when you're hodling, there's nothing that can liquidate you.
when you're using a defi protocol, you capture all the upside for the risk you're taking.
when you're using a cefi "bank", the bank keeps some of the spread when they're up, and goes insolvent when they're down. heads they win tails you lose.
gbtc is like a bond that eventually pays out as btc when regulatory approval comes.
steth is like a bond that eventually pays out as eth a few months post-merge.
but in the aftermath of the luna/ust crisis and general crypto bear, there was a flight to safety (gbtc is less liquid than btc, steth is less liquid than eth), causing the gbtc/btc and steth/eth spreads to widen instead of narrow, and 3ac was caught out of position.
tldr: they probably profited some from short btc but lost more on long gbtc.
i think what they're trying to say is that these firms just look like traditional trading firms, not like defi. opaque backroom billion dollar handshakes go wrong, contagion spreads, ltcm/2008 style.
main difference- there's no government bailout coming.
different tokens have different purposes, but you could describe vc investing as maximizing speculative windfalls, and that's how many traders view their tokens.
i can't speak to your friends' behavior, but you can buy tokens and do well without putting money behind the do kwons of the world.
coinbase's nft marketplace has <0.01% of the marketshare. they launched without using their key advantage- custodial relationship with the customer. coinbase nft should have been a custodial marketplace. this is definitely on someone in product, though it's unclear whether it's on surojit.
there's no widely adopted index fund in the crypto world. to get exposure to a variety of ideas, one inevitably buys some that don't work and yes, some where the project runners commit fraud.
we will find out if the crowd looking for trusted/curated/permissioned collectibles and experiences looking for nfts or if the decentralization critical