🧰 The (crypto) trader's toolbox

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: the SEC is suing Coinbase & Binance. Assets are being frozen. Here’s your step-by-step guide to surviving this mess.

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

First off, a word of congratulations. If you’re still here after:

• the collapse of $LUNA in May

• the collapse of FTX in November

• a -77% drawdown in the market

• the SEC suing crypto left and right…

… then you can pat yourself on the back 👋.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Sellers are getting exhausted.

Crypto markets have already recovered from one of the most important government agencies in the world coming after them:

And remember…

The game plan for the next six months is simple:

• continue accumulating BTC/ETH

• swing for the fences occasionally with a small % of portfolio

• don’t FOMO

• don’t panic sell

… and survive the regulatory attack of the SEC. Here’s how you do that:

1/ Learn to buy your crypto directly from decentralized exchanges (DEX).

We don’t think Coinbase or Binance are going anywhere. Coinbase’s Vault remains one of the safest places to store your crypto.

But there are alternatives to Coinbase or Binance that are fully decentralized. They cannot be shut down or their assets confiscated.

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange in the world. They allow you to trade almost any crypto pair and buy crypto directly with your credit card or a bank transfer.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to get started.

We’re still rooting for Coinbase and Binance, but if either ever gets shut down, you know where to go now.

2/ Store your long-term crypto holdings in a cold wallet

There’s crypto you might want to trade, and there’s crypto you want to hold onto.

For your long-term holdings, use a Ledger or a Trezor wallet. If you want to go all the way, you can back up your seed phrase using Cryptotag.

3/ Learn to use DeFi

DeFi (decentralized finance) is just an umbrella term for all things that banks do that we can also do in crypto.

For example, you can invest your crypto in liquidity pools that provide a yield, like the ones on Uniswap or Beefy Finance.

But you can also:

• Lend and borrow on Aave

• Stake in exchange for yield on Ethereum, Polygon and Solana with Lido

• Trade with leverage on GMX (mostly not recommended unless you’re a pro)

i.e. crypto allows you to earn, borrow, lend, stake, trade, hold and invest 100% on-chain, without the need for centralized exchanges.

Most of these DeFi apps require a web wallet and a little bit of Ethereum.

And that’s we’ll pay you to do today.

🍨 Dessert

Stories to read if you have FOMO

1/ SEC sues Coinbase

2/ Cathie Wood buys $21M of Coinbase stock despite lawsuit

3/ SEC files to freeze assets held by Binance and CZ (a story we explained yesterday)

📝 Task

Earn ETH for a simple crypto task

Ethereum is the center of Web 3 and DeFi - a new era of the Internet that allows you to own and monetize, not just read and publish.

And Metamask is the wallet that allows you to interact with the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

In the next few weeks, we’ll explore DeFi in more detail, but for today, your task is a simple Wallet Wednesday: get Metamask to explore Ethereum.

We’ll gradually start making the tasks more hands-on (e.g. borrowing, lending, etc.)

So stay tuned. We’ll announce the winner of today’s task in Friday’s email.

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