Current market thinking and inventory of opportunities in Golden September and Silver October

Author: Ruby Wang; Source: X, @rubywxt1

A while ago, I moved across the country for two months, and many tracks and projects have undergone great changes during this period.As the saying goes, Golden September and Silver October, take advantage of the second half of the bull market to reorganize the tracks and opportunities that are still worthy of attention, and strive to achieve good results before the end of the year!

1. Stablecoins are the basic market of this cycle

1. From the Battle of Hundred Regiments to the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea

The market value of the entire stablecoin increased by 50% in three quarters from 200 billion at the beginning of the year to 294.6 billion US dollars in the recent period.

In the first half of the year, we made an issue with @0x_Todd to talk about the 100-group battle and retail investors’ participation posture. This year, ifFocusing on the big narrative of “stablecoin”, which is emerging in the circle, we are taking financial management, airdrops and subsidies. To be honest, the returns are really good.After all, the Hundred Regiments Battle benefits users.

Now I think that stablecoins have reached the second stage, and basically the battle situation has converged to the top several camps. Combined with their alliance exchanges and public chains, it has reached the stage where the Eight Immortals cross the sea and show their magical powers.This part of the content can be fully felt from the bidding war between us and @mdzzi on Hyperliquid stablecoin USDH.

I think we need to pay close attention to the new trends of these leading camps in the future, spend time investing in research and finding greater opportunities.On TGE’s new stablecoin project, spending a small amount of money to ambush is not too much distracting like in the first half of the year.

I’ll sort it out here:

2. The “Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea” camp inventory (key version)

1. Tether USDT returns to America with USAT compliance

USDT is still the top spot in stablecoins, close to 60% of the market value of all stablecoins.Tether recently announced that it will issue a compliant SGD in the United States and will advance in accordance with the GENIUS Act framework, with the custodians including Anchorage Digital Bank.At the same time, two L1s that are strongly bound to Tether – Plasma and Stable are accelerating financing and ecological implementation.It is expected that USDT will continue to defend the global exchange and exchange settlement market, while USAT is its bridgehead for its return to the US market.

2. Circle USDC and Coinbase’s strongest North American compliance camp

After Circle’s successful IPO, USDC has firmly ranked second largest stablecoin with a share of 25%.The combined market value of Circle and Coinbase in the U.S. stock market is 110 billion + $100 billion.

The CCTP cross-chain selling and casting protocol built by Circle and Coinbase has become an “official channel” across chains.The newly released Arc public chain is positioned as the “home of stablecoin finance” and is natively connected with Circle’s whole family bucket (Payments, Wallets, CCTP, USYC, etc.), and is planned to be launched on the main network in 2026.It is expected that it will continue to be deployed in compliance payments, cross-border clearing and settlement, stablecoin FX, and tokenized capital market scenarios.

3. Ethena USDe and the new chain Converge

Ethena is definitely the king of the volume in this cycle, and USDe has basically secured its third-place stablecoin ranks with a market share of about 5%.The new chain Converge, jointly built by Ethena and Securities, aims to make stablecoins a Gas and connect to TradFi.The expected advantage lies in exchange margin and deposit-type USD. If Converge can run through compliance institutions, there will be a lot of room for growth.

In addition, Ethena has announced its cooperation with Binance and its native stablecoin USDm on its chain with L2 MegaETH. It can be seen that Ethena is working hard to penetrate and increase adoption in traditional finance and crypto-native fields.

4. Sky USDS (formerly DAI)

The veteran DeFi stablecoin MakerDAO has completed its rebranding, launching USDS, and launching Spark as an eco-money market in this cycle.USDS currently has a market capitalization of approximately US$4.5 billion, ranking fourth.Compared with USDe’s offensive style, Sky is more like a “defensive” and continues to deepen its efforts in over-collateralization, RWA integration and DeFi infrastructure.

5. USD1: Binance + Middle East MGX Capital

USD1 was issued by Trump-related project World Liberty Financial and became a settlement stablecoin for Abu Dhabi MGX invested in Binance for US$2 billion.The current market value is above US$2 billion, and it is mainly used in Launchpad/financial products of the BNB Chain and Binance ecosystem, such as the issuance of Four Meme and Buidlpad, as well as the lending of DeFi projects such as Venus.It is expected that as Binance channels expand and bind to the Middle East capital chain, USD1 will gradually occupy an important position in exchange financial management and ecological token issuance.

6. Paxos × PayPal’s USDG Alliance

USDG is a new Solana-first stablecoin issued by Paxos (Singapore Entity), aimed at enterprise-level applications and a new model of “reallocation of benefits to network participants”.Paxos is also the white-label issuer behind Binance’s BUSD and Paypal’s PYUSD.

The Global Dollar Network behind it includes Anchorage, Galaxy Digital, Kraken, Robinhood, Bullish, DBS, etc.USDG is designed to return reserve revenue to alliance participants.Recently, dozens of new members have been added, with the goal of implementing payment, custody, and clearing settlement scenarios.It is expected to strengthen its advantages in payment merchants, card organization integration, cross-border enterprise settlement, etc.

7. Tempo Public Chain of Stripe and Paradigm

Tempo is a payment-first public chain incubated by Stripe and invested by Paradigm, focusing on solving the shortcomings of existing chains in terms of throughput, stability and merchant-friendliness.Paradigm has released design documents. It is expected that with Stripe’s payment channel, if Tempo can successfully access it, it will become a high-speed settlement layer for USDC, USDG and other payment coins, promoting the on-chain card swiping experience to close to Web2.

8. Hyperliquid native stablecoin USDH

Hyperliquid, as the head of Perp DEX, recently passed a community vote and Native Markets became the USDH issuer.The founding team at Native Markets is composed of former executives at the early stage of the Hype ecosystem, OG Max and Uniswap.

USDH is positioned to feed back HYPE repurchases with reserve income to reduce dependence on external stablecoins.Testing is about to start.It is expected that USDH will play a core role in margin, market making settlement, and ecological subsidies to form an endogenous flywheel.

3. Where is the opportunity

Stablecoins can now be roughly divided into two categories, payment type and financial management type stablecoins.In addition to USDT and USDC, other stablecoins that have emerged later mainly make breakthroughs in financial management/returns, and acquire crypto users with more competitive returns.Of course, the first two will also provide some financial subsidies and fee reductions through cooperation with exchanges and public chains.

In short, opportunities are divided into: 1) Earn subsidies 2) Income-based stablecoins 3) Three categories of airdrop expectations for mining new stablecoin protocols/public chains, and sometimes these types of opportunities will also be merged.

1) Eat subsidy

• Exchange subsidies

In the first half of the year, there was a 12% annualized USDC subsidy on Coinbase exchanges that lasted for several months, and Binance also took a month in August.In addition, the previous on-chain financial management Plasma (the credit limit was robbed), and the recent subsidy is USDe 12% annualized in one month.

*The only thing to note is the risk of deaning and exchange rates for incoming and outgoing exchanges

• Exchange-related wallet subsidies, such as Binance web3 Wallet/ OKX Wallet, etc.

You can find recent activities in the “discovery” of your wallet, which are generally subsidies from the cooperation between the project party and BN.For example, Mitosis a while ago, the recent activities such as USDG and USDC subsidies of $Huma are more secure than the general new DeFi projects and have a lower threshold for user participation.

Generally, you can check whether the value is worth participating in. 1) The degree of annualized stability over the past few days 2) The total amount of subsidy.It should be noted that it must be a Binance’s private key wallet and you need to participate after signing up on the event page, otherwise you may not receive the corresponding rewards.

• Public chain/DeFi subsidies

Activities carried out by stablecoin issuers and public chain/DeFi protocols

For example, USDe has been working on the Telegram wallet Ton Wallet for more than two months and is still continuing. The actual measurement of 16%-20% of APY is only a limit of 25,000 (multiple numbers can be added)

Similarly, USDe is in AAVE; USDS and USDG will also cooperate with leading DeFi agreements such as Kamino and Jupiter to subsidize loans on Solana. They are basically double-digit APYs and can participate according to their own preferences.

After Plasma TGE in the past two days, many mines have also had high returns, but in short, there are really many opportunities for U.

2) Airdrop expectations for income stablecoin protocols

There are about 300 stablecoin projects on Defilama with a market value of nearly US$300 billion, 107 with a market value of more than US$10 million, 40 with a market value of more than US$100 million, and more than 10 with a market value of more than US$100 million.This is why it is said that almost only the Eight Immortals cross the sea on the head, and it is difficult to compete for stablecoins with long tails.

There are too many new stablecoin protocols. The first choice is to recommend that Pendle’s stablecoin category have the latest revenue products, and PT and YT opportunities can be obtained separately.In addition to buying some YT in Aster, I have also participated in the following projects

• USDf (Falcon Finance), TGE is about to be around. The market value of USDf has reached the seventh place in all stablecoins, close to US$1.9 billion. TGE should not be too bad.So I used to put on a 30% APY PT and locked up some of the positions for three months in order to issue new IDO;

• The PT of USDai and sUSDai are around 25% APY for nearly two months, and of course you can also participate directly on the official website of the project;

• Ethena “Cosmic” Converge’s ecological projects and USDe Ethena related unissued projects can also be pre-distributed.This cycle Ethena has outstanding results, so you can still make plans

TGE’s new stablecoin project has not yet been available, and I am still paying attention to and participating in some projects, decentralized deposits and airdrops.

*Note here that the risk of TVL is too low and deans are not used as endorsement, DYOR

• Solana Eco-Unknown TGE Projects: Hylo, Vectis Finance;

• MegaETH Untouched Stablecoin Project Cap.

2. The Perp track was ignited and in full swing

Aster was lucky enough to get a good airdrop and then sold it completely.Aster’s vampire attack was also a fire that ignited the entire decentralized perpetual contract exchange track.

You can watch this website more and pay attention to the overall track data. It is very exaggerated. It can be said that it changes every day (below is a screenshot of 9.25 on the same day)

As a very atypical trader, I used to save money and make more arrangements.

At the end of April, I wrote a tweet recommended to follow the contract office. In fact, I mainly planned three projects: Aster, Ethereal and StandX.

But five months later, the influence and fundamentals of the track have undergone tremendous changes. Now the focus may be the time for various teams and scientists to start swiping transactions to get points/tokens to show their skills.

As a Caicai trader, under this kind of machine-based brushing market, I still have only a few of them in the layout, and I may not be able to roll it any more.

• StandX

It has been about half a year since it has been a stablecoin DUSD pre-deposit activity, which is a Binance contract team.Pre-sale is over at the end of October. It is estimated that TGE will be a few months away. It is still time to save money + do LP and mine points (if you hold Aster’s wallet, remember to go to StandX discord to get a special character these days, and you may have surprises)

• Lighter

A16z invested in, a perpetual contract trading agreement using zk-rollup, requires a whitelist experience.I currently have a few invitation codes, and group members who need it can find me.

• EdgeX

The incubation of Amber Group is said to be the MEXC exchange behind it.Currently Vault can also save money, save money + trade to earn points.

• Ethereal (can save money)

Ethena’s perp dex Ethereal pre-distribution has been stored for a long time since the beginning of this year.Looking forward to Ethena, hurry up!

• Backpack

Solana is a compliance centralized exchange supported by ecologically, with a contract sector.The points trading activity has been in progress for two seasons. It is recommended to experience its silky compliant deposit and withdrawal function and trade on demand.

If you have enough resources to study the following projects, please study the opportunity (there are really many exchanges, so there are not enough users)

• BasedOne (Hyperliquid ecosystem supported by Ethena is perp)

• Boros (New Project of Pendle, Funding Rate Derivatives Trading)

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3. Various Launchpads: Take a small capital, the principal risk is low

Another feature of this round is that each company opens the launchpad.The 1.5-level new token issuance of project tokens does not take up much time and capital, and it can get several times the profit in a short period of time.Moreover, we are still benefiting from the launchpads of various companies.Especially the leading projects of the big brand launchpad, you cannot miss it.

Different platforms have different rules for allocating quotas, so you can also think about your own leverage and what are the advantages of your participation?

For example, if you have high Yap scores, it is suitable to participate in Kaito’s premium account, which is different from buidlpad’s strategy of getting more KYC and getting more accounts.

The following is the rankings are indefinitely

• Buidlpad

• Virtuals

• Kaito

The first three are platforms that performed well in this round. There are some recent actions below, so you need to keep an eye on them.

• Kraken (works with Legion)

• Byreal (Bybit did it in the end)

• Four Meme (Binance)

• Echo (Cobie’s startup project)

• Based (Ethena invests in HyperEVM projects)… I believe there will be many more. In the later stage, you need to consider whether the valuation of the above projects is reasonable and avoid backlash.

Summarize

The above is a review of some of my recent thoughts, and I also hope to communicate with more friends. Welcome to recommend more projects in the comment area or correct my views.

I will continue to practice stablecoin financial management and pay attention to new projects and applications in these sectors.Strive to be able to update a monthly observation.