ROLLUP: ETH hits ATHs | Blackrock buying BTC | SouljaBoy looking into NFTs

david happy third week of january what are we doing today we are rolling up the third week of january it is roll rollups time where we go through a whole entire week's worth of news in one single episode get that rolled up and injected right into your brain we go through the market we talk about what the market is doing then we go through releases what got released in the last week then we go through some news talk about what happened in this last week of news and then we get into some ecosystem takes and then we finally finish it off with what david and ryan are excited about

ryan are you ready i'm ready i'm excited about a lot of things let's do this all right you want to start with markets david that's my favorite place to start anyway so we have to start with bitcoin price but you know i am i'm i'm really excited to talk about eath price but i'm going to hold my excitement for a minute let's talk bitcoin yeah uh coming off of a very volatile last week the second week of january where bitcoin went from like forty two thousand dollars down to thirty thousand dollars up to forty thousand dollars we're almost doing the same thing uh bitcoin is at 31 and a

half thousand dollars after touching 40 000 last week uh so you know volatility is just keeping strong um and so people people are getting a little bit bummed about this drop in prices right especially right after we touched ether price this is just how it goes folks this is this is what the market does up and down a little bit of chop in the bull market nothing to worry about let's talk ether david it finally happened it finally broke its previous all-time high of 1420

topped out at 1440. which is awesome because we broke the all-time high but kind of [ __ ] lame because we only broke it by 20 dollars oh i don't even care i mean so like i was told so many times during 2018 2019 that this would never happen and it just happened last week i wish i could go back and like find all of the tweets that that you know that said this would never happen that ether was dead all of these things um pretty pretty satisfying i think that that ether went

all the way back from a 95 drop came back hit its all-time high it's trading lower than that now i don't really care we hit the milestone man that's that's what i wanted to see and i think that's a great marker that this is the the bear market or the bull market is in full effect where do you think things go from here uh yeah other than up and to the right um i think that we are in for some short-term chop um but the ball the ball has been rolled down the hill and there's no stopping it right maybe maybe some short-term chop

in the next week or or a couple weeks but like people's attention are on this industry now like there's no stopping stopping this from happening um anthony cesano is out of jail now this entire this entire bump was uh engineered by anthony is this possible just to get him out of jail well i did i bought some eth to it's explicitly try and help anthony get out of jail i know a few other people did anthony probably did too um we will see how engineered this was if it was engineered by anthony or not of course it wasn't really um but i think

what this really tells us is i mean for me um this is the power of a high conviction bet uh ryan you and i totally believe that this day would come where eth would break his previous all-time high and i believe that even when ether was dollars i believe that at 80 ether we would once again see 1400 ether and then we did shout out to the holders uh you guys helped make this happen and um you reap the rewards when things like this do happen david let's talk d5 for a minute so where are we hanging with the d5 pulse index at the time of recording we

are at 22.2 billion dollars locked in defy if we had recorded this a couple days ago or even yesterday even it would have been over 25 billion dollars i think it peaked out yeah at 25.2 billion dollars that is the highest number ever locked in defy and the deep dpi also similarly topped out at i think 225 dollars per dpi index token currently it's hovering around 205 dollars so defy tokens are coming along for this

ride as well though eth kind of took the uh took the headlines earlier this week um you know we were talking about holders david and pantera put out this um this a follow-up report talking about the the upside to holding bitcoin as an asset and you know it's similar to ethan bitcoin has a longer history and here's the magic of it david in order to win at crypto as long as you're buying assets like bitcoin and

ether all you have to do is hold like that's it so any time period if you held bitcoin for at least three and a half years you win like and you win by a lot that's all you have to do it sounds so simple why is it hard yeah this is what this report from pantera is saying is there are zero people who have held bitcoin for more than 3.5 years who are not in profit right and this is this actually kind of goes into how i think about some trades and some investments you know i'm not a

trader i don't really pay attention to the charts when i buy some assets like defy tokens that i want and sometimes i buy at the wrong time because i bought into the hype and bought into the fomo and then it drops but like my my personal bias my personal um rule of thumb is i never buy a token that i'm not willing to become a bag holder of and the reason is because you can just hold your way out of the floor right you can just hold your way out of the bear so if you're if you have conviction about the asset and you're not a trader and you are an investor holding is the secret to success in this crypto market

and what this report shows is that it's in no one zero people have been holders for more than three and a half years and are and are not in profit with bitcoin and that's the maximum that means is probably even less amount of time for people to just hold through dips before they're in the profit you know it's crazy too so this is a report that came out from vision hill what the vision hill does is they provide a composite index of a whole bunch of crypto funds so that the private crypto funds that you have to be an accredited investor to get in they basically track their

performance you know what their performance was in in 2020 david i don't know but i'm going to go ahead and guess it's less than if they had just held it was less than if they just held exactly buy a lot buy a lot so you know you know it depends on the funds different funds have different strategies but uh the composite index so kind of the the index behind the other indexes if you put your funds in the average crypto hedge fund you would have done well last year 170 up right that's a great that's pretty

good good number like be happy with that i guess but if you just held bitcoin and did nothing you would do 425 percent up um actually i think these numbers might be wrong i think uh bitcoin was 360 okay so the numbers we have on the screen are wrong but if you just held bitcoin you would have gotten 360 percent if you held eth all you did was hold eve you would have done 425 up so holding bitcoin holding eth in

2020 you would have outperformed all of the geniuses in their crypto hedge funds maybe not all of them but the average and you wouldn't have incurred any fees so these hedge funds charge a 20 20 to 30 annual performance fee on the profits plus two percent annualized no fees holding bitcoin holding ether you would have outperformed them like it's not only that you're going to be profitable on a holding strategy for any any time period greater than than three

and a half years you're actually going to outperform most crypto hedge funds uh on that on that time horizon this is why on the bank list program we talk about the value of the crypto monies specifically ethan btc they are the the benchmarks for this whole entire industry and this also illustrates why it's so powerful to actually practice like crypto and defy and ethereum is a skill and self-custody is one of those first skills that you learn and if you gave up bothering to learn that self-custody skill and instead just went

to the funds to and just exported your responsibility of researching and learning and getting your hands dirty if you just didn't bother to do that you lost all out on like two to three x more gains than you would have if you had learned to buy and hold the crypto monies the bitcoin and ether and do it yourself that's that's the cost of not actually teaching yourself the skills to be in crypto yeah absolutely and you know what holding is a skill too last thing i'll say in this i i had a friend who came to me in in 2018 and he said what you know

gave me some advice which i buy i talked about bitcoin and ether he went out and bought e3 bought it at like 500 right um and 2019 and i and my my my advice was basically hey if you're doing this you gotta buy and hold for five to ten years right okay like that's it just don't touch it but buy and hold for five to ten years and he texted me in 2019 and he was like oh so this is going well so his 500 ether dropped to like you know the low hundreds uh and then it turns out he sold it you know like

this is the thing it's it holding is also a skill that you need to develop as part of your crypto investment strategy and you have to you have to learn how to ignore the volatility and and look at the long look at the long term uh on this on this thing so um david fundamentals while we're talking about it let's talk about this this thread from spencer noon there's 11 signs he says that eath is going to blow past its all-time high this is a threat all about fundamentals which which

fundamentals do you want to pick out of this threat david well of course we have to mention fees we really enjoy the fee metric on the bankless program because of how ungainable it is there's no better way to prove that there is demand for a blockchain by illust by showing how much money people are willing to pay to use it according to this uh screen screen cap that uh spencer took you know the last seven days of fees for ethereum was 7.2 million dollars seven day average bitcoin was a 4.3 million dollars and

then even uniswap an application on ethereum collected two million dollars worth of fees these are big numbers yeah absolutely a few other things the number of eth transactions uh it this is it's he says is 7x smaller than its 2018 game uh all-time highs and so he says this is a sign that whales and institutions still haven't entered the game what's he saying here david yeah he's saying that it's still kind of retail that is playing in ethereum that you know there's a large amount of eth uh there

aren't large amounts of eth moving on chain which means there aren't yet big buyers i guess you could actually interpret this bearishly that's probably if i was a bitcoin maxi i would say like haha like institutions aren't aren't buying eth uh and perhaps that's bearish or perhaps that's an opportunity yeah absolutely he goes through a few more hash rate um ethereum active addresses i i generally like ethereum active addresses these are east addresses ether dresses are almost like bank accounts and um right now that figure of ether active addresses

has doubled year-to-date and is now its all-time high so the bank accounts on the ethereum network are using the network more than they ever have we hit all-time high on that fundamental metric too yeah yeah there's there's nothing more bullish to me than more and more people using ethereum as their banking layer yeah supposed to be for he goes through he goes through a number of defy users uh total locked value and defile of these things stable coins all of these metrics that we report out so lots of

fundamental reasons to be bullish as well um i saw this report from funstrat too david so funstrat is um kind of a group that appears on msnbc quite a bit this is sort of a mainstream finance um group and they just put out a price prediction for eth of over 10k so it's starting to leak into mainstream finance circles too what do you think about this number yeah i like i want to know how some of

these funds and entities come up with their price predictions they made a specific prediction of ten thousand five hundred dollars i wanna know where that five thousand came from or 500 came from yes um but you know the 10k meme is getting exported out of the inner circles of ethereum into the greater world of people that are interested in investing in crypto assets you know fair enough i haven't read the full report but this line stuck out at me so the person who wrote this report said um blockchain computing may be the future of the cloud

the future of the cloud so like what are we talking about what that means oh man i would like to know what that individual meant so price predictions coming out at over 10k but it's not clear to me that that mainstream finance actually understands what ethereum is yet or what ether as an asset is they're just they're just bullish for some reason if they did understand it they'd probably be a higher evaluation yeah absolutely okay 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 d5 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 than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently one of ave's v2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets trade them on unit swap and then deposit them back into ave ave does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's aave.com if you want to live a bankless

life you need to get a monolith defy visa card monolith is a one-two punch of both an ethereum smart contract wallet and an accompanying visa card that lets you spend the money that you have in your ethereum wallet everywhere where visa is accepted when you swipe your monolith visa card at the grocery store or at a restaurant it actually makes a transaction on the ethereum blockchain that spends some of the money you hold in your monolith wallet it's insanely cool and it's one of the best tools out there for living a bankless but still

normal life monolith also offers on-ramp services for getting your fiat money into the world of defy so it's trivial to top up your monolith card if you ever need to and your deposited money goes straight into your non-custodial wallet so your money is never held by a centralized intermediary because monolith is native ethereum infrastructure the money you hold in your monolith wallet still has the power of d5 behind it swapping assets on uniswap or earning yield in defy is at your fingertips go to

monolith.xyz and sign up to get your monolith visa card today that's market david let's get into your leases so do you want to start with this first one yeah mstable which is a uh literally called a meta stable coin where you know there's so many different stable coins on ethereum and sable is a project that kind of offers a new uh stable quantum theorem using a basket of other stable coins on ethereum uh hence the meta they are launching their musd save kind of like a vault feature it's like a high yield savings account um pretty cool for

people who are trying to access yield in d5 while also controlling for their own risk more and more yield opportunities than d5 for sure and have you kept up with the second one saddle raised 4.3 million for a slippage free d5 trading that's that's sort of the headline but saddle is basically it's a fork of a stablecoin automated market maker an amm called curve that's really popular very well used the saddle forked some of their code apparently rewrote the code

uh what is interesting about this story do you think david yeah i don't i actually don't know the competitive differentiator between saddle and curve i do know that there is plenty of room for more than just one version of a defy application i think that's what sushi swap uh proved out that you know not just uniswap is going to dominate the the amm market and i think this is the same thing with curve and saddle saddle's saying like you know curve is great but i think we can do something in here as well and there's plenty of space for more than just one protocol to offer

the same same product they had a bit of a rocky start with some issues at launch but we will see how it plays out certainly more competition is better for defy users the one thing i'll say on this to you david is it does seem like there's this dichotomy for for many protocols where you have sort of a vc backed version and a more crypto community led version right and yeah and so for almost every protocol you have both of those strategies being deployed um so we'll see how that turns out with

saddle loop ring has been on a tear lately this is one of the the shippiest teams in in crypto right now there's constantly shipping shipping i've never heard that adjective before i love it oh never you've never heard that adjective i use your body all the time i have never heard shippiest all right what are they shipping yeah so loopering an l2 uh scaling mechanism for ethereum with amms on it so exchange functionality um and and uh order based dex as well uh has put their product to

their app into the google play store um you know not actually not not the most revolutionary thing you know we're not we're not trying to infiltrate google play store that's not really at the goal of ethereum but we do need people to download applications like loopering like metamask like argent on put onto people's phones the difference with this loopering app is it is a direct integration into a smart contract wallet on loop rings l2 so people people who download the loop ring app are having their first interaction with ethereum on an l2 right and so to make an argent

wallet uh it costs like 40 dollars worth of gas that actually argent pays because if the user just downloads argent they don't have any ether so the argent team pays for that gas to deploy their smart contract wallet onto the l1 and then also transactions on ethereum using argent are actually more gas intensive because it's a smart contract wallet we actually just recorded a podcast with vitalik talking about um social recovery and l2 and we go into details about this that podcast is coming out in a few weeks um but what

vitalik is bullish on is smart contract wallets on the l2 and that's what loopering has rolled out here today this is great news because it means arjun's gonna go there next and so are the other smart contract wallets i'm really excited about this uh speaking being excited eth2 has been going pretty darn well like i i don't want to use the word flawlessly but there hasn't been a hiccup since network launch what did we launch back in december right so we're we're we're closing in on two months

uh of like it just working well danny ryan no news is good news yeah yeah i've like almost forgotten that it's up there right um things um well it's continuing to accrue new eth i don't know it's 2.6 billion something like that total eat steak so it's just humming right along and danny ryan put together a fantastic report that uh we'll we'll add to the notes that you can go take a look at and uh and and see what's what's new there david let's talk about this one we're speaking about

roll-ups in layer two optimism has just launched on mainnet with synthetics what's going on here yeah the long-awaited optimistic flavor of roll-ups the one of two flavors of roll-ups that this whole entire ethereum ecosystem is bullish on gets their soft launch on to the ethereum l1 synthetics is the team pioneering the usage of this new optimism l1 and so you know ethereum is just scaling in all directions look at this graphic looks like crypto utopia right there it's just on the horizon it's what the optimism team says

we'll see um coinbase is doing some much needed infrastructure work what is this story about yeah coinbase is famous for going down all the time especially last full cycle during 2016 and 2017 coinbase will crash all the time i kind of would figured that they would have fixed this by now but turns out like coinbase is continuing to crash all the time they had three three plus years to figure this out turns out they didn't um but now they just released a statement saying that they are going to quote

unquote figure this out by kind of compartmentalizing some of their back end infrastructure uh probably should have done this a few years ago coinbase like what what were you doing during the bear market well maybe they are just like uh surprised by all of the demand you know in this bull market so i guess that's good it's always a good sign when coinbase is crashing during the bull market i guess for price i guess question mark um what's going on with urine here too i was told that urine had a 30k

cap that they weren't going to issue any more tokens but it turns out they're issuing tokens why are they doing this what are they doing this is just a proposal so this is not finalized however there is been a growing conversation about how to fund uh wirns developers right and one of the ways that we could do this is by just minting the protocol token many other d5 protocols like ave have done this uniswap has like a 500 million dollar treasury of uni tokens that they can use for development iron doesn't have that because it committed to that

30 million uh 30 000 yfi token cap which it's now trying to perhaps walk back on maybe that 30 000 or 30 000 unit meme is actually not the best thing for the protocol and especially there is some some some incentive alignment uh friction between the developers and the token holders that they are hoping this mint can help solve um and so they are they are just looking to to fund development and personally i think it's i think we should absolutely make sure

that all wire developers are correctly incentivized to build for wire just i i think the my personal opinion is that uh keeping ourselves locked into that thirty thousand 000 hard cap just for the meme is a disservice to the people that are actually adding value to wire so you're not mad about this i'm not mad about this you know what's funny is uh fair launches are easy but like governance post fair launch is hard you know it's i think what the community is finding out um it's easy to issue a token it's hard

to build a product right if if wiring if wi-fi was trying to be a money like a bitcoin or an ether this would be an absolute no right but this is more of a capital asset and the the truth of the matter is they didn't have a way to fund their protocol development reminds me kind of of the uh the synthetics pivot remember we talked it with with with kane and originally uh they were planning to issue synthetics according to the the bitcoin uh schedule happening every four years happening every four years just because

why just because that was because that was popular you thought you had to do that and then when they finally started thinking about it scratching their heads are like no we should be issuing a coin to reward the activity we want in our protocol which is liquidity so let's go do that and it turned out very well for them so as long as you're not competing as a money this sort of thing is not necessarily bad but it is interesting how these communities are governing themselves david last thing we had lynn alden on the podcast post our podcast maybe partially in response to some of

the questions she raised she put out a phenomenal piece i thought it was good anyway um about ether as an asset and it's um not necessarily that she was bearish but she felt generally that ether and ethereum were not ready for prime time investment yet would be maybe my take on it uh we have a related response can you tell us about this yeah when lynn alden writes a piece and she put time and energy into that that piece the economic analysis of ethereum uh and when i and i do not believe that

lynn alden was just like contributing to the btc maxi dog pile on ethereum i think that was a an open invitation for her to gain more insight and understanding for her own benefit you know she put her rationale down onto paper as an invitation for the ethereum community to respond and you know she i think she wants to be convinced she just needs to be convinced uh and so i took the time as well as lucas and and we also made this open to just the general bankless nation community to help contribute and so we've gone through

some of lynn alden's arguments and and formulated our own responses to them and i don't think lynn alden is anti-eth or anti-ethereum she is just a macro investor and let's let's be real here the market cap of ether is 160 billion dollars that doesn't show up on macro radar like that's that's small that's time yeah it's just starting to show up absolutely so where can people find this response david at the time that were publishing this yeah that this this we are recording this on thursday that article this response is also going out

on thursday that's today so for listeners it was yesterday you'll be able to find that at newsletter.banklisthq.com all right man that's that's exciting i'm glad for that to go out good just continue the dialogue with lynn right um all right news goldman sachs i've heard of these guys they're bankers somewhere right um they're entering the crypto market quote soon with a custody play i feel like i've heard this from goldman sachs before and probably the last time was the the last bull run there were murmurs of goldman like opening trading

deaths and getting into custody maybe it's for real this time it's funny to see banks flooding back into this space yeah custody is the low hanging fruit first stop shop for somebody like goldman sachs to get exposure into this world just learning how to hold it for their customers is kind of how they get their foot in the door um i i believe it the the difference between 2017 and 2020 custody plays is there's actually a lot more opportunity for custody plays we saw um paypal purchased bitgo a while ago uh as

a custody uh play um and and then all the other like custody plays all the other uh protocols and or not protocols teams and companies and startups that were custody based got really excited because like oh you know paypal just bought bitgo who else is coming to buy you know my company my custody play and and i think that's kind of what we are seeing play out there's a lot more options for companies like goldman sachs to just buy a custody play i think uh what may have happened with bitco is if i recall that deal may have fallen through i'm not actually sure but certainly yeah

certainly paypal was in talks about buying bitco and then something broke down last minute if i'm recalling correctly but yeah i i totally agree custis makes sense to start from a banking perspective i have a bit more respect for for banks like uh fidelity that were also here during the bear market goldman to me feels a little bit like a like a fair market entrant well things are good we're going to go enter of course whereas fidelity's been building this stuff since 2014. good to see some more competition in that area speaking of that the world's

largest asset manager is a firm called blackrock they have billions in assets under management like excuse me i said billions but what i meant was trillions with a t trillions of eggs that's crazy um they just produced some filing some sec filings that suggest that they are looking to buy possibly buy big into crypto specifically into bitcoin is this a big deal yeah i'm not sure how much speculation this is or

just like reporters or investigators connecting the dots behind blackrock filings but what's going on here is apparently blackrock is doing all the filings that it needs to do in order to compliantly put bitcoin on the balance sheet um and so i mean the timing is fitting like there's plenty of mania and excitement about this space so that would make sense uh if black blackrock is putting bitcoin on the balance sheet like there's no better signal like you know druckenmiller that's great like you know uh raul paul that's great like you know

ray dalio talking about bitcoin that's great this is blackrock there's no more like bigger of an institution after this like this is the top this is the biggest institution uh if they're putting bitcoin on the balance sheet like everyone should be paying attention to that yup they do not make them any bigger david let's switch this so this is uh biden administration stuff it looks like janet yellen is going to become treasury secretary so replacing steve mnuchin and she's given some some remarks lately uh that might get into

the agenda here but let's talk about the first the first thing is she said that the us must act big on the next corona virus relief package what does acting big mean money printer go burr i'm pretty sure that's what that means um this is okay pretty expected out of what we we expected out of the biden administration we always knew that biden was going to be very um favorable towards reliefs of relief packages right they they want to put money into the hands of the people um

that's kind of in my opinion the the value prop behind the the democratic party was that they are pro relief and they want to get cash into the economy more than the republicans did and so this is them fulfilling those promises all right and that's janet yellen backing it up and at the same time she was calling for more money printing if you will she was also saying that cryptocurrencies are a concern what are they concerned for terrorist financing classic boomer statement out of janet yellen here saying let's let's turn on the money

printer and get relief into the hands of the people at the same time uh let's also like restrict or stop as much of that money going into bitcoin like that's kind of the what i'm getting at is is they are the the federal reserve the federal chair the us dollar is trying to get printed so it can put itself into the hands of the people yet at the same time if people just take those dollars and buy bitcoin with it it's that's bad and so i feel like this is what this is what janet yellen is trying to get in front of yeah it's very difficult to know whether