I've been building something I like to call personal onchain companies. You could call them investment portfolios. Fair enough. 🏗️ But I enjoy going a little further – designing financial structures with their own reserves, productive assets and cash-flow engines. One of them, YieldRing.eth, just turned three months old. Remember YieldRing.eth? :) That’s the very onchain company I placed inside a Tangem Ring! I’ve attached the original post below, where I shared the story of how it all started. And I thought I'd show you what's happening inside. 👀 • Current value: $4,083 • Three-month performance shown by my tracker: +31.79% About 65% of the capital is held in Bitcoin. That's the foundation, my long-term reserve. The rest is where things get interesting. I deliberately built this particular company around three productive assets: • FRAX – veFRAX @fraxfinance Locked for the maximum four-year period. Currently showing up to ~4.94% APR, with rewards distributed in WFRAX through the Frax ecosystem. • CVX — vlCVX @ConvexFinance Locked on Convex, with voting power delegated through @VotiumProtocol. The latest voting round showed ~13% APR in incentives. I also use The Union to receive those rewards in scrvUSD, a yield-bearing stablecoin that itself earns from crvUSD borrowing activity. I particularly like this arrangement. One source of rewards can become productive capital in another mechanism. • AERO – sAERO @aeroxyz Perpetually staked for maximum allocation power. Currently allocated to a USDC/tokenized Strategy stock pool on Base, showing ~9.8% APR. Trading fees, incentives, tokenized equities… I'm still exploring the new Predictive Allocation system, and it's becoming one of my favorite parts of DeFi 🏄‍♂️ Now, put these three positions together. At the rates shown today, the productive capital has a rough weighted APR of around 10%, excluding the Bitcoin reserve. These are snapshots from different reward mechanisms, not a measured annual return. Rates fluctuate, and some rewards need claiming or reinvesting. And the portfolio's 31.79% growth is a separate story – market performance is not the same thing as cash flow. What I enjoy most is how little daily attention this structure needs. The locks, staking and allocations keep working. I check in occasionally, claim rewards, renew CVX locks when needed, or adjust an Aero allocation if I see a better opportunity. ☝🏻 No constant trading. No staring at charts all day. And this is just one possible combination. Across The Holding @theholding_ , I experiment with many other assets and strategies. I don't think everyone should build a portfolio this way. It's simply one design I'm testing in public 🤝🏻 Even if these engines average only 8–10% over time, I'd find that interesting. Especially alongside assets I believe have long-term appreciation potential. Of course, token prices can fall, yields can shrink, and long locks carry risks. But I love the idea of capital gradually becoming a productive financial structure rather than just a collection of coins waiting for prices to rise. I genuinely love DeFi ❤️ It's like building entire financial structures out of LEGO bricks, mixing strategies and ideas from different teams. And I love X for this too!)) One post can bring together builders from different protocols, and your ideas can travel around the world, reaching people you've never met. Sharing my financial creativity, experiments and excitement with you is something I truly enjoy! I'll keep tracking YieldRing.eth and sharing what actually happens. Three months is only the first chapter.

The stream is live. 🎮 Not video games. Something much more interesting to me. With sAERO, I’m directing streams of AERO emissions to liquidity providers in the markets I choose. And as traders do their thing, trading fees start streaming back to my sAERO position. 🌍 Tokenized stocks, ETH, stablecoins… I choose the markets, and the cash flows follow their activity. No Twitch. No webcam. Just me, my wallet, and financial streaming business. 😎 Thanks @aeroxyz for this epic onchain playground!

Bought more Yield Basis (YB) today. Yes, that chart looks painful :) Down roughly 95% from its peak. But I'm not buying a chart. I keep accumulating DeFi assets I consider fundamentally valuable, using DCA instead of trying to guess the bottom. A falling price alone means nothing. What matters is what's happening under the hood. Yield Basis continues developing its BTC and ETH liquidity infrastructure, improving trading efficiency and the economics of its pools. I also voted on the latest governance proposals. That's another beautiful part of DeFi: you can participate in shaping the protocols you invest in. My plan is to lock the YB I accumulate for the maximum term, potentially permanently, and participate in its future cash flows. This is exactly what 🟩 Defitea Yield Fund is about: building a long-term collection of productive DeFi assets. And Defitea is just one layer of ⬜️ The Holding @theholding_ , alongside our BTC, ETH and precious metals foundation, stablecoin strategies and other capital engines. Some of these assets may eventually experience a major revaluation. Others may not. I'd rather study, accumulate and build during quiet markets than discover these opportunities only when everyone is euphoric. One purchase at a time. One more piece of the capital architecture.

📖 I'm reading Modern Monopolies by Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson. A book about the business models behind Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook and other major platforms. And it made me look at Aero @aeroxyz from a completely different angle. 👀 Think about Uber. It doesn't need to own millions of cars. Amazon Marketplace doesn't need to manufacture everything being sold. The power of a platform is in connecting people, businesses and economic activity. The more useful the platform becomes, the more participants it attracts. And those participants make it even more useful. Now look at what's happening with Aero. Aerodrome started as the liquidity hub of Base. A successful DEX, but largely tied to one ecosystem. Then came the strategic leap. Aerodrome and Velodrome became Aero, expanding into seven networks, including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain. I see something much bigger here than simply another multichain DEX. Imagine thousands of businesses bringing their assets onchain. Tokenized stocks, bonds, gold, currencies, funds, real estate. Stablecoins everywhere. Bitcoin, ETH, onchain forex, maybe eventually entire virtual economies. Every new blockchain develops its own markets, users and financial activity. And all these markets need liquidity. That's where Aero's platform model gets interesting. Issuers need liquid markets for their assets. LPs want to earn by providing capital. Traders want good prices and low slippage. sAERO holders direct incentives toward markets they believe deserve liquidity, potentially earning trading fees in return. Aero brings these interests together. And here's the part I find especially powerful. Aero doesn't need to create every tokenized asset, build every blockchain or launch every financial business. It can benefit from their growth by becoming part of the infrastructure connecting their markets. Robinhood expands tokenized stocks? More potential markets. Ethereum grows? More potential activity. Stablecoins and onchain forex explode? More possible trading flows. Another wave of tokenization arrives? Another opportunity. One platform, potentially benefiting from many different financial revolutions. Of course, none of this happens automatically. Liquidity must attract real demand, competition is fierce, and network effects take years to build. But that's exactly what fascinated me in the book. The most powerful platforms don't simply grow by adding more products. They become more valuable as more participants find reasons to use them. For years I viewed Aerodrome as a productive DeFi protocol generating cash flow. Now I'm watching something else: whether Aero can become a platform where the growth of many different onchain economies reinforces the growth of one shared liquidity network. That's a much bigger ambition than running a DEX on one chain. And a very interesting business model to study over the next decade.

I can spend an hour looking at DeFi pools offering 8%, 10%, 12% APR and genuinely enjoy it. Not because 10% is going to make me rich overnight. 😁 It's the feeling of knowing what I'm doing. Understanding where capital can work, why it earns money, and how to manage it. And after years of investing, I've come to see two fundamental skills that I believe matter enormously. The first is knowing what to accumulate before the market truly revalues it. Bitcoin, Ethereum, productive DeFi protocols, promising onchain infrastructure – assets you believe could become much more valuable as adoption, capital and real economic activity grow. I particularly like DCA here. Nobody knows exactly where the bottom is, and I'm perfectly happy building positions gradually over years rather than pretending I can predict every market turn. The real opportunity isn't necessarily earning another 2% APR. It's owning something before its fundamental value becomes widely recognized. A successful investment might appreciate several times over. Sometimes much more. And speculative enthusiasm can eventually push valuations even further, although those excesses can disappear just as quickly. Of course, plenty of assets will never get that revaluation. That's why understanding what you own matters so much. The second skill? Learning to generate cash flow from capital you already have. And this is where DeFi becomes fascinating to me. Lending, liquidity provision, protocol revenue, voting incentives, capital allocation… Learning to earn 5%, 10%, perhaps 15% annually, while understanding exactly where that income comes from and what risks you're taking. Practice with $10-$100-$1,000-$10,000. Learn the mechanics. Make mistakes while they're still relatively inexpensive. Develop judgment. Because imagine your capital eventually growing to $1 million. You don't suddenly want to start learning how to manage it! A 10% yield on $10,000 is $1,000 a year. On $1 million, it's $100,000. Same percentage. Completely different financial possibilities. Naturally, larger positions bring liquidity constraints and new risks. The skills can scale, even when individual strategies don't. And here's the beautiful connection between these two approaches. You don't necessarily need to chase outrageous yields to outrun inflation. Capital appreciation can do part of that work, while productive positions generate income along the way. That doesn't make inflation irrelevant or guarantee that your investments will outperform it. But I'd much rather patiently build positions in assets I believe have room to grow, while mastering sustainable cash-flow strategies, than risk everything chasing 100% APY. If the capital grows significantly, those seemingly ordinary 5–15% yields become a very different story. That's why I enjoy studying these DeFi mechanisms so much. I'm not just looking for today's APR. I'm learning what to do with tomorrow's capital, whatever its size turns out to be. 👨🏼‍🎨

I spent part of my weekend deciding whether I wanted my DeFi cash flow in tokenized Amazon or NVIDIA shares 🏄‍♂️ And then I opened X and saw another “crypto is boring” post. 😄 I get it. If your idea of crypto is waiting for altseason, farming points, doing 27 quests for a possible airdrop, or buying the next L1 that promises to change everything… it has been a pretty exhausting few years. Some of that stuff will stay. Memecoins aren’t disappearing, airdrops will still attract people, and there will always be someone looking for a 100x. But I suspect a huge number of tokens and copy-paste protocols simply won’t matter in the long run. Something else has been growing underneath all that noise. I can lock a position on Aero, study trading volumes, fees and incentives, and decide which markets to support. One week the rewards might include ETH; another, tokenized shares and stablecoins. On Curve, Convex, Frax, Yield Basis and elsewhere, there are different ways to participate in actual economic activity and its cash flows. This is what I’ve spent years digging into. It’s scattered across dashboards, docs, governance forums and real transactions. From outside, you might not even know this world exists. I also understand why perp DEXs and prediction markets get attention. Humans love taking a view on the future, sometimes with 20x leverage. 😁 Hyperliquid and other platforms have a real business serving that demand. I just find myself increasingly interested in the infrastructure collecting fees from all that activity, not only the next trade. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what might move onchain: stocks, bonds, gold, real estate, funds, more stablecoins. Traditional finance hasn’t arrived at anything close to its full scale. I’m not convinced the market has fully learned how to value productive, revenue-sharing DeFi protocols yet. Maybe some get re-rated. Maybe some never deserve to. Owning a token doesn’t automatically mean owning its revenue. There are other chapters still to be written, too: GameFi, virtual economies, metaverses. They won’t all work, but I’m certainly not ready to declare the whole experiment finished. AI grabs attention because you can see the usefulness instantly. Financial infrastructure is less photogenic. Sometimes the revolution looks suspiciously like a dashboard full of numbers. So yes, perhaps crypto has become boring if you’re still waiting for 2021 to come back I’m enjoying this version more. And I’ll keep sharing what I’m actually exploring and testing – real positions, cash flows, strategies, discoveries, and even mistakes along the way. I love making complex financial ideas easy to understand. There’s so much happening beneath the surface, and I genuinely enjoy bringing these pieces together and sharing them with you. 👨🏼‍🎨

👀 That $25 of Bitcoin I buy every Sunday? These days, it's funded by my DeFi cash flow 🏄‍♂️ So what actually produces it? Not some magical 50% APY vault. More like an engine room I've assembled piece by piece over the years. 😁 A look under the hood of Defitea Yield Fund, the income layer of The Holding (October 25 snapshots): • Curve – 2.91% veCRV APR from real protocol revenue: swap fees and crvUSD borrowing activity. Separately, I can direct gauge votes and collect incentives via VoteMarket (some pools currently show ~7–8%). • Convex – 13.02% APR shown for the last vlCVX voting-incentive round through Votium. My locked CVX also participates in platform fees. • f(x) Protocol – 25.01% veFXN APR snapshot. Income comes from protocol activity, including collateral yield and fees, paid to lockers in wstETH. I can also monetize my voting power through VoteMarket, where incentivized gauges currently offer additional variable voting APR (around 5–12% in some pools). • Frax – 4.94% veFRAX APR on my snapshot, linked to its own staking and revenue-sharing economics. • Yield Basis – 0.52% veYB APR today. Yes, barely half a percent! veYB receives a share of fees from the BTC liquidity system. Not every engine runs at full speed every day. • Aero – my sAERO Predictive Allocations show 8.7% on USDG/NVDA and 11.7% on USDC/AMZNc. I choose which markets receive my voting power, earning their trading fees in assets such as tokenized stocks, plus any available incentives. I also provide concentrated liquidity on Uniswap and now test LP strategies on Aero. Sometimes I move a vote or widen an LP range. Mostly, I want positions that don't need babysitting every hour. Important distinction: actual protocol fees, vote incentives and token emissions are different sources of yield. These APRs are snapshots, not guaranteed coupons, and you cannot just add them together. ☝🏻 My aim for Defitea over the long run is a blended ~12–13% annual cash-flow yield. Some engines might make 20–25%+, others 4–6%, sometimes less. I'm interested in the average earned over years, not winning the APR leaderboard on a Tuesday. 💵 Cash flow comes in all sorts of assets: stablecoins, ETH, protocol tokens, tokenized equities and yield-bearing tokens. Some of those rewards can themselves be put to work. Zoom out: Defitea is only one fund within ⬜️ The Holding @theholding_ Capital is organized across several named funds, each with its own strategy, role and meaning behind its name – including 🟦 Substantia Core Fund 🟩 Defitea Yiled Fund ⬛️ Monetra Stable Fund 🟪 Singul Venture Fund 🟨 Fructus RWA Fund The foundation is BTC, ETH, gold and silver; other layers explore stablecoins, real-world assets and venture opportunities. I'll share more about these funds and their deeper stories later. TheHolding.ai I didn't learn all this in a weekend. Every new engine took research, real transactions and a few lessons from experience. And I still enjoy sharing how it works, not just posting a yield number. DeFi LEGO ⬜️ 🟦🟩🟨

Bitcoin purchase #199. Another Sunday, another $25. 🧡 But there's something about this experiment that I find even more exciting than watching my BTC balance grow. These weekly Bitcoin purchases are now funded by cash flow from my DeFi strategies. Think about that for a moment. Through 🟩 Defitea Yield Fund (part of @theholding_) , I manage productive onchain positions across different protocols. Aero allocation fees and incentives, Curve protocol revenue, Protocol FX strategies, and other sources of DeFi income. Different assets, different mechanisms, different risks. And part of the income they generate is regularly converted into Bitcoin. I love the idea of capital working in one part of the financial system to help build reserves in another. Meanwhile, my original Bitcoin experiment continues exactly as it started on January 8, 2023: $25 every Sunday, regardless of market sentiment. Here's where 199 purchases have taken me: ₿ 0.0949 BTC – nearly 9.49 million sats! • Total invested: $4,974 • Portfolio value: $7,671 • Unrealized profit: +$2,697 (+54.2%) Almost at 0.1 BTC. And next Sunday brings purchase #200! Of course, DeFi yields fluctuate, Bitcoin moves, and none of this happens in a straight line. But what fascinates me is the relationship between these two strategies. One part of my capital actively participates in onchain markets, earning fees, incentives and other rewards. Another part gradually accumulates Bitcoin for the long term. I'm not just investing in different assets. I'm exploring how they can financially support one another. That's the kind of investing I genuinely enjoy. 199 Sundays later, this experiment has become much more interesting than I ever imagined back in 2023. 😁 🔗 Every BTC purchase, publicly tracked since January 2023 👉🏼 cryptocompare.com/portfolio-…

Three new allocations on Aero. And no, I’m not hunting for the wildest APR on the screen. 😄 Here’s where I’ve pointed some of my sAERO voting power: • USDC / AMZNc – Amazon shares on Base: 14.5% APR • USDC / MSTRc – Strategy shares on Base: 16.7% • USDG / NVDA – NVIDIA shares on Robinhood Chain: 10.6% Those are snapshot APRs, not promised returns. But I love being able to choose the markets I want to participate in and the assets in which trading-fee rewards may arrive. Some pools add AERO incentives, too. I'm gradually developing a feel for Predictive Allocation. I study the last 48 hours of trading volume and fees, upcoming incentives, and how much sAERO is already competing for those rewards. A huge APR can simply mean almost nobody has allocated there. Bring your own size and the math changes. High yields are great when there's a good reason behind them. Chasing a percentage and hoping someone eventually trades? That's a different game. Another thing I like: the cooldown isn't an expiry date. I don't have to reshuffle everything every two days. If I still like these pools, I can just stay allocated and keep earning whatever activity generates. Volume may slow down, then recover. Incentives may change. APRs will move. I don't need to react to every wiggle. It's similar to how I provide liquidity. I generally prefer wider LP ranges — often around ±4–5% to ±10–15%, sometimes more — instead of endlessly rebalancing narrow ones. Not a rigid rule, just years of learning that being in the market can beat constantly jumping in and out of it. And yes, I want to try Aero Autopilot too! I enjoy flying manual, but an experienced pilot should still be curious about the autopilot. 😎 If I like how it performs, maybe I'll split my sAERO positions 50/50 between manual and automated allocation. For now, I'm watching how these three pools behave and sharing the experiment as it unfolds. The real test isn't today's APR. It's what happens over time.

I’ve been calling my approach “creative investing” for years. 👨🏼‍🎨 For me, finance isn't just about numbers. It's also about imagination, finding unusual connections and seeing opportunities. I love explaining complicated financial technology in simple words. If you can explain something complex to anyone, you've probably understood it pretty well yourself. Here's how I see an sAERO NFT: a new kind of onchain financial primitive that feels almost like running an investment business (fund). Think about it. I decide which markets it participates in, study trading volumes, fees and incentives, and allocate its power where I believe it can work best. And this position generates %! Yesterday it was earning ETH and other tokens. Today it's collecting USDC, tokenized Amazon shares and AERO incentives. Previous rewards remain available while new ones accumulate. But there's another fascinating layer: the AERO behind the NFT can appreciate. And the assets accumulating as unclaimed rewards have their own growth potential, too! Of course, prices can fall as well. Almost like running an investment business from your wallet, participating in a global financial network without an office or employees. And there’s another layer: 👀 these NFTs can also be used as collateral for loans through platforms like 40 Acres, while secondary markets allow positions to be bought and sold. Aero is also planning its own marketplace. Suddenly, this starts looking less like a simple token and more like a new financial primitive – almost a portable investment fund, with cash flows, credit, liquidity and capital allocation in one NFT. Fascinating! Bitcoin, ETH, tokenized stocks, gold, currencies... These opportunities already exist onchain. Imagine what's still ahead! Could such a position generate 10%, 15%, 20% annualized, sometimes more? It's possible, but returns fluctuate and capital remains at risk. I find the whole concept fascinating: one NFT, multiple markets, different income streams, and a growing collection of assets waiting to be claimed. And Aero isn’t the only example. Uniswap uses NFTs to represent liquidity positions that earn trading fees, while Yield Basis offers another approach to distributing protocol revenue through veYB. Different designs, fascinating possibilities. That's my kind of creative investing. A mix of business, finance, technology and imagination. Soon I'll share more thoughts on LT NFTs and other fascinating onchain positions!

Something I tested on @aeroxyz this morning turned out to be one of my favorite features of the new system. 👀 After the 47-hour cooldown, I moved one sAERO allocation from WETH/fBOMB to USDC/AMZNc, a pool with tokenized Amazon shares. I deliberately left my old rewards unclaimed, just to see what would happen. Nothing disappeared. Nothing was automatically claimed. The ETH and fBOMB rewards are still there. And now the same sAERO position is accumulating USDC and AMZNc from trading fees, plus AERO incentives. All visible in one Claim Rewards window! It's turning into a fascinating business game. You decide which markets to support and which assets you'd like to receive your rewards in. Tokenized stocks, Bitcoin, ETH, other tokens, and potentially even tokenized gold as more opportunities emerge. And I'm gradually getting better at navigating this economy. Before reallocating, I study each pool: trading volumes and fees over the last 48 hours, available incentives, and how much sAERO is already competing for those rewards. I'm looking for that sweet spot where capital can work efficiently, rather than blindly chasing the highest APR. And the best part? I can keep exploring different markets while my previous rewards remain available to claim whenever I want. Right now I'm choosing pools for my other sAERO positions. Soon I'll also share more live experiments providing liquidity across different assets, with real numbers and results. There's a lot more to explore, and I'm genuinely enjoying the process! 🔥