📺 ROLLUP: Top 20 Crypto Moments in 2021

that gets us to number one david number one do we have a drum roll ryan buys a cr uh turtle all right no okay actual drum roll all right number one roll yeah i kind of heard it okay something we'll add it in post we'll put it in post sound effects and post production number one coming in at number one hey guys welcome to another bankless estate of the nation episode this one's gonna be a fun one i got my christmas

hat on david you know i'm in the i'm in the holiday spirit and i'm also in the spirit of like recapping everything we did in 2021 so what are we doing on this episode we're going through the top 20 things top 20 big things that happened in crypto in 2021 going down starting from 20 going down all the way down to number one because that's how countdown works and then we will of course finish off with some honorable mentions as well uh these are loosely ranked in some kind of combination of uh chronological order

but also with significance so as we go down the the list the things get bigger and bigger in deal but also later and later in the year so there's some sort of some sort of method to the madness there guys you know the uh spotify yearly wrap-up will you know tells you what music you listen to how many hours you spend all that sort of thing that's what we're doing these are all stories that we we we talked about on the weekly roll-ups and so this is like a a wrap-up of the year in crypto a roll-up of the roller coaster gated it's a roll-up of the roll-ups this is sharded roll-ups right now i think did you know ryan

you're quadratic roll-ups actually settle a roll-up onto another roll-up that's actually a technically a thing you can do and that is what we are doing with the yearly roll-up my braid's not ready for that okay i was just getting modular block chains and playing in my brain now you're talking about like roll-ups on top of roll-ups uh i'll leave that for 2022 okay guys um hey before we get in we got to talk about cash flow though david so cash flow is a d5 otc desk people know what defi is but what's an otc desk yeah an otc desk otc stands for over the counter

if you are a big trader trading a lot of volume and you just want your price to be optimized uh then you go to an otc desk but as we all know if you can do it in c5 you can do it even better in defy and so that's what cash flow is cash flow is your d5 otc desk for big trades with zero slippage mev protection and a bunch of other cool features as well a ton of liquidity and so you can check them out at app.hashflow.com if you are high volume trader or just

making a big purchase cash flow might be the place for you tight spread zero slippage liquidity mev protection also soon they'll provide a way to grant yield on top of this liquidity so you can actually be a liquidity provider on cash flow and there is a google form if you want early access to that you can check that out we'll post that link in the show notes as well alright so david i usually ask you what's the state of the nation this week but today is different because this is the last date of the nation episode of the years the last podcast you and i

are recording for the year we're gonna go on holidays uh so tell us you gotta tell us what's the state of the the entire year in crypto not just the week sum up the year for us in one word it's pretty it's a tall order ryan but i think the state of 2021 is proven we are proven crypto has proven itself in so many different ways inflation we got a solution for that uh terrible culture we got a solution for that uh terrible culture web two gargantuans that are consuming

all of our data we got a solution for that all of the use cases that we've always dreamed of in crypto are finally proven out in 2021 so ryan the state of the year in crypto is proven i think it's true man we uh we definitely had a lot to prove coming into 2021 and we uh we we proved it to mainstream so i'll plus one that and i think um one of the things that uh we've proven most is that crypto can be a home for new new forms of institutions right and uh you know the old institutions better get on board or get out of the

way so we are about to get to the 20 biggest events that happened in 2021 but before we do that we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible arbitram is an ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and now it's live with over a hundred projects deployed gas fees on the ethereum l1 sucks too many people want to use ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us and that's why teams like arbitrom have been hard at work developing layer two solutions that makes transactions on ethereum

cheap and instant arbitrary increases ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying when interacting with arbetrom you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into ethereum's level of security and decentralization that's why people are calling this ethereum's broadband moment where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security if you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and overall make a better experience for your users go to developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building on arbitrage if

you're a user keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps building on arbitrom many defy applications that are on the ethereum layer one are migrating over to layer twos like arbitrary and some are even skipping over layer ones and deploying directly on layer twos there are so many apps coming online to arbitrarily so go to bridge.aubertrum.io and start bridging over your ether or any of the tokens listed and start having a defy experience that you've always wanted living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so

many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet which makes proper private key management a breeze but the ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app and if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite defy apps all in one spot ledger live is where you want to be not only does ledger let you buy your crypto assets straight from the app but it also hooks into all of the defy apps and services that you're used to using ledger live you can stake your

ethan lido swap on dexes like paraswap or display your nfts with rainbow you can also use wallet connect inside of ledger live to connect to all the other defy apps that keep coming online defy never stops growing and the ledger live app grows alongside with it so click the link in the show notes to see all of the defy apps that ledger live has and stay tuned as more apps come online and if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet what are you even waiting for go to ledger.com grab a ledger download ledger live and get all of your defy apps all

in one space all right bankless nation here we are now we are counting down the top 20 biggest events the marquee events news items from 2021 and what a year it's been just an incredible year for crypto hard to summarize all of these things but we are going to attempt to do that so what are we doing dave we're doing a countdown from 20 all the way to one and what's the rank ordering here uh it's a little bit chronological a little bit by significance so as things progress down the list they happen later and later in the year but they are also

more and more significant as well uh ryan are you ready to get started yeah let's get started man what's number uh let's start with number 20. what is number 20 on our list of top 20 biggest events yeah number 20 is ether and bitcoin break all-time highs and this happened at the very beginning of the year in fact bitcoin actually broke its all-time highs in 2020 so technically that did not happen in 2021. uh bitcoin broke its all-time high on the 14th of december 2020 and then ether broke its

all-time high on the 18th of january 2021 after three years of depressed bearishness throughout a very long and drawn out bear market after defy summer happened which brought in a ton of new energy bitcoin finally broke its all-time highs on december 14 2020 at 21 000 and then ether followed suit a little over a month later breaking through that 1400 mark on the in the first few weeks of january so that's really how we started off this year is breaking new all-time

highs so we started this year bullish i feel like we ended it bullish but also we're in kind of this weird crap territory david uh and uh we'll see what's in store for 2022. i think both you and i are still bullish going to the new year but uh that remains to be seen what's going to happen but let's get to number 19 on our list so number 19 gme and the rise of meme stock so gme of course is the famous gamestock stock they had a little debacle with hedge

funds that happened earlier in the year and we covered it significantly on bank list i think it proved out the use case for defy in a big way but what was the story what happened here and there's so much packed into this story it's the story of uh a stimulus checks the downstream effects of stimulus checks which definitely were a big theme of 2020 going into the hands of retail traders and the retail traders showing the power of all of you know apes aping together ape strong together or apes

together strong that one uh and then also going up against institutions it was the apes versus citadel the the hedge fund uh and then also showing the power structures of the world where when a bunch of retail traders band together to short squeeze a big hedge fund the big hedge fund calls up robin hood and says yo stop trading uh and so this has so many different stories like wrapped in it inside of it the stemi checks uh retails retail traders banding together uh the inflation and uh pushing out on

the risk curve that people have as a result of increasing printing of dollars the power structures of the world the hedge funds connected with the infrastructure to make sure that the hedge funds can't lose oh man so much wrapped into this and this really kicked off the meme stonk revolution amc happened right after this dogecoin mooned from below a penny up to 25 cents right after this uh and so it really just kicked off so many things in 2021. what do you think about this energy do you think it's a healthy energy or do

you think it's a little bit unhealthy i know definitely no traditional mainstream media's view on on this which is pretty negative but what's your take on this oh i think it's definitely an indication of something that crypto very much stands for which is power going back into the hands of the individual and the individuals having and realizing they have more power than what they previously discovered uh and so no i'm i'm very very optimistic about this also just like again individuals taking more control over their own personal finances granted meme stocks is kind of okay like

whatever i'll i'm not going to fight that fight but yeah i think it's a just emblematic of of the year at large yeah another story wrapped up in that is of course like how reddit analysts are better than the best analysts in wall street and how if we band together and like research these uh these uh stocks and these various assets these opportunities um we can uncover things that that wall street doesn't uh it's really cool example there that's number 19. let's get to number 18. so this is

michael saylor buying bitcoin he did it all year we'll also wrap up tesla buying bitcoin in the mix here both of those things happened in uh q1 of course for michael saylor it's happened the entire year why is this number 18 on our list yeah this also michael saylor also bought a bunch of bitcoin in 2020 but it was really michael saylor and microstrategy buying bitcoin in 2020 and then also continuing to do it all throughout 2021 and then actually convincing other companies like tesla to

follow suit so yeah 2021 was the year that tesla the biggest one of the biggest uh public companies out there puts bitcoin on the balance sheet uh and also really when elon musk as an individual starts just participating in crypto discourse and uh we'll talk about that in the honorable honorable mentions category later but yeah michael saylor tesla and a few other public companies putting bitcoin on the balance sheet was a big theme in 2021 still kind of contrarian though because even though like uh microstrata is doing

it um you know a handful of other firms are doing it it didn't maybe get as widespread as people thought it was at the beginning of 2021 there was this idea that all fortune 500 companies or many of them their cfos were going to like i guess ape into bitcoin and start adding it on the ballot sheets and uh that didn't happen yeah no that's people thought that this was going to be a snowball that just rolls and it kind of stopped with tesla after tesla like no big significant company put it on the balance sheet and i perhaps people just looked at like the volatility of both elon musk and michael

saylor as individuals and be like oh well that's that's it i'm not so sure about this one right yeah exactly well let's get to number 17 so that was 18 but number 17 is the rise of layer twos david you and i called for layer two summer to happen it kind of happened ish at the end of summer which is the launch of uh all of these new layer twos but there were definitely some massive successes on the layer two front this year particularly in these application specific layer twos like dydx right here we're looking at uh

layer two beat why was the the rise of layer twos a big story this year number 17 on our list well because the conversation about layer twos and ethereum has been happening since you know 2017 we've talked about layer twos and so yeah plasma state channels yeah payment channels yeah all like raden all these like layer twos technical and technically count as layer twos but they weren't the layer twos that we really really you know hoped or dreamed for and so after 2017 2018 2019 2020 layer twos

are coming layer twos are coming layer twos are coming ryan we started this podcast saying layer twos are coming in 2021 layer twos actually came fully fled layer twos evm compatible smart contract enabled trustless layer twos arrived on ethereum after years and years of research and development and experimentation main nets are actually deployed onto the ethereum layer one uh and that's that's huge it's been many many years coming didn't really have the blowout you know if you know here the

blowout like adoption that we hoped that they would have turns out it was a little bit of a slow roll it turns out these things do not go are not when you deploy them onto mainnet they are not in their final form they are still like relatively constrained and limited but they are in their last phases of just research development and in the last phases of just actually being tested by the real world market which is of course the last thing so 2021 actual l2s with actual smart contract capabilities with actual trustlessness came to ethereum this kind of bleeds into our next uh

item on the list number 16 clocking in number 16 d5 bigger than c5 and this is a story i think in in two parts the first is this uh we're looking at a tweet from hayden adams from february 15th 2021 earlier in this year uniswap just became the first decentralized trading platform to process over 100 billion in volume an exciting milestone for d5 that on some days was larger than the volume on

coinbase also there were some days in 2021 that uh stable coin liquidity and volumes on uniswap v3 dwarfed that of coinbase as well so kind of a flipping in progress there the second part of this story is antonio from dydx and this dovetails into what you were saying about scalable layer twos uh with with number 17 he said five years ago i left coinbase and i eventually funded a founded dydx today for the first time dydx is doing more volume than coinbase

oh my god this d5 protocol deployed on layer 2 now doing more volume than the coinbase exchange uh d5 grew bigger than c5 in a few cases in 2021 and that's a big deal what are your thoughts i i think just having days and weeks where defy is doing more volumes just of course the first step to doing months and years uh so i think it's it's days and weeks in 2021 and 2022 and beyond it starts to be like oh we're like d5 exchanges are

doing more volume than coinbase on a monthly basis and then it's not many months after that until it's a yearly basis and then after that it's just forever and now defy has completely just eaten cf's lunch and that is what so just bullet bullish on that and we got the first tastes of that in 2021 bolus the the bankless thesis which of course says that d5 protocols will be at the very bottom layer for uh the entire financial ecosystem okay we just breezed through five of these we're getting to number 15 now uh number 15 is

clocking in china actually banned bitcoin this time crypto this time not just bitcoin but all of crypto all right so this has been like common fud in crypto circles for many years oh my god yeah couple months china's banning bitcoin china's banning crypto something like that is happening well this year it felt like they actually did it how do we know that there was a mass exodus of proof-of-work mining machines and companies out of china into other regions of the world we've never seen that before

why is that number 15 on our list david because it's a going to be very indicative of global shifts of power if you believe the crypto thesis that open permissionless public networks are going to be the dominant form of just financial activities and then you see china pushing out not just bitcoin mining but all crypto infrastructure like websites exchanges out or out of china and not only do we know that from from the hash flow migration hash rate migration but we also just know this from uh the data of uh holdings of crypto assets inside of

chinese exchanges have also gone to zero uh so we know that china is actually pushing out basically everything about crypto uh and so this might be the thing that finally ends china's like significant dominance if this might be the the thing that costs them significantly in growth and just you know integration into the real world economy in the future it's also really truly helped the bitcoin narrative as cash flow goes from the east into the west where u.s regulators are feel much more comfortable about it it's helped bitcoin

mining proof of work mining go from coal heavy to green energy friendly uh and so that's also helped with its narrative tailwinds uh and so there's a lot a very significant number of positive second and third order consequences as a result of china actually banning crypto this time uh except uh sad for the actual chinese citizens because they are now uh only have the option of the chinese central bank digital currency which while it is doing fantastic things to unbank the or bank the unbanked uh it's also putting

them even further under control of the chinese authoritarian government that that last point i i think merit some uh repetition as well we did a fantastic podcast on the chinese central bank digital currency and their plans around blockchain earlier uh this year with a book called cashless somebody wrote about what's going on in china and so if you want to dig in deeper into the story which i encourage you to do go check out that podcast we'll include a link to it in the show notes but that's exactly what china is

is teeing up so step one get crypto out step two replace crypto with this centralized pseudo crypto type of system that is completely controlled by the chinese government and you have to wonder what other nation states will do in reaction to this right there's kind of a a fork in the road will they follow china and pursue that path or will they follow the open permissionless cryptopath and continue to develop on top of those rails that's something we'll be

monitoring into the next year all right that's 15. number 14 this was big man a central bank finally adopted bitcoin bitcoin became legal tender in el salvador they started purchasing it on el salvador a nation state balance sheet why is this number 14 david this has been part of the bitcoin unofficial road map for forever like you know first individuals then companies then countries uh you know after countries there's not much more beyond that there's only bigger and bigger countries

uh and so el salvador small country small gdp uh but the first and so bitcoin is now officially a cryptocurrency the first ever cryptocurrency is now legal tender in an entire country um there this did not uh this also drew a bunch of criticism uh you know the the dictator nature of uh of the president of uh el salvador uh navy buchelli uh and also the kind of the the forcing of bitcoin upon uh individuals and businesses in el salvador didn't always

wasn't always received with positive uh feedback from both the the citizens of el salvador and from others as well this has also drawn the attention of in institutions like imf who feel very very threatened by this by the independence of el salvador from the global financial system uh and overall has been just a huge narrative tailwind towards alternative uh currencies that aren't just fiat currencies printed out of thin air by central banks uh so just a very powerful story and uh you know hopefully the first of many to come if countries

that are choosing alternative assets as legal tender in their countries yeah i think it's an extraordinary uh story and i like that you called it part of bitcoin's unofficial roadmap because that's exactly what it is it's now bitcoin is on an adoption roadmap there not too many you know technical plans and improvements uh in in the works but definitely a lot of adoption things to take and the imf's response on this has been like let's quarantine the contagion let's make sure this doesn't spread to other places in uh central america

other places in the world it was definitely a shot across the bow of the nation states and existing institutions of the world so that in itself is fascinating and uh i think worthy of being on our list here this year um let's get to number 13 though unlucky number 13 i guess it's a meme number in itself and uh 69 million dollars is also a meme number that was the price at which this beeple artwork sold 69 million dollars uh the highest crypto art sale in

history making beeple the creator of this art one of the top three most valuable living artists absolutely incredible this happened in march of this year we're still in q1 of nft mania which uh we'll cover i think on this list in in some more detail but what uh what are your thoughts on this one yeah this this i think is really emblematic of many of the things that make nfts so cool um uh beeple was famous for making digital art one

digital art per day for years like didn't miss a day and digital arts not easy to create in a short amount of time uh and so the and as a result of just the nature of digital art before crypto he never really had any way to monetize his artwork monetize his his you know creations nfts gave people uh the ability to actually monetize his digital art uh and so just from going from a guy who kind of an indie guy with a cult following of just like making weird digital art

things every single day in a decent sized instagram and then going to actually being able to sell those things because of the power of it slapping a token onto a jpeg that made people the number one uh or one of the top three most valuable living artists so this this is the story of nfts at large a lot of digital art news forms of art and don't have a way to be monetized and nfcs offer that for so many people people was just like a a signal of things to come and you know a lot of digital artists will be funded by nfts

in ways that they weren't previously able to monetize their their art uh so this was just the first of what turned into a whole entire movement and now we have uh photography nfts other digital like music nfts uh you know audience has a whole entire platform for example and so this is just a great example of the power of nfts putting money into the hands of artists that previously did not have such an opportunity i think if you're measuring the timeline of the creator economy right this 69 million dollar people sell is going to be a key milestone in that right it's

like this is an artist's connection directly to fans and a way to monetize um his art pieces without any third parties and uh the creator economy is definitely a big theme that carried forward through the rest of the year uh but so were nfts and that brings us to number 12 on our list only a dozen more to go number 12 crypto punks board apes and profile nfts pfp nfts what a crazy year for this asset class

uh let's talk a little bit about um you know board apes crypto punks breaking sotheby's estimates where do you want to start with this one david yeah the profile picture nft movement really just prove it really helped the whole broader nft movement because you could see uh profile picture nfts in your twitter handles and now i have them also in my instagram and facebook handles and when i uploaded it to my linkedin account i was like hahaha now everyone on linkedin has to look at my crypto you put a crypto punk on your profile

and so i'm gonna add my turtle i i think this is really just a breakout use case of the metaverse like actually putting a digital representation of yourself as your digital avatar on your all your social media accounts as it turns out as the definition of the metaverse has expanded it's expanded into platforms like instagram and into platforms like tick tock like turns out that's what the metaphors is so having digital representations unique digital representations uh just was an extreme use case and also the dollar value of things like crypto punks and board apes

the sticker shock of these things allows people to flex and people love flexing especially with art and and also just a combination of just like a a cohered community like there's all the crypto punks there's all the board apes but also have unique people inside of those cr in those uh communities so like you have you know ten thousand crypto punks ten thousand individuals but you know only one of them is the albino smile with the hat right so i'm a i'm a crypto punk but i'm only this crypto punk it allows for communities to form

with individuality also inside of those communities and so not only was it a way to flex in the metaverse flex your nfts but also a way to you know signal that you're a part of a tribe you're a part of a community but you're a unique part of a community as well uh so just a really big movement uh this year with the whole profile picture nft phenomenon this is new wave flex new wave rolex uh for sure and i i think you're right about something about the the profile it was like it's a perfect fit for all of our existing social media platforms that we

know and love like you could just glue it directly into your avatar image and it sort of became a representation of you in the metaverse also from a price perspective david what what are some of the prices that we're talking about with crypto punks and board apes like what what are the floor prices or some of the big sales over the course of the year well crypto punks recently had that over 10 million dollar sale for a single crypto punk making it the highest profile picture nft sale ever um the floor price of crypto punks i believe are is uh low at 60 right now

the highest i think it got to was like 160 yeah the highest it got to was 144. i believe board apes are clocking in at 45 east for the floor there's a big conversation about uh board apes flipping crypto punks in terms of the the floor price um uh but uh overall just a generalized adoption the board apes have been like the story of an nft profile picture adoption hands down i think it's specifically because they got launched in 2020 or or early 2021 so they had some of that early momentum jimmy fallon's got it i bought it got a

got a board eight the chain smokers has a board ape really board apes have kind of won the pop culture meme but we've just really seen that is it true that board apes launched i think i've got uh something in my notes like uh april 20th oh yeah yeah it before 2020 such a new project right right yeah so huge just huge victory by by board apes for how much mainstream adoption they've happened they've gotten in such a short amount of time uh and so yeah we've got got the headline up collection of board and mts breaks sotheby's estimates with three days to go also

crypto punks also sold on sotheby's and so really just making their way into traditional art sales all our sale auction houses um and so they they aren't the only ones as well other art blocks made their way here um uh also shout out to cool cats definitely deserves to be up here as well cool cats nfts uh of which i gave mine away um so slight slight regret on that one but okay it's fine it's fine well you got someone else into crypto right i did yes that's number 12. all right guys

number 11. getting closer to the top 10 not quite there yet but getting closer number 11 axi infinity of course just two words breakout game absolutely crushing it some stats this is a a tweet um from uh let's see august 6th the first nft project actually infinity to hit one billion dollars in all-time nft trading volume history in the making 2.5 million monthly active players in

october the axs token was about 30 million dollars in market cap this time last year we got to highs of like eight maybe nine billion dollars in the course of a 12 month time span absolutely the breakout uh token the breakout price appreciation maybe the breakout app of the year combining nfts and crypto games what's uh why does this make number 11 on our list besides everything i just said yeah just to help listeners frame the context of one billion in all-time nft

volume that happened in august so not even counting the rest of the year open c hit 10 billion dollars in nft trading volume in november and open seas a platform for trading nfts actually infinity is a specific nft project and that one nft project did 10 bit 1 billion dollars in august so that is absolutely insane uh the slp token the strange love potion that is the medium of exchange token in axionfinity has also become a