ROLLUP: 4th Week of December

if you are looking for the front page of defy look no further than xerion.io xerion is your home base for managing your d5 portfolios xerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the d5 protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis but all in one central spot here you can see i've loaded up a wallet and xerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time as well as a breakdown of all the assets that i own as well as all of my

transaction history that i've ever done in an easy to view fashion xerion also lets you invest right into d5's best yielding financial opportunities right from their home page xerion also makes it super easy to access interest in defy using applications like compound and ave in the background and you can also exchange your assets using the xerion app using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates you can even use the xerion mobile wallet to add your metamask or arjun or another ethereum

address right into your mobile wallet so you can see your portfolio and engage in defy on the go here i just loaded up my argent wallet and now i'm going to load up my meta mask as well and xeron will do the same thing it will add all of my assets and wallets together all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on adding wallets is trivially easy if you already have a meta mask you can get it right into the xerion app and it can sync with your desktop app as well and the best part is you can also buy ether right into the app itself

use the invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in as well as other opportunities and coming soon to the xerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well so download the app it works on ios and android go to xerion.io plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you we're also brought to you by monolith monolith is your cool new defy account

your d5 savings account your d5 checking account except the cool thing about the monolith defy account is that it gets software updates right you actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time so here are some of the features monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know defy and what it is you can you can add money to it you can put that money to work in compound and accessing yield uh but you can all and you can also swap through uniswap what was cool with monolith is that they will send you a very sexy monolith visa card that

connects to your smart monolith smart contract wallet on ethereum so it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a a savings account that gets software updates so this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world but you can still do real world things with you know real money it like buy your groceries so that's just fantastic coming soon to monolith actually already here to monolith is now you can buy die and get it sent to your wallet directly right so it's also being an on-ramp so you don't have to go

through your centralized exchange like coinbase or gemini or wherever you can just go straight from your bank account right into your monolith checking account smart contract wallet so check them out at monolith.xyz nation welcome to a special holiday episode of your weekly rollup this is the fourth week of december david what are we doing today we are rolling it up we are rolling up the week of news into a short little snippet that gets

injected right into your brain the crypto industry the ethereum world the bitcoin world moves super fast and so therefore we need to roll up the weak and get it injected into your brain so you can keep up with what's going on in the crazy industry of crypto because this is a holiday week guys we're releasing it to you a day early a day before christmas so this is going to come out on thursday for your thursday morning coffee so whatever you're doing this holiday season we hope you are enjoying some downtime with your family but we wanted to get this roll up to you

david we're going to attempt to do this in about 25 minutes and we hit market we hit releases we're gonna hit news some hot takes and finally end with what we are excited about so as usual you can view this on the bankless youtube channel check it out there or the podcast david are you ready 25 minutes let's roll into this let's roll it up all right let's start we're actually starting with something new so let's highlight a bankless citizen this week david so who is this guy yeah so like we say when we usually do our roll-ups uh

to bring your coffee and drink it with you because this is a very high energy show but uh the bankless citizen uh matthias i think yeah mathias uh he does handstands while he listens to the roll up so uh matthias hi i hope you're doing a handstand right now and thanks for the shout out on twitter and if anybody else has some crazy rituals that they do while they listen to the weekly rollups let us know and add us at the banquet twitter dude two things at the same time getting fit while you are getting crypto injected in your brain there's nothing better uh

that is awesome man okay let's talk with let's talk about the market dave let's start there what is the market telling us bitcoin continues to to hover up above its all-time high its previous all-time high anyway what are we looking at this week yeah this is the second phase it looks like of very high btc consolidation the last time we had a weekly rollup it was right before the bitcoin broke into the 20k range and it had been consolidating in the very high 17 000 low 19 000 range and then it jumped up to 23 000 ish and now it is

doing that same thing consolidating between twenty four thousand and twenty three thousand dollars extremely high prices and with historical in reference to historical bitcoin prices yet the dumps seem to be uh bought the there doesn't really seem to be significant dumpage here like bitcoin is at all-time highs and it doesn't really want to go down from that uh we'll see if that holds but again like super high consolidation levels from bitcoin right now pretty bullish way to end december also bitcoin dominance is doing like really well are we close to 70 percent

now yeah we are on we are basically touching 70 bitcoin dominance was already doing really really hot and and then the xrp news broke xrp the third largest cryptocurrency dumped 25 on the news which just propelled bitcoin dominance to be even higher so bitcoin dominance doing really really well right now and guys if you're not familiar with what bitcoin dominance is of course it's bitcoin's percentage of the total crypto market cap so bitcoin now in terms of value represents 70 of the total crypto

market cap uh that fluctuates up and down over time it's close to its all-time high on dominance as well at least the highest it's been in a while um also like corporations continue to buy especially michael saylor and mike microstrategy they they talked about buying more bitcoin it looks like they have now indeed bought some more bitcoin for their balance sheet what's going on here right so this was the announcement of microstrategy doing a an offering a bond offering a convertible note so if the

price of the microstrategy share price gets above a certain number the loan that microstrategy took out converts into shares in the company uh but this was what was announced last week the last week they announced that they were going to do this they which implied that they were going to be purchasing 650 million dollars worth of bitcoin and what they are announcing today is that they did it right like they told us they would and then they did i'm actually surprised that it happened so quickly uh 600 to move 650 million dollars in seven days is no small feat and what's

interesting to me is that the bitcoin price it's it's hard to pin where microstrategy made the purchase right it obviously wasn't one big market buy it was spread over time uh but it's it's hit because bitcoin is so liquid it's been hidden in the market frothiness that we've seen so we actually don't see a bitcoin price increase specifically because of this uh 650 million dollar purchase which illustrates how liquid bitcoin is guys this is why we always say liquidity begets liquidity this kind of a purchase a 650 million dollar

purchase would have been impossible to make like five years ago right like there just wasn't the liquidity to support it now or even in the bear market because prices creates liquidity too absolutely and so as as the market cap for these cryptocurrencies get bigger then larger entities institutions can begin purchasing them in larger quantities liquidity begets liquidity let's talk about eath price too so we're kind of flat from last week uh or so up just three percent in the last seven

days it really feels like david bitcoin dominance is just sucking the air out of the room here well last week was the week that bitcoin broke its all-time high so that's to me that's no surprise like the the week following bitcoins breaking of all-time high is a bitcoin themed week you know bitcoin was up 21.7 it's 21 in the last seven days ether up just three percent uh it's just a bitcoin week um and you know we'll we'll see what happens again moving forward uh yes you are right ether is struggling to keep itself up above the 600 mark it recently touched

670 now it's floating right above 600. so yeah it's definitely got some room above it in comparison to bitcoin the interesting thing about this is um you mentioned it was the bitcoin week that the when bitcoin dominance starts to get at these heights people start talking about like well is 2021 going to be a bitcoin dominated year right it always the conversation always swings in that direction until there is some type of reversal so tbd on 2021 whether that is

bitcoin dominated or whether a reversal really uh like swings the conversation the the other direction so we will see let's look at total locked value in d5 so that is down a little bit from about 16 and a half billion to 14 billion uh what's happening there and what's happening with the d5 pulse index david yeah this is most likely just the depreciation of the value of assets inside of d5 bringing that total value locked down uh dpi the define index

token is down from where it was last week at 115 dollars down to a hundred and eleven dollars uh so like still still pretty flat uh things kind of are waiting for the ethereum markets to heat up again so it's been a quiet week however like you are showing right now on the screen the east number locked in d5 continues to march upwards and that is one of the core fundamentals of the ethereum economy what percentage of ether is in d5 that number continues to march up to new all-time highs so we've got 7.3 million eth locked in defy an ad

in this e3 staking contract there's another almost 2 million we're at the cusp of hitting 2 million so that's almost 10 million locked so that's a good close to percent getting close to ten percent between staking and eth locked in d5 um i love the new charts that divide pulse put out this this bitcoin at work chart too which shows a breakdown of all of the um bitcoin assets that are tokenized on ethereum today uh and so it shows right

now there's a 142 000 bitcoin that represents about 3.3 billion dollars tokenized on ethereum today this number was like zero yeah at the beginning of last year like crazy man look at this growth chart dude like this is just like mount everest which is like straight up um and i love this this because they actually break down the different types of wrapped bitcoin tokenized bitcoin wbtc of course has an eighty percent dominance yeah and that is a custodial

crypto bank type solution so really interesting chart here do you have anything to add david yeah i'm i'm happy to see bitcoin on ethereum infrastructure like and data available like just having data about that available to us i think that's really important to growing that sort of conversation the the bitcoin iron theorem conversation is really really hard because bitcoiners like their bitcoin on bitcoin uh and we are going to see over i think the next year we are really going to see whether the bitcoin blockchain as a as an entity embraces

ethereum and embraces ethereum as an l2 solution for bitcoin or do they or or does bitcoin kind of just be stay reclusive and stay self-sovereign stay keep itself like in bitcoin on a bitcoin and kind of keep to itself we are going to see whether the the narratives and the ecosystems make that choice or not yeah absolutely uh two other things in the market section we're just going to skim over them quickly because we gotta get to releases the first is grayscale is like printing money my friend with

their gbdc and their e3 products 25 million a month in december annualized that's like what 300 million annualized uh what a great product for grayscale not so great for retail like the sec blocking etfs is really uh hurting retail they're paying a premium for these products but grayscale is cleaning up there of course also we're gonna get to this a little bit later david but it's worth highlighting a little bit in the market section xrp uh some news came out that the sec is

going after xrp in a big way ripple in it a big way and some of the crypto trust indexes namely namely bitwise already have are just sold liquidated all of their xrp grayscale is probably going to uh follow suit so some interesting developments on the xrp front i i generally ignore xrp david but it's worth talking about a little bit i think today do you have anything to add to that i know we're going to hit it later too yeah we are going to hit it later i think it's just worth to note

that like because what happened was that xrp is going is getting pointed at by the sec saying this is a security and then all the related infrastructure around xrp that legally cannot provide infrastructure to securities needs to change their path and so that's what we're seeing the bitwise is dumping all of their xrp to remove it from their their index grayscale is likely going to be dumping xrp because they can't be offering a security product in the way that they're offering exchanges can't list xrp because it is a security

overall a bad day to have infrastructure for xrp because you need to exit in that environment in order to be compliant according to the sec i think a lot of people saw this coming so it's tough to be surprised but it's you know that is actually happening now i guess is is somewhat surprising all right let's get to releases the graph network which is sort of a an api for all of d5 built on top of ethereum some other protocols they they um their token grt

has just gone like absolutely bonkers nuts this week uh i was kind of looking at it in the background but what's the story here i see this grt token is now a 4.6 billion fully diluted valuation what the heck is going on very high yeah brand new token on the block it immediately started pumping which is where so much attention got thrown into it the graph is straight up a great project a great team and really a needed service for d5 it is one of the important

cornerstones that allows d5 to work while also maintaining decentralization so very useful and valuable product i do not think that the token is currently reflective of the value that that the graph currently is adding to the ecosystem i think there's a lot of speculation here um and the the token made big headlines by like doing a like a 10x on the first day like three times over again um i would not recommend getting into this token at this present moment this is extremely bubbly this is extremely frothy however congratulations

to the graph for getting the token out the door and getting the graph network up and running of course guys this is not financial advice we are also going to be publishing some information about the token economics of drt and the graph project pretty soon on the bankless newsletter so make sure you are subscribed to that speaking of tokens david tornado cash they released a governance token what's going on here yeah a retrospective airdrop very much like uniswap did if you have ever used a tornado cash you might have gotten some

t-o-r-n tokens i've seen some criticisms about the design of this token saying that it doesn't actually do much there's not much about the tornado cache protocol that needs to be governed it's a pretty static system so i i have heard that criticism that like what's the point of the token however everyone likes retroactive air drops to anyone that's used tornado cash so if you have used tornado cash in the in the past go check out to see if you've got any torn tokens dude we've got to do an article on a bank list about a retrospective airdrops because here here's the reality

guys if you are using d5 protocols chances are you're going to be rewarded with airdrops in the future so there's a list of some protocols that don't yet have tokens that are candidates for rewards um zapper comes to mind xerion comes to mind dydex we should do a full post on this david tornado just went in that direction so get rewarded for using defy early that's a pretty compelling reason to start using these tools as well i think it's safe to assume that your tokenlist product and project that

you use probably will have a token in the future probably uh all right compound labs some interesting information here so they this is this is the compound protocol of course they released a white paper for a new i don't call this a side chain proof of authority side chain on ethereum that they are building um and it's supposed to serve as a bridge uh from ethereum to maybe central bank digital currencies through

to other chains what's your take on this new compound chain yeah this was met with a little bit of controversy however i'm i'm sitting on my hands and waiting for this to play out um compound is building like you said a a unique and its own independent blockchain that does one thing which is serve the compound protocol on that blockchain there are definitely some advantages to this such as you know low gas fees like you're not since you're not on the ethereum main net there's also some centralization going on because proof of authority trains are inherently centralized and i think that

might be like the angle i don't know what compound is up to however i do understand that they are some of the smartest and most on the frontier uh of many of the d5 protocols that we talk about so i trust that they're doing makes sense for a compound maybe the centralization element that they're adding to compound is something that allows for off-chain real-world assets ave has done something similarly similar to this by creating a centralized like derivative version of ave that can host off-chain assets maybe this is what

compounds doing what's also interesting is the cash token so compound has their own native stable coin which is like the ether of their own um chain uh so some some interesting plays what the criticism comes from compound is no longer explicitly and uh only built on ethereum it's now its own self-sovereign thing and so some ethereum axes are are hesitant about that however i'm i'm uh cautiously optimistic and waiting for whatever the benefits of this thing are to to play out um so well i will be

watching this i agree with that take i i think it's important uh to just kind of let things play out this is definitely not a competitive threat to the credible neutrality of ethereum um maybe it'll amount to nothing maybe it'll be useful for compound i think it'll be useful for d5 let's let's uh see what happens and figure it out it's definitely different though than the roll-up approach yes very right so very different the question of why they didn't go with kind of a roll-up and like the way synthetics is doing it you know

i still have that question in my mind i am happy to see a more a new stable coin enter the arena though the cash stable coin i think i have high hopes for that interesting okay we'll be monitoring that for sure also uh another protocol just mentioned a raise this is the union finance protocol uh tell us about this david yeah i this is new to me as as well i haven't heard too much about this but this is a project going straight after uh straight-up credit on ethereum and that's credit in a very different way in

the more traditional way which is unsecured loans um we in the d5 world are very used to over collateralized loans this is going after no collateralized loans or or maybe collateralized by something alternative like your reputation which in the legacy world would be your credit score uh and so they are working on building a system that allows for unsecured loans in d5 and so i'm that is something that definitely could uh really be useful in d5 we love our loans uh and why not add unsecured uncollateralized loans if

union can figure out how to provide this so uh good luck to union and congrats on the raise yeah i've seen an early demo pretty excited about it we will see how it goes once it hits mainnet um this perpetual protocol as well they just launched mainnet as well this is a ethe and bitcoin perpetual contracts protocol david what what is this and what's different about this versus something like a dydx that is doing uh perpetuals right now yeah perpetual protocol is one the first team that issued their perp token their

native token using the balancer smart contract or smart pool which is the same same pool that we distributed the bat tokens with so some combination of an amm slash dutch auction mechanism which i'm really bullish on as a token distribution mechanism and with regards to the actual uh architecture behind the perpetual swaps i i don't know what the difference is between perpetual protocol and dydx then that it's a little bit outside of my area of expertise but do know that there

are options out there new options out there to go leverage long on bitcoin or ether i do know that duidx caps out at 4x and perpetual protocol is offering 12x so if you are feeling three times more degenerate than whatever you were doing on dydx perpetual protocol might be for you tis the season to be degenerate is that what you're saying david you know just a full yolo man full yellow all right well let's talk about uh speaking of of yolos uh great git coin actually

like people during the the holiday season or in fact all year have been yolo giving and funding public goods on the ethereum ecosystem and in general in open source software so um bitcoin just passed 10 million in funding to open source software over their history the vast majority of that occurred this year this is super bullish for public goods yeah my take on this one is that this is just a symptom of ethereum building the tools that solves its own problems

ethereum has historically had terrible funding problems how do we fund development and get coin is the platform that really tackles that problem head on and seeing git coin have all the success that has had makes me really really optimistic because it just shows like if ethereum has it's a new problem bitcoin has a way to fund solutions to that problem so so bullish on ethereum solving its own problems i just want to add to that to you david it's like bullish ethereum solving its own problems without taking

shortcuts because a couple of years ago the shortcut that everyone was taking that was in vogue is basically okay your protocol should start issuing money to developers basically to public goods to infrastructure right um and so a lot of a lot of chains like decred uh tezos they started doing that of course the the trade-off to that is that starts to affect the credible neutrality of your monetary policy right because then there's a a group of people who own the coins who are voting like a plutocracy

and saying yes these developers this group gets some of the new senior age coinage that we are minting and these other folks don't that is definitely bad for the credible neutrality of the monetary system uh ethereum could have done that in fact there were proposals were segments small segments of the ethereum community wanted to do something like that but it didn't uh and you know the net effect is we have maintained a credibly neutral monetary policy in ethereum and we are also solving our own problems

the the harder way like so uh very bullish and i think um like bullish on ethereum not taking shortcuts to this solution as well yeah and i would also add on to that like git coin is something that is really resonant with some of the core values of ethereum funding public goods is one of the world's hardest unsolved problems it's not just an ethereum problem it's a world problem how do we add and direct money to things that aren't going to profit anyone yet still create a better

world for ourselves so when i see git coin pushing out 10 million dollars in public goods funding i see that not only is really optimistic for the ecosystem that that's benefiting from but as a proof of concept of other ways to solve bigger and bigger problems that aren't just ethereum related it reminds me of that slaying moloch episode guys you have to look that up so one of our most popular ones of the year one of my favorites of the year podcast episode all right david we talked about um releases we talked about market let's get to some of the news

let's start with the news again about right here well what's what's worth repeating i mean i guess um like what what's happening with the sec versus ripple thing right so it's been long speculated that xrp is a security that is under the purview of the sec the sec hasn't done anything yet up until today or yesterday and that was the day people have been speculating about this happening for years and now it's finally here this entire industry has always hated xrp as

soon as you get into the world of crypto and start to begin to understand how to evaluate and understand bitcoin and ethereum and what makes these things so awesome you then see a complete opposite ethos or values coming out of the xrp ripple project and so the xrp or at the sec is going after ripple for generating this you know quote unquote [ __ ] coin and then marketing it and then dumping it and doing all of these extremely unethical things to prop up the valuation of the token so that they

can continue to sell it to continue to fund themselves brad garlinghouse the ceo of ripple took in 600 million dollars in personal revenue that's revenue into his pocket from uh just ripple from from being the ceo of ripple uh so what's interesting here is like this is not only just a retail scam trying to pump the xrp token but it's also a regulatory heist because ripple has also trying been trying to get cozy with regulators by donating to the biden administration just being really cozy

with people in dc and so it's it's one part scam one part heist and i'm glad it's over yeah yeah uh absolutely even if italic got a little spicy i think on twitter this is a little off-brand for vitalik but um it's interesting that he called srp as shitcoin on twitter um you know and and this is this is some shade that xrp lawyers were throwing at bitcoin and ethereum and i think part of the reason why um you've just taken kind of the the hardline stance against xrp that you just took is because xrp and

ripples really specialized in decentralization theater right so because retail is not as plugged into you the credible neutrality and the decentralization that make bitcoin special and make ethereum special um xrp very much tries to disguise themselves as if they are just as decentralized have the same value set as bitcoin and ethereum and um sell their token to retail and like many who are new to crypto can't really tell the difference i don't know how many texts i've i've gotten from people over the years saying like

yeah i'm gonna buy bitcoin ethereum and xrp and i'm like guys like one of those things is not like the other two right like uh you should make sure you know what makes bitcoin and ethereum special before you go start buying other cryptocurrencies that like you you have no idea where their value comes from not only is xrp to me um and quite possibly a security in a scam it's also a bad investment right it suffers from the like the um mv equals pq velocity problem of 2017.

it's just not a good money so lots of problems with it it looks like the um the ship might finally be at least under attack but part of me david is is wondering if they don't just get off with a slap on the wrist a multi-million dollar fine maybe a large fine maybe 100 billion dollars but they can kind of afford it and go on their merry way i'm not sure what's what's going to happen you have any thoughts there yeah it's definitely a very strong worry of mine as well we saw this happen with the eos case which eos also had a

dubious token sale uh arguably much less dubious than xrp but eos they raised like something like something crazy in the multiples of billions of dollars and then they got like some 60 million dollar fine which at the end of the day like is that even a fine if you've raised billions of dollars i i'm optimistic that the sec will not go that same route simply due to how much money that xrp raised specifically from dumping xrp tokens into retail and also some of the back office

communications that the sec seems to have stumbled on upon which are extremely damning about the intentions of brad garlinghouse and and other members of the ripple board yep very interesting um another development has been this week uh the ledger breach so if you have a ledger wallet hardware wallet which um we love like it's a great great product uh david's showing a few fist wow um uh this week some hackers actually

published the full list so i believe in june of this year uh there was a breach so anyone who had ever purchased a ledger up to june through ledger specifically their information like their their name their email address their uh their home address wherever the ledger product was shipped to uh was hacked and taken and that was published online through dark markets sold that way now some hackers actually like published them for downloads uh very publicly so you don't even have to