The Humble Farmer's Digest 1/17

Your weekly dose of Crypto, DeFi, and more...

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Jan 17, 2024

Hello Humble Farmers, thanks for reading!

This substack aims to share everything we’re paying attention to, including new launches, good farms, tokens, and much more. If any of that sounds interesting to you, please subscribe!

What We’re Watching

Ordiswap

For those who aren’t familiar, Ordiswap is a BRC-20 project that aims to build an AMM-like decentralized exchange on the Bitcoin network. They have already released their early-stage DEX on testnet, and plan to launch on mainnet later this week.

Those who have attempted to trade BRC-20s understand how clunky the UX currently is, and Ordiswap’s mainnet could be a massive leap in the right direction. Ordiswap is also working with Thorchain to facilitate cross-chain swaps, with the goal of becoming Bitcoin’s underlying liquidity layer. The Bitcoin/BRC-20 ecosystem is likely in its DeFi Summer days, and the projects that cement themselves as leaders will be massive winners going into the next bull market.

While the BRC-20 narrative has taken a breather over the past few weeks, it’s still likely to be a hot narrative that sticks around for the future. After all, ordinals, BRC-20s, and inscriptions, all fix the fatal flaw of Bitcoin’s security budget, as one-day block rewards alone may not be strong enough to incentivize miners. It is worth noting that private/seed investors are currently up huge multiples, and this combined with the not-so-inspiring vesting schedule and a lackluster group of early investors could lead to some volatile price action in the short term. However, in the grand scheme of things, this shouldn’t matter significantly assuming the team is able to make a viable AMM for BRC-20s.

Berachain

We’ve talked about Berachain extensively over the past few months, but if aren’t completely up to date here’s a thread to catch you up.

Berachain has finally launched its long-awaited testnet, and has already been flooded with an overwhelming amount of traffic due to airdrop farmers. This attention has also led the Berachain NFT prices to skyrocket, as they are currently the only way to get exposure prior to Berachain’s mainnet launch. If you’re unfamiliar with the NFT mechanics, feel free to read this excerpt from a previous edition of the Humble Farmer’s Digest.

For those who aren’t familiar, Berachain stemmed from an NFT project called Bong Bears that minted back in back in 2021. Since then, the original collection has rebased into a total of six collections, those being Bond, Boo, Baby, Band, and Bit Bears. Each rebase has an increasingly larger supply, and allows holders of any prior rebase to mint the next.
But why do these NFTs matter?
While not confirmed, it is extremely likely that 5% of the BERA supply will be airdropped to NFT holders. There are still many unknown variables in regard to BERA value distribution, but it’s safe to say that a bet on the Bera NFTs is a bet on Berachain. You can work out your own metrics to value the NFTs based on expected valuations, but again, it’s hard to put an exact value on each NFT with so many unknowns.

There will also be another upcoming rebase for NFT holders, but this recent increase in attention has begun to price many people out. This has led to speculation on some of the Berachain ecosystem projects, some of which have released their own NFT collections (which we talk more about here). While navigating this ecosystem may seem complex, we believe it’ll be worth having exposure here as Berachain might turn out to be one of the biggest launches of the year.

Farms of the Week

Upcoming Projects

Ebisu Finance (The yield-bearing stablecoin backed by Eigenlayer deposits)
Mirage (Building secure, anonymous, & private dark pools on Solana's fast, low-cost infrastructure)
Layerless (Omnichain Liquid Restaking - Keeping your EigenLayer deposits liquid and usable beyond Ethereum)
Stacking DAO (Liquid Staking on Stacks)
Thruster (Coming Soon to Blast)
Echelon Markets (Move-Powered Money Market on Aptos)
Fable Platform (Decentralized media platform. Created to be the entertainment hub on Berachain)