Welcome to my Not financial advice – February 2022 post!

Hi everyone!

This post is as much for me as for anyone else.

How about all that market volatility hey?

In the last 30 days, the entire crypto market has been worth both 2.10 and 1.48 trillion USD… that’s a 30% drop, and now it’s back to $2T again.

The S&P 500 was less chaotic but still saw a bumpy road over that same time period.

I have no doubt that the US Fed influenced this volatility – they’ve been the biggest buyer of assets since early 2020 so everyone has to pay attention to what they’re doing.

And what they’re doing is slowing down their purchasing of assets.

They’re worried about inflation…. and, ah, rightly so… 7.5% is pretty massive.

There’s a few people around that say the inflation rate is much higher than officially reported…

… but these figures don’t seem right to me and there’s an interesting post here on why inflation isn’t at 15%.

I’m inclined to believe that inflation is high right now because of all the supply chain issues during the pandemic – as well as retailers taking advantage of increased demand to increase their prices. It’s very likely it’ll take 2 to 3 years after the pandemic ends to see where the economy is actually at… and so I’m expecting the US Fed to be very cautious. They might raise interest rates once… see the markets absolutely panic and then back away completely. Goldman Sachs reckons we’ll see 5 rate hikes but I’d bet money they’re wrong.

Inflation seems to be hitting almost every developed country and the moment. I have no idea if it’s temporary or not, but it looks like we’re all in the same boat.

I really tend to be a long term thinker… and don’t really pay attention to interest rates and the like… but the thing is that I’ve been expecting a crypto alt season for the last 6ish months and it just hasn’t happened yet. I honestly have no idea if it’s off the cards completely, or if we’ll see something over the US summer… but now that there are so many countries and institutions invested in the crypto market, what the Fed does, makes a difference.

The crypto alt season I was talking about comes from the Bitcoin Halving Supply Shock. A big part of that theory is the Stock to Flow model by PlanB:

While the Stock to Flow theory has had some merit, it hasn’t really stayed on the line at all… right now it’s not even close:

With the Fed tapering off, and markets worried about interest rates, where would the brand new $800B amount to buy up Bitcoin for the price to get to $106k… and where is that money going to come from?

When we look at crypto in the last year… it’s not like a ton of new money is really coming into this asset class.

So… what moves does that leave us for 2022+?

Firstly… Bitcoin dominance is currently 37.95% and Ethereum dominance is 17.83%. That’s 55.78% dominance from just two coins.

So… we might see asset rotation into the large cap, medium cap and smaller cap coins as investors get bored on waiting on BTC and ETH to do anything.

With no new injection of money into the crypto market, we might see a bear market as investors start to rotate their capital out of crypto altogether to find gains elsewhere (bonds, real estate, etc). So we can hold… but you may have to watch your crypto amounts drop by 80%.

Can you do that? Can you watch the percentage of your net worth drop 80% in the next couple of years?

Of course… if you can, there is tremendous potential upside:

The analysts at ARK Invest believe that Bitcoin itself could have a $28T market cap in 8 years.

With bigger things expected for Ethereum:

I think for me… I’m not going to worry about inflation too much. We’re extremely fortunate to not be living paycheck to paycheck so we can clamp down on spending if inflation did go wild… but honestly I’d be surprised if it does.

There’s also the chance of deflation caused by all the technological advances; robotics, AI/ML blockchain, etc – as companies start to produce more and more with improved technology… which would hopefully bring down prices, but will also put a lot of people out of work. Deflation can be really bad for a country, imports and travelling become much more expensive (but other countries do want your now cheaper goods) … but ironically crypto can solve both issues, so again, I’m not super worried (at this point… I reserve the right to change my mind).

I’m super fortunate that my life at the moment is going pretty well. I like my job, I like my projects, I like the opportunities that I have, so for me I will basically keep an eye out for any huge massive alt seasons that might rumble through, but I’m going to assume it won’t. Instead I’ll be trying to build up my assets for 2030 and beyond.

There’s a couple of ways I’ll go about this…

If a bear market or crypto winter hits us and CryptoTwitter is just non-stop screaming about ‘number going down’… that’s the time to DCA in.

DCA is just ‘dollar cost average’ – which really just means buy a bit of crypto or stocks each time you get paid. I don’t really do this so much myself, I’ve still got loans I want to pay off, but when I notice that prices are low then I’ll buy in. I’m not trying to catch the bottom, but just get some more when prices are down.

If you’d rather save your cash because you’re worried about your finances and future, I totally understand, and luckily there are ways to build up your crypto over the next decade or so.

The Hive blockchain is one of the easiest ways to build up your crypto portfolio, and you don’t need to invest anything but your time and effort.

Hive is a web3 social media blockchain. You post content and people upvote it. I choose to receive those rewards as 50% Hive Backed Dollars (HBD) and 50% Hive Power. The HBD are programmatically pegged to the USD… but the Hive Blockchain also pays out a 12% interest rate.

12% is obviously a great deal compared with any interest rate a bank will give you… so I put all the HBD I earn from my posts on Hive into this savings account to earn that interest. Not only is it a great interest rate, but this is my hedge against a crypto winter.

If the price of Hive (which is not pegged to anything) drops significantly then I can use this HBD to buy Hive cheaply. If the price of Hive stays around the same, then I’m enjoying the 12% on my HBD, and if the price of Hive soars then I’ll enjoy that rise with the other 50% of my post rewards.

I honestly see the Hive blockchain as an amazing tool for retirement. If I could build up my HBD savings to a point where I could live off that 12%, that would be amazing… but even if I can’t, I should be able to continue creating content well into my retirement years… and if I can’t do that, you still earn on the Hive blockchain by curating (ie, upvoting) other people’s posts. You can even set that up to be automatic if you like.

One thing that I’ve been doing for a while is taking advantage of the interest rates on crypto wallets like crypto.com.

If you’ve managed to score yourself some crypto, then you can put it into crypto.com and earn interest. I can tell you from experience that watching all the numbers go down doesn’t hurt as much when you know you’re earning interest anyway.

Now, please note that crypto.com is not FDIC-insured for your crypto. They are for any USD in your account, but not for the crypto… so the ‘not your keys not your crypto’ absolutely applies here.

It’s important to spread your assets around to spread your risk around.

So, for the vast majority of the time I’ve used crypto.com I’ve locked my crypto up for 3 months to get the best interest rates… but for the last few months I’ve just used the Flexible interest rates which are much lower, but it means I could sell my crypto if things go absolutely bonkers.

They’re obviously lower, but it’s still better than nothing and/or any bank interest rate.

Crypto.com also provides you with a super cool debit card when you could spend your crypto at any place that accepts Visa… but that’s just not something I’m interested in.

One crypto that I would definitely like to buy is Koinos:

This blockchain is still in development… but what they are building is truly revolutionary, and every single time I read up on it I feel the need to learn how to code so I can build all the things. It looks like the developers of this blockchain framework have solved so many of the problems facing current blockchains, and I cannot wait to see it in action.

Of course, even the best product in the world can’t make it if no one uses it… so if you’re interested in building something web3-ish, then you should definitely have a look.

Lastly, an important part of my crypto journey over the next decade is Splinterlands. Splinterlands is a blockchain play and earn game where every time you win a game, you earn a bit of crypto currency. Every time you win a number of games, you get loot chests that give you NFTs…. but the most incredible thing about Splinterlands is just the total myriad of ways that it adds value.

It’s a card game (see my more comprehensive post here) and all the cards are deflationary NFTs. To level a card up (which makes your card stronger and gives it more skills) you have to combine cards. For example, combining five Level 1 cards turns them into one Level 2 card. You’ve now got a stronger card to play with, and there are now less cards in circulation, making your card more rare.

By holding your Splinterlands NFTs, you earn SPS – which is the token players will need to vote on certain aspects of the game… which of course means it has a market value.

SPS is only provided to card holders for the next 166 days… after that you’ll either have to buy it or win it in tournaments. Also, you can lock your SPS up in the game and earn interest on that…

The current interest rate is 33.1% – but it’s constantly paid out, so it becomes compounding if you stake your earnings daily. This interest rate changes as more or less people stake their SPS… so it’ll change over time, but I’m actually not sure which way it will trend.

Staking your SPS also provides you with vouchers.

Vouchers are used to purchase bonus packs or special edition promo cards or a bunch of exciting stuff – which means there is a market of people wanting to buy vouchers. So, if you stake enough SPS to get a voucher a day, you could sell it and earn yourself an extra $2. This price obviously changes depending on demand.

There’s more!

Each game you win… you earn DEC:

It’s not a lot… this game that I won above earned me about 10 cents worth of DEC… but given the volatility of crypto, I have won games were my reward was worth about $2 worth. Who knows what the 33 DEC I won from that game is worth in a decade?

When you finish certain quests or when the season finishes you can also win Reward cards in Splinterlands… sometimes these cards are worth $0.03… but because they are deflationary and subject to increased demand… some of the $0.01 cards I won a year ago are now worth a couple of dollars. If you wanted to win yourself all the reward cards from the Untamed edition of cards, you’d be sitting on a few thousand dollars worth of cards now:

Splinterlands is a super fun game to play right now… but it’s hard to comprehend what value a lot of these digital assets will have in a decade. Maybe nothing… but also, maybe not.

So yeah, I’m keeping an eye on all the markets, on what the Fed does, on what inflation is doing. It’s important to be financially resilient, and that means having a few different plans depending on what might happen in your future. Have a think about what you’d like to see in the next couple of years, what you’d like to see in the next decade and what steps you can take to get there.

There’s always going to be stories of someone who struck crazy riches by buying the coin a celebrity tweeted about or selling a NFT… but you can’t plan for that kind of craziness. The real path to financial resilience is to chip away at it week after week, month after month, boom after bust and to have a range of plans that are ever evolving.

Good luck! Please let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments!

Featured Image Photo by Tezos on Unsplash

P.S) We need some HIVE photos on Unsplash.