Money Printer vs Panic Button: Welcome to Two-Faced June

Money Printer vs Panic Button: Welcome to Two-Faced June📈🤡

🚀 Your Weekly Playbook for Maximizing Yield in DeFi

📅 June 1, 2025 | 💰 ETH: $2,518.25 | BTC: $104,817.00 | SOL: $155.79 | 🌐 Market Mood: Cautious Optimism (Fear & Greed Index: 56)

📖 New to DeFi? 👉 Read the Ultimate Beginners Guide

Big Story: Cetus Hack: When “Code-Is-Law” Meets the Phone-Tree

The reason I can’t quit DeFi is that blockchains are supposed to be binary:
Right trade, up only. Wrong trade, your wallet bleeds. No insiders, no back-room edits, just math.

Then a single overflow bug wiped ≈ $223 million from Cetus pools on Sui (May 22).
Minutes later, validators hit the panic button, froze $160 million of the loot, and opened an impromptu group chat to decide who gets what back.

So much for pure code.

1. What Went Down

2. The Social Layer Kicks In

• Emergency vote — 91 % of stake backs a proposal to mass-unlock the frozen funds into a 3-of-5 multisig (Cetus, Sui Foundation, OtterSec).

• $11 M carrot — $6 M white-hat bounty from Cetus + $5 M tip fund from Sui Foundation if the hacker returns assets.

• Public debrief — Cetus is hosting a Twitter Space on June 2 to walk users through the refund schedule, new audit partners, and a full contract rewrite.

Result: affected LPs could recoup ~71 % of losses once the multisig unlocks, with the rest covered by a treasury top-up and a back-stop loan from the Foundation.

3. Why This Matters Beyond Sui

4. Questions to Ask Before Your Next Ape

1. Who can flip the kill-switch? If it’s a handful of validators, assume they eventually will.

2. How battle-tested is the math? Concentrated liquidity is only three years old; overflow and oracle edges are still soft spots.

3. Is there an on-chain war chest? Hacks are no longer if but when. Protocols without pre-funded insurance are socializing risk—onto you.

Because the chain still keeps score. Your PnL won’t care whether losses came from a bad trade or the moment “code-is-law” morphed into “call-the-validators.”

Maybe it’s time to add one more column to the risk sheet:

Everything else is just numbers on-chain.

(Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Always DYOR—Do Your Own Research.)

Yieldstacker Strategy of the Week: Loop the Restake — 30 %+ on eETH with Morpho Blue

DeFi Radar: Quick DeFi updates for the week ahead

🔹 $BTC — BITCOIN Act Heads to the Senate Floor
What’s Happening: Senator Cynthia Lummis’ BITCOIN Act is scheduled for debate next week. The bill directs Treasury and the Fed to acquire 1 million BTC (≈ 5 % of total supply) over five years, formalizing the “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” first set up by executive order in March.
Why It Matters: A federal buying program of this scale would create a nation-state bid under the market, re-price hodler expectations, and turbo-charge the “digital gold” narrative just as ETF flows stabilize.
Read More →

🔹 $ICP — World Computer Summit (June 3)
What’s Happening: DFINITY hosts its annual World Computer Summit tomorrow in Zürich and online. Agendas hint at new Layer-2 bridges, an AI-execution layer, and a three-year roadmap for institutional subnets.
Why It Matters: ICP remains undervalued relative to its developer metrics; headline-grade announcements could rekindle “world-computer” buzz and drive TVL beyond the current $560M plateau. Builders should watch for grant and R&D-partner programs announced on stage.
Read More →

🔹 $TAIKO — 69% Supply Unlock on June 5
What’s Happening: Taiko, the ZK-EVM rollup, will unlock ≈ 81.6M TAIKO (~$47M, 69% of circulating) at 00:00 UTC, releasing team, investor, and ecosystem allocations.
Why It Matters: The float quintuples overnight. Unless secondary-market liquidity deepens quickly, expect heightened volatility and negative funding as traders hedge. Yield farmers eyeing Taiko pools should be ready to rotate if APR drops below risk-adjusted thresholds.
Read More →

Deep Dive: ETH × Base — Scaling Gamble or Game-Changer?

The thing I love about crypto is that the chain keeps score in real-time.
No press release, no glossy ad campaign, no political spin—just blocks, fees, and prices that tell you instantly whether your thesis is right or wrong.

That brutal honesty makes it tempting to freeze in “HODL and hope” mode. I’ve done it myself with my untouchable ETH bag: let the gas burn, let the charts drift, assume progress will arrive on schedule.

But what if the meta just flipped again?
Next week Ethereum’s core devs and Coinbase’s Layer-2 network Base are expected to unveil a joint initiative. If it lands, it could rewrite the fee structure, the security model, and even the user-experience script we’ve been reciting for years.

So before the market marks us to reality, let’s break down what’s actually changed, how we got here, and why this Base collaboration might be the proof-of-concept for Ethereum’s next growth curve.

1. The Set-Up

• Where Ethereum is today. Post-Dencun and fresh off March’s Pectra hard fork, blob fees are down and smart-wallet UX is up, but throughput ceilings are already in sight. Dev attention has pivoted to PeerDAS and the security-obsessed Trillion Dollar Security campaign launched mid-May 2025.

Where Base fits

• Base is an L2 built by Coinbase, batching transactions off-chain and settling them on Ethereum.

• It’s averaging ~6.9 million daily transactions—five to six times most rivals—and pulled in about $193 million in fees last quarter.

• Because it runs on the open-source OP-Stack, it can adopt new Ethereum features almost the moment they’re ready.

2. The Rumour

The calendar lines up perfectly: PeerDAS testnets just stabilized, and Ethereum recently kicked off a Trillion Dollar Security campaign aimed at bullet-proofing the network before even bigger money arrives.

3. Our Working Hypothesis

4. Why It Matters (Even If You’re New)

1. Gas Prices & ETH Burn
   Cheaper L2 fees don’t kill ETH demand; the extra blobs Base posts can actually increase ETH burned per block.

2. L2 Fee War
   Arbitrum, Optimism, and others will have to slash prices or specialise (gaming, AI, etc.) to stay relevant.

3. Builder Economics
   Sub-cent fees plus Coinbase’s distribution could trigger an “App Store moment” for on-chain social, gaming, and consumer-finance dApps.

4. Regulation Optics
   A public Ethereum-Coinbase handshake reassures U.S. policymakers but also makes Coinbase a “too-big-to-fail” crypto entity.

5. Actionable Takeaways

• Traders

  • Monitor ETH/BTC into the announcement; strength without BTC confirmation hints at real structural flows, not just hype.

  • Watch Base ecosystem tokens (e.g., native dApp tokens) for rotational set-ups—liquidity there is razor-thin and prone to face-melting spikes.

  Builders

  • If you’re deploying a consumer-facing dApp, delaying launch until after the initiative could buy you an order-of-magnitude fee discount—and marketing halo.

  • Bake smart-wallet logic in now; account abstraction will likely be part of the toolkit Coinbase pushes.

  Long-Game Investors

  • Re-evaluate ETH staking strategy: blended yields (priority + restake) could edge above so-called “risk-free” DeFi stablecoin vaults.

  • Consider whether Base can capture value without a token. If not, map the most probable derivative plays—equity in Coinbase, app tokens, or ETH itself.

Bottom Line

If this ETH × Base initiative lands as expected, Ethereum will be test-driving its late-2025 roadmap a full cycle early using Base as the proving ground. Crypto’s scoreboard will let us know quickly whether we nailed the thesis or need to pivot fast. Stay alert, keep those blobs close, and remember: the base layer of crypto’s next growth curve might literally be Base.

(Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Always DYOR—Do Your Own Research.)

The Real Yieldstacker Portfolio

🗂 Public Sneak Peek (1 of 6 Positions)

✅ ETH / USDC (Wide V3 Band) – targeting $2,303-$3,100 – ~65 % APR – Medium risk

🔄 Curious how we’re still earning triple-digit fees on ETH, what we’re doing while Cetus funds remain frozen, or how Moonwell continues to anchor the stack??

Chart of the Week: Global M2 Liquidity vs. Bitcoin Price

What the Picture Shows

• Global M2 (blue‐shaded area) — the combined money supply of the world’s 21 largest central banks — has resumed its climb, pushing through $90 T and setting fresh highs in 2025.

• Bitcoin (black line, log-scale on right axis) tracks that liquidity pulse with a lag: every major expansion in M2 (2013–17, 2020–21, and now 2024–25) has coincided with BTC’s biggest advances.

• The grey vertical band highlights “recent data” still being finalised; even so, the upward slope is clear, implying the liquidity faucet remains open despite rate-hike headlines.

Why It Matters for Crypto & DeFi

1. Macro Tail-Wind – More base money sloshing around the system historically lifts hard-capped assets first. If the M2 curve keeps trending up, BTC’s floor likely rises with it.

2. Risk-On Signal for Alts – As BTC digests fresh liquidity, the follow-on rotation usually hits ETH, L2s, and high-incentive DeFi vaults (our fee farms).

3. Stablecoin & TVL Growth – Global M2 expansions trickle into dollar money-markets, which seed new USDT/USDC issuance. Bigger stablecoin float means deeper liquidity for DEXes and higher fee potential for LPs.

4. Policy Read-Through – Central banks may be talking tough on inflation, but balance-sheet reality says the spigot isn’t shut. That disconnect is rocket fuel for the “digital scarcity” narrative.

Bottom line: Liquidity remains the master KPI for this market. Keep the M2 curve on your dashboard; if it pushes decisively above $95 T, history suggests BTC’s next leg – and the downstream alt-season – won’t be far behind.

Beginner Mistake to Avoid: Believing APR Is Cash-in-Hand

New to DeFi? A triple-digit APR can look like a risk-free lottery ticket. Reality check: the figure on the DEX screen is a marketing forward rate, not the paycheck your wallet will receive.

Why the Quoted APR Rarely Matches Your Take-Home

How a “300 % APR” Becomes 30 % (or Worse):

1. Reward token −60 % → 120 % APR.

2. TVL doubles → 60 % APR.

3. 5 % perf fee & gas → ≈ 30 % net.

4. Add IL or price slippage and you might even go negative.

Quick Due-Diligence Checklist (5-Minute Drill)

1. Payment Currency: Stable, blue-chip, or emissions?

2. Duration: Is the pool subsidy ending next week?

3. Liquidity Depth: Can you exit without nuking the price?

4. Contract Risk: Audits, bug bounties, insurance?

5. Historical APR: Scroll 30 days back—does the number crater?

✅ Pro Tip

Treat headline APR as theoretical max, then haircut it for price risk, IL, fees, and dilution. If the math still beats a risk-free 5 % T-bill, size the position; if not, rotate.

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