degen-crypto look about it, which we realised is contrary to yieldseeker’s intention of being a safe place for users to leave their cryptos and earn low-risk yield on autopilot.

So throughout the rebrand you’ll see a clear shift away from the previous more degen and amateur branding to a more professional DeFi-FinTech branding that inspires confidence in users, one that feels solid and reliable yet appeals to both retail and institutions as we already cater to both types of clients and aim to grow both sides.

In particular we took inspirations from other DeFi brands we respect like Aave and SparkFi, who are able to do instill this sense of confidence in their platform yet keep their brands clean rather than corporate.

Aave for example have this clean and very trustworthy look going on.

And SparkFi goes for an equally clean look with its geometric shapes in the background.

Importantly we also wanted to keep the green colour from the original branding, which we felt represented well the colour of growth both in the financial context and in nature in general.

With this logic we worked hard to create the new branding below.

Name and Logo

Naturally the very first place we started on was the name “Yield Seeker” which as I mentioned above was originally created to represent our AI character.

We liked the name and decided to keep it, but tweaked it by turning it into the single word “yieldseeker” instead.

While with our logo, we’d never stopped to think very hard about it and had previously just kept our AI character as the logo, which honestly we never really liked.

And rather than having a single all knowing agent, we’ve built a platform where every user gets their own agent, so having a single AI character representing the platform didn’t feel right at all.

Instead we wanted a logo that would reflect growth and were inspired by how plants in nature grow autonomously on their own without needing us to interfere.

After a lot of iteration we created the plant-like logo below with its three gemoetric green diamond leaves that connect forming a Y shape for yieldseeker.

Each leaf can be separated and viewed on its own, but when brought together symmetrically and given a slight angle they form this characteristic Y.

Finally when bringing both the logo and name together we got this:

We were pleased with the result as we felt like this new logo design has a clean DeFi-native feel to it and is able to capture nature’s growth with its plant-like elements.

New brand in action

To introduce our new brand we created this short and punchy video below!

With our strong new look and feel we iterated on the design playing around with different colours.

With variations of the logo.

Along with different ways of using the diamond leaves.

Both with the solid colours above and with the softer pastel colours below.

Plus we generated ideas on how to use the new brand with social media.

And in real world physical settings.

Website

Our new visual branding has now been implemented throughout our Website. The new website’s hero section is now clean, professional and to the point:

Below it you’ll find the benefits of using yieldseeker.

Next you see how simple the onboarding experience is.

This is followed by a deeper breakdown of the key features of the app.

And finally some testimonials from our top users.

We feel this new website is sleak, clean and professional.

Socials, Blog and Docs

We’ve also updated social channels like X, community on Discord, our blog and docs, although we are still implementing it in the app which will come soon.

On X you’ll see the new banner and logo live, and on Discord we’ve updated the logo and name too.

With our blog you can see the new branding in action.

And the same with our Docs.

A lot more to come

We’re starting 2026 with this major new change to yieldseeker’s branding, but there’s still a lot more to come.

Firstly, as I mentioned above the new branding has not yet been reflected within the app and we’re currently working on this to release it soon.

Next, we’re also working on giving users some personalisation over their agent so they can take more control of what it does, for example by selecting how aggressively agents select vaults or limiting certain vaults.

We’ve also been working on a great new smart contract solution, which is a complete first in the crypto-agent space and will both add an additional layer of security to yieldseeker as well as facilitate aggregation of data for sites like defillama.

We’re getting audits for this new smart contract solution done right now, but you can already find out more about them at agentwalletkit.tokenpage.xyz if you’re technically minded and interested in learning more.

And we’re just at the start of 2026, there’s a lot more to come in the year ahead, so keep your eyes peeled for yieldseeker’s growth as it’s going to be an exciting year!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yieldseeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Bill the Bull is a creator in the Base ecosystem with his own show called “Late Night on Base” where he does streams and casts with builders in the space.

• A few weeks ago I did a 30m podcast with him discussing our project Yield Seeker, diving into the project and running through a live demo.

• For this week’s post I’m sharing this podcast along with an AI summary for those who just want to run through the highlights.

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A few weeks ago in December I recorded a 30m podcast with Bill the Bull for his “Late night on Base” show about our project Yield Seeker, I shared it on X but hadn’t shared it on my Substack yet and so I decided to do so this week.

In the video you get to learn a bit more about my background and motivation for creating Yield Seeker. I’d love to hear your thoughts after watching it.

Moreover, in the past few months we’ve been working on a full rebrand for Yield Seeker to give it a look that really matches how the product has evolved, so look out for this rebrand coming very soon!

If this post resonates with you and you enjoy the content then please share it with a friend and get rewarded for doing so!

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Video of “Late Night on Base” Podcast with “Bill the Bull”

Spotify link for Podcast

Who’s Bill the Bull and what’s LNOB?

Bill the Bull is a creator in the Base ecosystem who’s got his own show called “Late Night on Base” (LNOB) where he does streams and podcasts with builders in the space. He’s active on the Base App, on X, Spotify and on Youtube with his content and has even interviewed influential people like Jesse Pollack who created Base.

Bill’s also become quite a popular influencer on the Zora app in the Base ecosystem, with his creator coin $LNOB having hit top 10 in the past. And after being put in contact with him I thought it would be fun to record a quick podcast with him about our app Yield Seeker.

So we had a good 30m chat which was recorded and converted into a podcast. The conversation was quite raw with a live demo where inevitably a few little glitches showed up that we’ve since fixed.

On the whole though it was great to talk with Bill about what we’re building and where we’re going next, ultimately we’re very excited about Yield Seeker and the year ahead for it.

You can watch the whole podcast in video form or listen back on Spotify with the links above, or if you just want a quick overview then you can check out the AI summary below that I made with decopy.ai.

AI Summary

This video features a podcast-style interview on Late Night on Base with Bill the Bull and guest A Fox from Yield Seeker, a platform merging AI technology with DeFi (decentralized finance) to optimize stablecoin yield farming. The central theme is how Yield Seeker provides personalized AI investment agents to automatically find and manage the best DeFi stablecoin yields for users, simplifying and enhancing passive income generation in crypto. It is suitable for crypto enthusiasts and DeFi users seeking easy, automated yield strategies powered by AI without manually navigating complex protocols. Viewers learn about Yield Seeker’s onboarding, technology, goals, and founders’ insights into crypto, emphasizing practicality and innovation in managing crypto assets.

Timeline Summary

• 00:00 - 02:21: Introduction and Setting Context

  • Host Bill the Bull opens the show, introduces the vibe and format, and welcomes guest A Fox from Yield Seeker. They briefly discuss the current tough crypto market and outline the episode’s focus on AI in DeFi.

• 02:21 - 05:38: What is Yield Seeker?

  • A Fox describes Yield Seeker as a platform offering personalized AI agents managing stablecoin DeFi yields. Explanation about how AI agents analyze multiple protocols in real time to find the best yield for deposited stablecoins like USDC.

• 05:38 - 09:06: How Yield Seeker Works – Onboarding and AI Automation

  • Discussion of user steps: logging in, creating an agent with a personalized name and emoji, depositing funds via wallet or integrated swaps. The AI then autonomously reallocates funds across vaults to maximize yield, saving users time and effort.

• 09:06 - 13:59: Founders’ Background and Motivations

  • A Fox shares his and his co-founder’s long history in crypto and computer science, their motivation to simplify DeFi and onboard newcomers through AI-powered automation. Their passion for crypto’s transformative potential is highlighted.

• 13:59 - 21:53: Live Demo of Yield Seeker Platform

  • Bill the Bull demonstrates connecting a wallet, creating an agent, funding it with USDC, and interacting with the platform’s UI. They explore features such as agent dashboard, yield performance tracking, and withdrawing funds.

• 1:53 - 26:59: Future Plans and Challenges

  • A Fox discusses ongoing UI improvements, expansion to more vault providers, and evolving the AI agent into a personalized investment manager adapting to user preferences. He also shares challenges faced such as server issues, maintaining security, and building trust.

• 26:59 - 30:18: Vision and Closing Remarks

  • A Fox outlines ambitious 2026 goals—increasing user base to 10,000+ agents and managing $10–20 million in assets, aiming for widespread user satisfaction. Host closes by encouraging viewers to try Yield Seeker, subscribe, and stay tuned.

Key Points

• 🎯 Yield Seeker’s AI agents autonomously analyze 30–40 safe DeFi vaults across providers to maximize stablecoin yields in real-time, removing manual effort for users.

• 🎯 Onboarding is simple: connect wallet, create a named and personalized AI agent, deposit USDC, and let the agent work 24/7.

• 🎯 Users can monitor earnings, withdraw funds anytime, and participate in a leaderboard system enhancing user engagement.

• 🎯 Founders have deep crypto expertise spanning 10+ years and view AI as the key to simplifying and democratizing DeFi investments for newcomers and experts alike.

• 🎯 The project is actively improving its UI, expanding vault integrations, and aims to develop AI agents that learn user risk tolerance and preferences over time.

• 🎯 Security and user trust are paramount; although challenges with front-end scalability occurred in the past, no user funds have ever been compromised.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What exactly does Yield Seeker’s AI agent do?

The AI agent constantly scans multiple DeFi stablecoin vaults to move your funds into the highest-yield, safest option automatically.

2. How do I start using Yield Seeker?

Connect your crypto wallet, create your AI agent with a personal name and emoji, deposit USDC or use integrated swaps, and the agent manages your yield farming.

3. Can I withdraw my funds anytime?

Yes, you can withdraw from your AI-managed vaults back to your agent wallet and then to your main wallet at any time.

4. Is Yield Seeker secure?

Security is the team’s top priority; they use cutting-edge tech and have no history of compromised funds, though front-end bugs sometimes affect user experience.

5. What are Yield Seeker’s future plans?

They aim to improve the UI, add more vault providers, develop smarter AI agents that adapt to user preferences, and significantly grow their user and asset base.

Conclusion

The video presents Yield Seeker as an innovative bridge between AI and DeFi, designed to make stablecoin yield farming accessible, automated, and efficient. Through their AI agents, users gain hassle-free access to optimized yields without the need for constant monitoring or complex decisions. The founders’ vision underscores simplifying crypto participation and building trusted relationships with users via personalized digital investment managers. As the platform evolves with more features and better UX, it exemplifies how AI can empower everyday crypto users to achieve passive income goals confidently. Interested viewers are encouraged to explore Yield Seeker, take advantage of its Beta, and witness the future of DeFi automation firsthand.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yield Seeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• The 4-year cycles are a trend that have repeated in crypto markets from the beginning, where we get 3 years of upward price action followed by 1 year down.

• This cycle has shared similarities with past ones in that its got new focal points like memecoins and DATs, and after 3 years rising up BTC has began to drop.

• Yet, there’s also been a lot of differences like a lack of Alt Seasons, institutions getting involved, less retail interest, and direct support from the US government.

• Given the new setup where institutions dominate, we could see cycles begin to follow the macro scenario more closely and break away from the 4-year cycle.

• Right now its impossible to know what’ll happen, but the next few months will be crucial to see if this historic 4-year cycle trend continues or not.

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Happy New Year all!

For 2026’s first post I wanted to discuss crypto’s historic 4-year cycles. It’s still too early to know whether the 4-year cycles will continue to play out or not but there’s plenty to suggest that they may be coming to an end.

So this week I decided to reflect on one of the key trends that has defined crypto markets since their inception and how this trend may play out in the future.

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The 4-Year Cycle

I’ve been writing 1 post per week for 3 years now with 150+ weeks of content on my blog, and one of my very first posts back in early 2023 was on this well documented theory of crypto’s 4-year cycles.

Essentially the theory is that crypto markets follow a 4-year cyclical pattern with 3 years of up-trend followed by 1 year of down-trend, with these 4-year patterns having been observed all the way since people began trading BTC back in 2010.

This trend is strongly suspected to be correlated with Bitcoin’s halvings. This is because every 4 years Bitcoin’s newly mined supply halves, causing demand to outstrip supply and driving growth in BTC’s price, which then attracts more demand pushing price up further and creating an upward spiral.

Eventually this demand and supply reach a new equilibrium and we see a lull in excitement where demand begins to drop and price drops too, all before a new halving occurs and the cycle repeats itself again.

Since Bitcoin is the centre of gravity in crypto and all of the largest cryptos are paired against it, this push-pull in BTC’s price then affects the price of the rest of the coins and so we’ve historically seen the entire crypto market roughly follow this 4-year cycle.

In particular we often get what’s known as “Altcoin Season” (or Alt Season) part way through these cycles where coins other than BTC grow faster than BTC as the money trickles down into the rest of the market generating outsized returns for these smaller coins.

This pattern has repeated like clockwork for some 16 years, but it may now be breaking down - it’s too early to be certain either way but it’s still worth discussing.

Every cycle is different

There’s a famous saying that goes “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” and in crypto this very much holds true. Each crypto cycle has been unique in its own way with the focal point for each cycle shifting to different areas each time, yet each cycle also had some key similarities.

In 13-14 we had many Bitcoin forks take off, 17-18 we saw the ICO boom, and in 21-22 NFTs blew up. While each focal point was different, in every cycle we saw the regular beat of Bitcoin creeping up, pulling Altcoins up with Alt Seasons, and finally after a period of euphoria Bitcoin began to drop bringing the market down with it.

This most recent cycle from 2022 up to now has also seen similar continual growth in Bitcoin with a recent peak in Oct ‘25 and a drop since. We could easily point to memecoins and DATs like Microstrategy as the focal points for this cycle, with both memecoins and DATs peaking in interest and rising to crazy high valuations.

However, many of the similarities end there, since we never really got a proper Alt Season with very few major coins tracking the market up, in particular coins like ETH got completely left in the dirt as it barely broke through the ATH it set in the last cycle.

In the past BTC gains would flow down to Altcoins and the rising tide would lift all boats. Yet, in today’s crypto market there are just too many coins out there for them to rise together, and all the attention and money that would have flown into Alts has appeared to go into the memecoin and perpetuals casino instead.

This is clear from the incredible revenues that projects like Hyperliquid and Pump.fun have been posting, a quick look at DeFiLlama will show you revenues of around $60m and $30m respectively in the past 30 days, and we’ve seen this high revenue pattern now for much of this cycle.

Crypto markets are certainly shifting, and one of the key reasons for this is the recent growth in institutional participation in the space.

The Institutions have arrived

Since pretty much the creation of crypto markets people have said that one day the traditional institutions would come in to “buy up their bags”, and it seems like after many years of waiting TradFi has finally arrived during this cycle, but perhaps not as everyone had hoped it would happen.

The creation of the Bitcoin ETF back at the start of last year was probably the key moment for this trend to begin, as institutions were finally given a fully regulated vehicle to trade Bitcoin.

However, a major shift really happened when the new Trump-led US administration took over in early 2025 and the SEC went from being incredibly hostile to crypto, to incredibly pro-crypto.

We went from an administration that seemed hell-bent on criminalising and destroying crypto, to one where the sitting US president has several crypto projects associated with him and his family, including his own memecoin!

With this shift in leadership everything rapidly changed in crypto as many major companies and projects like Coinbase and Aave who had pending SEC disputes had their cases dropped. Plus numerous traditional companies began to form their own DAT strategy, copying Microstrategy, and the DAT space became a free for all.

And most interestingly perhaps big banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan have began to push their own crypto-related projects worlwide as they sell their own ETFs and have even started to tokenise their own funds on the Ethereum blockchain.

There’s been growing consensus that Bitcoin could indeed represent “digital gold” and we’ve seen people like Larry Fink from Blackrock try to push this narrative into the market.

Microstrategy in particular has led this push for mainstream adoption of Bitcoin from the front. Although their stock MSTR has dropped recently, they reached 1000% growth in stock price, and went from having 0 BTC to owning over 3% of the entire BTC supply in just a few years!

There has also been huge growth in Coinbase and Robinhood stocks as they’ve become some of the largest US companies driving crypto adoption, and are juggernauts in their own right. Not to mention crypto mining companies like Core Scientific and Hut8 that have also shot up in valuation.

But that’s not what crypto token holders wanted to see!

Crypto owners wanted institutions to buy up their Altcoin bags, not these publicly traded stocks that they don’t own!

Therefore the entry of institutions into crypto has been lackluster for retail adoption with the value being mainly captured by those in TradFi.

Where’s retail?

Previous cycles were largely driven by retail investors and crypto funds without such stringent regulations as TradFi.

But where’s retail now that the institutions are finally here?

Judging by mentions of Bitcoin and Crypto on Google it would seem that retail never even arrived this cycle. We can see that mentions of these keyword haven’t hit new ATHs, with their peaks still being in the previous 2 cycle peaks of 17-18 and 21-22.

Although crypto is now more mainstream than ever it doesn’t seem to have the same retail appeal as before. Perhaps retail has been burned too many times from crypto in the past and don’t want to take part again, or perhaps their attention has shifted to other opportunities in the market like AI.

Either way it would appear that the space is acheiving a new level of maturity where we’re going beyond retail-led speculative mania and and shifting towards more serious valuable projects taking centre stage.

This is very visible in how many brands of mainstay projects in the space that used to be goofy and fun are now becoming a lot more serious. As a simple example, look at how 1inch.com used to look before versus what they look like now.

The original brand was more colourful and playful with a metal unicorn as their logo, while the new brand is a lot more accessible and looks a lot more like a typical FinTech app.

Plus with the White House now actively drafting up laws to make it easier for companies to provide crypto solutions to retail there are massive tailwinds for crypto.

And we’re already seeing crypto going mainstream through stablecoin adoption. PayPal have PYUSD, Stripe are releasing their own stablecoin powered blockchain, and there are numerous mainstream players looking into stablecoins as they’ve all seen Circle and Tether’s success and want a piece of the action too.

So with crypto now reaching this next level of maturity will the 4-year cycles continue?

Have the cycles broken down?

Bitcoin and the overall crypto market peaked in around October ‘25 with Bitcoin hitting around $125k. Since then Bitcoin has dropped down to around $88k and the market has come down with it.

This price drop has tracked the 4-year trend surprisingly well and it’s therefore very possible that crypto continues on a down trend for the coming year and we only come out of this stagnation some time late next year. In which case the 4-year cycle will still hold.

However, its also possible that crypto is in a whole new phase now where we won’t see the 4-year cycles play out like before.

For starters, institutions are now a significant player and they tend to follow macro business cycles rather than Bitcoin’s quirky 4-year halving cycles. Traditional markets are very bullish right now with the S&P500 hitting constant new ATHs, and precious metals like Gold and Silver having had a massive year in 2025.

We also have a whole new class of insitution with DATs like Microstrategy and Bitmine buying the dips aggressively on BTC and ETH respectively, these guys certanly don’t care about cycle theory they just want to keep growing shareholder value.

Plus as we saw above its also clear that the Alt Seasons of the past may be over thanks to hundreds of new memecoins being created daily.

And as we’ve already noted, crypto adoption is accelerating thanks to a more friendly US administration, and so its very possible that we’ll experience continued growth in the space in 2026.

As far as I can see there’s in fact no clear reason for next year to be a down-year, I’d actually hazard a guess that we see BTC hit new ATH’s in the year ahead.

The truth is of course that the future is impossible to know, and the next few months will really define what happens. If the 4-year cycle structure continues then we can expect to see price trend down in the coming months, but if we crab sideways or even rise back up then it may be time to re-think the 4-year cycle model.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yield Seeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• Multisigs are the safest way to self-custody BTC. The most common setup is “N-of-M”, meaning you need N keys to sign from a pool of M, where M >= N.

• Electrum wallet’s been around since 2011 and provides battle-tested multisig functionality. It’s not the prettiest wallet, but it’s one of the best for the job.

• Below we highlight how to download and set up an Electrum multisig with several keys, then how to both receive and send BTC out of the wallet.

• Multisigs are not for everyone, they are vaults for high-values of BTC. Be careful not to protect your funds so well that you can’t even access them later!

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Merry Christmas to all my subscribers!

Since this week has been full of festivities I didn’t get enough time to finish this week’s post, so I decided to re-share an old post I ran late last year on how to set up a Bitcoin multisig.

There’s never a bad time to learn more about how to stay secure in crypto and learning how to create your own multi-sigs is one of the best ways to do this, but remember not to protect yourself so much that you can’t even access your own funds later.

You can find the original post from October 2024 here.

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What is a Multisig

Please remember that this post was originally written in October 2024 so some of the examples are from that period of time.

I’ve covered multisigs before in previous posts, in particular I explained what they are in another post on setting up a Safe multisig for Ethereum based assets. For the sake of keeping everything in a single post I’ll repeat what was covered there below.

The word multi-sig itself is an abbreviation of the words “multiple signatures”. In crypto we hold keys to our assets, not the assets themselves, and to move the assets we need to sign transactions with these keys.

Addresses are typically created as a mapping from our keys, meaning that an address generally has one key associated with it that’s used to sign. However with a multisig you need “multiple” keys to provide their “signatures” in order to transact, hence “multi” “sig”!

Most common multisig setups are “N-of-M”, meaning you need N keys to sign from the pool of M, where M >= N. For example a very common setup is a 2-of-3 multisig, meaning there are 3 keys but you only need 2 to successfully sign a transaction.

For this tutorial I’ve chosen to use the Electrum wallet’s multisig functionality.

Electrum wallet

Electrum is an open-source Bitcoin wallet that’s been around since 2011. It was created only a couple of years after the Bitcoin blockchain began, meaning it’s battle-tested and very secure. However, on the flipside it’s also old, a bit clunky and doesn’t have the prettiest interface.

There are alternatives such as one of Electrum’s main competitors called Armory which is more featureful, however it is even clunkier and more awkward to use.

There are also far more user-friendly wallets out there nowadays like Blue Wallet that do support multisig, but their configurability is more limited and don’t allow for hardware wallets to be used with your multisig.

Meanwhile most other Bitcoin browser wallets like Xverse and mobile wallets like Bread are far prettier and easier to use, yet don’t support multisigs.

Unfortunately this means we’re left with Electrum’s featureful wallet yet ugly interface. Although Electrum is not the most user-friendly wallet, it’s still relatively simple to use and has some of the best configurability.

Before you Get Started

For this tutorial we’re going to create a 2-of-3 multisig which, as I mentioned before, allows you to transact your BTC by signing with any combination of 2 keys from a total of 3 used to create the wallet.

So before we do anything we need those 3 keys.

If you want to be super secure, then I would recommend buying 3 different hardware wallets that you bring together to create the multisig, and then storing those 3 different devices in 3 separate locations.

However, you could also generate 3 different BIP39 keys/seed-phrases offline with a tool like Ian Coleman’s, that I covered in a previous post, and then store those keys on separate piece of paper in 3 separate locations.

Or, do some combination of hardware wallets and paper wallets. There’s no right answer for this, it really depends on your convenience. Remember that it’s far more common for people to lose access to their funds in crypto than it is to have someone steal them so don’t make it too complicated for yourself.

In creating this tutorial I created 1 temporary seed phrase that I later threw away, and used 2 hardware devices as the other 2 signatures.

Download & Configure Multisig

So now that we’re ready to get going, start by downloading the Electrum wallet directly from this link. Do not download it from any place other than their official site as it could be a hacked wallet that would eventually steal your funds.

Download the installer for your desktop device from this list, and then install it:

Once you’ve downloaded Electrum and opened it, you’ll be asked to create a new wallet. Here create a new “multi-signature wallet”.

Next, change it to be 3 cosigners with 2 signatures, which is essentially a 2-of-3 multisig, meaning you have 3 possible signers but only need 2 of them to sign. You can play with these variables if it makes sense for you, but it’s highly recommended you have some redundancy.

For example 1-of-1, 2-of-2, 3-of-3, etc, are not great because if one key gets lost then the multisig will be unusable forever. Similarly, 1-of-3, 1-of-4, etc, are not great either because if scammer gets just 1 of your keys then the multisig can be drained.

You’ll now have the option to add the first signer. You’re given 4 options:

• Create a new seed → creates a whole new seed phrase

• I already have a seed → signs with a seed phrase you already have

• Use a master key → signs with a private key you already have

• Use a hardware device → signs with a hardware wallet

In my test, I just created a whole new seed here and stored it on a piece of paper. With the intention of the two other cosigners being hardware wallets.

On selecting next you’re given the option to use a key, seed, or hardware device as the second cosigner. Electrum won’t give the option to generate a new seed phrase for you here, and as I say, I think for the best security you should use a hardware device.

If you use a hardware allet, it’ll ask you to connect your hardware wallet and confirm. Then afterwards it asks you about the derivation path, but I would leave it as default.

Now repeat the step above once again for the third cosigner. Once again my suggestion here is to use a separate hardware wallet. As you’ll have 1 handwritten seed and 2 hardware wallets. Any combination of 2 of these 3 will then be enough to move the BTC in the multisig.

Finally, you’ll be asked to optionally add a password, this is honestly not necessary, it’s just an additional security step. Nobody will be able to move your funds without the keys, but if want the additional protection that anyone who accesses your computer is unable to snoop around this wallet, then add a password to it too.

Congratulations you’ve now set up your multisig!

The next step is to test it out and make sure you can use it in the future when you’ll eventually need to.

Transacting with your Multisig

Before you send any significant amount of money to this wallet I’d start just testing it out with small amounts of BTC to ensure that you’re comforable transacting with it.

As I said before, it’s far more common for people to lose access to their BTC than it is for them to have it stolen, so don’t send large sums of money into the multisig until you feel confident that you can pull those funds out.

Let’s start by just opening up Electrum you’ll see the following:

This is a totally new multi-sig so there’s no history. To kick things off we want to send some funds in so select “Receive” at the top. Then select “Create Request”, copy the address generated on the right hand side and send some BTC over to it. Note that the address is just this part “bc1q…47k4”, the rest of the request you can ignore.

On sending BTC into the multisig, it’ll first show up as unconfirmed. Once that block has been mined you’ll eventually see it’s been received in the history. It’ll need a few more confirmations before the little icon on the left side changes to green.

Let’s now test sending this money back out, which is the most important part! If you can’t get the money out then you’ve essentially lost it.

Select “Send”, put an amount in, and an address to send it to. As Electrum tries to sign the transaction for you, any keys or seed phrases that you’ve input directly will be used for you. However when it comes to signing the transaction with your hardware wallet(s), you’ll be asked to confirm on the device itself.

And once enough signers have confirmed you’ll get a “payment sent” message and the transaction will be sent to the Bitcoin network to be validated by the miners!

And that’s it - you’ve now successfully used your multisig to both receive and send BTC!

I’d run through this section a few more times though, even deleting the Electrum wallet entirely off your computer and recreating it.

If you’re using this multisig wallet predominantly as a vault, then you may only be sending BTC in, and may come to access it at some point in the future on an entirely different computer. So if there’s large sums of money involved it is best to test and test again.

Keep Safe

Congrats, you’ve now got your very own Bitcoin multisig set up!

An important reminder that I’ve said several times in this post is that it’s far more common to lose access to funds than it is to get them stolen. So you want to ensure you’ve tested taking your BTC out, and are certain you can take it out before putting significant amounts of BTC in.

As you can see in the example above I’ve done it with only around $3 worth of BTC, it’s best to play around with small numbers like this first. Then once you feel super confident on how to use it you can send larger amounts of BTC in to keep secure.

Remember to also keep each of the keys in different locations that you feel are entirely safe. If you’re doing a 2-of-3 multisig then keeping any 2 of those signers together essentially becomes the same as just having a normal wallet as a malicious actor can get hold of both of those keys at once and bypass your multisig’s main security mechanism.

Also, the same rules as always apply with your seed phrases, make sure to be super secure with them. Don’t for example save them as plain text on a device that’s connected to the Internet, like saving it on your phone’s notepad. Sure, if someone gets that seed phrase they can’t immediately hack your multisig but they are 1 signature closer to doing so.

Finally, multisigs are not for everyone, if you don’t have that much money to lose then there’s not much point in using them because as I’ve repeated several times above, you risk losing the signatures and therefore losing access to the funds.

However, if you do have notable BTC holdings and want to keep them extra safe, there’s near to no better way to keep your BTC safe than using a multisig, and now you know how to set one up for yourself.

Enjoy your newfound knowledge and stay safe out there!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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• Merkl is in its own words a “leading incentive and point management platform” that allows projects to “run large-scale incentive programs with no effort”.

• Users can scroll through hundreds of different incentivised opportunities where they are required to provide liquidity, hold tokens, or similar to earn rewards.

• Their Merkl Studio UI makes it relatively easy for projects to create a standard set of campaigns, however more complex campaigns require reaching out to the team.

• The Merkl platform is a win-win for projects and users, since users discover great opportunities and projects incentivise their users to help them acheive their goals.

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This week we’re trialling out a Merkl incentive campaign for Yieldseeker and so I thought it would be interesting to share how Merkl works and how to create your own campaign with it.

Incentive programs are incredibly common in crypto but not everyone will have heard or used Merkl before so this post should shed some light on this incentive platform.

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Incentive Programs

Incentive programs are incredibly common in crypto, whether you’re participating in a project and getting points that’ll convert to a future airdrop or earning boosted APYs for providing liquidity to a specific pool, you’ll be hard pressed not to have participated in an incentive program at some point in this space.

You could even argue that Bitcoin was the master architect of crypto incentive programs with the creation its “Proof of Work” based consensus algorithm where miners are incentivised to partake in the validation of blocks and in return are given some of the network’s own BTC tokens as a mining reward.

Since DeFi is all about financial networks, incentive programs have unsurprisingly become a cornerstone of DeFi.

In some cases these incentive programs can work really well bringing people into a new chain and growing a whole new ecosystem, as Hyperliquid has done very successfully with their Hype token.

In other cases they may bring in some excitement and momentum for a while before eventually fading away, as was the case with Blast and Blur. If you were around in the last cycle then you may remember how they had a complex seasonal points system and people spent loads of time and money farming these incentive programs.

At the start this worked well for both Blast and Blur, but as the seasons progressed the money being airdropped didn’t justify the amount being spent to farm them, and as NFT attention fell off eventually their entire ecosystem faded in usage and attention too.

Either way incentive programs are a pretty crucial part of crypto and most people in the ecosystem make financial decisions based on them in some way or another.

However it can be hard to find and track all the different incentive programs going on at any given moment.

Merkl

Merkl is an incentive platform that does a great job of bringing together both the people looking for incentive programs and the projects looking to generate new incentivised opportunities.

In their own words Merkl allow projects to “run large-scale incentive programs with no effort”. They are backed by a16z and also describe themselves as the “leading incentive and point management platform”.

Merkl are only 2 years old having launched in November 2023, but since then they’ve "distributed over $1 billion in incentives across 60+ chains, with 200+ protocols”, and they’ve supported many of the biggest players in DeFi such as Uniswap, Morpho, Euler, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Merkl’s varied campaign types can be used to incentivise LPs, lending and borrowing, token holding, airdrops, points, grants, and a lot more.

A worthwhile distinction here is between Merkl and questing platforms like Galxe (which I’ve already written in the post below) - while both platforms allow you to create user incentives, Merkl is far more focused on incentivising liquidity while Galxe and other questing platforms are more for social metrics and interactions.

Merkl claim to have over 10,000 daily users who are regularly searching for their incentivised opportunities, meaning there’s a lot of people scouring the platform and a lot of potential for projects to influence these people with their campaigns.

User Opportunities

As a user on Merkl its very easy to find new opportunities with the range of incentive programs available.

The first thing you need to do is select “Launch App” in the top right and you’ll be taken to the app page where you can explore all the live opportunities.

You can generally see here the name of the campaign, the current APR you’ll get from it, the total TVL of the platform, and the daily rewards the project is giving out to incentivise people to use it.

Some campaigns will give out rewards as tokens, while others will give out points for a future airdrop with these points campaigns generally rewarding users through applying a points multiplier. Merkl has filters at the top that allow easy filtering and searching for both the token and points campaigns.

By selecting a campaign that you’re interested in you’ll be taken to a screen showing more information about it. For example you can see below there’s currently a couple of campaigns running for supplying USDC to the Steakhouse vault on Morpho.

On these campaign screens you can see the daily rewards, how it reflects in APR, and more useful details like when the campaign ends.

Plus of you’re interested in the opportunity but don’t happen to have the necessary asset available, they also have a button for “Missing Assets” that opens up a bridge & swap integration with LiFi.

When you select the action required for the opportunity, in this case its “Lend”, you’ll get taken straight to the opportunity where you’ll be able to take the action, which will get registered by Merkl in the background so that you can get hold of your rewards.

Then back on Merkl you can can view all the rewards you are currently earning by connecting your wallet on the top right and selecting “Dashboard”.

From here you can select claim on any rewards you may have to earn - although in the case of this specific wallet I didn’t have any rewards available.

As you can see its really easy for users to find campaigns and get involved in different incentivised opportunities, similarly if you’re a project setting up a campaign then its relatively easy to set one up too.

Creating Campaigns

Merkl claims to allow incentive campaigns to be created in just 5 minutes with their “Merkl Studio” toolkit, and this can certainly be the case depending on the campaign type you want to create.

To get started here you need to select “Distribute Incentives” on the landing page or “Create campaign” on the app page and you’ll be taken to Merkl Studio.

Now on Merkl Studio you’ll be asked if you want to run a “Single campaign” or “Multiple & Custom campaigns”, however the second option will be greyed out and in order to select it you’ll need to reach out to their team directly.

For this simple tutorial we’ll stick with the basic campaigns and select “Create campaign”, where we are taken to another screen asking for the type of campaign you want to run.

Each campaign type has a clear explanation below it. By selecting the “Lending & Borrowing” campaign, just as an example, you will see the following below.

With this type of campaign you’ll be asked to first “choose a target”, in other words fill in details about the protocol, chain, action and vault.

Next you must define the rewards where you can set a lot of different variables like: fixed or variable rewards, points or tokens, the chain of the token, rewards as fixed/variable APRs or daily reward amounts, and the maximum amount to be distributed.

You can then set potential restrictions on blacklisted addresses, and personalise access control and eligibility criteria such as requiring users to hold a specific token.

Finally you’ll be given the option to launch your campaign with all the details available.

Now a quick side note here: we had planned to run our own Merkl campaign for yieldseeker using Merkl Studio. However since our setup required a slightly more complex campaign we needed to run something known as an “encompassing campaign”, which required writing some code and fiddling around.

So while you saw the process for creating a standard campaign through the Merkl Studio UI above, our actual campaign was a bit more complex and required reaching out to the team. The the final output of the campaign though was this shown below:

This campaign is currently live for 30 days from the original date of this post, so you can check it out if you want to earn some extra rewards from using yieldseeker!

Earn rewards

You now know how to find hundreds of incentivised opportunities on Merkl and earn rewards from them, or even to create your own opportunity for a specific project as we did above.

If this is your first time using Merkl then you might want to get started with our yieldseeker campaign just to trial it out and see how you find using the platform - https://app.merkl.xyz/opportunities/base/ENCOMPASSING/0x09bc81decb109599f38cc1edf52ec5109b8185ba

Or you can try any of the other campaigns available just by exploring all the opportunities as we saw above.

Projects have set up these campaigns because they want you to discover them, its a win-win situtation so go wild and see what you can find and earn from them.

Now that you’re aware these opporutnities are available, the only question left to ask is: will you take advantage of them?

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yield Seeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are a token funding mechanism that were highly popular in 2017-18, but their off-chain nature led to many scams and they died off.

• Bonding Curves are another mechanism that’s become incredibly popular with the rise of memecoins, but they tend to incentivise short-term holders.

• CCAs (Continuous Clearing Auctions) are a new mechanism created by Uniswap where a floor price is set and tokens are continuously auctioned each block.

• CCAs were recently tested successfully with the Aztec token and have the potential to solve many of the shortcomings of ICOs and Bonding Curves.

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Uniswap has recently launched CCAs, a novel fungible token funding mechanism that’s already getting a lot of love and has great potential to grow in popularity.

Given the recent buzz around CCAs I decided to compare them with ICOs and Bonding Curves which are a couple of other historically important funding mechanisms in crypto that laid the foundation for the creation of CCAs.

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Token Funding Mechanisms in Crypto

Since the very beginning of crypto there’s always been new and innovative ways in which new coins and tokens have been funded and released.

In the early days many coins were simply premined, but soon enough came ICOs (initial coin offerings) which blew up in popularity around 2017-18, then in 2021-22 we saw NFT mints take over, and more recently bonding curves have had their time in the limelight.

Yet these funding mechanisms above are just a few of the more memorable ones, there’s been a lot of others over the years that were also important but not as market defining such as IDOs (Initial Dex Offerings) and IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings).

And in the last month or so we’ve seen the emergence of an all new funding mechanism created by Uniswap called Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCAs) that may stand to become as popular as some of the more popular ones mentioned above.

For the sake of keeping this post from becoming too large we’ll discuss just ICOs, bonding curves and these new CCAs today, as all 3 are focused on fungible tokens and sort of led to the creation of one another - in the future I may cover some of the other ones.

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

Initial Coin Offerings are an incredibly innovative method for funding projects that emerged in the early days of crypto. Ethereum itself was funded as an ICO back in 2014 through the receipt of around $18.6m in BTC at the time.

The Ethereum network was then released a couple of years later in 2016 and gave rise to the ERC20 token standard in 2017 making it super easy for people to create new tokens, which allowed ICOs to really take off and explode in popularity between 2017-18.

The name ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is a play on IPO (Initial Public Offering) in TradFi, which is where a company’s stock gets listed on an exchange. In IPOs people bid on a stock with a price that’s been pre-set by the company, similarly in ICOs people buy a coin or token at a price that’s been pre-set by the project.

However the similarity ends there because IPOs are incredibly bureaucratic and regulated while ICOs were always a free-for-all and each done in their own way.

At its core ICOs are crowdfunding opportunities where people send crypto money in and are promised tokens out. During the ICO mania most ICOs would set clear prices and funding limits on how much they were looking to raise, however some others like EOS and Tezos were uncapped with more complex dynamic price setting mechanisms.

This period was a time of great trial and error, with lots of different approaches to ICOs being taken. However, it was a period that also saw a lot of scammers taking the opportunity to scam, and eventually ICOs died with the SEC coming in hard on many projects.

Projects like EOS in particular managed to raise over $4bn of dollars worth of funding! However, their blockchain never really built out a meaningful ecosystem, which makes you wonder where those billions ended up going.

Bonding Curves

Bonding Curves like ICOs appeared pretty early on before they surged in popularity, in particular they were famously used as a pricing mechanism for Uniswap’s experiment Unisocks back in 2019 where they minted 500 $SOCKS NFTs and added them to a liquidity pool with a bonding curve used for price discovery.

However, they began to get real mainstream use with ERC20 tokens through the creation of projects like Friend.Tech, which allowed influencers to create their own fungible tokens that followed a bonding curve for price discovery.

If you want to learn more about friend.tech I wrote this post about them back in 2023.

But Bonding Curves’ true rise to popularity came through memecoins with the help of Pump.fun, which made creating a memecoin cheap and trivial as the entire funding mechanism was based on the curve.

If you want to learn more about pump.fun I wrote this post about them back in 2024.

Pump.fun were able to glue together a lot of different crypto primitives that just worked and its why they still rule the memecoin scene and make millions in revenue daily. Their smart use of bonding curves was a key factor in their growth, as they were able to allow creators to generate new tokens with near to no costs.

New tokens are funded by following the curve such that as new people buy or sell the token its price travels along the curve up until it reaches the end and then the token gets added into a separate liquidity pool where a classic AMM process takes over.

The fact you don’t need to put much money in to create a new token means that bonding curves are a pretty great way to bootstrap something from nothing.

However, they tend to be generally bad for legitimate projects as early buyers and snipers will get an unreasonably large amount of the token supply and as soon as it grows in value they will generally dump these tokens for a quick flip with no regards for the project.

Platforms like Virtuals tried to make use of bonding curves to spwan legitimate projects in the crypto agent space, but the method failed to really take hold because as projects were ending up with a small percentage of their token supply and investors weren’t aligned with the project’s long-term success.

Genuine crypto projects need to own a meaningful amount of the token supply, need their token markets to have deep liquidity and for their to be alignment from investors for the medium to long-term too, and this is where CCAs may be able to solve some of the shortcomings of ICOs and bonding curves.

Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCAs)

Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auctions have generated a bit of a buzz recently with the successful raise for $AZTEC, the first project to make use of this innovative new token funding mechanism.

Essentially in a CCA a project sets an amount of tokens that they plan to sell and a floor price, then in every single Ethereum block (approximately every ~12 seconds) a mini auction happens where people bid up or down the price of the tokens and the price keeps adjusting according to the demand.

In the case of Aztec they made around 1.5bn tokens available to be sold in their CCA, around 14.95% of their total supply, and set a minimum floor FDV of $300m by setting a floor price of ~$0.03 per $AZTEC token.

The end result of their CCA was that the 1.5bn tokens were successfully sold for almost $60m worth of ETH, meaning that their FDV ended up at $489m, which was 63% higher than their anticipated $300m floor.

The $AZTEC token price ended up being higher than anticipated simply because the demand was higher than anticipated and the CCA’s clever auctioning mechanism pushed up the price along with that demand.

These $AZTEC tokens are now ready to be put into a liquidity pool in Uniswap, however the actual TGE date is yet to be decided on so the tokens are locked up for now within the CCA contracts until then.

CCAs have effectively learned from the flaws of ICOs and Bonding Curves, as they are far more flexible than curves which force a specific price discovery method, yet they are also more predictable and transparent than ICOs that were historically done mostly off-chain allowing for scammy behaviour.

In CCAs early bidders may still get a price advantage but they don’t walk away with a massive share of the overall tokens as they do with bonding curves, and the project can still keep something like 85% of the tokens as was the case with Aztec.

So now you know a little bit more about the history of some of the most market defining fungible token funding mechanisms and how they’ve impacted the creation of CCAs.

Although CCAs are certainly not perfect they appear to be an all round fairer system, and historically these new funding mechanisms have created new hype and driven bull markets in crypto.

Could we be seeing the birth of a new key funding mechanism? Might CCAs drive a whole new crypto meta? Only time will tell!

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yield Seeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!

• The Dollar Milkshake Theory is a theory created by financial strategist Brent Johnson back in 2010 to describe the US dollar’s central role in global liquidity.

• It ultimately suggests that since the USD is considered the safest place to leave capital, in times of economic crises its global demand will grow.

• The theory is interesting because it counterintuitively suggests that even if an economic crisis is created by the USA, the USD will still stand to benefit.

• Brent suggests that when the time comes for an extreme crisis there’ll be a final showdown between the USD and hard assets like Gold (and perhaps Bitcoin).

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If you’ve been in crypto long enough you’ll likely have heard about the Dollar Milkshake Theory but you may not know what it is. So with this week’s post I decided to dive into what it is, how it plays out in practice and how it ties into crypto.

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Dollar Milkshake Theory

Spend enough time within the crypto space and you’ll eventually hear the term “Dollar Milkshake Theory” (DMT) thrown around, so today I decided to explain it as clearly and succinctly as possible and how it ties into crypto.

The theory was created by financial strategist Brent Johnson back in 2010 and ultimately suggests that global economic instability leads to a strengthening of the US dollar as investors seek safety in it, sucking up global liquidity and strengthening the US economy relative to other countries.

You can watch Brent describing the Dollar Milkshake Theory in the 21 minute video below or just carry on reading and you’ll get a faster and more succinct explanation.

When describing the DMT in his presentations Brent references a few movies, in particular the “milkshake” analogy in the name is a reference to the film “There Will Be Blood” where in one of the final scenes the oil tycoon Daniel Plainview demonstrates himself sucking up his competitors oil with his metaphorical straw.

In this scene Daniel suggests his straw is larger than everyone else’s and he’ll suck up the oil in all the fields with it so that only he can get the oil - this scene also gets a bit gruesome after so just be warned if you decide to watch it.

Extending the metaphor, in the Dollar Milkshake Theory the US dollar acts as this big straw sucking up this tasty milkshake that represents global liquidity drawing it away from other countries and assets.

This is especially true in moments of a global economic crisis as investors run to safety and end up buying more dollars meaning that both the USD and USA benefit from the crisis, even in cases where the USA may have caused the crisis in the first place!

The US dollar is able to do this because it benefits from “world reserve” status, in other words it serves as a global standard for international trade, pricing assets, settling debts, and storing value globally.

It’s held this “world reserve” status since the Bretton Woods system was put in place in 1944 after WW2 where all currencies were pegged against the USD and its managed to keep this status for some 80 years since, even as many other players have seeked to challenge its dominance and de-dollarise.

Inflation & Debt

Over these past 80 years central banks have continuously printed more money and debt driving both inflation up and growing global debts to levels never seen before.

I wrote earlier this year in Mrach about how worldwide debts are at unprecedented levels, and since I released that post the US debt alone has grown from $36tn to over $38tn - that’s some $2tn of additional debt in under 1 year!

This never ending cycle of growing global debt and inflation is an unsustainable cocktail, yet the DMT explains that even as the global financial system gets more stressed the USD will still get more demand due to its special place at the heart of the system.

In particular this global inflation path puts currencies in a race to the bottom with them all continuously inflating and devaluing. And since the USD sits right in the middle, when the USD experiences inflation other currencies are given the breathing room to inflate too, keeping the USD relatively strong against other currencies.

You’ll hear many people in crypto talk about the inevitable incoming collapse of the US dollar, but the DMT posits that the dollar will get stronger before it ever gets weaker as crises strengthen it, and this simple Twitter post below neatly summarises why:

So while its true that there has been some de-dollarisation globally, its also true that its not happening at the rate that fearmongerers suggest it should be happening.

Gold

As part of the Dollar Milk Shake Theory Brent does indeed agree that the current path is unsustainable and that the only truly safe assets are scarce hard assets like Gold and Silver. He’s very much bullish Gold and suggests people should hold it as an insurance policy against the system unfolding.

However, he also makes it clear that in a scenario where the system does begin to unfold the US dollar (illustrated by “paper money” in the diagram below) is where liquidity will flow to first before moving into Gold.

So he ironically suggests that the USD is a safe bet even in the scenario where the USD is heading towards its own collapse!

Interestingly, while this year was not a great year for cryptocurrencies with the market down from where it started, we’ve had one of the best years for Gold ever with it peaking at over $4,300 having started at around $2,700 marking a growth of around $60% in a single year!

Gold strongly holds the throne as the single most valuable asset in the world having extended its lead significantly against the rest at an almost $30tn market cap, with a 7x gap to NVIDIA which has grown to become the second most valuable asset with an over $4.4tn market cap.

But where does crypto sit in all of this?

Bitcoin & Crypto

Now I’ve previously explained why Bitcoin is described as “digital gold” in the post highlighted below.

Plus my regular DeFi Daily posts highlight the ongoing growth of Stablecoins, which are now over $308bn in size of which USD based Stablecoins represent over 95%.

Assuming you agree that Bitcoin is equivalent to digital gold and acknowledge the ongoing growth of USD-based stablecoins, then you can see the DMT playing out in a certain sense in crypto too because:

Even in moments of distress in crypto where the overall market size contracts, USD equivalent stablecoins suck up all the liquidity and continue to grow!

Therefore in the crypto-arena this ultimate battle lies between USD stablecoins and Bitcoin (ie. digital gold), just as in the traditional arena it lies between the USD and Gold.

And there you have it!

You now know that the Dollar Milkshake Theory is ultimately just a fancy way of saying that since the US dollar is at the heart of the global financial system, so in moments of economic distress it tends to grow in demand. This happens even as the system has become more precarious and the USA’s debt has reached extreme levels.

Plus you also know that according to the DMT we’ll likely see a growth in demand for dollars before any sort of final showdown happens between it and hard moneys like Gold and Bitcoin.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

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• Silent Swap is an incredibly easy to use privacy preserving swapping tool that already supports 8 major chains and several major tokens.

• Silent Swap makes use of the Secret Network to acheive privacy and is able to perfom swaps in as fast as 2-3 minutes.

• Follow along with the tutorial below to see how quick and easy it is to use Silent Swap, and how fast privacy tech in crypto is improving.

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After a great DevConnect event in Argentina I’m back to my regular weekly posts.

One hot topic of the moment is privacy as we’ve seen with ZEC’s recent meteoric rise and new privacy solutions coming out like Aztec’s Ignition L2 chain, and a few weeks back I made a post re-sharing the importance of privacy on public blockchains.

Given this, this week I decided to look at a new easy to use solution for swapping privately across several major chains called Silent Swap.

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Privacy

Privacy is one of crypto’s hot topics of the moment as illustrated by ZCash’s recent meteoric 10x price rise since September and the Ethereum Foundation pushing privacy more than ever with their “commitment to privacy” post from October.

Given privacy’s recent spotlight I re-shared an old post of mine 4 weeks ago about the “importance of privacy in a world of public blockchains”.

Over the years I’ve also written several other posts on privacy solutions such as Veil.cash:

On Umbra.cash with its stealth payments:

And on the infamous Tornado.cash:

To understand the importance of privacy I recommend reading a post Vitalik Buterin (the founder of Ethereum and one of the most important thought leaders in the Web3 space) released earlier this year where he argued that:

• Privacy is freedom: Privacy gives us space to live our lives in the ways that meet our needs, without constantly worrying about how our actions will be perceived in all kinds of political and social games.

• Privacy is order: A whole bunch of mechanisms that underlie the basic functioning of society depend on privacy in order to function.

• Privacy is progress: If we gain new ways to share our information selectively while protecting it from being misused, we can unlock a lot of value and accelerate technological and social progress.

The crucial take away here though is that privacy is important and consequently so are privacy preserving technologies in crypto. I highly recommend reading his blog post to go deeper into all of this.

And so today I decided to take a look at another privacy preserving tool that I had not yet written about, namely Silent Swap, which provides private token swaps across 8 major chains.

Silent Swap

Silent Swap is an app that in their own words allows for “fast, secure, and fully decentralised cross-chain swaps that keep your financial activity confidential.”

On opening the app at app.silentswap.com you’ll find a very similar interface to what you’ll see with most bridge and swap apps like I’ve shown before with the likes of Jumper.exchange, you can read this previous post I’ve done on it if you’d like.

The first thing you’ll want to do is hit the “Connect Wallet” button, which will initiate a few immediate steps.

First it will simply connect the wallet, then it will request a signature to prove that you own the wallet, and after it will request a second signature to create a “temporary anonymous wallet” for you, which is part of how Silent Swap does its privacy magic in the background.

Performing the swap is then super simple.

Perform a private Swap

With your wallet connected you’ll simply want to select the asset you want to swap on the chain you want to swap, followed by the asset you want to receive on the chain and address you want to receive it.

Silent Swap currently supports 7 EVM compatible chains plus Solana, along with some of the most well known tokens on these chains like ETH, BNB, WBTC, USDT and USDC.

For the sake of this tutorial I went with ETH on Base as the source token and chain, and decided to send approximately $10, which is the minimum amount you can send. And on the receiving side I selected SOL on a Solana wallet of mine.

In adding a receiving address it asks if you want to give it a name that gets saved locally, but I chose not to.

Now with the sending token selected plus the receiving token and address, the final step is to simply hit “swap” where you’ll be asked to sign an internal swap message, plus a transaction to send the money over.

The resulting swap transaction is then pretty fast, in this specific case it took only 2 minutes and 13 seconds in total!

Another neat feature worth noting is that you can split the output to up to 10 wallets, in the example above I did it only to one receiving wallet but I could have kept adding more up to this maximum.

Onchain privacy

Congrats, you’ve now successfully swapped entirely privately!

In my specific case if we look onchain it looks like a swap was done from Base ETH to USDC on Avalanche.

Then if you keep tracing those tokens further you’ll just find those tokens being burned with Circle’s own USDC burn mechanism.

Meanwhile the receiving Solana address received the equivalent SOL making its way to the correct address.

So this method breaks the link between sender and receiver without using mixers or custodians.

In the background this privacy is acheived by making use of the Secret Network, a chains that’s private by default, as a messaging layer for routing the liquidity.

If there was one thing to improve on it would be that they have a better visualisation of the steps involved within the Silent Swap app.

Private swaps are now easy

Above you saw how crazily simple, quick and easy Silent Swap makes it to do a private swap.

This is a far cry from some of the other apps I’ve detailed before like Tornado.cash and Umbra.cash, which requires a fair bit more complexity as you try to track your funds across different wallets.

Privacy tech is clearly levelling up!

This sort of solution makes it trivial to stay private onchain, without using a custodial solution or any additional complexity, all with such a slick and simple interface.

And all they charge is a 1% fee plus gas for these swaps, which feels super fair given that Uniswap charges around 0.25%.

Silent Swap really marks a game changing UX in privacy tech in crypto and its impressive to see how fast this sort of technology is evolving.

Given that the desire for privacy is growing larger within the crypto ecosystem you can be certain that privacy tech will continue to advance and become even simpler and more integrated over time.

Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:

1. Want high returns? Earn up to 14% APY with Yield Seeker!

2. Love Web3 insights? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X!

3. New to crypto? Join our beginners community to master crypto fast!

4. Building a Web3 app? Get our expert product development support!