Ivan Zhang 🦇🔊

Starting thread of threads to keep my thoughts on #crypto, #tech and #finance organized. Some threads have a complementary in depth blog post on substack. 🧵👇 ivan13.substack.com

@antoniogm As a former IR quant, I would say you are a few steps ahead of the "curve". Before getting credit spreads we need to have interest rate swap curves and cross currency basis swaps. Only then would you be able to add your credit spreads. Still a few years out IMO.

Crypto is going to find out the hard way that it's horribly behind when it comes to risk modeling (I'm a former credit quant...the field is behind what the state of the art was 20 years ago). It'll learn one blow-up at a time. Want to make a fortune in defi? Create a dashboard that shows DV01 (to offchain rate moves), JTD (pivoted by underlying asset), correlation delta (for correlation across assets)...and for fuck's sake, time to have a tradable credit spread for vault curators and asset issuers (to both model counterparty risk and hedge against it). We're in caveman-land right now. Crypto's general tendency to YOLO everything just isn't good enough anymore.

@TimurNegru Does it have internet?

Someone is selling an 18th-century French estate sitting directly on the Lot River. 27 rooms, 10 beds/8 baths, 487m² (5,200 sq ft) of living space across the main house and 3 gîtes (self-contained guesthouses). 2 swimming pools, tennis court, wine cellar and 1.18 hectares (2.9 acres) of gardens running down to the river. Live in the main house, your friends and family have their own space and nobody's in each other's way. This is Cahors Malbec country by the way, with Bordeaux 2,5 hours away (wine lovers will understand). Asking price: €1.3M ($1.4M). How much would an estate like this cost in your country?

One of my small regrets in life: I had tickets to the men's singles finals tennis match (with Nadal!!) for the 2008 Olympics. I was interning at Merrill Lynch and HR said that it would look bad if I took the last 2 days off to fly to the Olympics. So I didn't go. I did get a return offer, but it was way below my expectations and the firm would go belly up the following month. In retrospect, I think I could have gone AND gotten the job anyway. Now I wonder about the 100s of other similar decisions since that pivotal moment. What would you have done in my shoes?

DeFi Managers! If you are serious about maximizing your gains while juggling complex risk limits, I want to talk to you! I'm building a DeFi optimization toolkit. In exchange for constructive feedback, we are offering free beta access. Limited to 5 spots, DMs open!

The future of IoT, when any device can compromise security and privacy on a global scale! Combine this with x402 micropayments, and instead of getting your TV stolen, your TV will be stealing from you :-)

I'll be in Miami for #GlobalAltsMiami, we are hosting a private rooftop cocktail party on Wed Feb 25th. Would love to meet more folks in the DeFi space, if you are in town, please swing by! Spots are extremely limited though, so get yours fast! luma.com/kkzkmhs2

'Trust-me-bro' is no longer a valid way to compute NAV. Curators need to partner with a trusted 3rd-party to compute NAV accurately, near-real-time with the ability to trace it back to individual on-chain txns. Enter @pennyworks_ Thank you @DarrenCamas for this valuable piece.

@rossiadam Aren't there requirements on minimum of in-state students admitted?

I hated K-12 school. I viewed it as a prison. I had major discipline problems and a terrible attitude. I vowed that I would play the game to the minimum standard possible. In High School I never brought a book home. I only used school hours on the bus or in the hallway for homework. I told my parents and teachers “when I am in school it’s your time, but when I am out of school it’s my time.” Yet I managed to get into Virginia Tech’s engineering program as an early admission student due a just good enough GPA and my SAT scores. And there I learned how to love learning. I thrived. That is not possible today. I would not have been admitted to VT at all today with my GPA and with the racial/gender preferences that have been put into place since I was a student. College admissions is now an arms race in which kids are competing against students from around the world for admission to their state school. It puts them in an incredible pressure cooker. Is it any wonder that so many are suffering from depression? They have to have 4.0+ GPAs, a laundry list of extracurriculars, charitable endeavors, a perfect essay…. The idea that taxpayers support public schools and that kids from the state should have a good shot at admissions is over. Because the out of state and international students pay higher fees, the incentive is to admit them with higher and higher preference. The woke stuff may be getting rolled back in that admissions may be getting less discriminatory toward white and Asian students, but the money issue won’t be reversed as easily. That’s why I think the focus should be on making state colleges much more affordable. Remove the need to admit ever higher number of out of state students. Until that happens, the community college system is still in amazing option. It’s what would have been my only option if I was graduating high school today.

@kenchangh It's partly because you are (still) very early. The stablecoin payments use cases are just now starting to get traction post GENIUS act. Steve Jobs founded Next, on desktop supercomputer. Burned 9 figures. Then made a roaring comeback with... kids movies and mp3 player.

is cloudflare down again? seriously how did internet come down to this?

What's a good way to test LLM models? It's a lot of work to click through a dozen models and ask them the same thing and see how well they do, and even if they do complete my task, I don't really have a good way to measure how many tokens they used up. Asking for a friend.

Everyone took advantage of the crypto black friday/cyber monday sale right?

@DefiIgnas 100% agree. It's very much that it's not clean. If they had only the excess in whatever volatile asset like GameStop, it wouldn't matter. The moment there's a non zero possibility of the peg being broken if those asset underperforms muddies the waters. They are being greedy.

Why would you hold USDT instead of USDC? For trading some markets? Sure. Maybe occasional higher yield on lending? But there's no point being a stablecoin maxi: neither USDT nor USDC pass down the yield to holders. No equity exposure to Tether either. You get 100% of the risk but no upside (only temporary escape from crypto volatility). There's also no need for CT to get defensive on S&P's latest downgrade risk for USDT to 'weak'. That was my first though. On the second thought, Tether is buying BTC (5.5% of backing) that helps pump its price. Kinda based? Circle just holds US treasuries and cash-equivalent assets. But we've got Strategy for pure BTC proxy-trade. And Strategy pumps when BTC does well, why USDT has no upside... Oh, but Tether also buys gold for their backing. Now at 7%... Ok... Why not buy more BTC instead of gold? Are their bearish on BTC? Anyway, 10.5% of the backing is a salad of loans to 3rd-party non-affiliated entities like crypto trading firms, mining operations, etc.* I get flashbacks to 2021 when Tether lent $1b USDT to Celsius (backed by BTC) as part of "secured loans" category in their reserves. At that time loans like this were 8% to 10% of USDT reserves. Now, ~23% of USDT's backing are volatile assets (what S&P calls high-risk assets). Up from 17% a year ago. Why not climb to 50% in 5 years? Their profits pump. Although I get nothing out of it. I think I better stop FUDding Tether as USDT collapse would rekt my portfolio as it would leave an exodus of capital from crypto. At the end of they day, I don't and won't hold USDT (As EU's MICA protects me from it and Binance won't allow me trading USDT markets). So I won't say anything besides 'Tether good': they pump my BTC bags. So that's that. *Tether doesn't disclose borrower identities or loan terms for privacy reasons, but BDO checks a sample for collateral and overcollateralization.

This is precisely how we account for defi lending. The subtlety of doing it wrong could mean a massive tax bill when swapping from regular tokens to atokens. Now apply that to the hundreds of protocols and thousands of tokens in a consistent manner. That's our specialty.

@vasuman So she has less than 1 year of experience and someone is willing to take them on as a founding engineer? What exactly is the problem?

> grind 12 years in Bay Area public high schools > start a non-profit just to get into college > get into elite CS program > go through another 4 years of weeder class hell > graduate into AI layoff era > leetcode for months > finally get founding eng interview at the AI notetaker startup > mf takes the call from a restaurant > hear her chewing dumplings while you invert a binary tree > offer comes in: 60k base + 0.5% equity

@lex_node @Ledger That's why I love @gridplus and @Rabby_io . The combination of upfront simulation and clear signing on the device is a no-brainer. The only downside is that the grid plus is a heavy BRICK. If only there was some more portable version...

>be @Ledger >revamp entire wallet product line around having (laggy af) touchscreens to display transaction information >only have these screens display esoteric information useless to 99% of humanity >make them unskippable and multi-page in most cases, and even when skippable have the skip button create an additional page asking aRe U SuRe? >gatekeep ability to make the displayed information actually useful (aka 'clearsigning') via IP in order "monetize" so that still the screens serve an anti-purpose in 99% of cases >profit????

Early impressions of Gemini 3: Doesn't work as well as Sonnet 4.5? There was a lot more internal monologue, but couldn't follow mundane instructions. It coded something wrong, I fixed it, asked it to run again, and instead, decided to just undo my changes before rerunning.🤷

When coding, I'm like the Juggernaut. It takes a while for me to get going, but once I hit my stride I'm unstoppable. I do my best work between midnight and 2 am. Is anyone else like this?

@iamjosephyoung Dumb question but don't you need gas to move the funds out? How would that be funded?

vitalik introduced Kohaku—ethereum’s native and compliant privacy framework. it's the biggest privacy upgrade path ethereum has ever outlined. i try to explain the flow in the most intuitive way possible. so let's say alice wants to send $1k to bob. 1. say bob has a normal wallet. (0xABC...) 2. bob creates a stealth keypair linked to his real wallet. 3. alice derives a one-time stealth address from bob's stealth key. 4. alice sends money to the stealth address. 5. bob scans the network to see if his stealth key's addresses received funds. 6. the stealth address alice sent the funds to expires. in essence, Kohaku creates an ephemeral stealth address with your public key, which lets you execute a private action without revealing the link to your main wallet. this is a game changer, but why is it compliant? you can publicly reveal the linkage if required (for regulation, audits, institutions). but the blockchain does NOT automatically expose it. believe in somETHing.

@xhabib Yes please!

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