📺 ROLLUP: BIG DIP | NFT Culture | Coinbase IPO | Ethereum Jobs

all right everyone welcome to the weekly roll up this is the last week of february the fourth week of february david what do we do on these weekly rollups we roll up the full week of crypto which is always an ambitious endeavor first we start with the markets what are the markets saying then we go into releases what got released in the last week of crypto then we go into the news what happened in the news cycle then we get into some ecosystem takes who had some interesting opinions over the last week and then lastly we get into what david

and ryan are excited about and then we top things off with the meme of the week i like how you fit that in david are you ready to start let's get going with markets you ready absolutely so again so much happened in marcus let's get into it all right let's roll them up markets let's start with bitcoin what is going on with bitcoin it was up and now it's down what's happening bitcoin topped out at 58 and 300 and now it is at the low low price of 49

hundred dollars uh i feel like this is our biggest correction in the crypto markets this entire quote unquote bull run ever since like at the end of defy summer right so d5 summer ha ha happened and then that was a pretty big correction we had like a quote-unquote like two-month bear market uh this most mostly a facetious joke um but that was like kind of the last time we ever had any big correction and ever since then it's been basically this linear up and to the right trend and but finally we got this big correction both

in in bitcoin and in ether prices but the trend is still your friend the trend is still here we're still looking good over the long term david uh we've been told to respect the pump i think we've got to respect the dip my friends sometimes these dips happen this is perfectly normal during a bull market you're going to see 30 you're going to see 40 dips sometimes a little bit higher in previous bull markets that happened three or four times before the end of it this does not necessarily mark the end of the bull market and i'm still bullish

over 2k as well uh this week but now it's back down where where did we go and where are we now yeah ethan broke 2k and it hit 20 2040 so just got a little bit over 2k decided it wasn't really it's it's the right it wasn't it wasn't the right time you know we're saving it for later we're back down to 1572 dollars almost five hundred dollars off of the east top which again it's a it's a big correction legacy market participants don't understand like the

these magnitudes of these moves but in crypto this is just a normal correction this is just how it goes david i'm just glad we got a chance to celebrate eve 2k my friend like you know that felt good just hitting that milestone even though we're under now i'm confident that we'll get back there again uh what happened to total locked value in d5 that's down a bit too yeah we we peaked out at 43 billion dollars locked in d5 the last weekly roll up we've reported it at 42 and today we are at 37 and a half

billion dollars locked in in d5 uh it actually takes a a little bit more of effort and energy to figure out like well what is just asset price appreciation versus depreciation when it comes to locked in defy or what is actually like deposits and and or withdrawals from the ecosystem so there's a little bit of noise here in this metric but still like 37.5 billion dollars still a large number just a little bit you know shaved off the top next big milestone seems to be 50 billion we'll see how long it takes us to get there uh let's talk about dpi so

this is the the d5 pulse index tracking the top 10 d5 tokens you know what's interesting about this if i look on the weekly view david um it's about flat so it didn't take quite the hit that ether it it definitely went up with eth but it didn't take uh quite the hit at least from indications where are we hanging out right now yeah we are just below 400. 390 dollars for one dpi

yeah and let's let's take a look at the uh dpi eth ratio to see sort of that effect so um it's up a little bit from last week right this is definitely where you can see the strength that dpi and d5 at large had against ether uh the last uh last weekly roll-up it was also the first major correction of dpi versus ether but now we are back up to the week before that right and so dpi out once again outperforming ether do you know i have a reason for this so it's always

it's always a mistake it's often a mistake i would say to attribute kind of like the noise of of markets to specific fundamental reasons but i think this might be due to the binance chain narrative david so uh binance chain has been gaming gaining some steam and volume and usage some real some not so real uh but that aside has been gaining some some usage while ether ethereum fees gas fees have been going

kind of off the charts and i think the d5 token index move up while eth price move down or at least this ratio moving up a bit might be as a result of that might be as a result of people seeing that narrative or hearing that narrative and being a bit less bullish eth relative to d5 tokens do you think i'm jumping the gun on that take or do you think that's a a live narrative that is affecting these prices uh over the last week yeah yeah we definitely saw the binance

chain bnb token absolutely skyrocketed last week to a a i think yeah it became number three in market cap behind bitcoin and ether this binance chain next i think it even passed tether uh which is pretty crazy so uh binance chain definitely riding in the same tailwinds that ether is riding in and uh if you are bullish finance train you would might even say that uh binance bnb token kind of took the wind out of the ether sales um i'm skeptical as to how long that lasts but you know by the last week was definitely a win for finance trained believers and

bnb holders yeah are you a finance chain believer david i don't know not at all not at all okay why why i don't cz doesn't pay my salary he doesn't pay my paycheck why would i believe in his product no i believe in protocols i think we'll have time to get into that hopefully during the take section i'm sure uh one of us has some hot takes on that um let's go to the next though on the market side of things while this happens again anytime there's buys or anytime there's sales so you know in a uh in a bull run or in a bear

run um with with these market moves dexes tend to do well or at least exchanges tend to do well and lately decentralized exchanges have been just crushing it in terms of volume they had their biggest day ever over over 4 billion in daily dex volume now i mean these numbers would have blown our minds back in 2017 and now we're hitting them on the regular and they feel like they're only going to go up during this full cycle what do you think about this

yeah so volume is goes hand in hand with volatility right and so when there are big moves and especially big moves down because big downward moves tend to happen much faster than upward moves and so there's a lot of volume that's compressed into a short amount of time and i think that blow off top from uh twenty two thousand dollars down to even the low low price of fourteen hundred dollars where ether was that's a big move and that means that there's going to be a lot of on-chain liquidations there's gonna be a lot of people uh selling off their positions

there's gonna be a lot of people taking positions there's just overall going to be a lot of volume and we're seeing that we're seeing that in d5 we're seeing that with dexes uh just all-time highs with dex volume uh on the upside and on the downside this is just how volume works last i checked dex volume was like something like you know five to seven percent or so of centralized exchange volume um i'm looking for that ratio to go up i'm looking for decentralized exchange volume to start consuming more and more of the centralized exchange traffic and we'll see how that uh turns out david this is a really like we refer

to d5 pulse all the time that's d5pulse.com they just came out with a crypto dollars chart which i think is super cool this is all time david so dude look at this it's like it's like climbing everest we got a mountain of crypto dollars being printed each of these crypto dollars generally is backed by some collateral so this is not fractional reserve banking which is which is interesting right each of these crypto dollars actually represents a dollar of value in collateral or a dollar in the bank but we're at over 35

billion now in terms of crypto dollars that are active and live on ethereum and i think this probably includes maybe some that are on um or is this just a theorem i'm actually not sure david do you know uh yeah i believe this is just aetherium yeah i don't think there's a single other chain that they have listed here um the interesting thing about this this metric and you can see a similar chart with a btc on ethereum uh charts tend to go up and down but not these charts this chart is only up which

really is really indicative of crypto dollars when deployed to ethereum don't leave they only stay and and bitcoin when it's deployed to ethereum doesn't uh it leaves a little bit more than crypto dollars but generally it stays there right and so this is one of the fundamental theses that we have about ethereum as like the nexus of of internet economic activity as the global permissionless settlement layer once assets come to ethereum they don't leave because they're more useful on ethereum and so like we see corrections in crypto prices we see corrections in other realms but with crypto dollars up and to

the right never ever down yeah i think like just i guess ask yourself um if if you have a sell plan david right i'm sure you have some sort of cell plan um you know i'm sure like like most of us on the bank listen you're not going to sell all of your crypto assets but you might sell some uh when the market heats up too much during this this bull cycle uh aside from money you need to pay bills rents living expenses that kind of thing like when you sell are you gonna bring your money back into your wells fargo account or what are you gonna do with it

why would i do that like my wells fargo account that's their account that they let me use i would rather use my own account on ethereum i was having this interesting conversation in the uh our eth finance uh uh uh subreddit shout out to all the our our eth finance bros underappreciated subreddit out there um and i was i was saying like you know when i when i do myself which i do plan on doing at towards the end of this uh towards the end of the cycle i plan on holding crypto dollars in my my ethe wallet just because that's my account

like self-sovereignty self-custody uh what's also interesting is i also added into this conversation and this is kind of where the conversation led is i actually also plan on having a decent number of my crypto dollars that i will sell into not inside of smart contracts right so not only am i selling into dollars which are stable and and you know while we on the dollar at the end of the day it is the dollar can't really hate on it but i'm also going to keep it out of contracts or at least make sure that when i do put them into contracts they are insured because one

parts i want to lock in my profits but then i also want to reduce risk and right and so buying into the dollars having a position in dollars is a reduction of risk position but if i put those dollars into contracts um then i'm taking more risk right and so i actually plan on selling into dollars and also keeping them out of contracts just be able to hold for the long term yeah i totally agree i've the same plan right so i my money is not going to touch my traditional bank account wells fargo account where i'm earning like point zero one percent almost near zero zero

just call it zero percent when there's uh crypto dollar stable coin interest earning opportunities like spanning from three to five to ten percent right and some of these are relatively low risk some of them are more risky than others so um it it's exactly what you said david the money once it goes into crypto it's like a black hole it ain't coming out even if you're selling reserve assets because they're overheated like bitcoin or eth on the cycle they're staying in crypto dollars all right before you move on ryan i really like

that metric on the left that they have is custodial dominance oh yeah so i was gonna say it's a really cool metric all right so what does this mean what does custodial dominance mean yeah it means uh what percentage of crypto dollars are uh trusted right um usdc tether what has like a a custodian managing a dollar in the real world right so this wouldn't include dye and so that's going to be an interesting metric to watch over time and it's at 93 which is a little bit sad it's a little bit sad face like the trustless dollars

have not um have not succeeded against traditional crypto dollars yet so yeah but they have such strong tailwinds because there's so many dollars out there and there's much they're easier to get out the gate there's less risk with them they don't have to worry about solidity and code they can just put dollars in a bank account and then make this claim that say hey we'll give you one of these if you give us a crypto dollar blah blah blah i totally agree and guys if you want to check out crypto dollars what they are in more long form content check out our jeremy alaire conversation that

was a few podcasts ago just look that one up okay this is probably the biggest news we're going to touch on in the news but but let me just touch on the market piece so here's the thing coinbase just dropped their s1 report this is sort of the filing with the sec that's public that they need to drop um before they they ipo before they go public we'll get into that in a second because that's in the news section but i just wanted to highlight this stat that came from it david which is probably the most bullish thing i've seen

this this month maybe uh maybe this year so that's you know this week anyway i'll get that at least this weekend for now um and that's uh the coinbase's volume okay and they segmented it in their s1 report there's a fantastic graph here that that shows you um what it looks like and the bottom line is right now in q4 2020 coinbase estimated that 36 of their volume was from retail so only

36 from retail that means the rest is more from kind of institutions that was totally different during the last full run in q1 of 2018 the last bull cycle it was 80 retail okay now it's 36 retail before it was 80 retail you can interpret this a few different ways one interpretation is oh my god we're already here and retail hasn't even come yet that's one interpretation what do you make of this david yeah the i'm reminded of in 2017 2018

like the memes that were going around to like convince people to not sell was like quote unquote the institutions are coming yeah and back in 2017-2018 we were right they were coming just three years later right much further down the line but now the institutions are here right like this is clearly indicative of bigger well-capitalized entities coming and just dominating uh exchange volume over retail yeah i think retail beat institutions the first bull run it feels like institutions would be retail a little bit this bull run at least for some of

these assets maybe not for d5 type assets but it also feels like we've got a lot a lot of way to run from retail like coming into this space i'm sure we'll see some sort of retail friendly uh frenzy before this is all over david you ready to get into the releases yes we absolutely let's get into releases but first we're gonna take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible ave is a borrowing and lending protocol on ethereum and just recently released ave version 2 which has a ton of cool

new features that makes using ave even more powerful with ave you can leverage the full power of defy money legos yield and composability all in one application on ave there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral here you can see me getting a 200 usdc loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and eth i'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate

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monolith.xyz and sign up to get your monolith visa card today alright guys we are back getting to the releases on this last week of february roll up david we got to start here optimism tell us what optimism is and what they're doing and why this is a big deal yeah optimism is uh favorable beliefs about the future right that's what it means to be optimistic but optimism is also a scaling platform on ethereum using some sort of uh uh

we call them optimistic roll-ups right and where you settle optimistically uh and there's some nuances behind that but this post is about and and the the point is that is that everyone is really really bullish on the optimistic roll-ups and how they're how they are constructed and everyone is optimistic about optimistic rollups and what what makes me optimistic about optimism is the um crazy team that they are putting together so they just put out this blog post called dope hires and more mainnet in march uh so they go through just a

number of just really strong players that they hired on to the optimistic team and i also loved the way that this article was written um you you know you can feel the ethos just exude out of the optimistic team the optimism exuding out of the optimistic team uh it's a really strong players here and really what this means is that optimism has really done a is really ready to take it to the next level right and really get this thing out the gate uh business developers are on the team more coders and more more integration

specialists uh a lot of really cool things i'm optimistic about optimism i could tell david all right so like the big takeaway from this apart from their um their new hires is that they are launching on mainnet in march now originally they were planning to launch on mainnet and march in sort of a limited way with just a few pilot projects now it looks like they're going to launch like generally be open to everyone and what rollups if you've been tuning into bankless so far what rollups allow you to do is

essentially copy all of the d5 protocols we know and love on another chain so these are fully uh ethereum virtual machine compatible so if if uniswap was to join this synthetics is already on it if you swap was to join this if if yfi was to join this if if curve was to join this we'd create a whole another roll-up chain with all of our d5 protocols basically like a d5 roll-up chain so this is uh very timely given gas fees very timely given that the narratives in

the space and i think is absolutely going to be a massive launch event and then story going into 2021 as all of these d5 money protocols kind of pick their their various scaling solution i think optimism is poised very well here david they also announced uh some additional investing we had chris dixon on the podcast not too long ago and chris dixon and his firm um andreessen horowitz so he he sort of runs the the crypto investing uh area at address and horowitz they are investing

they just announced that they are investing in the optimism team too how much money are we talking about here um wow part of a 25 million series a investment in optimism so definitely some runway for that team and uh super excited about what's going to happen next yeah yeah the i and i think the other vc fund that doubled down already had a share of optimism was paradigm and they bought more um so paradigm doubling down on their bags

smart move all right we also have layer two coming from one of my favorite exchanges decentralized exchanges dydx now they're doing this with not optimistic roll ups but z cave roll ups but the net effect is is similar in that they're going to be able to scale dydx to new levels without using ethereum mainnet block space but it will be just as secure as the ethereum maynet david any takes on this news yeah i think this is going to be a theme in coming rollups is a project x d5

protocol y scales goes on to l2 optimistic roll ups or zk roll ups or something uh so i'm get used to it i guess is my takeaway dydx one of the first uh i expect here's a prediction for you ryan i'm just making this up right now at least three projects will uh be on next week's weekly rollups on some sort of l2 wow okay we'll see we'll i'll i'll try to remember that david you know one other thing i think that's important to realize is that there are different dimensions to

scaling transactions per second is is certainly one of them but another one is how do we scale oracle's in our conversation this week with hart from the uma protocol really impressed that economy david it's like so oracles of course are useful for everything in ethereum that requires a price and synthetic assets all require a price so the scalability of oracles is really essential for kind of the different assets and and money primitives that we can create on ethereum well chain link has been one of

the predominant oracle type solutions one challenge with chain link is it cost a whole lot in terms of of gas uh these are validators on chain link that are paying this gas but it costs them a lot in block space in gas and fees to push these prices on chain well chain link just released a new upgrade that is going to drastically reduce the cost 10 times more efficient to put um pricing on chain than it

previously was this is another dimension of scalability that we like i think is under reported david but like is just as important to what we're trying to do in d5 right there's there's two ways to scale there's we can produce more block space and we can do that with zk roll ups and other l2s l2s is generally pla building out new places to have block space uh and then they bundle that up and then put that on the main chain that's one way to scale the other way to scale is to just simply optimize and be more

efficient with what we put onto the chain right and so uh make or doubt when they run their oracles specifically maker dow's oracles cost twenty to thirty thousand 000 a day in gas alone just to put prices on the chain so that the app can can operate uh there are optimizations that we could be doing here and one of the strategies that maker dow is doing and is exactly the same kind of pattern that train link is doing here is they do a lot of their computation off chain in a trustless manner in a cryptographic

manner and then they only publish the bare minimum on chain right and so simply just doing less on the l1 and optimizing what you do with the l1 block space is going to be huge especially for oracle's right um oracle optimization is really really important and there's other like vectors as well aside from oracle's like chain uh coinbase uses like 20 to 30 percent of ethereum block space simply because they're not well optimized uh and so block space will become more available when when heavy computation teams like chain link maker down coinbase etc figure out how to

optimize and and put more of that computation on on not on the l1 yeah david i think every team is working for up to toward optimization we were talking to the nifty gateway um co-founders uh they they said in their next release they're going to reduce the minting cost of an nft on chain by 99 so this is uh it's awesome to see this sort of innova innovation and efficiency that these teams are bringing due in part to high gas prices david talk about this one so ave and balancer are partnering

in some way what are they doing here so if you guys are listening to this weekly roll up on friday morning when when this comes out we are doing a live stream with uh stani from ave and fernando of balancer moderated by dan elliser so something pretty unique on the bankless youtube where it's going to be live streaming at 12 12 pacific time definitely tune in to that if you want to learn more about this but basically what ave is doing it's using balancer as its back end as its asset management platform to produce yield for its deposited assets right so

balancer is kind of like uniswap but instead of two tokens it's many tokens and so the uh balancer and ave are working together to make a balancer pool to generate liquidity for assets that are in ave but also generate yields and so it'll actually be more lucrative to deposit assets into ave because they're using balancer in their back end for liquidity and for yield pretty pretty uh pretty cool so tune in to live stream if you want to learn more yeah the way i understood this is if you are a liquidity provider in a balance or pool right you're not necessarily earning

interest on those assets that are inside of the pool and what this is going to do is essentially allow a portion of those assets inside of the pool to be earning interest in the ave protocol so super cool to see this kind of collaboration coming out david this is also awesome we've been tracking this for a while we've got all of these great nfts but how do you how do you display them this is zapper coming out with a user interface uh enhancement zapper is is just a fantastic tool along with zurion to see

kind of your crypto assets your crypto portfolio and now zapper is extending that to nfts so you could you could see your super rare art that you purchased your nft art inside of the zapper platform inside of that wallet david what's your take here yeah there's so much to unpack here right so we got to start off with the conversation that nfts are status tools right so crypto dollars ether bitcoin these are wealth tools nfts are status tools like the mona lisa is a status thing whoever owns the mona lisa it's a

big deal right art is a status thing it's a way to signal status and one of the problems that nfts has is that typically if you buy an nft you can only view it on the one pla the issuing platform right so if you bought it on wearable you got to go to railboo if you bought it on nifty gateway you got to go to nifty gateway there are aggregators like openc that are helping with this but this is exactly the same type of innovation that we're seeing out of zapper where you can see your assets see the actual visual visual representations of your nfts displayed here along with the market value right and so not only

can you include the value in your portfolio you can actually make it display right and so i kind of expect some sort of specialization when it comes to people's crypto wallets that you know maybe they hold their funds in one wallet but their art in another wallet so that they can flash their art right like show people what i what i own like all the nft all the cool nfts that i bought without having to dox all their funds um i think innovation like that is definitely coming and it's really cool to see zapper being able to innovate on like both both the value of nft size and the

display of nft sides because what are nfts if they don't have a visual display of the art yeah i can't wait to see all the the social signaling type wallets that that come out of uh come out of crypto given that the nft the nft bull market here uh david let's talk about this alchemix is releasing something uh can you tell us what alchemix is yeah alchemyx is a new d5 money lego right uh attempting to be relatively governance minimized return uh attempting to be protocolized um but the way that this works is that you deposit

your crypto dollars right now it starts starting off with dye and then those die the dye gets deposited into urine to generate yield and then alchemix will mint you al usd or or a al uh stable coin so you deposit stable coins and then you borrow stable coins but the thing is is that you don't actually if you are patient you don't actually have to pay back your debt uh so typically with d5 protocols when you borrow you have to pay an interest rate uh but because alchemix has yearn in the

background yearn the interest that you get from depositing to yearn automatically pays back the debt that you that you took when you borrowed al usd and so if you are if you are a patient you just get free money uh be it from the interest rate so you deposit a hundred dollars of dye you get to like withdraw 70 al usd but you don't actually ever have to pay that back and eventually you can just go back to alchemix and withdraw your die or mint a l more alusd it's a it's a system that auto repays your loan for

you because it's generating yield in the background so it's pretty cool that's super cool and i think what the the the macro story here is is this is now we're seeing like i don't know third fourth fifth layer money legos because this whole thing alcamx is built on top of wiring which is built on top of all sorts of other lending and borrowing protocols which is built up you know on top of stable coins which is built on top of ethereum so we've got like this is why we call it money legos because we have these these sort of stacking type effects and uh you can you can create