7th October 2022 > > DeFi.

tl;dr

A handy tool and tip for staying safe when using Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

Market Snap

Market Wrap

With 10-years hurtling back to 4% again, the pain point is fast approaching for UK pension funds who have over-exposed themselves to Liability Driven Investing (LDI). They will once again plead to the Bank of England (BoE) for another bailout in the form of more quantitative easing (QE).

The LDI problem arose because of QE in the first place, so it seems extraordinary that the bureaucrats think it is also the solution. It is worth noting that many warnings were made to the regulators and the BoE about these products for the last five years. All those warnings were ignored in the headlong rush to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Occasional Series – I am very annoyed about this

I cannot believe I missed this.

National football team NFTs have been flying over the last quarter with around 1,000% gains. To put that in cash terms, a $100 investment is now worth over $1,100 …

Brazil Fan Token (BFT) is up 10x since early August. Argentina Fan Token (ARG) has performed even better since May. Spain Fan Token (SNFT) is up 15x since July. Portugal Fan Token (POR) is up a little less than Spain’s since May.

You may notice a South American theme here, and it seems that centralised cryptocurrency exchange MEXC is pretty much the leader in trading these coins. I have looked in vain for the Watford Fan Token, but it is only a matter of time.

But two of them are available on gate.io which, though it does not have the CCC seal of approval, ranks very highly in the second tier of centralised exchanges.

I might have missed the boat on this one, but World Cup excitement is only going to build from now (NOT investment advice, simply a comment).

Anyway, I couldn’t help myself.

This does now mean that for the very first time ever I will want Argentina to win, except of course when we meet in the quarters or semis.

Note that market caps are still tiny (less than $9mm for ARG) for much of the genre of fan tokens which could lead to interesting volatility during the World Cup.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Very useful Decentralised Finance (DeFi) tool

For those who are brave enough to interact with DeFi, I have come across this very useful tool, which should come in handy.

For background, when using DeFi, signing access to smart contracts sometimes gives those smart contracts the ability to spend funds in your wallet. By default, most smart contracts are set to “unlimited”, a setting that could lead to obvious problems if the code is malicious or is later hacked.

As a user you can set a specific limit, which we will get onto shortly. Before we do so, here is the tool for checking your current token approvals:

https://etherscan.io/tokenapprovalchecker

Pop in your public address and you will see results along these lines:

In the past I have given permission to Uniswap V3 to spend any of my holdings of USDT, which currently amount to precisely zero. Nonetheless, let’s get rid of this permission.

Press the “Connect to Web3” button, click “OK” on the warming that this is a beta version, choose your wallet (probably MetaMask) and the “Connect to Web3” is now saying “Connected” with a green tick.

On the right-hand side of this screen is a “Revoke” button. Clicking this takes you to your wallet. For a small amount of ETH as gas fees (16c at time of writing) Uniswap can no longer spend any USDT I might hold here in the future:

To avoid these potential problems the next time you use DeFi, there is a setting under “Permissions” which allows users to set approval limits:

I urge all users of DeFi to make use of this option going forward.