1. Growing and persistent threat group targeting the NFT community, and how to protect yourself against the scam
YugaLabs warns that there are phishing attempts around attacking the NFT community. On the other hand, Uniswap V3 is also suffering from a phishing attack, resulting in loss amounting to $4.7 million worth of crypto.
Meows.eth has a series of tweets on how we can stay safe from such a scam. Here are some takeaways:
- "SET APPROVAL FOR ALL" should always be done sparingly! It gives the approver complete permission to do anything they want with a given token in your wallet.
2. Watch closely at the signature, and double check the red text when it appears. Make sure you close the window if you encounter such red texts. There are different kinds of ways to sign with your wallet. This is the dangerous one that can drain your assets.
3. Add nicknames to the contracts you are familiar with. Do this for your most cherished tokens, so you can be alert when a random site asks you to sign them away.
2. Mental models that will help you become a better Crypto Investor
Mental models are concepts to help us better understand the world. The idea íis that your thinking is limited by your own experiences, biases, and overconfidence. Mental models are a way to get around with your limitations and gain wisdom from entire fields. Understanding them will help you think clearer. Here are summary of some models that we find useful in guiding your investment decision:
Cockroach Theory
People suffer from “What you see is that there is (WYSIATI)” cognitive bias i.e they only see things that are in front of them, but fail to extrapolate what might be coming afterwards. Seeing one cockroach means that there's more hiding, hence the name “cockroach theory”. Whenever there's bad news, brace yourself for more, as companies tend to hide bad news to buy time.
Three Men Make a Tiger
It is a Chinese proverb equivalent to the Western saying “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”. Imagine if there are rumors of a Tiger:
- Person: He's a liar
- People: Is this true?
- People: There's a Tiger!
Now instead of 3 people, imagine if it's thousands of people sharing across social media. If you add in bots and financial incentives, it's easier than ever to spread misinformation. A takeaway is that you should be cautious of rumors without any facts or evidence, and that you should even fact-check the evidence presented to you.
Behavioral Inevitability
Human behavior and its biases will always remain. As Voltaire puts it: "History never repeats itself; man always does." Extrapolating this to the crypto world:
- Will there be more real-world adoption? Yes.
- Will there be better technology next cycle? Yes.
But will there also be ponzinomics and cult leaders again? Yes. Carrying this thought on the back of your mind will help you picking up the right investment and guarding yourself against culty projects
Unknown Unknowns (Black Swans)
Risks can be broadly classified into two categories:
- Known Unknowns - Risks you are aware of, such as smart contract exploits.
- Unknown Unknowns (also goes by Black Swans) - Risks that are so unimaginable that you couldn't have seen them coming. Examples include the 9/11 attack, pandemic, or 3AC Collapse.
Human beings tend to underestimate the probability of Black Swans events, and weigh them insufficiently in their decision making. Diversification helps protect against these events, which means diversifying outside of crypto or even financial assets. As an exercise,, imagine rare events happening & their impact:
- Satoshi's wallet wakes up
- China invades Taiwan
- Nuclear strike
Lindy Effect
The longer it has lasted, the likelihood it will continue to last.It's hard to say which coins will be around 20 years from now, but there's a strong probability that BTC and Ethereum will be around. So they're the safest bet as investments.
So if you're collateralizing assets, it makes sense to go with more Lindy ones such as Aave and MakerDao. If they were hackable, it would've happened already.
3. Unclaimed EVMOS airdrops
There is $150 MILLION dollars of the EVMOS airdrop that is still unclaimed. The claimable airdrop will start transferring to the community pool in 2 weeks so you should check whether you are eligible for the airdrop.The first thing you need to do is to check app.evmos.org/claims to see if you qualify for the airdrop.
ATOM stakers, OSMO stakers & LPs, various Ethereum dApps users like Uniswap, OpenSea, DyDx, SushiSwap, AAVE etc, EVM bridge users such as Arbitrum, Polygon, Hop Protocol etc, users who got rugged like Poly Network, MEV Victims etc, and early EVMOS individual contributors by the snapshot date are eligible to claim the airdrop. The snapshot was taken on November 25th, 2021 at 19:00 UTC.
Evmos is bringing the world of Ethereum-based applications and assets to the interoperable networks of the Cosmos ecosystem, all while aligning developer and user incentives. EVMOS is currently priced at $2 per token, with the market cap of $400M.
