The law of diminishing returns erodes everything in nature including crypto.

If you were around for the 2011-13 cycle, you either participated in or were privy to the chosen few with access to disparate global BTC markets, leveraging 20-50% arbitrages on every trade. Moving BTC from Latvia to Nigeria wasn't as easy as it is today; you needed to be in-the-know with the ability to physically move between territories in a timely fashion. Only a few made multimillions, but those that did got stupid rich.

Those holes got closed during the Ethereum ICO period. There were no more easy arbitrages on simple BTC trades, but there was plenty of money to be made on altcoin raises. Put your money into the right ICO and you could score a 1000x in no time, day after day after day (assuming you missed all the scams).

Those holes got closed. The next gold rush was defi summer. You clowns today dealing with these V3 scams should've been around for those six-digit three-day APRs, sometimes longer. Shit like Iron Finance went on for weeks; OHM for months. Cash on cash on cash.

You'll be lucky today to get a stable three-digit APR for a week on a complete shitcoin nowadays (I've seen the best on Aerodrome and Extrafi if you want to play that game). The game now is Solana memecoins, but those returns don't match defi summer in amplitude or frequency. Not even close. You actually have to be good at picking these memecoins in 2024. You didn't need to be good in defi summer. Spray and pray won the day.

With each bull market iteration, returns became more difficult to achieve. You can expect that trend to continue post-2024 as regulators take their piece (due to the absolute faggitry of crypto) and gatekeepers purposefully close the doors behind them (wealth is only wealth in comparison to others; they must keep you "poor" to be by definition "rich").

So how do you make money in crypto post-2024, post-Solana, post-regulation, post-being early?

Sophistication wins the day now as crypto markets begin to mirror high-volatility securities. You don't make money in Tesla by guessing the direction of swings. You make money by knowing there will be swings and creating delta neutral trades to capture volatility.

Same with shit like Maker, Aave, Pendle or any other halfway established top 200 crypto.

The tooling for this type of trading is being built as we speak. This is the shit I've been hiding from you in previous articles about Monad. It's revelation time!

You heard it here first. Hedgemony is taking full advantage of Monad's bottom up EVM rebuild to create a Saiyan level aggregator that aggregates not only trade routes, but multistep, multiplatform defi routes into a one-click, single UI process.

Suppose you want to trade out of 8 memecoins on 4 different chains that you fucked around and bought when the bull was on. Imagine being able to nuke that trade back to USDC in one transaction, faster than anyone else in the market. Yep, that's where we're going on Monad.

We'll talk more about that individual project later. It's more important to understand where the market is going holistically.

Holistically, those 100x memecoin plays and quick hacks to millions are leaving crypto after 2024. Regulation and dilution happen in every industry. Crypto is no exception. We see Solana slowing down already — it's 95% scams, 4.5% duds and 0.5% profit opportunities. And you better have 0.01% timing within that 0.5% to come out on top.

You can play that game or get ahead of where we know defi is going — into a more sophisticated future. You need to be able to daisychain the basics and move into positions quickly to keep making money. Make sure you follow Hedgemony — not only is it a great project to use, but they have yet to drop a token. You may be able to get in on the actual sale and get a piece of Monad through it.

✴️ Follow me on Twitter ❗️This project may save the 2024 cycle.