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We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

blog.stablegains.com

181–190 of 388 posts

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#181
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All crypto is a scam and it's so simple to see, it's astonishing anyone fell for this. Look. Imagine an otherwise empty room with a table and a few chairs. A couple people come in with some money in their pockets and cards. They play a few round of a card game, some lose, some win. When they leave, the room as it was before so it is crystal clear the sum of their money couldn't change. Some won, some lost but overall…

But what about crypto completely revolutionizing transactions, decentralizing the economy and providing a stable universally accessible data exchange medium? What about tracking the food you buy on the blockchain? What about web3? What about muh NFT monkeys?

What about flying cars and hoverboards? I’m sure those have been pitched to the public too. Making a claim does not make a truth.

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#182
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inspired by the possibilities across DeFi, our aim was to go beyond Anchor and to integrate with multiple protocols so that users could have easy access to multiple tools and allocate their assets across all of them based on their judgment of the benefits, costs, and risks of each option. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there in time. Their previous marketting said (or at least implied) that they were spread across di…

Do you have a source for the misleading marketing? Feb. 2, 2022 [1]: "Stablegains' 15% APY is earned using Anchor Protocol, a decentralized lending market." This is in a giant blue block right above a "get started" link. There is no mention of anything other than Anchor being used to store investor funds. It seems to me that you are trying to twist the post-crash retrospective into a marketing statement that didn't s…

From https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402687632...

> Our main stablecoin is USDC (USD Coin). For every 1 USDC in supply, $1 USD is kept in reserve.

> The other stablecoins we may use are, UST (Terra USD) and DAI.

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#183
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All crypto is a scam and it's so simple to see, it's astonishing anyone fell for this. Look. Imagine an otherwise empty room with a table and a few chairs. A couple people come in with some money in their pockets and cards. They play a few round of a card game, some lose, some win. When they leave, the room as it was before so it is crystal clear the sum of their money couldn't change. Some won, some lost but overall…

Crypto is a tool. Is it often used for scam? Yes. But so is email. Just like stocks can fall 99% in a day. It stock s cam? No. The problem is that users dive into it without understanding the risks. Also, there should be (and will be) more regulations around it. But it is as far from the scam as it gets.

> The problem is that users dive into it without understanding the risks. Also, there should be (and will be) more regulations around it.

Correct. Only a few cryptocurrency projects will survive and the several meme cryptocurrencies or non-compliant coins will wither away.

This is why some companies waited for regulatory clarity to enter back into the cryptocurrency markets. This is what the absolutist crypto-skeptics or absolutist crypto-maximalists won't tell you.

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pathetic that the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury allowed anyone but the U.S. Government to mint a coin 'tethered' to USD, and named anything remotely similar. It's bizarre and a complete reversal from prior practice.

Plenty of countries have currencies which have a fixed exchange with USD, including my own (1 KYD = 1.2 USD). It just takes a shit-tonne of capital, and it helps to have a functioning internal economy and flexibility to be able to defend against malicious agents. I suspect there are other legal issues with creating an alternative currency in the us though, which is why these aren't currencies but securities. Which is…

It’s trivial to mint tokens that are on a fixed rate to USD - assuming you are ready to keep the full amount of USD locked up somewhere.

Disaster strikes when someone sees the mountain of money and thinks ”If we invest this money, we get to keep the gains”

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, they are also a YC backed company.

VCs promoting this sort of blatant and obvious Ponzi - and there are many VCs getting into ponzinomic crypto enterprises - is a good reason to start making some of the investors more liable.

> is a good reason to start making some of the investors more liable

I'm beginning to agree.

Piercing the corporate veil is reserved for "serious misconduct" [1]. If you're told someone will sell an unlicensed deposit-like product [2], promise depositors (their words) "will not lose [their] funds" [3] and pay a ten or 20% interest rate, and you give them money to do it, you aided and abetted fraud. (At the very least you were grossly negligent with your LPs' money.) You should have to make the people you scammed and hoped to profit off whole.

[1]https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/piercing_the_corporate_veil

[2] https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680375...

[3] https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680425...

[a] Thank you nrmitch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31462617

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#186
post #100

What's funny about this is that I can recall discussions here and elsewhere from only a few months ago questioning the "guaranteed" super-high returns. I forget who said this but someone awhile ago said in finance said that if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk. And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to whic…

What most people don't understand about finance is that there are fundamental rules that you really cannot break without consequences. Anyone who has studied quantitative finance knows that it is a HARD science. I worked with a Nobel prize winner in economics, and the math dominated. There was no politics, no opinions, no ethics involved. It really is a science. Most social media characterize finance as some ethical…

Will understanding the math make me rich? :)

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#187
post #100

What's funny about this is that I can recall discussions here and elsewhere from only a few months ago questioning the "guaranteed" super-high returns. I forget who said this but someone awhile ago said in finance said that if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk. And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to whic…

And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to which the retort is "No, you just don't understand finance".

If you believe the statement "if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk" it might be true that you don't understand DeFi to some degree. DeFi isn't a single market, it's millions of micro markets that are accessible through what amounts to a single API.

So when you have millions of markets with different returns that can be traded in every imaginable way (and some you probably haven't imagined), throw in an insane amount of dumb money, people willing to borrow at high interest rates (relative to the real world), and a laundry list of factors that introduce inefficiencies into the market, it's quite easy to find pockets of above-average returns if you're smart. I have no idea if Stablegains was actually smart, but it's more than possible to achieve above-market gains in DeFi without exposing yourself to outsized risks.

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#188
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inspired by the possibilities across DeFi, our aim was to go beyond Anchor and to integrate with multiple protocols so that users could have easy access to multiple tools and allocate their assets across all of them based on their judgment of the benefits, costs, and risks of each option. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there in time. Their previous marketting said (or at least implied) that they were spread across di…

Do you have a source for the misleading marketing? Feb. 2, 2022 [1]: "Stablegains' 15% APY is earned using Anchor Protocol, a decentralized lending market." This is in a giant blue block right above a "get started" link. There is no mention of anything other than Anchor being used to store investor funds. It seems to me that you are trying to twist the post-crash retrospective into a marketing statement that didn't s…

I'd have a hard time trusting their current documentation which seems to have been heavily edited since this whole incident began, but frankly the subheader on their main landing page is "Stablegains makes it simple to earn high and stable interest from DeFi lending markets." Market(s). Plural. That at least heavily implies in their marketing that they weren't taking all of their users funds and shoving it into a single asset.

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#189
post #100

What's funny about this is that I can recall discussions here and elsewhere from only a few months ago questioning the "guaranteed" super-high returns. I forget who said this but someone awhile ago said in finance said that if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk. And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to whic…

[deleted]

Re: We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

#190
post #100

What's funny about this is that I can recall discussions here and elsewhere from only a few months ago questioning the "guaranteed" super-high returns. I forget who said this but someone awhile ago said in finance said that if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk. And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to whic…

And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to which the retort is "No, you just don't understand finance". If you believe the statement "if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk" it might be true that you don't understand DeFi to some degree. DeFi isn't a single market, it's millions of micro markets that are acces…

> it's more than possible to achieve above-market gains in DeFi without overexposing yourself to insane risks

"Insane" is subjective. The point is nothing safe yields ten or 20%. Someone saying "you will not lose your funds" [1] when paying above-market yields is lying.

[1] https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680425...

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