ROLLUP: Celsius Bankruptcy, Vitalik's Book, GHO Aave Stablecoin, 3ac StarkWare Token

Like we need local, uh at home, decentralized, sustainable agriculture food production, which Ryan is veggies and meat. Veggies and meat. I have opinions on this thing.

Alright, David doing a nutrition podcast is just about the most bear market thing I can think of right now.

Hey, Bankless Nation, it is time for the weekly roll-up. Happy third week of July. I hope you have your morning coffee. David, you drinking a morning coffee?

Oh, two uh two every single day, yeah? Absolutely. Just we never miss it.

No carbs in coffee, right?

Oh, absolutely. No, black black coffee. As soon as you put anything into coffee, the sugar, milk, anything, it becomes a beverage. It's no longer coffee.

Wow, dude. These these takes. Some uh

yeah, anti carb maximalism here. I don't know if we're gonna stand for it. We're not talking nutrition today, though. I know you want to start another podcast, but the topics of the week are crypto. David, what are we gonna cover on the roll up today?

Celsius files for bankruptcy after paying off its DeFi loans. Important, very important order of operations there. So we're gonna cover that. Suzu of Three Arrows Capital leaks the Starknet token, and then the next day, Starknet announces a token. Uh so go figure. Thanks, Sue. We're gonna comment cover all of that, both like why he leaked the Starknet token and all the Starknet token details. Also, Vitalik writing a book coming out on Amazon called Proof of Stake. Uh, do you have it pre ordered, Ryan?

I I did pre-order that, yeah, just last week.

And then Ave doing a stable coin. G-H-O for Ghost, the Go stablecoin. Cool.

A lot happening in crypto, of course. We're gonna talk about markets in just a second. Of course, if you like the roll up, if you like the bankless podcast, if you appreciate what we are doing here, if you want to spread the word, make sure you like and subscribe. Give us a review if you are viewing this podcast, listening to this podcast in your podcast player too. Spotify, Apple, if you will. This comes out every Friday, of course.

Also, something new on Spotify. We actually have video on Spotify now.

Right. I was just gonna say that.

Yeah, so if you are on Spotify and you also want to see mine and Ryan's faces, that option is available to you.

Yeah, it's it's it's great. I actually started seeing that on the Lex Friedman podcast, which is the first time on Spotify I saw Spotify video and I kind of like it. It gives us another avenue for distribution of the video beyond uh YouTube, so we get some redundancy there.

That uh YouTube is the only place that we have our video, well, not anymore because of Spotify, but it's kind of crazy to think about like, oh, well, there's we we put out the podcast everywhere, but like YouTube's only the only place that gets the video. Uh

Remember that one time YouTube uh kicked our channel off?

Yeah. Remember that one time the YouTube CEO apologized for kicking us off YouTube.

That was pretty cool. Can't believe that happened. That was this year, right? Is that happening this year? It's all a blur.

Wasn't that like

David, let's get to markets. What's Bitcoin doing this week, my friend?

Yeah, Bitcoin, a little bit down on the week, start of the week at $20,400. Oh, it's gone up since I wrote down these prices. Crazy. Okay, so crypto markets, they move. Not that much, though. Not that much. Don't get

Get to it

too excited. Uh so down from 20,2, 20,400 up to uh down to 20,150. So like down one percent ish, one and a half percent.

and how about ETH?

Ether started the week at 1185, currently at 1115. So down about what is that? I have to redo these numbers because like when I wrote these numbers, it was 1080, not 1115. So like rough 6%, down 6% call it. Quick math.

Yeah.

As of now, as of now, when you listen to this on Friday morning, it'll be completely different. So none of what David said actually. Why do we even do this? I don't know. Why do we even tell you price? You know it's just gonna change.

But we're looking at trends over time, David, and the trend is down bad. But but there's also some interesting inflation news, and um, crypto is not responding as negatively to that recent inflation news as it could have. So maybe maybe there's a silver lining there. We'll get to some of that later. But what about the ratio, David?

Flat on the week, flat on the week.

It's that point zero five five.

It's not telling us anything. It's telling us the market doesn't know what to do right now. Uh global cryptocurrency, total market cap. We are under a trillion dollars. What are we headed at today? Yeah, last.

Last week we were up to 976 billion. This week we're down to 929 billion.

The good news is we get to uh celebrate that one trillion yet again and probably back down and then again again and again and repeat. What is the point of looking at any of these prices? How about uh Ethereum gas prices? Uh not doing too bad there. I mean, they're down as well. Yeah. So if you're trying to get a transaction through, it's a good time to do that.

DeFi is

What are we looking at?

cheap right now. I think the the average gray price in last week was like 20 something.

You doing anything new in uh on Ethereum? It's like all the cheap, all the cheap gas transactions.

I'm not doing too much.

No.

Well that and that that's reflected in like the usage charts. Like the usage charge rates are generally down. Except you know I I I was looking at the usage charts. You know the usage chart that's actually up uh in terms of like usage and volume?

US uh USDC stable coins. I was gonna say the transactions I actually did on Ethereum this week were all like withdrawals and deposits and like stablecoin stuff. I was like, oh, it's nice. I only have to pay like a dollar for that. Right. Usually it's like five

Five

six.

Something like this. Um all right. Well, let's talk about the big macro story, which continues to be inflation. And David, new numbers came in this week, and they were the worst in 41 years. They were

higher

US

last month. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, US inflation just hit a four-decade high of 9.1%. That is the headline in the Wall Street Journal. Um, we should break this down a little bit, but first first, here's the chart. Um, look how bad it is. 9.1% inflation just shooting up like a rocket in uh 2022. Uh and then from a category perspective, what are the big contributing categories, David?

Yeah. Energy is obviously the big one. So the the biggest ones are fuel oil in the last year has doubled. Gasoline has gone up 60%, gas utilities up 38%, electricity up 14%. So like those are the biggest ones, and they're all energy related. The next one after that is food, like groceries, up 12%, which is also a proxy of energy. Uh, and then new cars is like the first non-food, non-energy one, which is up 12%. Overall CPI up 9.1%. Uh I heard this really awesome uh illustration for like energy. Uh like why why is why do people pay attention to energy like so much in the global macro space? Uh energy is like nature's interest rate, it is the cost of doing things. If you need to move yourself any further than where you can walk, you have to consume energy. Elevators take energy, escalators take energy, cars, energy, trains, energy, buses, planes. Like those things also move all of the things that people need, like food. Uh and so when energy when energy prices go up, like the cost of existing also goes up, which makes the world a harder place to exist in as it goes in. So this is why everyone's concerned.

Yeah, it's uh it's like a transaction fee for real life, right?

Yes.

I I guess that's why they call it gas on Ethereum. It is really the analog. If you want to do anything in the metaverse on Ethereum, you have to pay gas. If you want to do anything in real life, it's going to come at you through the price of energy and fuel uh costs. Um, David, we are also looking at the DXY, which is this is basically US dollars, um, the ratio of US dollars to to uh primarily the yen, Japanese yen, and the euro.

I think the Euro's the biggest one, followed by the yen.

And what's the story with the DXY? What's it doing?

Yeah, we are hitting like uh also a very, very long time high, all-time high in for for a while. I think like the the last time it was this high was something like 2001 or 2002 or something. 109 is the index uh for for record. Uh let's see, in in the most recent it's high was like 102 back in like 2017, also when they were like raising interest rates most recently. Uh, but then COVID hit and it dumped. When the dollar's high, everything else is low uh by comparison. Uh and so like you when you see this dollar index, you're like, and you're seeing that go through the moon, like all assets have suffered because that's the dollar going up versus well, not all assets, is this basket of currencies, but like strength in the dollar, right? A lot of like everyone's going to uh to France for ECC in a little bit, my myself included, and all of a sudden, like my fiat, my fiat dollars are getting cheap.

Did you see, David, uh Euros and the dollar are at parodied?

It's there's broke down below parity. It's like ninety one euro is uh one dollar ninety-nine wait. One dollar one dollar and one cent is now one euro. No wait, the inverse. Damn it, I'm so bad at math.

Anyways, the dollar's stronger than the euro.