Joey Koh's Investment Journey - Crypto (Sept 2021)

Hi Seedly folks 👋

I have been posting about my crypto and equity portfolio for about 6 months now on substack. In the spirit of transperancy, I'll also share an adapted, concise version on Seedly so that people can understand where my viewpoints and perspectives on Crypto and Equities come from.

This article focuses on my crypto investments, my current developments in crypto and my future plans. As this is the first post, it will be slightly longer to explain some of the things I'm doing in crypto. Over time, I'll include more commentary as to why I'm treating crypto as a long-term investment. Furthermore, I expect to flesh more details of my activities such as on NFTs, P2E games, as well as what I've shared below.

I hope this will help others learn about the near-endless possibilities to participate in crypto (& reap potentially life-chaning gains from it). Nothing is impossible, and as long as you put in the effort (& be smart about it), success in crypto-land will come eventually. We are still early.

Note that our risk appetite, tolerance, and thinking will definitely be different, and the info below is not financial advice.

LFG 🚀

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Crypto Portfolio Performance

The last time I added actual SGD from my income into crypto was in July 2020. Hence, my starting point for comparison to be conservative will be the start of 2020. The current chart shows the comparison from Nov 2020 as I've only begun to measure my performance then. I've also included an index to track (assuming if I invested all my cost into BTC and hodl) my active investing performance in crypto.

Commentary

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that while crypto ended September lacklustre-ly, October has seen some decent gains across the board. Uptober, anybody? For conciseness, I'll skip the crypto commentary (written here), and instead talk about my portfolio and my other developments in crypto (yield farm and bitcoin mining)

My portfolio below:

My largest holding is Solana, then some bitcoin miners (Compass Mining), then other components of the Solana ecosystem (SRM, RAY). FTT is also a blue-chip exchange token, which I urge interested investors to take a look at. It's quite a virtual cycle, especially given its association with the Solana ecosystem.

In total, that would take up 74% of my portfolio already. The other 25% is split into thematic plays, like NFTs, other Solana coins, Avalanche ecosystem, blockchain gaming plays (YGG, PYR), as well as DEXes (DYDX, PERP). This is what I would refer to as a barbell portfolio.

Other assets worth mentioning is that in my Others category, I’ve got a small amount of BTC, ETH and LUNA. I plan to make LUNA a long-term hold, but that will wait until I have more capital freed up from either earning bitcoin from mining or taking profits on my riskier plays.

To sum up my crypto monthly performance in September, we went to the moon 🚀, but crashed landed on the international space station. Still better than Earth, right?

LFG :)

Yield farm developments

I also want to start talking about my yield farming developments taking place across multiple ecosystems. Within the month, I may make moves depending the attractiveness of any given yield farming activity. Be sure to check out my running thread on my yield farming develoments to stay up-to-date. In any case, I'll flesh out my developments here too.

Solana

On Solana, I'm staking on a few liqudity pools for yield farm, namely Saber/Sunny, Orca and Solfarm.

1) Saber is an automated market maker (AMM) protocol that focuses on providing liquidity on cross-chain assets. It's current reward is a native token ($SBR) that is passed onto users for providing liquidity. With Wormhole providing a bridge from ecosystems like ETH, any assets sent across sent across chains have to be wrapped in the base protocol’s clothes (like formats, code for compatibility). As an example, a wrapped Ethereum on Solana would likely be wETH. As such, the AMM provides liquidity for swaps like FTT/wFTT.

Hence, Saber pools offers very little risk of an impermanent loss as we’ve seen on other token-USDC pools, allowing you to put your spot coins to work. Sunny** **is an yield aggregator protocol, that also distributes native tokens for shifting your liquidity from Saber to their pools). Don't ask me why its doing so (I don't know!). I get the tokens, and mostly sell them for USDC.

2) Orca** **is a similar protocol to Saber, but more for regular assets (e.g. SOL/USDC) to provide liquidity across the ecosystem. Orca has a program where they reward users in their native token ($ORCA) as well as the pool's native token (termed double-dip). I've dipped my toes into 2 pools on here as the APYs are about 100+%. Of course, unlike Saber, this has impermanent loss. This can actually be hedged, and is up to the user to do so (same with Solfarm as well).

3) Solfarm is an autocomponding protocol, helping users automate the process of harvesting and re-staking into the pool to earn additional yield. This maximizes the yield, especially for a pool generating 100+% APR. It's also known for leveraged farming, which is the process of farming using leverage (borrowed funds). Do note that this is incredibly risky and you should only do so if you fully understand the risks associated with it. For me, I've started a small leveraged farming (2.68x position in the ORCA/USDC pool, that earns me a yearly APY of 35,000% (or 350x). Of course, if the value of ORCA drops below a certain amount, my position will get liquidated if I don't provide additional collateral. Hence, I'm monitoring this pool daily to ensure I don't get liquidated. This is a snapshot of my position detail. Refer to the docs if you're interested to learn more.

The distribution of funds in these 3 pools are around 94% (Saber/Sunny), 3% (Orca), 3% (Solfarm). Of course, Saber/Sunny's yield will be low (as relative risk is low) compared to the other 2. Risk management is very important.

I've also got my spot raydium in their single-sided staking pool (about 27% APR), mostly to put it to work (single-sided i.e. no impermanent loss), as well as to gain access to exclusive IDOs and NFT drops.

Binance Smart Chain Tranchess

Tranchess is a tokenized asset management and derivatives trading protocol. Inspired by tranche funds’ ability to satisfy users’ varying risk appetites, Tranchess aims to provide a different risk/return profile out of a single main fund that tracks a specific underlying asset (e.g. BTC). Take a look at their docs to learn more.

Simply put, there are 3 ways (tokens) to put your money to work on Tranchess:

Queen: A single share in a BTCB (Pegged Bitcoin on Binance Smart Chain) tracking index fund. It’s a synthetic ETF.

BISHOP: Holders earn interest from ROOK holders paying them (see below).

ROOK: A leveraged product with no forced liquidation. The ROOK holder borrows daily from BISHOP holder to buy the main fund tracking BTC. ROOK receives all gains/losses associated with BTC less interest paid to BISHOP. By borrowing from BISHOP, ROOK can increase leverage to juice returns.

I currently have funds in the BISHOP tranche, which is earning around 40% APY in its native token (CHESS). I also earn rebates from trading fees on the platform (in BTCB).

Avalanche

I have staked JOE in a single-sided pool to earn rewards (also around 20% APR like Raydium) from their exchange activity (fees used to buy and burn JOE, and distribute to stakers). I've also staked some XAVA in their launchpad, which offers a small 3-5% yield, in addition to exclusive pre-sale tokens (KYC is needed).

NOTE: Do note volatility works both ways in crypto, and in a bear market these yields will significantly depress as the prices of native tokens that are emitted as yield will also crash (see original disclaimer above).

Bitcoin Mining

Waiting for my Bitcoin miners to come online like:

Note, I've bought my miners from the mining conceirge service, Compass Mining.

They are a service that helps you set up the miners in mining facilities globally, effectively helping to decentralize the Bitcoin network. Furthermore, their facility has much lower electricity rates than mining at home, and oh! They help you set up everything (you only have to provide them the wallet address details), including repairs too!

My motivation to buy miners came after reading this comprehensive article reviewing the pros and cons of bitcoinmining with Compass Mining. She's legit.

I'll likely talk about it more as they come online (2 are slated to start mining in end Oct). Do follow me on Twitter if you're interested to follow on my mining journey.

Conclusion

If you've read thus far, thank you. I simply want to share my experiences in crypto as I've been in this scene for quite some time (and thus do things differently). If so much as 1 person has benefit from what I have written, then this article won't be in vain. If you have any queries about anything crypto, do let me know in the comments below 👇.

Otherwise, stay safe and keep stacking sats,

Joey Koh

Do check out and/or subscribe to my monthly substack article to join me on this investing journey!

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