ROLLUP: ETH Merge Soon | Yuga Labs Acquisition | ApeCoin | Raises & NEW Releases Galore

This is this is definitely the biggest event, uh the biggest crypto event of twenty twenty two. Maybe the big

uh right?

Other than the Genesis block of Ethereum itself, is this the most significant event since that?

And so this is now now we've got uh bullish David back, I think, for f for the most

Bullish side. We got three for the bear, we got one for the bull.

Hey Bankless Nation, happy third week of March. David, what time is it?

It's the Friday bankless weekly roll up time, Ryan, where we covered the entire news. And this one is a little bit different this week, I'd say, just because, you know, it feels like uh merge week, Ryan. I don't know why it feels like merge week, but it does.

Merge week. Okay, that's the Ethereum merge you're talking about. It's funny because that's still months away, but suddenly it was like everyone was talking about the merge again.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, including us. People, it was us, yeah.

Uh

guilty, guilty.

People have decided that the next thing to focus on is the merge. Who knows? We we have like three plus months until the merge actually comes. So, you know, maybe this is just one week and then the topic of next week will be a different topic. But this week, the topic of crypto Twitter was definitely the merge.

Yes, we're gonna talk about that Ethereum merge week. Also the biggest NFT M ⁇ A deal ever. Apes by punks. I'm gonna talk I'm gonna interview a punk holder and see uh how he feels about that one on today's episode.

Sure.

Talking about you didn't

Oh, me? All right.

And then they released a coin too. So I don't know what that means. We're gonna talk about the Ape coin as well. Zuckerberg, that's Mark Zuckerberg, also said NFTs are coming to Instagram. Big surprise. Not really. We knew he was going to do it. How is he going to do it? We'll talk about that later. Also, Stripe, the payment platform, fintech platform, jumping into crypto with both feet. Huge. Yeah. I think this is hugely underrated and probably the biggest thing that happened this week. And uh we'll have to talk about that too. Uh David, before we get in, we should talk about our friends at Xereon. Guys, I've loved Xereon since it launched. This is the way a bank user interface should be. Except banks can't pull it off because banks are not connected to decentralized finance. Uh, you can bring your own assets to Xereon. You cannot bring them to your Wells Fargo bank account. And this is what it looks like. David, they've just added a whole bunch of multi chain features, some bridging features. Uh tell them what's going on in Xereon these days.

Well, yeah, especially as we get into this layer two world, which we have plenty to talk about this week in the weekly roll-up, it's going to require infrastructure to help manage your assets, not just the many, many more assets that you have in your Ethereum wallet versus what you have in your bank, but also in the many, many more chains that you uh engage with, much more than just the Ethereum L1. Uh so not only is the Ethereum OL1 obviously available, but all of the Ethereum layer twos like Arbitrum and Optimism, and also the alternative EVM compatible layer ones like Avalanche and uh the other ones. Uh and so, what depending on whatever chain that you are on, or whatever asset that you prefer, Xerion's the place for you to go and manage all of your crypto finance. Uh it's just, you know, things that your bank could never do, Xerion does for you.

Really cool too as well. Being able to bridge from one chain to another. If you want to go to ETH to Polygon in a hurry, you can do that in uh Xeron. You can also view all of your NFTs. Lots of cool stuff going on in Xereon. So guys, check that out. There is a link in the show notes where you can connect your wallet to Xerion and get started. All right, David.

This couldn't be your wallet, Ryan. You that's way too sophisticated NFTs for you.

Oh, this is sophisticated, huh? These are really good. No, this is not my wallet, by the way. This is a demo wallet. Uh but uh yeah, maybe we'll get to some of my NFTs a little bit later.

Yeah?

You notice a little something behind me today?

Just a little bit, yeah, yeah. I'm I've noticed that it's a great looking cat that's got a little bit more shine than my punk, and I'm a little bit upset by it.

It it you know it starts as a cat, and who knows what other animal it could turn into. Maybe something the shell? I don't know. We'll see a little bit later today. But let's first

Started with turtles, graduated to MFers, and now is at Cats. He's starting to get into the blue chips, folks.

Yeah, I'm working my way up here. Um I'm learning, okay?

Mm-hmm.

Let's let's talk about the market. What's the market teaching us? What is the market telling us? Let's start with Bitcoin. What's the price this week, David?

Yeah, we got a happy Bitcoin this week, Ryan. It started at $39,000, went down and touched the low of $38,000 very briefly, and then recovered right back up and started climbing out of that hole to where it is now at $40,700, hit a high of over $4,100 uh $41,000. So overall up 5% on the week. Uh so happy week could also just be a recovery off of a very bearish week of the last week. So, you know, who knows?

I'm a little surprised about that. Are you surprised that we're actually going up this week?

Um, I am conflicted that we are going up this week.

Okay, 'cause it was all uh it was all about bearish David last week. And I wanna know w the whether whether bearish David has has returned again this week or whether it's uh a more neutral David or or maybe the Bull David is back.

No, it's not Vold David's not back. It's it's

Bull David's not

full conflicted David where we're we're gonna we're we're gonna be talking about this throughout the markets where just macro has not changed at all and in fact has even I would say gotten worse. Uh meanwhile, like the merge is just so bullish. Like how do you how do I square these things? I just don't know.

You just buy more ETH is what you do. But speaking of which, tell us what the ETH price is doing this week.

Yeah, ETH started the week at $2,600, hit a low of $2,500-ish dollars, and then climbed right back up out of that to where it is now at $2,800. Especially in the last 24 hours at the time of recording. This is we always record these as as Thursday morning, by the way. So uh where it is now is is up from 2500 basically just 24 hours ago or 2600 to 2800, kind of climbing out of that hole that it set. Uh and then if you kind of just zoom out, Ryan, there's a there's another chart that we have uh available. I I don't know if you pulled it up. Yeah. Uh this is the the creator of the of these charts who drew these lines would like us to inform you that these are just meme lines, and that's really all TA is is meme lines. But if you let know if you know Bankless, we know that memes are real. Uh there's a there's a triangle. There's a triangle here, and uh the 2800 level of ETH price is poking through that triangle. And that has been a descending uh line uh descending line from where it was at the start of the year for like three to four months of ETH price just descending on this line. Uh and it's poking through. It's poking through, saying, hey, what's up on the on the upside of this line? Um

Who knows? It's it's it's trying to figure out what merge week means for the price of ETH. I mean that's what what's going on. But how about the ETH to Bitcoin ratio? Because this is our bull market bear market indicator when ratio goes up. We're generally more bullish when ratio goes down, more bearish. Uh and it's up this week?

Oh.

Yeah, it's up this week. And you can see that line that I was talking about basically started towards the end of December where the merge hit the high of, or excuse me, the merge. The ETH BTC ratio hit the high of like what looks like 0.086 in December. And then it has had that linear line down setting lower highs and uh just basically for the last like four months. So started at point like zero eight eight in like January is at 0.082, in February is at 0.0 like 75 to where it bottomed at basically 0.064. But since hitting that bottom of 0.064, we have climbed back out to 0.068. So, you know, like there's a shape being formed here, and we actually got some chardy chart stuff to look at with that too. Uh so this is uh what was called a ri a channel. Uh, and so uh we touched the bottom of that channel earlier last week, uh, and we have bounced off of it. And so if you are perhaps a trader, you are looking at how Ether is in the bottom of this channel, heading to heading back towards the top of this channel. So if it continues that, uh, you know, bullish, bullish.

How about this one?

Oh and this is a triangle. We all we we love the shapes. We love the triangles. Uh and so again, it's it's another uh the the concept here is that as this triangle converges, something happens at the end of this triangle. Uh like it's gotta go up or it's gotta go down. This is what traders look at when they look at these things. Uh and this is a a wedge, I believe. Uh and and if you'll notice, Ryan, that the wedge comes to a close right around July, right around when the merge would happen. Uh and so things are lining up. Like uh I don't pay attention to TA too much, but I do know that there are real reasons to look at it. Uh, and when you see an inflection point happening around the same time as something very, very fundamental, that is interesting. That's an interesting thing to look at.

Okay, so so we're looking at TA, all right? We almost never do that on Bankless. So I I feel like we're looking at TA in this episode because you're you're feeling like conflicted. As to what's going to happen next. This is what this is when you pull out the like the horoscopes. Or I'm sorry, the the TA, right? Is when you're like, what's the future going to hold? Let me look at the charts. Let me look at TA when you you don't really know, and it could fall one way or the other. So what is uh what is it about this market that's so you know like conflicting right now? Is it the fundamentals of the ETH merge happening in 2022? Yet in the backdrop, we have all of this macro bad bad news. We've got obviously you know war in Ukraine, commodities, uh price increases, shortages everywhere, still the tail end of COVID, economy, uh like inflation, the Fed just raised rates, which you're gonna talk to. So all that macro stuff you're contending with, mixed with the bullish, otherwise bullish, uh specifically Ethereum news. Is that what's going on in your mind here?

Yeah, that's a that's a pretty good summary. Uh I I talked about this on last week where there's so many things about the current crypto markets, talking just about crypto right now, that are reminiscent of the end of the cycle last year. Like last gasps of the mania for people to just la grab their last amount of hype and ac and attention so they can exit.

Said last year. Do you mean do you mean like

That cycle cycle. Right. Yeah. Like super cringy ICOs, and people were just participating in them because that was just like the leftover energy. And like now we're seeing we'll talk about this when we talk about the Ape coin. But like people, when people run out of ideas, what do they do? They issue tokens because that's the only idea that they have left. And ultimately that just becomes dilution. Uh and that's bearish. Uh and so, like, like we're seeing just the attention just leave out of the whole play-to-earn gaming side of crypto. We're seeing attention leave out of the NFT side of crypto. Uh, we're seeing people just hanging on on these desperate attempts for it for attention. And so, so much of the crypto industry just feels like it has lost the tailwinds. Uh, and on top of that, there's just all of the macro bearishness. There's the commodity markets that just suck right now. We're gonna look at uh the uh the like an index of equities charts and just kind of looks looks bad. And meanwhile, like like Putin is scared and in a corner, and like that's volatile. And so, like, you know that you know that meme rind of like that that the building that's toppling over, and there are like three steel beams that are holding it up. Like that feels like the the world, and the beams that are holding it up are is the merge. And so, like, there's an infinity number of like bearish things going on, but the merge is so bullish, and I don't know what to do about it.

Well, uh maybe we'll find it out by the end of this episode once we go through the the merge, how you're feeling at the end of this, David. But yeah, I I understand the conflict here. Um let's talk about the bed index, 'cause this is a nice blend. DeFi, Bitcoin, and ETH. What are we looking at on the week?

Yeah, start of the week at $101, ending the week at $103.78. So up like four or five percent on the week, three or four percent on the week. Um modestly up. Modestly up.

Let's let's let's switch to some of this macro stuff for a minute in our in I guess our FedWatch uh segment. So Powell came out this week. Turns out he is more hawkish than the market expected. I don't know what I expected. I c I kind of expected him to be hawkish in the face of inflation. Hawkish means looking to raise rates, looking to um get a bit tighter on monetary policy these days. Uh so the big news is they are increasing, the Fed is increasing its uh interest rate by 25 basis points, a quarter of a percent. I believe that's happening sometime in March. Um not sure exactly. There's some other things we can get into, but what do you think this means high level?

I thought this was expected. I thought the Fed move the Fed raising by point two five percent was like viewable from a long way off. So I kind of am confused as to how the hawkishness interpretation came about.

Yeah, I guess maybe some people thought that given events in Ukraine that the Fed might sort of change their their position. Worried about like the R word has been used recently with commodity prices uh increasing, the recession word. And of course they have to balance inflation with the the threat and fear uh uh of recession. So this is the f this is also the first increase since 2018. I'd forgotten it's been that long, so that's a big deal.

Yeah, so we were just the Fred was just getting into raising interest rates post I believe 2008 or something, uh, and started doing that in 18. And then boom, COVID. And then they just scrapped those plans. And then now they're start they were about to start to raise interest rates, and then boom, Russia invades Ukraine. Uh but now this time it looks like they are not stopping the raising of interest rates because of the invasion. So maybe that's the hawkishness. It's like, oh, they didn't give us another free ride. I guess.

That's the take so far. Apparently his language is um they outlined seven more hikes this year. So seven more hikes this year and then four hikes, interest rate hikes in 2023, so next year. Uh they're also planning to run down their balance sheet a little bit, so that's kind of equivalent to another hike, um, discharging some assets from from the balance sheet.

So discharging assets from the balance sheet was one of the reasons why the whole entire market turned over in December and January and w and we've been bearish ever since because people were like, oh, that's actually way more aggressive in terms of interest rates increases than we ever kind of accounted for. And the markets have been bearish ever since.

Exactly. And you know, people are look, people are asking the Fed to do something about inflation. Like that's that's coming from politicians now, too. Um, but Powell also hinted that if they did 11 hikes uh this year, that that would not cause a recession. He he used the words no recession because he said aggregate demand is strong, tight labor market, there's a tight uh labor market, and household balance sheets are strong. So he doesn't think that these rate hikes and this more like aggressive monetary policy uh contraction will actually lead to a recession. That's an interesting take. And of course, look, the Fed can change its mind at any time. Like between this meeting and next meeting could be a totally different story. But this is a new message coming out of the Fed. Do you remember six months ago uh or so the the the big story on the roll ups about the Fed's action was like,

completely ignoring inflation. Right. Like it's um you s it's only temporary. Transitory

transitory inflation. And now this is a complete direction change which is like, oh inflation's here and we have to fight it. And not less than six six months later, this is the new message coming out of the Fed. So that's interesting in and of itself.

Well, I mean, it sounds like they've done their research. They've certainly done more research than I have, because I didn't measure like the average like uh cash on hand for the average American household. But at the same time, like

The the game of controlling inflation and interest rates is such a game of game theory. So, like the Fed is like, oh yeah, we're gonna raise interest rates like seven more times in 2022. But in the back office, they could be like, all right, guys, we're gonna tell everyone that we're gonna raise interest rates seven times in 2022. And maybe we're actually only gonna do it four times. And so the market is actually also playing the game theory game is like, all right, so that's what they said, but what do you think they're really gonna do? And like it just throws everything into a ridiculous mess. And that is why people should not be in charge of the value of money. Anyways.