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 analyze the top 200 DeFi crypto projects in this article.

This isn't a study. The findings benefit crypto investors.

Let’s go!

A set of data

I analyzed data from defillama.com. In my analysis, I used the top 200 DeFis by TVL in October 2022.

Total Locked Value

The chart below shows platform-specific locked value.

14 platforms had $1B+ TVL. 65 platforms have $100M-$1B TVL. The remaining 121 platforms had TVLs below $100 million, with the lowest being $23 million.

TVLs are distributed Pareto. Top 40% of DeFis account for 80% of TVLs.

Compliant Blockchains

Ethereum's blockchain leads DeFi. 96 of the examined projects offer services on Ethereum. Behind BSC, Polygon, and Avalanche.

Five platforms used 10+ blockchains. 36 between 2-10 159 used 1 blockchain.

Use Cases for DeFi

The chart below shows platform use cases. Each platform has decentralized exchanges, liquid staking, yield farming, and lending.

These use cases are DefiLlama's main platform features.

Which use case costs the most? Chart explains. Collateralized debt, liquid staking, dexes, and lending have high TVLs.

The DeFi Industry

I compared three high-TVL platforms (Maker DAO, Balancer, AAVE). The columns show monthly TVL and token price changes. The graph shows monthly Bitcoin price changes.

Each platform's market moves similarly.

Probably because most DeFi deposits are cryptocurrencies. Since individual currencies are highly correlated with Bitcoin, it's not surprising that they move in unison.

Takeaways

This analysis shows that the most common DeFi services (decentralized exchanges, liquid staking, yield farming, and lending) also have the highest average locked value.

Some projects run on one or two blockchains, while others use 15 or 20. Our analysis shows that a project's blockchain count has no correlation with its success.

It's hard to tell if certain use cases are rising. Bitcoin's price heavily affects the entire DeFi market.

TVL seems to be a good indicator of a DeFi platform's success and quality. Higher TVL platforms are cheaper. They're a better long-term investment because they gain or lose less value than DeFis with lower TVLs.

I'm trying to understand why Bitcoin NFTs aren't ready.

Ordinals, a new Bitcoin protocol, has been controversial. NFTs can be added to Bitcoin transactions using the protocol. They are not tokens or fungible. Bitcoin NFTs are transaction metadata. Yes. They're not owned.

In January, the Ordinals protocol allowed data like photos to be directly encoded onto sats, the smallest units of Bitcoin worth 0.00000001 BTC, on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ordinals does not need a sidechain or token like other techniques. The Ordinals protocol has encoded JPEG photos, digital art, new profile picture (PFP) projects, and even 1993 DOOM onto the Bitcoin network.

Ordinals inscriptions are permanent digital artifacts preserved on the Bitcoin blockchain. It differs from Ethereum, Solana, and Stacks NFT technologies that allow smart contract creators to change information. Ordinals store the whole image or content on the blockchain, not just a link to an external server, unlike centralized databases, which can change the linked image, description, category, or contract identifier.

So far, more than 50,000 ordinals have been produced on the Bitcoin blockchain, and some of them have already been sold for astronomical amounts. The Ethereum-based CryptoPunks NFT collection spawned Ordinal Punk. Inscription 620 sold for 9.5 BTC, or $218,000, the most.

Segwit and Taproot, two important Bitcoin blockchain updates, enabled this. These protocols store transaction metadata, unlike Ethereum, where the NFT is the token. Bitcoin's NFT is a sat's transaction details.

What effects do ordinary values and NFTs have on the Bitcoin blockchain?

Ordinals will likely have long-term effects on the Bitcoin Ecosystem since they store, transact, and compute more data.

Charges Ordinals introduce scalability challenges. The Bitcoin network has limited transaction throughput and increased fees during peak demand. NFTs could make network transactions harder and more expensive. Ordinals currently occupy over 50% of block space, according to Glassnode.

One of the protocols that supported Ordinals Taproot has also seen a huge uptick:

Taproot use increases block size and transaction costs.

This could cause network congestion but also support more L2s with Ordinals-specific use cases. Dune info here.

Storage Needs The Bitcoin blockchain would need to store more data to store NFT data directly. Since ordinals were introduced, blocksize has tripled from 0.7mb to over 2.2mb, which could increase storage costs and make it harder for nodes to join the network.

Use Case Diversity On the other hand, NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain could broaden Bitcoin's use cases beyond storage and payment. This could expand Bitcoin's user base. This is two-sided. Bitcoin was designed to be trustless, decentralized, peer-to-peer money.

Chain to permanently store NFTs as ordinals will change everything.

Popularity rise This new use case will boost Bitcoin appeal, according to some. This argument fails since Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency. Popularity doesn't require a new use case. Cryptocurrency adoption boosts Bitcoin. It need not compete with Ethereum or provide extra benefits to crypto investors. If there was a need for another chain that supports NFTs (there isn't), why would anyone choose the slowest and most expensive network? It appears contradictory and unproductive.

Nonetheless, holding an NFT on the Bitcoin blockchain is more secure than any other blockchain, but this has little utility.

Bitcoin NFTs are undoubtedly controversial. NFTs are strange and perhaps harmful to Bitcoin's mission. If Bitcoin NFTs are here to stay, I hope a sidechain or rollup solution will take over and leave the base chain alone.

Too much NFT, Discord, and shitposting.

How do you choose?

How do you recruit more members to join your NFT project?

In 2021, a successful NFT project required:

• Monkey/ape artwork

• Twitter and Discord bot-filled

• Roadmap overpromise

• Goal was quick cash.

2022 and the years after will change that.

These are 6 Rules for a Strong NFT Community in 2022:

THINK LONG TERM

This relates to roadmap planning. Hype and dumb luck may drive NFT projects (ahem, goblins) but rarely will your project soar.

Instead, consider sustainability.

Plan your roadmap based on your team's abilities.

Do what you're already doing, but with NFTs, make it bigger and better.

You shouldn't copy a project's roadmap just because it was profitable.

This will lead to over-promising, team burnout, and an RUG NFT project.

OFFER VALUE

Building a great community starts with giving.

Why are musicians popular?

Because they offer entertainment for everyone, a random person becomes a fan, and more fans become a cult.

That's how you should approach your community.

TEAM UP

A great team helps.

An NFT project could have 3 or 2 people.

Credibility trumps team size.

Make sure your team can answer community questions, resolve issues, and constantly attend to them.

Don't overwork and burn out.

Your community will be able to recognize that you are trying too hard and give up on the project.

BUILD A GREAT PRODUCT

Bored Ape Yacht Club altered the NFT space.

Cryptopunks transformed NFTs.

Many others did, including Okay Bears.

What made them that way?

Because they answered a key question.

What is my NFT supposed to be?

Before planning art, this question must be answered.

NFTs can't be just jpegs.

What does it represent?

Is it a Metaverse-ready project?

What blockchain are you going to be using and why?

Set some ground rules for yourself. This helps your project's direction.

These questions will help you and your team set a direction for blockchain, NFT, and Web3 technology.

EDUCATE ON WEB3

The more the team learns about Web3 technology, the more they can offer their community.

Think tokens, metaverse, cross-chain interoperability and more.

BUILD A GREAT COMMUNITY

Several projects mistreat their communities.

They treat their community like "customers" and try to sell them NFT.

Providing Whitelists and giveaways aren't your only community-building options.

Think bigger.

Consider them family and friends, not wallets.

Consider them fans.

These are some tips to start your NFT project.

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.