The Tomb Fork Saga : Chapter 16

Tomb Forks: the race is on

Le Zèbre finally leaves Platinum finance, to launch a new experiment.

Platinum wasn’t going so well. I decided to exit. I had taken 100 FTM with me to the land of DeFi. I was at 197 FTM a few weeks after with 2omb. Then I tried Platinum and here I stand, at 188 FTM.

After these experiments, it appeared that staking LPs wasn’t so bad, and staking shares wasn’t so good. Sure, only going to the second room of the casino by only staking shares had really worked for 2omb when it was going to the moon, and that’s even after me selling the dip. Now that these projects were stable, it looked like the amazing rates that the players of the casino were getting, were at the expense of their invested capital.

Was it the normal life cycle of Tomb Forks? A strong rise, very rewarding, especially for those who caught it early. This rise being fed by the newcomers to that shiny new casino. Then a slow decline where the inflow of newcomers is hardly compensated by the outflow of older players.

The race is on

I wanted to have a more precise idea of these tomb forks. So, with the FTMs I had left, I started an experiment:

I put 30 FTM in 5 tomb forks. Each scattered this way:

1. 10 FTM in Base coin — FTM liquidity pool token staked in the first room of the casino (the cemetery in Tomb speech)
2. 10 FTM in Share — FTM liquidity pool token staked in the same room
3. 10 FTM in Share, staked in the second room of the casino (the masonry)

To help me watching the evolution of all these stakes, I set up some page where I could see all the figures at once. Setting this up is one of the reason I haven’t written that much during the last few days. I was busy developing that page, which took me quite a few hours. But I learnt many things doing it: composing objects in javascript, working with VueJS and Nuxt, querying blockchain states with axios, reading smart contracts, compiling them on Remix so I could get the function hashes, … That was a really fun bit of programming involving a whole bunch of different technologies.

You can see that page here: Tomb Fork Watcher

(I finally put that page offline because I could not be bothered to host it any more. You can see a screenshot of it in my next article: the Fall of the Forks.)

If you are playing in one of these casino, you can also put your wallet address on the top right input field, and you’ll see all your stakes and rewards on one page.

Now the race is on. We’ll see in a few weeks where this all goes. Will all the casinos end up in the toilets? Will they all thrive back or will some of them fail while only a few others success?

This story will be written day after day on that page.

Conclusion

And yes, if I manage to find enough time, I’ll tell you, at last, if I think these casinos are just disguised ponzi, or if they could be something else. And I’ll conclude by explaining the weaknesses of these protocols, and how they could be mitigated. But I have no time for that today. It’s late. We are Wednesday February 23rd 2022, and tomorrow will be a calm day like any other.

… le zèbre will be back in the next episode: the fall of the forks.