ROLLUP: Mark Cuban on DeFi | Gemini going public?? | Morgan Stanley apes into MSTR

david it is friday morning what is it time for it is time for roll-ups weekly roll-ups where we inject a whole entire week's worth of news into your brain in as short of a time as possible we go through a number of different topics first we start with the market we ask what the market is telling us then we move into releases who released what in the last seven days then we go into the news what's happened in the news cycle then we finish off with some takes who had some interesting takes this week out

in the crypto ecosystem and then we top things off with what david and ryan are excited about ryan are you ready to get into it i'm ready man let's get started with the market i am setting the timer keep us on track david let's talk about the market so we had like what a mini bear market and now we're out of it what's going on with bitcoin yeah we had a famous two to three day long bear market we ended last week with bitcoin touching forty two thousand dollars so all this happened in the last seven days bitcoin touched forty two thousand dollars fell down to thirty one thousand

dollars and then it regained forty thousand dollars earlier this morning it's currently just a couple hundred dollars below forty thousand dollars so we experienced you know a quote unquote two day bear market and now we're back at it pretty interesting price action i i feel pretty good that we kind of predicted this on the last roll up we said get ready for 30 to 40 drops we just saw what a 30 drop closing in on 40 with ether do you think we're out of this yet yeah so this has been really interesting the the conversation about crypto prices leading up to last week

was that you know a quote unquote there's a new paradigm right because we would think we would see like five to seven percent dips and then they would just get bought right so we never really had those famous like 30 to 40 corrections and so that's what we talked about last week we said this the likelihood of a correction is coming but previously corrections can can be like you know we saw a 30 correction and previously we've seen 40 corrections that you know turn into like two weeks of just bearishness sometimes even three weeks but this is very much in line with like the dip got bought so hard so we

still had one of our big 30 declines again that's actually below average for how large one of our classic retracements is and then it just got bought within seven days so we are already back into bullish territory it's all happened within seven days that's pretty incredible all right let's take a quick look at the bitcoin price from this week to uh from last week to this uh excuse me the ether price from last week to this so we fell to about 900 and what are we hovering at now yeah we are roughly 20 above 1200

again roughly six days ago five days ago east started to pump above thirteen hundred dollars it touched thirteen fifty thirteen to uh thirteen hundred and fifty dollars which i got me it got me really excited i sat down and just watched the charts just to see if we were going to all-time high didn't quite make it again then we dumped to 900 and now we're back above 1200 david remind us what's that magic all-time high number that we're looking for for ether 14 20 14 20 is the number to beat all right we'll see if anthony cesano can be

freed if we get to 1420 or higher what happened with the the d5 pulse index so this is again the top 10 d5 tokens uh number go up there too right yeah just a little bit last week we were at 22.7 billion dollars today we are at just over 23 billion dollars locked in d5 d5 tokens and d5 in general has actually done really really well i've been calling it a slow crescendo that doesn't stop crescendoing we're not really seeing a pop but things are

starting to heat up things are starting to boil total locked value looks like it is just touching all-time high as well so that's essentially all assets under management in d5 protocols so it's an important vanity metric it sort of measures the economic bandwidth of the d5 ecosystem um let's talk about a particular defy token that is maker it's kind of been a sleeping giant for almost like the last year or so ever since um ever since that black thursday in march of last year where it sort of took a big tumble

but it had an explosive week this is a seven-day chart um even the 14-day chart looks like this massive run-up what's going on with the with the maker token yeah i think what's even interesting ryan if you hit the max button to zoom all the way out the maker usd price has been flat ever since like complete since like late 2017 or 2018 it dipped down to 500 in the bear market and then it stayed at 500 literally until you know just a couple days ago where it exploded upwards the maker eath

price uh that has also been something worth watching because the mkr eth ratio has just been suffering like there you are getting less and less ether for your mkr ever since like the middle of 2018 yet that that trend finally reversed mkr just yeeted itself to right below its almost all-time highs back in 2017 and so it just made up for so much lost ground in such a short amount of time pretty interesting price action david you know what this reminds me of like it's that old investor equip that uh you

know time in the market beats timing the market and that is so true projects with good fundamentals like assets like ether even assets like like maker i mean uh the die stable coin has been on a tear it's above a billion dollars um you don't want to try to time those things if you looked at the last year and you'd be like oh project is dead it's flat it's no longer cool and then suddenly you get these 14 days and you like double in price almost triple price and hit all-time high right so you can't time these things guys you have to

invest in uh assets and tokens with strong fundamentals and just hold right timing is a swing trading thing that you might not be equipped for uh with explosive growth like this and also i would like to say before we move on actually uh the dpi price was heavily influenced from this so dpi went from last week 185 dollars which is the d5 pulse index token it went from 185 dollars to 208 dollars and that the d5 tokens did not get a big of a hit during that uh retracement as

many other assets like ether and bitcoin did and a part of that rise in the dpi token price was because of that very strong maker appreciation yeah absolutely makers waited heavily there okay it looks like retail is starting to enter as well we we're coming up with some new metrics and numbers for that this is one i really like this is new weekly twitter followers uh for crypto exchanges so it looks at kraken binance coinbase their twitter accounts actually and it charts the number of net new followers that they've had on a weekly

basis over time you can see in this chart we are for the first time approaching something closer to 2017 numbers but we've got a lot of room to grow so 2017 started adding a like um uh more than what's the number what's the number 100 000 100 000 yeah a week and then it picked out at 200 000 per week at 200 000. and we're at about 75 000 per week now which is explosive growth from the last two years but still not at its peak

this indicates that retail is starting to use crypto exchanges starting to get back into crypto what do you make of this yeah and also using crypto exchanges as probably their new source because they probably don't know where else to go they probably haven't been introduced to bank list yet i can definitely i can definitely corroborate some of this retail entrance i'm starting to get uh text messages from from some old college buddies that you know we are pretty close with back then kind of lost contact with them but because i'm i'm pretty degenerate with my instagram stories i put a lot of

bitcoin and ether talk up there so people know i'm in the industry and now everyone uh everyone's coming in to ask like should i buy bitcoin and uh it's always an interesting answer to that question i it's i try and pack as much information as i can into that question but it never really seems to do it justice it's starting isn't it it's starting and we might be at just the start we think it's still going to go a lot higher from here 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 aave.com synthetics is ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol what does that mean synthetics

is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks traders can use the quenta exchange which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetics traders on cuenta can trade synthetic tokens like sbtc s oil or sd5 because quinta is powered by synthetics traders experience zero slippage on their trades no i didn't mean low slippage i meant no slippage because that is the power of the synthetics

platform no slippage on your trades you can also easily short assets with isynths which are synthetic assets that move inversely to their target asset synthetics isn't just for traders developers can build on synthetics to access the infinite liquidity offered by synthetic assets or investors can stake collateral to the protocol and earn fees that the protocol collects if you're a trader and you're looking for a trading platform and not found in the legacy world check out cuenta.io if you're a developer or you just want to earn yield

on your collateral go to www.synthetics.io where you can stake your snx or ethe and earn fees from synthetics another thing that's i think is interesting is that all of the numbers are so much bigger now in this full cycle david so masari put out this tweet that bitcoin is now moving by its entire market cap from the march 2020 low it's market cap there at a price of 4800 multiple times

a day so it is moving by its entire market cap on a daily basis this entire market cap from less than a year ago is now the daily volatility of bitcoin absolutely insane these numbers are just so much bigger even the coinbase volume is bigger starting to show the early signs of a retail market yesterday actually this is uh earlier this week rather coinbase just recart recorded its

highest daily volume ever of almost 10 billion dollars this is crazy when you look at the chart and compare it to growth it's like a uh you know 5x already of the peak of of 2017. yeah it's pretty crazy and bitcoin moving as much of its previous market cap back in the depths of the bear market is an interesting metric i don't really have any evidence to back up this claim but i kind of have this rule of thumb that with the day that bitcoin paints a like a twenty thousand dollar one day candle might be like the blow

off top that ends the bull market twenty thousand dollars being the previous all-time high so like the day that bitcoin runs from like 200 000 to like 220 000 or something maybe that's the blow off top i don't know if that's if that has been backed up by anyone but that's something that i'm looking forward to david's got his own superstitious numbers around his numbers but you know could be the case it's definitely the numbers are bigger um another reminder of course i actually saw an advertisement david when i was looking at etherscan earlier today was cme

advertising ether futures and they are coming they're still coming on february 8 2021 so speaking of bigger numbers this of course allows large institutional investors to make bets on ether in ways that they couldn't before that they can currently on bitcoin what do you think's going to happen as a result there um famously that kind of when when bitcoin got its futures on the cma it sort of marked the top of the bitcoin market i don't think that'll be the case for ether

but what's what's your take are we going to see any volume any any kind of price appreciation as a result of this event yeah futures are the way that you know some preferred high capitalized institutions prefer to get access exposure to some of these assets they just it's just a more capital efficient way to deploy capital for some reason institutions like it more so when futures uh open up to big institutions it is a new mechanism for accessing exposure to ether and i think that not this is not at all

near the top of the market i think the fact that bitcoin when bitcoin got its futures it was just a complete coincidence that it happened at the top of 2017. i expect this to be very bullish for ether long term because it's opening up the floodgates for more institutional exposure into this asset 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 let's talk releases the first is some news on layer two scaling tether is launching on hermes i've not heard of hermes before i have not heard of this okay so this is a layer two scaling

solution that's based on zk roll up so some interesting tech here i've not heard of hermes um i think it's part of the layer two story of ethereum though why is this uh potentially interesting yeah it's just i think one of the many uh stories about l2 adoption um i don't know if hermes is going to be the l2 that is adopted uh tether is also on omisego network tether is one of the biggest gas consumers of the ethereum blockchain so they should they also have the incentive and the capital to experiment with a bunch of l2s and look this looks like

one of them ultimately the winning l2s are going to be the ones that everyone else wants to be on so there's sort of a coordination game going on there and i think it's very much up to some of these l2 solutions to prove themselves this year also some interesting news nexus mutual we had hugh carp on the podcast they are decentralized smart contract insurance protocol they are now expanding their decentralized insurance they used to they still do ensure smart contracts against um protocol risks like hacking

risks that sort of thing they're now moving that same offering to ensure centralized exchanges i think this is a good example of defy starting to enter into the um the c5 space or this the centralized phase space after kind of conquering all of the the smart contract insurance area now nexus is moving into centralized exchanges what do you make of this yeah this is just one more step of software eating the world and i think this is a great feature we know that one of the

biggest uh chinks in this industry's armor is centralized exchanges getting hacked you know defy has this uh negative connotation to some for being you know very rug pulley and very hacky and like you can get your funds swiped from you and d5 but if you look at the total dollars lost d5 is is dwarfed by centralized exchange hacks uh and so that i think this is a fantastic product that is obviously very needed and i think perhaps an interesting customer for this product is the exchanges themselves this offers like kraken or gemini or

coinbase to purchase insurance against their own hacks uh that's pretty interesting and this is also just one more step closer for something like nexus mutual for uh to offer products for like people like me to insure my car or something this is just something further out like into the real world it's it's the next closest hanging fruit but again the the real world is for next or the real goal is for nexus to be able to ensure anything um so this is them breaching that territory yeah it's probably a five to ten x of the total addressable market size for nexus the

protocol so that's very exciting i think for everybody who's supporting that project um and maybe invest in that token um something else interesting i saw this on the block this week david so this is a a bitcoin mining the second largest bitcoin mining pool a pool called uh poulin they just ruled out a hash rate token that is essentially an erc20 that tokenizes hash rate so it tokenizes the um

basically the asic power of their individual pool and they're selling that as an erc20 token what's interesting about this yeah this is a it's really important for bitcoin miners to have financial infrastructure because they need hedging options because bitcoin miners are an inherently long bitcoin they don't have a way to express any alternative view unless they have access to like financial options and and you know what is defy other than just like an endless

financial engineering um there were already options like this available to uh bitcoin miners but they were very much a centralized uh centralized play a few like bitcoin futures first off are like a great option for miners but also hash rate futures which are a real thing and now a hash rate token on ethereum i think it's actually going to be uh offer you know competitive differences so some of these centralized alternatives it's so interesting that uh once again it's kind of the gravity well of ethereum sucking another type of asset into itself and settling on ethereum

also back to kind of layer two and what we're talking about i don't know if you've been following connext but they have recently been talking a lot about their vector platform what does that do david yeah connects is a payment layers infrastructure and they are doing maybe maybe it's a pivot maybe they're just adding on to their current offering but just offering um what is kind of like uh middleware or middle payment layers between other l2s right so you know what

allowing one l2 to talk to another l2 using the connectxdel2 right so lots of l2 is going on but mainly we're just finding different ways to communicate and pass value around the ethereum ecosystem without having to make transactions on ethereum and the reason this is really important is because ideally we want to live in a world where all of the different layer 2 roll-ups are integrated and connected and interoperable and at some level composable with each other so that even fiat on ramps can happen in l2 and we

just use the mainnet for security right that is a much more gas efficient and um like like more scalable world and that's what connex is starting to build so that's that's cool as that develops so david this was really interesting this week as well cloud fair has created a name resolver for the distributed web so they're using two pieces of technology one is ipfs so that's you know filecoin this is sort of a distributed storage type of protocol

and also ethereum particularly ethereum names domain names ens names i have ethereum domain names i know you have ethereum domain names what this essentially does is connect ethereum domain names to the rest of the web so that you could type in your ethereum domain name in a browser without an extension and actually be directed to a website so what this means is instead of using dns which is the centralized domain

service that the entire internet uses people can start using ethereum as a decentralized name service and create unstoppable websites this is part of a sliver of that promise of web 2 essentially this whole decentralized internet that no single party could could shut down and i think is super exciting for ethereum use cases and this is an ethereum use case that's a little bit outside of the the money title as well i know lots of people have been uh you know talking about that and asking

about that for for years what's your take on this yeah this is kind of goes back to the original vision of ethereum before we kind of knew what ethereum could do like ethereum was supposed to be the quote-unquote the world computer and also run unstoppable code this is kind of a return to some of that early thinking of web 3 technologies trying to build a totally persistent decentralized and permanently available internet stack uh that is something that is completely part of the ethereum roadmap roadmap it

just doesn't have the tokens and price charts to go with it so it's kind of forgotten and lost under the noise it's something that fascinates me just doesn't get as much attention as some of the other things but i'm very very excited about uh you know a completely trustless and decentralized web built on ethereum i think people kind of forget how trusted the internet is dns that is a centralized trusted system that is just kind of you know an organization that we give the rights to organize the internet for us too but it is not it does not belong

in the protocol sync thesis and something like this totally does it's just a centralized database what's also interesting i think is that uh maybe this increases the value of ens names more adoption of course like um definitely increases the value in the sorts of things you can do with ens names that's something to watch as well argent is one of our favorite wallets for d5 it's like one of my number one recommendations when somebody asks me how to get started in d5 and they've just released eth2 staking inside of it

as well what's your take here yeah just a really nice feature out of arjun for those who want to stake their eth but maybe they don't want to run a node and maybe they just don't even want to manage their own private keys or ledger and they just want to have their argent you can put your ether inside of argent and using an integration with lido which is a staking as a service provider they can stake in ethereum 2.0 what's nice about this too is if you have less than 32 eth you can start staking with argent synthetics is doing some things on layer

two as well this is the optimistic rollout they just laid out a road map for adoption actually starting they're going on mainnet actually on uh the day you're listening to it on january 15th and then they have some next steps after after this david is this going to be the year of layer 2 for ethereum yeah this is such a big deal this is optimistic ethereum coming live to mainnet synthetics has always been at the head of the curve with uh integrating and

tinkering and experimenting with optimism uh so in synthetics was always destined to be the first team this first big dap to incorporate optimistic ethereum optimism optimistic rollups into the ethereum main net and it looks like that day is finally here we are actually going to see a significant amount of the synthetics activity which itself is significant move off into the l2 um so the way that they are doing this is that they are starting to migrate some of some of their most basic functions into an l2 so

snx staking is moved on to the l2 whereas some of the some other things like minting or is also going to be moved on to the synthetic s l2 some things are being kept on the l1 just for simply because something needs to be there but you can now think of synthetics as a protocol that exists with one foot in the ethereum l1 and one foot in the ethereum l2 and depending on what you want to do you would participate on either side of that of that boundary absolutely um this is part of d5 kind of re-architecting

itself in this new rollups l2 uh paradigm so very cool to watch that play out david let's get to the news and i want to start here this is a fascinating rumor and it just came out yesterday this is gemini considering going public as well following in coinbase's footsteps coinbase of course has announced an ipo why not gemini it sounds like there's rumors of that what does that mean for crypto this year

yeah and this is i believe the third ipo rumor that we've heard well i guess coinbase wasn't a rumor because they straight up announced their intentions yeah and then there was one more that i can't remember what it was it was um another like pub company announced plans to go public gemini marked the third and interestingly gemini is also an exchange right behind coinbase um and i think coinbase did a fantastic job with announcing the timing their announcement literally on the day of the bitcoin breaking the all-time high and i i think you and i are both

pretty bullish on the coinbase ipo they the initial valuations were guesstimated to be at 50 billion but i think you and i ryan are ready to commit to believing that that is going to be well above 100 billion uh just because there's going to be a crypto mania and people are going to want exposure to coinbase as exposure to crypto gemini is going to get all of those same benefits so it's no surprise that gemini is trying to capture some of the mania going on so that they can boost their ipo price a few things i'm glad about here one is i am glad that they are going public rather than

selling their companies to a bank or somebody in big tech like a facebook or amazon so i'm i'm glad about that the second thing i'm glad about is that there's some competition here it's not just coinbase if gemini joins the ranks as well they're going to push coinbase into maybe more innovation in particular i wonder how these exchanges and their public offerings on the stock market are going to compete against defy offerings right so there was an airdrop quite famously with with uniswap why not an airdrop for coinbase

users and if coinbase doesn't decide to do it why not an airdrop for gemini you can issue some sort of a tokenized security on ethereum today that could be an exciting future and i think is is more likely to happen if there's some competitive pressure between these giant exchanges you know i'm i don't really know the details behind this but i can't imagine that air dropping equity to customers is all that different than air dropping tokens to customers maybe maybe maybe the infrastructure indeed fights way easier but i i would

imagine that that's a that's a possible innovation to have well if you're going public if you're going public you don't need you don't have the accredited investor laws at least in the us to go through so why not why not coinbase gemini if you're listening to this drop us some gemini tokens speaking of gemini uh this is pretty exciting as well gemini's launching a credit card they just announced that uh today as well with potential crypto rewards so what does this mean david i

know you're particularly excited about using this yeah totally so this is a credit card that you can apply for and you get cash back i think up to three percent cash back is what they advertise in bitcoin or other crypto awards ether is in there as well this is the second credit card that we've seen block fi uh did a similar 1.5 uh cash back on fiat purchases in bitcoin form gemini it looks like they're rolling out a credit card with even more cash back with even more crypto assets cash back and importantly ether uh i will be getting this credit card

100 uh totally i'm pretty excited about that so important that this is not like a a visa card that's just a debit card that you load with crypto and spend right this is a credit card so you're actually like you know it's it's it's based on credit it's not money that you already have which is a little bit different so are you going to basically replace the other credit cards that you have from the traditional banking system with something like this yeah so i have an apple card which i really like just because it integrates with all my other apple products but it doesn't give me ether cash back so everyone everyone knows i like ether so

i'm going to be migrating that's awesome we had some interesting regulatory news as well here david so we have a new sec chair that was just named under the biden administration this guy's name is gary gensler sources say from what i'm hearing i i i don't know that much about him and of course the proof will be in the actions he takes but apparently gary could be a more crypto friendly sec chair than jay clayton was you know maybe maybe not going as far as

as we would like being like sort of a like a crypto insider an advocate but he he might not be crypto hostile and he might actually be crypto friendly certainly had a history of pushing back against the big banks in the past do you have any takes here yeah that i feel like that's kind of surprising i could totally see a world where the biden administration came in and recommended a pretty you know top-heavy heavy-handed regulator somebody that might you know be in the row on gray camp you know um so having a friendly one is really really awesome um i think

having a friendly sec commissioner uh as it relates to crypto is as good as we could hoped for yes and i want to be clear i don't think we totally know how friendly he's going to be but he does know about this technology has written about it before he does know about crypto and blockchain so it remains to be seen but uh it could be good news and a story to watch it is a story to watch and speaking of good news david we did it we did it what did we do we kicked out the comment period from 15