“It was a beautiful episode, I will never forget it” — it is appropriate to start with this classic to briefly summarize what happened in 2022 on the financial markets, in the global economy and politics. While, in fact, many people will never forget this year, it was beautiful only for a handful.

2022 will be remembered as a tumultuous year. The war on Ukraine, bursting bubbles in many sectors with crypto & tech at the forefront, the consequences of Covid lockdowns and money printing, or unrestored industrial dependencies. You can talk about it, but the topic has already been taken up many creators.

Referring to the quote with which this take was started — the year 2022 could turn out to be beautiful for all those who looked critically at the market euphoria built in recent years and were able to use this as an advantage. That’s the kind of community we’re trying to build around of the bigshortbet$ project — conscious, independent and decentralized. In the context of development also a lot has happened in the field of technology — developing the Market BETA, presentation and testing of $BETS, a mobile application with a proprietary hookup solution to TOR-net, clearnet version and numerous UX fixes. However, these are matters discussed at up to date on the bigshortbets YouTube channel in the Devs & Hodlers Meeting series and on the official one medium channel. I will rather focus on the informational and social aspect of the environment, which we try to build organically and with healthy commitment.

So let’s take a look at some of the best plays and threads the bigshortbets community has found and played in the market. I will not answer the question of how much you could earn, because it is a lot an individual matter — depending on capital, leverage and, above all, the size of the balls and patience. But it did work, and actually a lot.

Luna & UST

The bigshortbets’ community’s first big move. There were 2 approaches to shorts, both successful, the second ended as expected — collapse of the ecosystem, the LUNA token and the UST stablecoin.

Short on Luna is a topic widely discussed in the media by the bigshortbets community, Rafał Zaorski and many other foreign creators. There was also a lot of discussion in the domestic backyard (Poland) due to the high involvement of the Polish community in the Terra ecosystem. A lot of people sat down to the topic to study the Terra environment as good as possible to make sure that its algorithmic dependencies are not pathological and destructive. Not only an algorithmic nature, but a 20% yield offer implemented with Anchor Protocol defined Luna as a Ponzi scheme. Such an environment creates excellent conditions for a speculative attack, which has been used by many entities in the financial markets.

In the case of the LUNA token, we made two attempts to go short. The first was just after the start of the new year in the ~$65-$45 range, ended with support bounce. Closed profits — but that’s not what we were waiting for, the topic did not disappear, Do Kwon still had money to contribute to the system, and this was not unlimited. The second approach was to catch a new ATH peak in April 2022.

https://twitter.com/bigshortbets/status/1511657807367528450?s=20

As it turned out later — at the entrance, we managed to shoot the top. How long individual members of the community held their position is an individual matter, but there have been many phenomenal results. The whole situation was very funny because Do Kwon himself got involved in discussions where his overconfidence came out. In Polish crypto community, a broader discussion took place on Mike Satoshi’s channel, and the main representatives of the ecosystem in Poland also participated in the conversation — including Pan Paragraf and Kamil Jarząbek.

Waves & USDN

In the case of the $WAVES token and the related stablecoin USD Neutrino ($USDN), the matter was simple — a lot of similarities to $LUNA and a similar relationship — algorithmic.

$USDN, like $UST, maintained its $1 peg using the $WAVES token minting/locking mechanism. Currently (12/30/2022), $USDN is trading at $0.46. As in the case of Anchor Protocol, the yield offered was of great importance here among others by Curve Finance. The principle of operation was as follows:

Borrowing $USDC against stacked $USDN to buy and lock in more $WAVES to mine more $USDN creates an unsustainable Ponzi mechanism.

Positions opened around $50 per WAVES token. Its price at the end of 2022 is just above 1$.

https://twitter.com/bigshortbets/status/1510933997458804736?s=20

Tron & USDD and Solana

Our portfolio of successful predictions includes TRON, Justin Sun’s related $USDD stablecoin, and Solana, the ‘Ethereum killer’, a project with Sam Bankman-Fried as its top investor.

Tron & USDD

A project by Justin Sun who was helped by CZ and Binance to more centralize power over the network. I will not surprise anyone that the problem was algo-stablecoin, admittedly not the only one, but also in this case there were plenty of similarities to Luna. Just like Do Kwon, Justin Sun was adding to the system. The difference at the moment is that he did not miss it, but we do not take our eyes off Tron, a lot can still happen there.

You can read more about TRON and $USDD on Twitter bigshortbets news and the bigshortbets platform.

Solana

The project, which is labeled “turboshit” within bigshortbets community, is very strongly defended by others (the topic of religiousness in crypto has been discussed many times). Overall — Solana offers smart contracts, hence the beautiful marketing slogan forged at the end of the bubble — “ETH Killer”. There were many problems around this ecosystem, but the biggest one was regular network outages. There was even a meme that Solana works 5/24. At the time of its growth, Solana was the basis for many NFT projects and others using cheap and widely available money, such as $STEPN.

Crypto-lending & Polish scene

Most of the crypto lending industry is often pathology, run by people who have no idea about risk management. Most of the Polish crypto scene is also a pathology, where the sale of tokens actually went quite well, worse with the implementation of intentions and fulfillment of the RoadMap, but let’s get to it.

Celsius & 3AC & Voyager & BlockFi

As the entire system began to collapse with Luna, we reported disruptions in cash flow, reserves and encouraged quick payouts from centralized entities offering various DeFi products, loans and staking. The main reason this whole business was going to hell was because of the crazy, unrealistic returns for locking up your crypto and fiat funds. 10–20% was the norm in DeFi. It is a pity that so few people asked — where does the money for profit payments come from?

Ever since these problems started, the topic has been regularly tracked and updated. The information appearing on the bigshortbets platform and communication channels saved people from losing funds, and this is a big win. In the case of Celsius, we also warned about the subsequent exit liquidity that was forming around the #CelShortSqueeze movement.

When we wrote the tweet below, it was still possible to withdraw from Celsius — some people took advantage of it and saved their money.

https://twitter.com/bigsb_news/status/1532989280099835904?s=20

Polish scene

When it comes to topics discussed on our domestic scene, there were a lot of topics, because the bear market hardly spared anyone (almost (; ). These are not even all the threads raised by the bigshortbets community, but the main ones:

• Fanadise & Fancy Bears
• Ari10
• SubMe
• Synapse Network
• Tenset
• MetaHero
• Everdome
• Fame
• Satoshi Island

& More..

A representative example would be Bartek Sibiga and Jakub Chmielniak’s Fanadise and Fancy Bears, as the guys collected a lot and involved big names in promotions. Problems appeared on the first day after listing — there were problems with token claims and contract. A moments later, Jakub Chmielniak confirmed that vesting does not apply to early investors, although it should — and hence the declines. Then it was only worse, spending the collected funds, no development, no special purpose company to collect, in the end, probably an exit scam — we don’t know that, because the exploit has been unexplained for several months.

An extensive thread starting with entries from 07/30/2021 (1 day after listing):

https://twitter.com/bigsb_news/status/1518138626877632512?s=20

I will also mention the cult Krakow package, i.e. everything that came from the hand of Tenset and marketing by Robert Gryn. Cashgrab tokenomics, project abandonment, typical pump & dump. Everything except FAME seems to have no working business models. The FAME federation has a product and they have the potential to tokenize the business, but putting it in the hands of Tenset turned out to be a mistake — a sharp call, but what is surprising as the capitalization at the listing price was as much as the market cap of mBank.

USD/JPY

We’ve been talking about Jena since the beginning of the year, but it was hard to say exactly what the BOJ and the FED would do — if so. After a significant weakening in March-May, potential interventions were sought, but those carried out internally by the Bank of Japan were ineffective, and the US did not react. And so the following months flew by without intervention with the weakening yen. We were looking for $150 levels on USD/JPY, we were also taking profits there, and as it turned out, the market didn’t want more.

PS — SAXO sees USD/JPY for 200 in 2023 and frozen rates in its predictions.

EGP/USD & commodities

2022 was a very “interesting” year for Egypt and the African region (+Middle East). As for Egypt itself and their Egyptian pound, there were plenty of factors causing currency devaluations. It is worth starting with the crisis that also affected Africa. Due to droughts and the war in Ukraine, Egypt had problems with food supplies — there was a lot of scheming, wheat could be played here, which we also wrote about. The issue of vegetable oils was also important when it turned out that Indonesia was blocking exports. In addition to the internal crisis, which primarily affects ordinary citizens, the local authorities are working on a large bill leading to the denationalization of 2/3 of the state’s assets. Such a policy in the long term may bring a lot of good, given the likely increase in investments, especially in the energy sector, such as the recently announced tender for drilling wells for fuels or the construction of a nuclear power plant. Currently, however, this is not enough to combat the weaknesses of the pound. The authorities are trying to react to the situation and have devalued the EGP twice, but this has not improved the economic situation as a result. Nevertheless, it is a paradise for speculators who could easily predict the EGP/USD dump.

What now? What’s next?

Above, I have not mentioned many other threads — wheat, corn, palm oil, or soybean oil. Nor did I mention the BRICS and OPEC+ or oil or real estate.

As I wrote at the beginning, many things have been omitted, because it would be really hard to collect the activities of the year in one article. In our everyday environment, there is a lot of talk about BRICS, dedollarization, the situation with fuels — because we try to go beyond information bubbles. It is very important to understand the basis of the interests of our “opponents”, not to be offended by reality and to look for opportunities.

The development of the “Eastern Bloc” is fascinating, because they pursue a completely opposite policy to the Western world on many issues. At this level, there will be situations in which the East will dictate the conditions in important sectors. An example is OPEC+. Currently, the US has almost no influence on the supply of oil — Biden went to Saudi Arabia to beg for oil and how did it end up?

Non-ferrous metals (aluminium, copper, zinc, nickel)

This theme is one of our favorites at bigshortbets right now. The situation in the energy sector causing the lack of profitability, high stock levels due to covid financing and limiting industrial production along with limiting construction meant that a whole lot of all sorts of steelworks and entities processing non-ferrous metals simply turned off their furnaces and closed. It is worth noting, however, that this is a European and American solution.

Indeed, at the moment there is no such demand for raw materials of this type, but it must be remembered that these are important, fundamental issues for the industry, and restarting the kiln in the future involves a lot of problems along the way. First you have to re-hire people and then start production. This is where we expect return of demand for non-ferrous metals and limited supply. The market is already starting to price it in, as evidenced by additional bonuses for contracts for 2023.

So we are looking for lows on non-ferrous metals (or maybe they are already behind us?). You can find more about this on the bigshortbets platform, below are the charts for aluminum and copper.

Crypto & tech

I push this thread a bit by force, because I don’t necessarily want to judge what will happen in this sector, but your interest makes me look at it. Certainly, there are no factors that could bring about any sudden increases. At the moment, money is more expensive, which is not conducive to the development of the industry based on external financing. The same applies to trust in the market — it is lacking for now and will be lacking for some time. The market also needs to verify what is worth investing in and what is just a shell (an analogy to the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century).

We discussed more about the vision of the markets in 2023 in one of our live programs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzFdvwR8PKI

Summary

It was a year of high volatility, giving many opportunities, but also risks — for many it was a very good or very bad year. The bigshortbets community has shown that they can think independently and critically, a lot of content and theses have been created, which over time turned out to be correct, some of the results were impressive. We played a lot of cool trades, which we will certainly remember for years, if not for the whole life (see: Luna). We are entering 2023 with optimism, because there will still be a lot going on — the stock exchange has been through a lot in the past year, the economy will only feel it in 2023. See you in the new year!