DeFi “Will Bleed Into the JPMs of The World,” 0x_b1 Says

0x_B1, a pseudonymous trader or traders who holds at least 1% of assets in DeFi, isn’t just about cold, hard cash. In an exclusive interview with The Defiant, they revealed their long term vision for the space, and how their motivation goes beyond financial gain – though of course, they’re raking in profits too.

0x_B1, believes the world’s largest investment banks will adopt some of the characteristics of decentralized finance, yet designed for state-sanctioned digital currencies. The mysterious whale also revealed his best and worst trades, and what he considers before investing in a project.

DeFi “will bleed into the JPM [JPMorgan] Citi [Citibank] GSs (Goldman Sachs) of the world, as the rise of CBDBs [Central Bank Digital Currencies] will lead these scrambling for their own COMPs and AAVEs of their world,” they said in an interview.

0x_b1 provided insights into their investments, saying that, for the first few days of CREAM’s Cream Swap, the wallet was generating $75K to $150K an hour. And while CREAM was their best trade, Harvest Finance was their worst one, because of the project’s exploit.

As is characteristic, 0x_b1 was somewhat cheeky in their responses. Upon The Defiant’s questioning of the degree of success their outfit has achieved, 0x_B1 said “we ponder why anyone would think that the entire sphere of 0x_b1 and our strategies would be contained to a single address. Key pieces of our strategies are not seen and therefore not understood.”

While the wallet’s controller declined to reveal what is likely a multi-person identity (0x_b1 addressed themself as “we”), they are unable to hide their wallet’s balance which has grown by ~$70M, to $410M, since last week’s The Defiant article, according to DeBank.

An unedited interview follows:

1. We used Ethplorer and Zerion to analyze your wallet, and Ethplorer says AUM declined to $320M from $420 since August, when it was created. But Zerion shows an increase in AUM to $220M. Which is the most accurate, or more specifically, how much are you holding in that wallet, and what has been its return since creation?

AUM goes up and down based on profits realized, and ongoing capital management relating to our centralized lending/borrowing counterparties.

It’s hard to get a comprehensive overview of every position 0xb1 is in because Zerion, Debank, and Zapper don’t support all the protocols we are utilizing. We just tipped DeBank because they were the first to integrate Alpha Homora, which allowed us and the community to have a peek into our dabbling there– however, as of the current time, no platform has been able to work out the duplicate AH positions to give a fully comprehensive view.

Further, we ponder why anyone would think that the entire sphere of 0x_b1 and our strategies would be contained to a single address. Key pieces of our strategies are not seen and therefore not understood (ie. multiple forms of hedging, etc).

1. What goes into your analysis before deciding to invest in a project?

Audits, yield, mission & technical params of the project. The majority of our deployments are not platform-specific, ie liquidity being provided for fee yield only.

1. What have been your most and least profitable crypto investments ever?

One of the most profitable farming investments was during the early days of CREAM’s Creamswap when we were minting 20-30% of all CREAM rewards the first 48 or so hours; ie $75-150K/hour for the first 2-3 days.

But this was the value minted. The value of the CREAM minted based on the avg price during this time period. Given we only sold ~half of the CREAM we were minting (compounding the rest in a few ways), the price was treated better than in most other launches of Q3/Q4. So, all questions of “wen most profit” and P/L are always relative to the actions of the sized player we are.

Least Profitable: Harvest because of the exploit. This could have been rectified, given how well the Harvest team first handled the exploit and the community input on restitution and ultimate issuance of GRAIN.

That being said, after the initial GRAIN drop it became apparent that the team was not as dedicated to the GRAIN repayment scheme, as 15-20x the weekly FARM rewards awarded for GRAIN LP are sent to “the treasury” for “discretionary purposes”.

They lost our faith and half our TVL at that point. They are great innovators but with great power comes great responsibility. We wish them luck.

1. What is the main motivation behind your DeFi investments? Is it purely making money or is there an ulterior motive? (ie, supporting DeFi dapps with liquidity, etc)

We love to support the mission of decentralized finance.

1. What drove you to go pseudo-public with a Twitter account and ENS?

People started taking notice of our work on the 0xb1 address and we wanted to communicate to the community. We realize that because we are perhaps one of the biggest proponents of DeFi, our words and actions are valued by others. So, we wanted to take up the opportunity to voice our thoughts and insights with the ecosystem. We also saw potential value this as a social experiment, and its worked! We have many DeFi trackers adding accounting tools for the new platforms we are utilizing, DeFi twitter has found us missing profits, and further helped us refine our strategies and focus.

Consensus: what its all about.

1. What role do you see DeFi playing in the world’s future?

DeFi has already changed the world, though most do not yet feel it. I am speaking specifically, about how internal operations of most of the market makers and lending co’s operate internally.

Soon this ethos, which we do not yet share, will bleed into the JPM Citi GSs of the world, as the rise of CBDBs will lead these scrambling for their own COMPs and AAVEs of their world.

1. Respecting your pseudonymity, a) can you say whether you’re a lone investor or a group? b) any comment to speculation that you’re the Sushi chef?

We’ll leave this one at….. We Are Borg!
We are Sam?

Including the community that is supporting us, we are 0xb1.

1. What would you like to see more of in DeFi? What is the space missing?

The last year has been pretty incredible in how far the DeFi space has gotten. Product-wise, most of the primitives for what a robust ecosystem would need have been built, but further refinement and a wider range of offerings will get us to 100 billion-plus market.