"Time is money" is an old adage. But sometimes time wasted could mean money saved. Ok, it sounds weird I know! So let me tell you exactly what happened.
For last 2-3 days, I was trying to invest in a new Crypto project on Uniswap.
I haven't heard much about this project. But that's where the chances for making maximum gains lie. If everyone knows about a project then you won't get the advantage of moving early into it. What has already become mainstream has got little chance for multiplying your money ...multiplying with a higher coefficient So I was on a look out for a new project that wasn't very well known.
Finding projects like this is more like finding new quality posts for maximizing your curation rewards. You need to vote it up earlier than others to get a higher curation reward.
But there is a catch. If you find it too early and instantly upvote it within 5 minutes of publishing then you run the risk of incurring curation penalty. Same principle is applicable when you make investment for profits.
So this thing, I was looking for was called Unifi. Now when I go to Uniswap, I see multiple tokens listed by this name. There were several liquidity pools, liquidity for which was completely withdrawn within a few days. This fact will raise anybody's suspicion.
When I started to research further, I found several projects using the name Unifi. All of them were talking about their project, using the same common buzzwords surrounding DeFi space - decentralized financing, borrowing and lending, trading & analytics, cross blockchain compatibility, scalability etc.
Two of these projects were talking about saving on transaction charges among and within blockchains using some Nitrous layer. High transaction fee is currently a hot issue in DeFi applications based on Ethereum network. So any project claiming to solve this probloem will obviously get a lot of attention and boost. However, it's another thing to actually solve the issue. If it were that simple then Ethereum Network itself could have done that. Many second layer solutions are already trying to address that problem. But if some new project claims to find and implement this in a short period, it makes me skeptical of it.
I checked BlockFolio and found 2-3 projects listed with the ticker UNIFI. CoinGecko had also listed some tickers like UNIFI, Unify, Unifier etc.All of these are different than those listed in Blockfolio. Yet the one I was interacting with ain't listed anywhere and are still trying to list at both these places.
These projects have very legit looking websites like UnifiDefi, UnifiProtocol, UnifiHub with detailed white papers, following of few thousands on their Twitter handle and Telegram channels. Surprisingly, all these projects are hardly a month old (except that Seasame SEED's UP Unifi bridge).
I interacted with them, attended AMA session of one. Everyone says theirs is the legit one and all others are scam. (Hmmm, I better understand that!)
After interactions, what was apparent to me was that everyone is talking about solving several problems but are seems to be working on only a few viable products (which are probably being used as some anchor to raise the hype). Projects showing sneak preview or mock designs of their websites with no sign of its launch even 10 days later amuses me. They keep playing those old games like soon announcing big partnerships, Exchange listings, token staking with a great APR etc. etc.
E.g. UnifiDefi team says to launch their "extremely user-friendly" staking portal in September. They says they will announce some partnership tomorrow, have locked up most of their liquidity in Uniswap etc. I don't doubt anyone of that. They can (and will) do that. But all these ain't going to help anything. What about the big problems they claim to address through their project? They are not talking much about their work for Nitrous protocol which is gonna make transactions gas-free. But will talk more about their community, mass crypto adoption, favourable tokenomics, staking, decentralized governance, increasing no. of investors, high trade volume, profit potential blah,blah,blah!
I think these projects are actually teaching me to how to easily market a new crypto project by promising moon (in future) but delivering some peanuts (now). Yeah, I believe their strategy will work. I saw their coin doing 3x (from $0.07 to $0.20) in last week. But I'm not going to put my money in these.
DefiHub went to over $4 today. All result of some hype around Unifi. But many people are confused as of which Unifi 😀. So some money is flowing in all Unifi projects. Thus "Unifi" has become "multifli" ...lol.
May be, one of these is a genuinely promising project. But I don't have time to figure out which one. I've already wasted my 3 days on UniFi projects.
Conclusion: Time wasted but money saved!