This is sent as an email to everyone on OSOM and published here for everyone to enjoy. As always, note that you can find week-by-week details in the “insights” panel in the app. 📊

💨 TL;DR

• In February the overall Crypto market grew, in Euro terms by 39.9%. The Autopilot, based on our model portfolio, by 86.94% 🚀
• AVAX, SUSHI, and LUNA were added to the addressable universe. AVAX was added to the portfolio by the Autopilot
• We were asked if your crypto could be claimed by our creditors if we went bankrupt, the answer is no. We were asked if we tweaked the algorithm and if that explains the recent performance, and the answer is also no.
• The Autopilot holds as of March 1st: BTC, 34.90% - BNB,15.30% - THETA,10.80% - DCR,10.10% - AAVE,8.10% - XEM,6.90% - HBAR,5.10% - FIL,2.90% - MKR,2.70% - NEO,1.80% - AVAX,0.50% - RVN,0.30% - EGLD,0.30%
• February saw a lot of activity around NFTs, and people looking for solutions to Ethereum’s congestion and high fees

💌 Spread the word

✔️ February was a good month for Crypto and the Autopilot

1. The Total Market Cap of Crypto kept growing. It started the month around €800B and ended it at about €1.1T. A 39.9% growth.

2. Altcoins (meaning, everything except Bitcoin) performed well overall as the Total Market Cap of Crypto Excluding Bitcoin grew by 42.46% in February. That’s a little less than the 63.53% growth of January, but it’s nothing to frown at. And Bitcoin’s dominance (its share of the total value of all crypto), kept falling overall as the Altcoins caught up.

3. Bitcoin opened the month at €27,392.97 and closed it at €37,338.78, a 36.31% gain

4. The Crypto Autopilot Performance 📈

The ₿ - denominated performance for the month was 36.69%; meaning that our diversification strategy beat holding Bitcoin alone for the month. By a lot. When it comes to the 💶-denominated performance, it was 86.94%.💰

✍️Interesting Crypto Autopilot moves in February

As happens when Bitcoin stops stealing all the attention, some other coins were able to start qualifying for inclusion.

1. On February 15, Sushiswap (SUSHI) and Avalanche (AVAX) were added to the Autopilot’s addressable universe. And the Autopilot holds some AVAX right now.

2. On February 17, Terra’s LUNA token was added to the universe.

3. While the Autopilot is allowed to take positions in any coins up to 40% at the moment, it has decided not to do that, keeping you well-diversified and able to enjoy the gains from the altcoins rally. You’ve got to love A.I.🤖

🙋 Your questions on the Autopilot, answered!

Continuing what we started last month, here are some answers to the most often asked questions about the Autopilot. Last month, we covered “How diversified is the Autopilot?”, “Why do I never see Ethereum in the app?”, and “When is the best time to deposit?”. If you missed the email, all those answers can now be found on our blog.

Here are the questions for this month.

1. The returns have been amazing lately. Have you changed anything to how the Autopilot works?

We haven’t. We review and populate the list of addressable assets and we tweak the maximum holding between 30% and 40% depending on market dynamics, but that’s the extent of our involvement. The rules and the logic followed by the algorithm have remained the same since Sept 26, 2019.

It goes to prove that smart diversification reduces risk and is linked to outperformance. We talked about it previously. It’s very visible in the long run (2.5 to 5 years), but can be glimpsed in the short term too.

As in October and November - when the Autopilot was trailing Bitcoin following the summer of DeFi - one might want to be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from short-term movements anyways. It is best to look at longer-term trends, and if you can’t make sense of all the numbers, consult your own financial advisor to see how this plays in your overall portfolio.

2. What if you go bankrupt? Can your creditors claim my assets?

We are well funded, planning on being around for longer and our financials are strong, but it’s a worthwhile question for anyone who is going to entrust the care of their assets to a custodian, so we thought we might bring a bit of a spotlight on it.

As a regulated crypto service provider licensed and overseen by the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), we have very strict obligations to meet, and cannot use either your fiat nor crypto funds other than for the purpose for which you entrusted them to us, i.e. trading, purchasing and selling of crypto assets on your behalf. In other words, we are the "custodians" of your crypto assets, and these remain yours at all times. As such, we have a fiduciary duty towards you, in particular with regards to your crypto assets.

For practical purposes, we do not do anything else with your crypto assets than what you instruct us to do with them, i.e. on the wallets your crypto assets stay stored where you can check the balance addresses and move them from/to at any time, and in the Crypto Autopilot they are traded on exchanges by the algorithm as per the agreement with you. As for your fiat funds, these are prepayments in view of carrying out crypto transactions. You can move either your fiat or crypto funds in and out at any time.

In the event of a hypothetical bankruptcy on our part, no claims would be valid against your crypto assets with us (as custody does not transfer legal ownership), and in no event would these be used to repay our debts.

We will be adding that language to our T&C’s shortly so it’s immediately clear for everybody.

3. What are the holdings in the Autopilot exactly?

📅 Crypto happenings in February

1. NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens - meaning tokens representing, on-chain, something that’s unique (like a piece of art or digital piece of property) had a very good February and it looks like they are all anyone’s talking about.

2. If people weren’t talking about NFTs, they were probably talking about Layer 2. Ethereum is congested, it’s hard to get a transaction through and the fees are mind-boggling. The Ethereum team is working on a solution with ETH 2.0 but there are also other teams, building on top of Ethereum, who have solutions to offer. One such team is Optimism, and they recently raised some big bags from some smart people 💰. But Loom, Skale, and Polygon also have some interesting value propositions. And there are others.

3. And if they weren’t talking about either of those things, they were probably talking about “Ethereum killers” - who, instead of trying to improve on Ethereum propose to pretty much replace it. The funny thing is that many were launched by former Ethereum team members. Cardano took over the #3 spot in terms of market capitalisation towards the end of the month. Polkadot has been on a tear since mid-January. A hedge fund from Dubai is betting big on them. Binance Coin, while it has a bit of another spirit because it’s much less decentralised, has also seen a lot of growth as its DeFi applications are being used when Ethereum’s can’t. It’s not all the promises of Blockchain, but at least it’s usable right now.

What does March have in store for us?

1. The vaccines are promising but everyone is still pretty much confined to home. Some activity in the bond market seems to suggest that inflation could make a comeback and stocks took a bit of a hit. In Crypto as well we are seeing things cool down a little. What all that means for the medium to long term is currently hard to decipher.

2. Shortly, the home screen will display balances in EUR for the Autopilot. Previously, it defaulted to denominating values in BTC, but following requests and for the sake of consistency with the rest of the data on the home screen - which is all in EUR - we’ve decided to adjust the default view to EUR. Additionally, for the Crypto Autopilot screen, you will find that the “Insights’ tab will give you Euro-based data too. If you prefer to see your analytics, earnings, and balance in BTC, the toggle on the Autopilot screen remains available.

3. Our designers are toying with the idea of a dark theme.

For OSOM, we continue to look at adding more ways for you to enjoy the benefits of Crypto. One such way would be to make DeFi usable despite the horrendous transaction fees.

🎞️We have recently hosted a free Webinar about the opportunities and risks in DeFi. You can find it for replay on our Youtube Channel or get the audio, presentation, and transcript over here.

If you are interested in lending stablecoins through smart contracts and would like to be part of our group of early testers, let us know at research at osom.finance. For those of you who have already contacted us, we will be in touch in a couple of weeks!

And don’t forget, if March has you looking for a unique socially-distanced gift, 🎁 you can gift Bitcoin or an Autopilot balance very easily.

As always, thank you for your trust. Feel free to let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve - or anything else!