Regular people were actually making money by participating in the stock market — which isn’t how it’s supposed to work — so hedge funds were rescued when Robinhood, Webull, M1, and more restricted trading on meme stocks and brought prices down from the moon. Not since Flappy Bird’s creator deleted his addictive game from the App Store have we seen such abuse of centralized power, inspiring WallStreetBets to launch its own blockchain-based trading platform: the WSBDApp.

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What’s WallStreetBets?

Founded in 2012, WallStreetBets is a movement that aims to empower the “little guy” investors of the world against unaccountable financial institutions. The movement lacks formal leadership and is instead a grassroots decentralized effort to leverage the power of community organizing for bringing accountability and transparency.

What the New WSBDApp in DeFi Ecosystem

The WSBDApp is a decentralized application taking aim at the structure of greedy fees and market manipulation that have helped our lizard-person overlords hoard power and widen inequality for decades. But what’s a lizard to an army of apes, harnessing the transparency and consensus of blockchain to create a community-owned and operated evolution of r/WallStreetBets. The DApp has been developed to create ETPs (exchange-traded portfolios), which offer investors exposure to a variety of assets similar to index funds. Make no mistake, these aren’t your mother’s ETFs; WSBDApp ETPs are run in a completely decentralized manner and are composed of fiat-linked crypto stablecoins, tokenized commodities and crypto native assets. They’re also traded 24/7 from anywhere in the world, instantly redeemable, self-custodial, liquid and completely fungible.

“When r/WallStreetBets was first created, the idea was to bring the fight to powerful institutions and tap into the subreddit’s collective wisdom to outperform the pros in the market,” said Jaime Rogozinski, founder of WallStreetBets and strategic partner of the WSBDApp project.

Jaime continued, “But we can’t beat Wall Street on their own rigged turf, so we made our own blockchain-based haven in the WSBDApp to help everyday retail investors vote with their crypto wallets and build a strong portfolio for the future of finance. The DApp is everything Wall Street is not; transparent, borderless and run by community voting instead of campaign donations.”

The WSBDApp is governed by its own $WSB governance token that holders use to vote on the rebalancing and exposure of each community-owned ETP. That means token holders can decide which assets make up a particular portfolio and in what amount, creating one-of-a-kind products that combine crypto with synthetic stocks like Tesla to thrive and hedge against market volatility. The DApp’s newest ETP, the WSB Macro Hedge ETP, perfectly reflects voters’ concerns about rising inflation and how best to counter, and even benefit, from the present moment. Three main goals were at the forefront of the Macro Hedge ETP’s allocation:

• Capturing long-term capital growth and simultaneously outperforming inflation to retain purchasing power;
• Representing the real-time market performance of a crypto basket, fiat currencies, precious metals, and other tokenized assets;
• Physically holding underlying assets in a non-custodial way

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The ETP’s assets were chosen based on community research and assessments of macro-factors like economic models, market conditions, historical trends and international relations. Notably, due to the current devaluing of the U.S. dollar, the DApp’s governing community members voted to hedge investments against more stable currencies and assets.

The past few years have been impossible to predict, to say the least.

And if someone could predict our present moment they’d either end up burning at the stake or hooked up to a CEO or investors as their personal blood boy. But 99 percent of us are in this together, and it’s high time that the elites get a little dose of their own “economic anxiety.”

Can Blockchain be that battleground?

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]