GM Friens

The space had better days. Those greenish spikes...oh wow, haven't felt that in ages. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs have lost popularity. Google agrees. Both are declining.

As seen below, crypto interest spiked in May because of the Luna fall. NFT interest is similar to early October last year.

This makes me think NFTs are mostly hype and FOMO. No art or community. I've seen enough initiatives to know that communities stick around if they're profitable. Once it starts falling, they move on to the next project. The space has no long-term investments. Flip everything.

OpenSea trading volume has stayed steady for months. May's volume is 1.8 million ETH ($3.3 billion).

Despite this, I think NFTs and crypto will stick around. In bad markets, builders gain most.

Only 4k developers are active on Ethereum blockchain. It's low. A great chance for the space enthusiasts.

An employee of OpenSea might get a 40-year prison sentence for insider trading using NFTs.

Nathaniel Chastian, an OpenSea employee, traded on insider knowledge. He'll serve 40 years for that.

Here's what happened if you're unfamiliar.

OpenSea is a secondary NFT marketplace. Their homepage featured remarkable drops. Whatever gets featured there, NFT prices will rise 5x.

Chastian was at OpenSea. He chose forthcoming NFTs for OpenSeas' webpage.

Using anonymous digital currency wallets and OpenSea accounts, he would buy NFTs before promoting them on the homepage, showcase them, and then sell them for at least 25 times the price he paid.

From June through September 2021, this happened. Later caught, fired. He's charged with wire fraud and money laundering, each carrying a 20-year maximum penalty.

Although web3 space is all about decentralization, a step like this is welcomed since it restores faith in the area. We hope to see more similar examples soon.

Here's the press release.

Understanding smart contracts

@cantino.eth has a Twitter thread on smart contracts. Must-read. Also, he appears educated about the space, so follow him.

The same way Amazon killed bookstores. You just can’t see it yet.

Shultz globalized coffee. Before Starbucks, coffee sucked.

All accounts say 1970s coffee was awful.

Starbucks had three stores selling ground Indonesian coffee in the 1980s.

What a show!

A year after joining the company at 29, Shultz traveled to Italy for R&D.

He noticed the coffee shops' sense of theater and community and realized Starbucks was in the wrong business.

Integrating coffee and destination created a sense of community in the store.

Brilliant!

He told Starbucks' founders about his experience.

They disapproved.

For two years.

Shultz left and opened an Italian coffee shop chain like any good entrepreneur.

Starbucks ran into financial trouble, so the founders offered to sell to Shultz.

Shultz bought Starbucks in 1987 for $3.8 million, including six stores and a payment plan.

Starbucks is worth $100.79Billion, per Google Finance.

26,500 times Shultz's initial investment

Starbucks is releasing its own NFT Platform under Shultz and his early Vision.

This year, Starbucks Odyssey launches. The new digital experience combines a Loyalty Rewards program with NFT.

The side chain Polygon-based platform doesn't require a Crypto Wallet. Customers can earn and buy digital assets to unlock incentives and experiences.

They've removed all friction, making it more immersive and convenient than a coffee shop.

Brilliant!

NFTs are the access coupon to their digital community, but they don't highlight the technology.

They prioritize consumer experience by adding non-technical users to Web3. Their collectables are called journey stamps, not NFTs.

No mention of bundled gas fees.

Brady Brewer, Starbucks' CMO, said;

“It happens to be built on blockchain and web3 technologies, but the customer — to be honest — may very well not even know that what they’re doing is interacting with blockchain technology. It’s just the enabler,”

Rewards members will log into a web app using their loyalty program credentials to access Starbucks Odyssey. They won't know about blockchain transactions.

Join the waitlist here

Starbucks has just dealt its rivals a devastating blow.

It generates more than ten times the revenue of its closest competitor Costa Coffee.

The coffee giant is booming.

Starbucks is ahead of its competitors. No wonder.

They have an innovative, adaptable leadership team.

Starbucks' DNA challenges the narrative, especially when others reject their ideas.

I’m off for a cappuccino.

Overview

I'm happy to provide this important update. We've worked on this for a year and a half, so I'm glad to finally write it. We named the application AESIR because we’ve love Norse Mythology. AESIR automates and runs trading strategies.

• Volatility, technical analysis, oscillators, and other signals are currently supported by AESIR.

• Additionally, we enhanced AESIR's ability to create distinctive bespoke signals by allowing it to analyze many indicators and produce a single signal.

• AESIR has a significant social component that allows you to copy the best-performing public setups and use them right away.

Enter your email here to be notified when AEISR launches.

Views on algorithmic trading

First, let me clarify. Anyone who claims algorithmic trading platforms are money-printing plug-and-play devices is a liar. Algorithmic trading platforms are a collection of tools.

A trading algorithm won't make you a competent trader if you lack a trading strategy and yolo your funds without testing. It may hurt your trade. Test and alter your plans to account for market swings, but comprehend market signals and trends.

Status Report

Throughout closed beta testing, we've communicated closely with users to design a platform they want to use.

To celebrate, we're giving you free Aesir Viking NFTs and we cover gas fees.

Why use a trading Algorithm?

• Automating a successful manual approach

• experimenting with and developing solutions that are impossible to execute manually

One AESIR strategy lets you buy any cryptocurrency that rose by more than x% in y seconds.

AESIR can scan an exchange for coins that have gained more than 3% in 5 minutes. It's impossible to manually analyze over 1000 trading pairings every 5 minutes. Auto buy dips or DCA around a Dip

Sneak Preview

Here's the Leaderboard, where you can clone the best public settings.

As a tiny, self-funded team, we're excited to unveil our product. It's a beta release, so there's still more to accomplish, but we know where we stand.

If this sounds like a project that you might want to learn more about, you can sign up to our newsletter and be notified when AESIR launches.

Useful Links:

Join the Discord | Join our subreddit | Newsletter | Mint Free NFT

It’s only a loss if you sell, right?

Nayib Bukele proclaimed himself “the world’s coolest dictator”.

His jokes aren't clear.

El Salvador's 43rd president self-proclaimed “CEO of El Salvador” couldn't be less presidential.

His thin jeans, aviator sunglasses, and baseball caps like a cartel lord.

He's popular, though.

Bukele won 53% of the vote by fighting violent crime and opposition party corruption.

El Salvador's 6.4 million inhabitants are riding the cryptocurrency volatility wave.

They were powerless.

Their autocratic leader, a former Yamaha Motors salesperson and Bitcoin believer, wants to help 70% unbanked locals.

He intended to give the citizens a way to save money and cut the country's $200 million remittance cost.

Transfer and deposit costs.

This makes logical sense when the president’s theatrics don’t blind you.

El Salvador's Bukele revealed plans to make bitcoin legal tender.

Remittances total $5.9 billion (23%) of the country's expenses.

Anything that reduces costs could boost the economy.

The country’s unbanked population is staggering. Here’s the data by % of people who either have a bank account (Blue) or a mobile money account (Black).

According to Bukele, 46% of the population has downloaded the Chivo Bitcoin Wallet.

In 2021, 36% of El Salvadorans had bank accounts.

Large rural countries like Kenya seem to have resolved their unbanked dilemma.

An economy surfaced where village locals would sell, trade and store network minutes and data as a store of value.

Kenyan phone networks realized unbanked people needed a safe way to accumulate wealth and have an emergency fund.

96% of Kenyans utilize M-PESA, which doesn't require a bank account.

The software involves human agents who hang out with cash and a phone.

These people are like ATMs.

You offer them cash to deposit money in your mobile money account or withdraw cash.

In a country with a faulty banking system, cash availability and a safe place to deposit it are important.

William Jack and Tavneet Suri found that M-PESA brought 194,000 Kenyan households out of poverty by making transactions cheaper and creating a safe store of value.

2016 Science paper

Mobile money, a service that allows monetary value to be stored on a mobile phone and sent to other users via text messages, has been adopted by most Kenyan households. We estimate that access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.

The impacts, which are more pronounced for female-headed households, appear to be driven by changes in financial behaviour — in particular, increased financial resilience and saving. Mobile money has therefore increased the efficiency of the allocation of consumption over time while allowing a more efficient allocation of labour, resulting in a meaningful reduction of poverty in Kenya.

Currently, El Salvador has 2,301 Bitcoin.

At publication, it's worth $44 million. That remains 41% of Bukele's original $105.6 million.

Unknown if the country has sold Bitcoin, but Bukeles keeps purchasing the dip.

It's still falling.

This might be a fantastic move for the impoverished country over the next five years, if they can live economically till Bitcoin's price recovers.

The evidence demonstrates that a store of value pulls individuals out of poverty, but others say Bitcoin is premature.

You may regard it as an aggressive endeavor to front run the next wave of adoption, offering El Salvador a financial upside.

I was entering tens of millions of records per hour when I first published Slonik PostgreSQL client for Node.js. The data being entered was usually flat, making it straightforward to use INSERT INTO ... SELECT * FROM unnset() pattern. I advocated the unnest approach for inserting rows in groups (that was part I).

However, today I’ve found a better way: jsonb_to_recordset.

jsonb_to_recordset expands the top-level JSON array of objects to a set of rows having the composite type defined by an AS clause.

jsonb_to_recordset allows us to query and insert records from arbitrary JSON, like unnest. Since we're giving JSON to PostgreSQL instead of unnest, the final format is more expressive and powerful.

SELECT *
FROM json_to_recordset('[{"name":"John","tags":["foo","bar"]},{"name":"Jane","tags":["baz"]}]')
AS t1(name text, tags text[]);
 name |   tags
------+-----------
 John | {foo,bar}
 Jane | {baz}
(2 rows)

Let’s demonstrate how you would use it to insert data.

Inserting data using json_to_recordset

Say you need to insert a list of people with attributes into the database.

const persons = [
  {
    name: 'John',
    tags: ['foo', 'bar']
  },
  {
    name: 'Jane',
    tags: ['baz']
  }
];

You may be tempted to traverse through the array and insert each record separately, e.g.

for (const person of persons) {
  await pool.query(sql`
    INSERT INTO person (name, tags)
    VALUES (
      ${person.name},
      ${sql.array(person.tags, 'text[]')}
    )
  `);
}

It's easier to read and grasp when working with a few records. If you're like me and troubleshoot a 2M+ insert query per day, batching inserts may be beneficial.

What prompted the search for better alternatives.

Inserting using unnest pattern might look like this:

await pool.query(sql`
  INSERT INTO public.person (name, tags)
  SELECT t1.name, t1.tags::text[]
  FROM unnest(
    ${sql.array(['John', 'Jane'], 'text')},
    ${sql.array(['{foo,bar}', '{baz}'], 'text')}
  ) AS t1.(name, tags);
`);

You must convert arrays into PostgreSQL array strings and provide them as text arguments, which is unsightly. Iterating the array to create slices for each column is likewise unattractive.

However, with jsonb_to_recordset, we can:

await pool.query(sql`
  INSERT INTO person (name, tags)
  SELECT *
  FROM jsonb_to_recordset(${sql.jsonb(persons)}) AS t(name text, tags text[])
`);

In contrast to the unnest approach, using jsonb_to_recordset we can easily insert complex nested data structures, and we can pass the original JSON document to the query without needing to manipulate it.

In terms of performance they are also exactly the same. As such, my current recommendation is to prefer jsonb_to_recordset whenever inserting lots of rows or nested data structures.