Insightful Insiders #1 - The Airdrop Alpha Newsletter First Launch

Welcome to the Inside prepare to be injected with insight

First off this is the first post in a revival of this newsletter now called the “insightful insiders” where the goal is to delivery primarily high quality airdrop related content/alpha twice per month straight to your inbox. Will also touch on some web3 gaming and Defi opportunities as well if there is demand and I have the bandwidth for it as I’m also heavily involved in that space/niche.

Many of the emails used in this next phase of the launch were taken from those who reached out for the free LayerZero sheet access. I tried to reach out to as many people as possible to get permission to add their email to the newsletter. If your getting this email and don’t want it I apologize and feel free to unsubscribe or reach out to me on Twitter and I’ll remove your email from the mailing list.

With that formality out the way lets get into the newsletter

Why I rebought TIA - The Cosmos Ecosystem Thesis

As mentioned in this post I recently rebought TIA at 5x the price after I dumped at the bottom. This is the first time I’ve ever bought back an airdrop that I’ve dumped never mind at 5x the price.

Why?

I initially didn’t do any deep research around TIA but when I looked into it more I understood why it was up only since launch.

A TLDR on TIA: A blockchain is actually composed of many different layers. A typical blockchain is a monolithic blockchain which means all of these layers need to be executed together on the base chain.

A modular blockchain is a blockchain that is highly specialized in one of these layers making it more flexible, customizable and can be outsourced to other projects/products.

Celestia is a modular blockchain, specifically for the data availability (DA) layer. This means that instead of projects needing to create and run the DA infrastructure for their blockchain or product they can save a significant amount of time and capital by outsourcing this to Celestia

Here is an image compilation of the majority of projects currently utilizing Celestia. While some of these projects already have a token many big hitters such as Berachain, Manta, Altlayer and more do not and its reasonable to assume that more projects will continue to be onboarded over time.

A common theme within the Cosmos ecosystem is those that stake ecosystem tokens to validators are generally eligible for airdrop by projects that adopt that ecosystem.

Historically this has been true for ATOM (core cosmos token) OSMO (core defi token) and a few more.

Thus buying and staking TIA should potentially qualify you for projects that eventually do an airdrop in the future and utilize the TIA tech stack in some way.

It seems the market tends to agree with this thesis as TIA is up another 40% to around $14 from buying at 5x the launch price at $10 from that original tweet. Additionally, just within the last week Dymension and Movement recently announced they are doing a token airdrop (with some of that likely going to TIA stakers).

Now while it feels like your buying the pico top I like this play for a few reasons

1/ very “LP and chill” requires very little maintenance/attention over time you just stake and wait or pay attention if there is a manual claim required for a respective project

2/ Even if the TIA price goes down 50% from here, I’m comfortable with that because I think the cumulative amount you’ll make in airdrops will greatly outpace that

3/ TIA is a frontrunner in the modular blockchain narrative and I believe the future is blockchains become more composed of multiple modular blockchains together opposed to monolithic ones

4/ You can hedge this by shorting TIA if you think price will go down

5/ You can diversity into other Cosmos tokens to stake for airdrops mainly being Atom, Osmosis, Injective/Kujira in that order

If you need a guide on how to onboard funds into the Cosmos ecosystem and how to navigate their native wallets and stake your TIA so your eligible for future potential airdrops, I’ve created a step by step video guide here.

How much should I stake? Using past criteria for Atom airdrops the minimum amount required to have staked was 11 atom. So I recommend to go bit above that and try to have at least 12 atom and 12 TIA staked per account/wallet.

Ideally you have 21-26+ ATOM or TIA staked or $500 or more worth of ATOM or TIA staked if you want to be safe, but this isn’t attainable or scalable for most people. You could hedge this by doing 1 “quality account” that has 25+ TIA and ATOM staked while all your other accounts have 11+ TIA and ATOM staked.

Time Sensitive Airdrop Actions

1/ Manta Paradigm is an L2 with 25M funding at a 500M evaluation. They are essentially using the same onboarding campaign that we saw with Blur’s L2 Blast. Getting a lot of questions around this which I tried to answer them all in this post here.

Basically you “lock” in X amount of ETH that you want to bridge over, you need to get invite via a code and then you can invite others, to unlock more codes you “team” pool of eth bridge over needs to hit certain thresholds.

You then immediately get a LST version of your ETH called STONEeth that you can deposit into layerbank (if caps arnt’t full) or swap into ETH on Izumi. Since onchain liquidity isn’t great right now you’ll be taking a 10% loss if you swap right now. Alternatively you can LP on Izumi and earn yield with your STONEeth and wait for the peg between ETH and STONEeth to get better over time as more liquidity flows in.

In terms of game theory around manta if you are low on liquidity it may be wise to sell the new paradigm NFTs you are getting from your box rewards to use in other ventures as you wait for your ETH to unstake.

If you are not as confident around the redemption mechanics around STONEethor you think the peg will get worse over time it may be wise to take the -10% hair cut now and swap it into ETH to hedge your risk and become more liquid.

First part of this new paradigm campaign runs until the new year starting in January thus posting about it now. I posted about the Manta Ecosystem early before the Paradigm campaign put it all over CT (crypto twitter) around 5-6 weeks ago you can get an introduction to the ecosystem with this thread.

2/ As mentioned in this post Mantle recently launched their own LST called mETH (or meth lmao) as mentioned by jordi in the clip (who works for the mantle team) there will be an airdrop for meth holders. All you have to do is stake ETH and you’ll receive/mint mETH (see this twitter post from mantle to find website) and thats it. In the future you’ll be able to stake with Eigenlayer so you’ll also be able to farm Eigenlayer at the same time.

You can mint until the cap is reached, as of Dec 24th there is still ~97k worth of eth capacity and Mantle is providing additional incentive rewards until Jan 22nd.

“underfarmed” airdrop of the week

In this section I like to try and highlight a protocols/projects that may be under the radar to most people and something your prolly not going to find being talked about /shilled on twitter from the larger airdrop/threadooor accounts

1/ @FinanceFlorence RWA protocol mentioned on @blocmatesdotcom (good podcast/newsletter for projects within the crypto and Defi space)

3M in funding $ ~4M in TVL

Mint free Duke NFT

Buy FLR on @CamelotDEX deposit in vaults, earn points

Only 1900 total on leaderboard

Can get top 100 with $200 worth in ~7 days

Then send funds to an alt wallet and use previous accounts referral links to fuel both accounts with more points. As long as your wallet cluster (txns connecting accounts together) is under 7 wallets I think its fine to self refer alts.

Shoutout to 0xbluegod for making me aware of this via debank DMs

2/ @JuicyPerp an NFT perp platform where you can speculating if the price of an NFT collection will go up or down within 24hrs. Currently in incentivized beta, join their discord fill out beta application form and wait.

Currently its on the Arbitrum Sepoilia testnet so you may need to get some gas for txn fees that can be provided top you through several public faucets like Alchemy. When you sign up you should get 69 ETH testnet juicy perp eth to play with and take trades.

Why spend time here? Interacting is free, there is a leaderboard/points system, hinted at rewarding beta testers. Past history confluence for similar products.

For example if you interacted with a similar platform NFT Perp during mainnet (on arbitrum) and put in roughly 1 ETH worth of volume over 3 months you would of ranked high enough to qualify for their free PFP mafia Nuts which sold after mint for around 0.25-0.3ETH. I know because I did this and it was a nice bear market treat.

If you found this email insightful consider sharing the newsletter with others to gain access to free tools and resources.

As long as your logged in to your substack account when you refer all progress will be tracked you’ll automatically be sent an email with the rewards when you’ve hit the required milestone

Tier 1: referrals required (3) = Full LayerZero interaction tracker and guide sheet access

Tier 2 : referrals required (7) = 6 different L2s interaction tracker and guide sheet access

Tier 3: referrals required (20) = ???