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3 Jan, 5 tweets, 2 min read
The most effective meme I’ve found for Ethereum is “Digital Economy”

From there it’s easy to layout how Ethereum is the foundation for a variety of digital institutions (protocols) built upon the same principles of decentralization as Bitcoin.

1/
With “Bitcoin : Digital Gold :: Ethereum : Digital Economy” as the framing its then much easier to describe what a bet on ETH is.

I first explain DeFi (the new Wall Street), NFTs, Web3, and all the other mind blowing projects built on Ethereum...
...then illuminate how ETH is at the center of all it.

If BTC is like gold - an asset that people store value in but don’t use as money.

Then ETH is like money - the most liquid asset in Ethereum’s on-chain economy that is demanded for a wide range of economic uses.
If I get pressed on the semantics of “money” I explain how ETH is used as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account...

...but also eventually as the ultimate source of security for the Ethereum blockchain, stretching the idea of what money is.
A lot these ideas are what we attempted to express and put numbers behind in our latest ETH 2.0 report.

messari.io/road-to-eth2

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More from @RyanWatkins_

Ryan Watkins Profile picture
30 Dec 20
Many will scoff at this but it’s not far fetched.

The flip side of cheering on bankers and billionaires as they pile into Bitcoin is that it is re-enforcing the status quo wealth distribution.

If we’re not careful it may even exacerbate it.
With the way many Bitcoiners romanticize the gold standard, you would think that the gold standard was actually popular when we were on it.

Hint, it was not.
I strongly believe BTC is an important check on privileged parties controlling the money supply and abusing their power.

I also believe the certainty Bitcoin provides people over the preservation of their wealth is important as well - Bitcoin is stable, apolitical, and reliable.
Read 4 tweets
Ryan Watkins Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Excited to share our 2020 #Bitcoin review.

2020 will be remembered as the year the long fabled institutions finally arrived and #Bitcoin became a bonafide macroeconomic asset.

Below are the top highlights of each month for Bitcoin’s historic year.

1/
Bitcoin is now at all-time highs capping off an extremely successful year.

But it was by no means stable ride up.

2020 was a historically volatile year.

@YoungCryptoPM and I provided a detailed overview of every month of 2020 in all its glory.

messari.io/article/bitcoi…
Jan.

3 days into the new year the US assassinated Iran’s top general Soleimani.

BTC surprisingly reacted to the events behaving like a safe haven as the risk of war increased.

The events provided the first hints of BTC potentially having graduated to a legitimate macro asset.
Read 23 tweets
Ryan Watkins Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Nearly all the recent growth in total value locked in DeFi since the summer has come from BTC, stablecoins, and other ERC-20s.

What does this mean for ETH?

1/
Pet rock 1.0 (BTC) looks like it’s about to reach parity with pet rock 2.0 (ETH) in total value locked in DeFi 👀
Lol gave ETH bulls hopium earlier today, now giving them hard questions.

I’m actually not too concerned about the above charts, but I can’t pretend it’s not a risk.

We’ve been talking about this for a while.

messari.io/article/defi-i…
Read 5 tweets
Ryan Watkins Profile picture
22 Dec 20
On the surface index protocols appear to just be vehicles for passive exposure to cryptoassets.

However under the hood they're much more powerful than that.

Through meta-governance index protocols may be an attractive DeFi aggregation play through voting power accumulation.

1/
It all starts with the premise that index protocols are fundamentally community governed pools of assets that can be used to provide investors:

1. Passive asset exposure
2. Yield from vault strategies
3. Governance delegation through meta-governance

Index protocols are the latest attempt at DeFi aggregation - a topic we’ve explored multiple times.

The reason why is simple - Web2 aggregators have accrued trillions of $$$ in value by occupying powerful positions in value chains throughout the economy.

messari.io/article/value-…
Read 6 tweets
Ryan Watkins Profile picture
19 Dec 20
There’s a growing dichotomy between tokens championed by venture funds vs tokens championed by hedge funds.

VC tokens:
- larger insider allocations
- more core team driven
- methodical iteration

HF tokens:
- little to no VC backing
- more community driven
- rapid iteration
I don’t think one class is necessarily better than the other.

But one of the most important features of DeFi is the democratization of financial opportunities.
And the clearest benefit of projects HFs like right now (YFI, SUSHI, AAVE, SNX, etc) is that their communities got in on the ground floor and feel empowered.

When tokens are only available to the public after 10x - 100x it’s just not that same.
Read 5 tweets
Ryan Watkins Profile picture
10 Dec 20
There’s been a ton of development in the Yearn ecosystem recently to the point where it’s worth asking again:

What the hell is Yearn?

@jotto and I did a deep dive into the theory of Yearn to breakdown what Yearn is and where it’s going.

1/
It all starts with the theory of the protocol.

Protocols are coordination mechanisms that define rules and provide incentives for market participants to facilitate economic activity at a global scale.

messari.io/article/the-th…
The second building block to understand Yearn is to understand a key premise of DeFi:

DeFi provides individuals unprecedented access to financial opportunities traditionally reserved for HNW individuals and regulated financial institutions.
Read 20 tweets

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