Historically, liquidity mining campaigns with HummingBot were on the Firo/Bitcoin and Firo/USDT pairs.
They were then limited to Firo/Bitcoin: no problem for me, I find stablecoins useless and harmful for Bitcoin.
Why, for 3 weeks, has this Firo/Bitcoin pair disappeared to be replaced by the Firo/USDT pair?
Using the Firo/USDT pair is, in my opinion, the wrong choice: it is the Firo/Bitcoin pair that counts (still historically, the majority of Firos have been purchased with Bitcoins and not with USDT ). Favoring USDT instead of Bitcoin means placing additional risk on those who agree to promote Firo.
Thanks for participating in the Hummingbot miner campaign!
The volume numbers on FIRO/USDT vs FIRO/BTC for many years now say otherwise. I do understand where you’re coming from in that in 2018 or so, altcoin/btc pairs were still the dominant pair but that has shifted.
Even when we were supporting FIRO/BTC more, the volumes and organic liquidity didn’t really pick up there even when liquidity was strong in FIRO/BTC. We mentioned in the extension of the Hummingbot miner campaign that we were gauging interest in the FIRO/BTC pair.
After discussion with Binance, they said yeah they’re seeing less interest in altcoin/btc pairs in general and were thinking of dropping support for that in favour of focusing liquidity on a single pair. They also wanted to see FIRO/USDT in the 60k USD on each side of the book in the 2% range otherwise we’ll be at risk of not meeting their liquidity requirements. So far as long as we maintain these bands, we’ll be safe.
For your information, core team doesn’t have any meaningful inventory to be used for market making and instead uses my own personal holdings to serve as inventory. I was providing most of it on the FIRO/BTC pair on Binance but because of the lack of market interest, I have shifted it to FIRO/USDT as per Binance’s recommendations.
Thank you Reuben for the explanations: I saw that you were absent from the campaign the week of the switch from FIRO/BTC to FIRO/USDT.
I can only regret this choice of communities to favor USDT over BTC, especially since, on certain continents (Europe, for example), USDT will probably disappear with the MICA2 laws.