ROLLUP: Elon Musk Twitter | UK Royal NFT | Bitcoin Miami | DAI vs UST Stablecoin Wars | Axie Bailout

This is the first Royal NFT. Okay? Uh Queen Elizabeth in on the

NFT the Holy

Yeah.

Hey Bankless Nation, happy first week of April. This is the first week in April 2022 that we are doing what, David?

Oh, we're rolling up the week in crypto, Ryan, where we condense the entire week of cryptocurrency, which was always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless. So many crazy things happened this week. Uh gosh, Ryan, you want to tell us about give give us the tease. Tease us what

Okay, I'll give you the little tease. So uh Elon Musk just became the largest shareholder in Twitter. And for those of you who are like, that's not crypto news, well, Twitter is like crypto social governance protocol, basically. It's a lot a lot of the social layer of crypto of crypto happens on Twitter. So that we're gonna talk about that. Uh UK, the UK, United Kingdom is minting an NFT. This is the first royal NFT.

Okay. Uh Queen Elizabeth in on that?

NFT the holy

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a very special Royal NFT. So we're excited about that and the UK talk as well. Also the stable coin wars are heating up. You haven't heard of the stable coin wars. We'll talk about them. There's this thing called four pool on curve.

There's a lot of detail here, but the the the key thing is stablecoins are getting aggro with each other, like communities coming after one another and like trying to conquer market share.

while Do Kwan is trying to basically kill Dai, uh according to his own tweets. Meanwhile, Maker Dao is making deals with Tesla at the same time. So there are some uh deep things to be talking about in the stablecorn wars this week.

Uh Luna is also buying Bitcoin in Avex. So that's what uh that's what we're gonna be talking about. Uh not ETH though. So that's interesting.

Political choice.

A lot more to say about that. Okay, guys, before we get in, we want to tell you about this uh really exciting NFT opportunity. All right, so this is an NFT that goes to a good cause. That's the first thing you need to know. So uh it is National Awareness Day for HIV and AIDS on April 10th. And uh MAC, the makeup company, Consensus NFT, they're partnering up, teaming up to present some art by the artist Keith Herring. Some fantastic art here embodied in an NFT, and all of the proceeds go to support those affected, youth affected by HIV and AIDS. So really cool opportunity if you've never partaken in the NFT sort of uh shenanigans, as David calls them. This is a good starter NFT. Um, some of the the lowest tier mints cost $25, and then upwards of there, there's a limited supply. And the art is really cool, David. Keith Herring, I've had an opportunity to uh to look up more of his art. And I'm I'm sure you've probably seen it in pop culture references, but uh he's done some incredible work here in the past.

Yeah, I actually I didn't know the name Keith Herring, but I knew the art by Keith Herring. It's very iconic art. Uh and so this is actually a pretty interesting opportunity. We have a very big company, MAC Cosmetics, uh, pairing up with Consensus, one of the biggest crypto companies, uh using the art of Keith Herring, an absolutely like massive artist in the space, to make some NFTs where 100% of the revenue from these NFTs is going to uh youth HIV AIDS awareness. So, like, just a lot of cool things all in this NFT project. Um, and so perhaps this might be the NFT project for you. Maybe you don't uh maybe you're looking at all these uh monkey pictures and all these like, I don't know, all the weird NFTs. But you know, if you want to get into an NFT and also feel good about it, maybe this is the first NFT for you if you've not yet minted an NFT.

So if you want to uh hear about that, sign up so you don't miss it. Go visit the link in the show notes. It's banklist.cc slash capital A.

Uh sorry, capital M, capital A, capital C, and you'll be directed to that where you can sign up. Um David, some other things going on is we are doing an episode on treasure Dow.

Treasure ecosystem.

And I think that's cool in and of itself. But also, this is uh a new show series that we're playing around with. Um tell us about this, David.

Yeah, we're calling this the Alpha League series. Basically, anytime that there is a community out there who wants to present the bull case for that community, Bankless is here for you. So I started out with this whole series with MakerDAO. And then this is going to be the second show in that series, Treasure Dow. And so I'm just posting on Twitter like who should come on next. So if you are a part of a community and you think that the bull case for that community needs to be heard, make sure you're following Bankless and me on Twitter because I will always listen to who gets the most energy into these tweet threads. And that's how we decide who's coming on next is who wants this the most. So treasure, the ecosystem, uh really, really vibrant community. Uh never been on bankless before, but now they will be. And so your community can be on bankless too. Uh so yeah, stay tuned for more.

I can't wait for the Cardano episode, David.

Oh god.

Oh, what did I just do? Oh no.

I think you may have said too much.

Yeah.

Uh speaking of saying too much, though, I don't think we're doing that in the Bankless Alpha report, but um there is a lot disclosed in the Alpha report, a lot of alpha, okay.

So this is where you get your alpha. There is, I think, a growing need for people that are really just paying attention to the token ecosystem as attention goes from one token to another. The Bankless Alpha report is where you get an understanding as why is attention going to where it is. So this is coming off of analyst Ben Kiev. He's a super hungry Zoomer analyst in the DeFi space. He's the methodologist behind the GMI index, and he pays attention to DeFi more than anyone that I know. He is on the bleeding edge, he is on the frontier. And so he is covering the hottest tokens that have captured people's attention in the last like month or so. He's explained why they've captured attention. And then he gives his rating overweight, underrate, underweight, or neutral, along with some price targets and some analysis and justifications as well. This is going out to bankless premium subscribers for those that pay $22 a month. And this will be an ongoing uh thing every single month to capture some of the hottest themes and the biggest alpha that Ben discovers. Ben and the rest of the bankless analyst team discovers in the DeFi space. Uh so if you are a bankless premium subscriber, this uh alpha report is coming to your inbox today, uh Friday, as you are listening to this. So go check it out. You can see the preview here, but the text is hidden. Uh and so I expect this to come out every single month uh and it just always be a rotation of the hottest tokens that are in the uh in people's mind share every single month. Uh Ryan, anything to add to that?

Oh dude, I'm super excited about this because I actually I actually want to know, right? It's like um we're so busy with the day to day of kind of managing all of the news and the ecosystems, like uh to to spend the in depth time that our analysts do and finding actual token opportunities and what the catalyst might be. It's something I don't have time for. So this is something I'm gonna pay a lot of attention to, and I I can't wait to read the entire thing. I've read part of it now, David, but I uh I'm I'm gonna give it all my attention soon.

Yeah, we're so we we actually we asked Ben to put in these like did digest to to really bolster up uh the the bankless roll-up and what we talk about. But then we just realized, you know what? Let's just put it into a report. And so that's what we did.

Absolutely. Uh okay. Speaking of reports, I guess. Market market report. What's the market telling us right now? Uh Bitcoin, where are we at on the week?

Uh it's a womp womp womp week, Ryan. Uh Bitcoin is down seven percent, started the week at forty-six thousand dollars, hit a low of forty-three thousand dollars to where we currently are now are at now at forty-three and a s forty-three point six thousand dollars.

Okay. We're down. We're down. Let's uh look at the three months. Still up? Still up a little bit? Crab

Krabby up, uh

year to date. We're kind of down ish, but it's all been crap. Uh how about Ether? What's that looking like on the week?

Etherprice started the week at $3,300, hit a low of $3,150 to uh but it also had an interweek high of $3,550. Looked really good, Ryan, trying to break out to the upside. It failed that breakdown, and now the bears are in control again, but also not really because we didn't really break down below 3,100. So crabby week, but down overall, down uh six percent, I think. Yeah, down six percent.

Over 3K, it's a good day, is what I say.

And you know

the rhymes, yeah.

Yeah. That's true for anything. Uh ETH Bitcoin. Well we'll talk about maybe why we're down on the weekend in a second because I think some of this has to do with the uh the Fed news uh this week. But before we get there, the ETH Bitcoin chart on the ratio, the all important ETH Bitcoin ratio. What's that looking like this week?

Uh, it's looking good, Ryan. Last week it was at 0.072. This week it is at 0.074. So above a little bit more than a 2% growth on the week. Uh, you know, you can't be disappointed. Uh, yeah, we didn't really get the US dollar breakout that we wanted, but the uh ETH BTC, the risk appetite indicator, is slowly grinding upwards.

Okay. Crypto hungry for more risk, I guess. Uh the bet index, which tries to moderate some of that volatility and that risk, a third, a third, a third, but that's a third Bitcoin, a third DeFi uh tokens, and a third ETH. What's that looking like on the week?

Yeah, down 7% on the week. Started at $122, uh, currently at $113.

There we go. There we go. Gas markets. It was a lower gas week most of the time with some huge spikes, I think. Like the Gary Vee spike. We'll talk about that when we get to the news. But what's the average gas? What's this looking like?

Yeah, average gas last week was 40 GUE. It has moved up to 44 GUE. So Ethereum usage marginally increasing. Marginally increasing.

There you go. Well, let's talk about uh maybe why some of the prices are down. This is our Fed watch. The Fed officials this this week announced a plan to shrink the balance sheet by ninety five billion a month.

That's a

Big number.

number.

That's a big number, right? So this is reverse quantitative easing, quantitative tightening, I suppose. I don't know if these terms are still used very much, but uh 95 billion a month they are shedding. And this would shrink the Fed's balance sheet by one trillion per year, David. And the the reason uh is of course, this is on the back of concern about uh inflation, you know, it's it's not so fleeting, apparently, as the Fed was talking about last summer. It it seems to be a sustained issue that the Fed is now dealing with. And so they are not only talking about, of course, um shrinking the balance sheet, but also continuing to raise rates expeditiously was, I believe, a term that was used. And we saw some of the damage that came in the bond market as a result of this. Oof. So uh massive damage. This was like one of the biggest drops, I think, since the nineteen nineties in the bond market. So the biggest drop we've seen like twenty five plus years.

What time frame though? Just for the for the listeners that aren't looking at the chart, are we talking about from the end of November to where we are currently time frame?

Uh this is a different chart. This is a different chart. I I was just saying that in general. This is the iShares uh twenty year treasury ETF chart, which is down eleven percent year to date. So in general it's

It looks like a crypto chart, Ryan.

The takeaway is like people are getting out of bonds. What's interesting about this is um

stocks are still up, right? So you got bonds going down, stocks up. Like people don't want to be in bonds. People want to be in, I guess traditionally, they they've been seen as risk on assets like stocks, like even crypto didn't take too big of a hit compared to bonds. And you you sort of wonder if maybe the definition of risk is changing fundamentally. Like

Bonds are somewhat risky. Like, I mean, you're looking at a uh federal government who's printing trillions per year. All of every single nation state is printing so much money these days, and their deficits are getting higher. Their ability to pay them back without printing is becoming less and less likely. And so are bonds really the safe asset? I don't know. Maybe the market is showing some some signs of that cracking. Of course, I'm not a macro economist. I just see the Fed doing some more tightening. Interesting that crypto didn't take quite as big a hit as I thought it might. And uh perhaps all of this is is saying something to us. It's also saying that uh U.S. mortgage rates are up. You're looking to get in in a mortgage. The time was like a few months ago, not so much now. Rates are up to like four, four and a half percent almost now.

And uh the take I have here is that the volatility the the joke, the tweet is saying this is not oil, this is not a meme stock or even a shitcoin, it's US mortgage rates, which is indicating the absolute like gargantuan run in mortgage rates from just like earlier this year where it was at 3% down up to 4.4%, which is like a big move in mortgage rates, apparently. But just also the the speed and magnitude of the move is kind of what's uh caught a lot of people by surprise. And my take here is that the world is becoming more and more chaotic. As crypto becomes less and less volatile, the the world around it is becoming more and more volatile. I remember in 2017, 2018, one of the conversations about why crypto will never work was like, oh, it's too volatile, it's too volatile. Well, the rest of the world has gotten a lot more volatile since then. Uh and also since then, crypto volatility has dampened. So, you know, not really how I expected that to play out at the time, but uh the world becoming more chaotic makes crypto a lot easier, uh a lot more appetizing than previously.

Can I just say this? I feel like crypto has made me volatility proof.

Totally. Well

Like I just

if if you've been in crypto, you are prepped. You are prepped for the next