Telegram Hunter 🏹
The Signal
Hello anons 🐸
We picked up a few more subscribers last week thanks to the some shout outs from the Fantom Community around my piece, Fantom Powered, and my interview with MultiFarm. Whether you have been here with us for awhile now or just joining glad to have you and always open to any feedback you might have if you want to DM me on Twitter.
We saw further gains in the Total Crypto Marketcap this week thanks primarily to the announcement of the first Bitcoin ETF.
Many consider this a real turning point to mainstream crypto adoption and it sent values of BTC/ETH (and many others) to at or near their previous ATH’s seen before the May crash.
There is another side to this announcement in that it now opens up massive BTC arbitrage opportunities for hedge funds and brings in new intermediaries who can profit from the opportunity. The news is still net bullish in my humble opinion but the new dimension it opens for additional players to enter the arena cannot be underestimated … hedge accordingly.
Since we’re on the topic of potential manipulation of markets by power players I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent Ribbon Finance ($RBN) airdrop and all the controversy that arose from it. It’s kind of a long story and if you are really interested in learning all the details you can take a look at this article.
The TL:DR of the situation is that well connected and influential VC’s are major players in the crypto space and, at times, manipulate systems for their own gain. This lesson tells us that for all our hopes of fair and equitable networks of value creation we’re still a long way from realizing those dreams.
I really enjoyed Darren Lau’s perspective on how VC’s can be a force for good and what qualities to look for as new projects assess their options for partnerships.
When you are considering new stage projects I would highly recommend taking a look at how they are funded and what VC’s (if any) are already in the mix. It’s always good to know how the VC’s are participating with new projects and what share of the network tokens they hold prior to them being available for the rest of us.
… and then there are those special projects that do not take on any VC support you can watch for as well.
Enough news and updates … now let’s take a look at the main event.
One of my favorite parts of crypto is the hunt for sources of alpha that can help find new and emerging projects with upside potential. I shared a bit on this topic in my interview with MultiFarm and thought I would expand a bit here for this audience, specifically for Telegram.
For some background, Telegram was founded by Nikolai and Pavel Durov in in 2013. The two originally founded the Russian Social Networking site VK but left in 2014 after it was taken over by President Putin's allies. The story of Pavel Durov and Telegram is very interesting and it’s story is one full of intrigue like you would expect in a spy thriller.
Telegram has over 1 billion downloads as of August, 2021. The app has become a worldwide phenomenon for connecting people all across the globe. At it’s core it is a very slick messaging tool that claims a focus on privacy and security of it’s users. Wikipedia describes it as:
“a cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging (IM) system. The service also provides end-to-end encrypted video calling,[14] VoIP, file sharing and several other features.”
I have a couple articles linked below with some additional background on Telegram if you are interested to learn more about the platform.
Below is how I use Telegram as a tool for tracking down news, alerts and alpha. This is what has worked for well me, hope you find it useful as well, anon.
Telegram Hunter 🏹
Hunting for fresh alpha is probably my favorite part of the whole crypto experience. I have always enjoyed learning new things and nowhere will help to reward you for that like crypto.
I have found a few approaches that help me optimize for the time I have (not much) but still keep me well informed of what's happening and what I should be paying attention to.
Telegram is a key source of information for me but I have heard recently from a few friends some challenges they have experienced with the platform including scam groups, data overload and/or lack of credible information.
All of this made me think it might be a good to touch on my process and some of the tools/channels I use in case helpful for anyone else.
Getting Organized 📚
To begin let's make sure telegram is even setup in a way you can filter data and prioritize action. I use these four basic groupings or “folders” as Telegram refers to them for organizing the channels and bots I subscribe to.
Alerts 🚨
Communities 🤝
News 📰
Projects 👾
You can click on the three lines in the top left in either desktop or mobile version then select Settings → Folders and you will be able to customize different folder names and order they appear in the app.
I find sorting this way makes it much easier for me to navigate and set specific notification levels for each grouping (I mute news and groups, for instance, as they can get noisy). Keep in mind in addition to these groups you will also have a default called “All Chats” along with “Archive” which we will look at a bit below.
You might have some different ideas on how best to organize and that’s cool anon just don’t let them all go into a single folder, my OCD can’t handle it.
Now that you are all setup let’s take a look at some of the channels and tools I recommend for each of these categories…
Alerts 🚨
Alerts can get really noisy and waste a lot of your time. I only have a few channels I put in this category and use them quite regularly to track current/potential portfolio picks, overall market conditions, and alpha updates from a few choice sources.
EtherDrops 💧
EtherDrops is a Telegram bot that has been around since 2018. It was created by 0xCheck who published a pretty comprehensive article on how to use and configure it that you can find here.
EtherDrops allows for monitoring all kinds of things across Ethereum, Polygon and BSC including wallet transactions, DEX and CEX swaps, liquidity pools, gas price and more. I started to play around with it’s functionality and that is what led me to another product the team has in development called DropsAnalytics.
DropsAnalytics 📈
DropsAnalytics provides alerts on all kinds of things available from the EtherDrops interface but it is monitoring whole market conditions automatically versus you having to customize and set alerts (which can take quite a bit of time and management to keep up with). There is all kinds of interesting functionality I am seeing them build including alerts of Twitter Followers by key CT influencers, Fear/Greed Index alerts, and top 24H winners/losers to just name a few.
I have been watching their English Community Telegram channel and the team is actively taking feedback and building better functionality into the product. My hope is that you can start to customize some of the kinds of alerts coming out of DropsAnalytics in the same way you can with EtherDrops.
DeFi Airdrops 🎈
This account is maintained by CryptoTesters, a group dedicated to building better understanding of the crypto space and on boarding more users.
The team does a great job of letting folks know about credible airdrop opportunities and they also have a Twitter account that publishes the same info if you would rather follow their updates from there.
Communities 🤝
Communities are most helpful for participating in conversations, asking questions or understanding general sentiment towards a particular project or topic.
Both of the communities below are pretty well established and host to all kinds of great discussion around crypto. If you are looking for some places to hop in and engage in this kind of conversation I recommend checking them out.
Ceazor's Snack Sandwichery Chat
I only follow a couple on Telegram as most of this kind of activity I prefer to engage with on Discord either in communities like Ethropy or MultiFarm. I also find that it’s hard to keep up with multiple community channels so might as well pick a few and just dig in.
News 📰
Just the facts, anon.
As all of you know the cycle of news and updates in the crypto space is relentless. I consume most of my news from Telegram via the channels below. I find them really helpful and something that I try to make a little time each day to stay current on.
The Daily Ape 🦧
If you are not reading Darren Lau's Daily Ape regularly then you are probably NGMI.
Darren is well known in the DeFi space and has some great perspectives (like the VC post I have above) on all sorts of topics. In addition to checking out his Daily Ape I would recommend you follow him on Twitter for everything from thought provoking content to dank memes.
The Daily Ape is regarded by many as the single best free source of news and updates from the DeFi space and regularly includes fresh alpha for those paying attention. I use the Telegram channel to keep up (obviously) but he also has a newsletter and then a Notion Site where all kinds of info from his updates is kept for future reference.
ShualAlpha 🐸
Shual is part of the County Capital (CC) group … this is his Telegram Update Channel.
The updates are usually published weekly and include all kinds of news, Twitter storms and a very special “alpha” section that would be sovereign individuals should definitely be paying attention to.
Briefly Crypto
A very popular option with almost 9K current subscribers. This news aggregator does a great job of grabbing all the stories out there that are relevant.
DeFi Prime
A great source of DeFi news from the same folks that bring you the Defi Prime site.
Projects 👾
Gonna disappoint you here at the end anon.
I actually don't have any project channels to recommend and here's why … projects that have only a Telegram are usually a huge red flag to me as really any credible project these days has a Discord and uses that as it's primary communication platform. Now there's some alpha you probably were not expecting.
Sometimes you can find that rare gem of a project that uses Telegram for it's primary source of communication but that shouldn't last too long if the project takes off. My advice is to tread cautiously anytime you find a new project that only has a Telegram and make sure you see admins being responsive and participating in the conversation with users.
With that being said … There are a few choice project specific Telegram announcement channels I follow (Curve and Convex here's looking at you) and I do think using Telegram for those kinds of updates is helpful.
Another week closer to making it … see you next time anons.
-Sov