Are we bear yet?

Not all futures are in backwardation but near dated certainly are. Remaining will find their floor soon after we get a reading on Saylor's latest $500m notes offering. Muted reaction to Saylor's offering is not yet a concern because same thing
occurred when he did the original offer. Buying futures once they fall into backwardation has been pretty decent over the years but of course timing is what matters - gonna be keeping an eye out for the listing of June 2022 expiry on Deribit and how it reacts at open.

Did we get Pomp-ed?

A. Pompliano seems to have made a mistake in his marketing attempt of Sovryn (BTC's version of defi). Looks like he wanted to make a show of having $1bn TVL (total value locked). It backfired; because the team hadn't updated the page that auto-computes it! TVL: is essentially a way to show how much money (usually in $) is on that platform.

The debate:
Users of a platform are allowed to deposit assets that they would like to use as collateral. The sum of all these assets represents the TVL. There are other assets of platform such as governance stakes that represents various players who keep some sort of equity in platform so they can weigh-in on various decisions (depending on governance mechanism etc). So a bit like real-world AGM / shareholders etc. These assets are risk-free way of being paid to be part of governance therefore are not included in the TVL as it sounds unfair (e.g. developers may be given X governance tokens for free).
Pomp / Sovryn decided to include these - but mistimed the tweet vs code change to show the TVL number. As with everything in crypto; more often than not code is open source thus readable so such marketing gimmicks also get caught out if mistimed!

End result:
Crypto battles ensued between BTC & ETH proponents; we now have 2 definitions and only time will tell which will be accepted by majority; nevertheless Sovryn team seems to have taken it within their stride and will probably learn to stay quiet while concentrate on continuing to build out a functional & secure platform. Oldie BTC folks like me are agreeing with ETH folks that Pomp got his definition wrong.

Yo, I don't see you talking about El Salvador:

It's a good experiment. In a nutshell, it's supposed to be structured as a trust holding $150m under the development bank (as opposed to being within their central bank). Its job is to allow merchants to swap BTC for USD (if merchants wish to) at the market price of BTC when merchant received it.

So the trust takes on the risk of price fluctuation; has swap lines (to borrow the US Fed lingo) with the merchants of El Salvador; and becomes a lendor of last resort of sorts for BTC. Timeline wise legislation is supposed to become law in 90 days.

Is it good or bad?
Not bad and they have been doing experiments for a while but this will be first large scale test of the lightening network. As a person who has family across multiple 3rd world countries it would be super beneficial if they were to do this - I can instantly send value and it be useful to someone when they need it. I fell into such a scenario few months ago suddenly and it was painful to wait 3 days or pay a hefty sum for quicker value transfer. In west African region, where some my family lives, they already use mobile money internally as a form of value exchange so its not a huge leap of faith if the country was to opt for such an exchange mechanism. Moreover, Salvadorien trust feels more like a clearinghouse with a certain initial $ capacity. The president was asked about whether they will sell BTC and he was wishy washy about it. I recall listening and thinking he's avoiding being too specific. I am guessing the trust's mandate to hold more BTC will probably come but at the same time it will need to have spare $ capacity if it needs to do its primary function of having that swap line open to the country's merchants.

Lastly, I understand there is 3 BTC minimum investment for having some sort of residency. It is super low threshold but maybe the aim is indeed to get eye balls and eventually some sort feet through the doors. Quite a few BTC holders might just throw 3 BTC at it just as a moonshot in case something changes drastically in a decade. After all, in their view, BTC is only a decade old and is already causing havoc in traditional finance world so why discount anything.

Why lightening network?
It's a way to transmit BTC without having to go via the blockchain (so avoids the hefty fees) and its secure / tried / tested / ...essentially its BTC's layer 2 payment protocol. Supposedly, Jack Dorsey will push to have his twitter integrated into the lightening network.

musings:

Bitcoin fixes this meme is such an annoyance that there are too many silly debates between the pro & anti-bitcoin crowd so now there is a push to educate folks that even Satoshi (recall us old BTC lovers think highly of him) in one of his old posts dating back to 2010 agreed that BTC will become an expensive blockchain and it will make sense for other blockchains to solve other problems..i.e. bitcoin's job is not to solve all problems of humanity thereby validating the need for existence of ETH / SOL / etc.

BIS published a draft proposal for capital regulations of stablecoin and crypto which essentially seems to boil down to making it unfavourable for banks to pyshically hold (or do leverage plays) on their own books for themselves. However, banks don't seem to be limited from custody, asset management and settlement activities. In some ways I like it since bank's need to get used to the volatility expectations; some may even do well to presume it's simply a meme stock world out there for past 10 years.