Hello, SPIer's. I have been looking to do an EMP update post for the past month as i know a few were interested to follow our progress with that. Now I have the time but I dont wanna write the update because the past 2 weeks have been bad times for EMP. It's not nice having to do updates with bad news but hey, we're all crypto investors and we understand the smooth comes with the rough. If I were to only report good news and paint a pretty picture for ya'll, I'd feel dirty. Remember, SPI from day 1 has always been transparent and to this day is the most transparent fund token on HIVE. The proof is our weekly reports, all 170+ of them.
Anyways, before we get started and while im talking about giving our bad news. LISTNERDS is away to hell, I've cancelled our subscription and I'll do a post about this on another day in the near future because it'll be the last post about LISTNERDS.
Back to EMP and the update. I've spent a few minutes searching through old posts to find the last update to see what's actually happened since then. Ok, I see the title was "Earning $100+ per day | EMP Update" which we are not anymore, our EMP/ETH LP was worth exactly 10 ETH as EMP was on peg and we held 1 ESHARE.
Today EMP's peg is sitting on 0.76 which is the lowest I've ever seen it. It's decline from close the peg to 0.85 was fast but it's further decline to 0.76 has been slower which for me is alot scarier. A whale can dump a bunch and peg could drop 10% easy but watching it slowly drop 10% over a week is not a whale and most likely people cashing out LP tokens because they see the peg crashing.
Before I show what we are holding now, I need to point out that when im dealing with EMP, im thinking in my head about ETH. We invest ETH and we wanna yield ETH, the dollar amount is not important for another few years. So ETH is #1 here.
This is a current EMP/ETH holding shown using debank. On the actual EMP site, it's shows our holdings as $14,700 which is roughly a 0.3 ETH difference. I would tend to believe the actual EMP siteweb but there's a 0.1 ETH discrepancy. The bottom number in a dark box shows the amount of LP tokens we have staked and there value.
Either way, we'll use the debank number as its worst case and we can say our LP tokens are currently worth 8.74 ETH.
I bought 2 more ESHARE's ages ago for under $400 each, they went to $850 last time EMP was on peg and are now down massively since it lost peg again, down to $319 at the time of writing, ouch 🙈
I also added 3 nodes as they are 100% passive and I like passive. They cost 500 EMP each. I dont count them as assets because we never invested 500 EMP into each node, we kinda paid for an EMP income for 500 EMP that will pay out 400% over the course of 2-3 years. I consider this money spent and gone.
Lastly, we have EMP/ETH LP staked to an auto farm as well. It's been staked from day 1 and to be honest, i've completely forgot about it. I mean i still update the price every week on the report but i've not logged into the autofarm for a while. It's looking to be about the only thing, we're winning on at the minute.
Before we look into the numbers, let me give a short rundown on my approach to EMP and the gameplan I have been playing from the beginning. So in the beginning, I converted ETH to EMP/ETH LP and staked some to the EMP farm and a small amount to the auto farm that compounds. We earn ESHARE from the farm on EMP that I mostly convert to BUSD. Over the course of the past 3-4 months, i have added 3 full ESHARES to the boardroom. The boardroom pays out EMP when EMP is over peg in the simplest terms. I use any EMP earned from the boardroom to buy nodes. Nodes pay out EMP and we use that EMP to buy more nodes. We invested into the farm only and the rest has been seeded from farm harvests. We dont sell EMP and when we do cash out, we sell ESHARE which is ok and not frowned upon.
Let's see where we are at.
I dont have this worked out yet so we're doing this together. I will not be able to account for everything that I've used BUSD for without digging down many rabbit holes but I remember the big things. I converted some into HIVE to test an exchange/bridge but i cant remember the amount.
We started EMP with 10 ETH so this is our break-even number, let's look and see if we are winning or losing overall.
EMP/ETH LP = 8.74 ETH
EMP/ETH Auto = 2.28 ETH
ESHARES = $956 (0.57 ETH)
BUSD (holding) = $2625 (1.57 ETH)
We are still winning, our sellable EMP assets/gains total 13.16 ETH to give a 31.6% ROI. I have spent some BUSD so we will now factor that in.
$900 (0.53 ETH) = SPI Royalty Rewards packs
$610 (0.36 ETH) = 200 INCOME tokens
Now the total is 14.05 ETH representing a 40.5% ROI if we were to cash everything out today. This is good news because we are not losing yet.
Im happy with this, i knew EMP is way off peg and had the worst in mind.
What about going forward?
I still have hope in EMP as it has a very strong and committed community but that not guarantee success. At the end of the day, people only have so much money and with a platform like EMP that is set up to be gamified, most people only make 1 big deposit and they compound and reinvest. It's not the sort of thing, you DCA into.
People are being squeezed for money with high inflation rates, they are saving less and maybe even crawling into debt. The crypto market is bear, this ETH merge thing will come and go and we'll continue on the road we are already on, the bottom in my POV is not in yet.
Going forward, i would like to stay in EMP but i have to draw a line so i'll draw 2 lines.
1/ If EMPs peg drops to under 0.70, i'll sell everything and convert the lot to BUSD and wait for the ETH to drop under $1000 and rebuy back in for close to 20 ETH fingers crossed.
2/ If ETH pumps to $2000, I'll sell everything and hold the BUSD until ETH drops to under $1000.
I believe the bottom is not in yet and ETH dipped below $1000 before this recent pump so I believe it'll go there and much further over the next 12-24 months. I think ETH could bottom at $600 but im confident it'll drop to under $1000 again before it takes off again to $5000+. Not hating on the merge thing but it's just another overhyped event, people only care about transaction speeds and transaction fees and from what I read this solves neither. Progress is progress which is good but the markets tend to overreact. What's the old saying? The news is better than the event.
(PS, i love Vitalik)
What I think is happening to EMP?
Just my 2 cents but im starting to think that EMP has hit its apex, I hope I am wrong as it's a great money maker, even at 25% off peg, we're still up over 35% and earning roughly $200 a week.
I think that alot of people invested in this when it first launched and its growing TVL numbers are mostly made up of funds being reinvested into the platform. The same people that invested early will have made returns of more than 5-10x in terms of ETH and they are starting to cash some or more out. Think about it, rich people are not investing their ETH in EMP, I mean proper rich people. EMP is for plebs like you and me. When you grow a $1000 investment which is maybe 20% of your crypto holdings and it's now worth $10,000 after 7-8 months of compounding, you are more likely to pause compounding if the bills are growing and getting harder to pay off. EMP launched when we were in a bull market and the flippening is taking place with other people remembering 2018 and watching their portfolios drop 90% and the opportunites in 2019's crypto winter. And then lastly, investors are watching the peg get destroyed so more people are exiting.
I hope it starts to recover but we have to draw a line in the sand and mark an exit. As it stands, if the peg losses another 0.05, we're out. My personal investment into EMP might be different but that's my money and I'll lose it how i like. I have to be a little more reserved with SPI funds, haha.
That's pretty much all i think about saying today. The next EMP update will either be "We're Out" or "EMP regained peg"
All in all, not great but we're still up so not bad either. Thanks for taking the time and have a great rest of your day/night.
