Maker is the most under appreciated DeFi blue chip.

- By far the most profitable DeFi protocol adjusted for token subsidies ($100mm run-rate rev) and growing 📈

- Has one of the strongest moats in DeFi (most widely integrated)

- Use cases are expanding rapidly (more $$$)
Dai is far from perfect.

It doesn’t scale perfectly.

It has centralized collateral.

It is governance heavy.

The buyback and burn token model is suboptimal.

These are all reasons why I believe there is an opening for new decentralized stablecoin competitors.
But overcoming Dai will be not be easy by any measure.

The MakerDAO system is reliable, stable, secure, and proven. Just like anything at the base of the monetary system should be.

Key reasons why the moat is so strong.
Finally when I think about where value will accrue on Ethereum it’s hard not to think the protocols that issue currency like Maker will be in a powerful position.
They will be foundational infrastructure for the Ethereum monetary system that will set the price of currency and potentially accrue massive balance sheets that they may use for other revenue generating activities 💸
I’ve been guilty of fading MKR myself, but gotta respect the king of decentralized stablecoins.

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More from @RyanWatkins_

3 Mar
Remember algorithmic stablecoins?

Following their mini hype cycle in Q4’20, they’ve entered violent death spirals and effectively broke.

But what if told you that they’re going through a Renaissance, powered by the idea of protocol owned collateral?

1/ Image
In our first of two reports on the future of central banking on blockchains we cover algorithmic stablecoin’s:

- market potential
- issues
- renaissance
- most promising projects

This is also the first of our new Enterprise Research offering 👀
messari.io/article/the-ar…
Why should you care about algorithmic stablecoins in the first place?

A sneak preview 👇🏾
Read 14 tweets
12 Feb
Messari Enterprise just launched.

What makes it so special?

It's all about automating information flows and the evolution of the crypto investor.

1/
Currently if you want updates on assets outside the top 10 you’re out of luck if you only follow crypto news publications and twitter.

The result is you have to follow all these projects manually.
The problem of course is that staying on top of all these projects is an extremely time consuming process that requires scouring a wide range of disparate and idiosyncratic sources for high signal information.
Read 8 tweets
10 Feb
What is the holy grail of token design?

To me it is when a protocol is designed from the ground up so that its token is an integral part of the protocol and involved in the value creation process, rather than just serving to extract rent.

1/
Over the past year in DeFi there’s been a renewed interest among the community in value accrual mechanisms for tokens.

messari.io/article/govern…
This is for a good reason.

Due to a combination of opportunism and naivete, the 2017 ICO era was flush with utility tokens that attempted to jam useless tokens into new projects.
Read 8 tweets
26 Jan
To me this is the biggest invalidation of the thesis that fee capture today actually matters.

So long as DeFi protocols have 100x+ growth ahead of them:

Growth > Fee Capture.

1/
Along this line of thinking, even if a token does implement some kind of fee capture it’s much better to reinvest those earnings rather than distribute as dividends.

UNI implicitly does this by not extracting fees from LPs (fee switch off).
This industry’s obsession with dividends is a backlash to the useless utility tokens from 2017.

Yes it’s important for tokens to have the potential to accrue value.

But earnings potential is not the same as dividends.
Read 5 tweets
25 Jan
One of the more thought provoking essays I’ve read on Ethereum in a while.

In short Ethereum wins not by challenging nation states head-on for monetary supremacy like Bitcoin, but by growing its own digital economy until it surpasses that of the dominant sovereign powers.

1/
“History teaches us that there’s only one viable method for a challenger willing to replace the current monetary reserve: it has to grow its own economy till the point it matches, and eventually surpasses, that of the main global power of the moment — currently, the U.S.”
This is a mental model I’ve long agreed with as well.

Bitcoin - a digital challenger to gold

Ethereum - a digital challenger to sovereign jurisdictions

Bitcoin : Digital Gold :: Ethereum : Digital Economy
Read 5 tweets
25 Jan
Over the past year Helium has been the single most effective way to evangelize crypto to my friends.

The reason?

Financial use cases are hard to grasp and uninteresting to people without financial backgrounds.

1/
Bitcoin is hard to explain because reality is most people don’t even understand the purpose of gold outside it’s use in jewelry and electronics.

In many ways Bitcoin just seems like a pet rock.
DeFi while somewhat easier to explain because people use financial services, is still hard.

The second you start talking about market making, derivatives, synthetic assets, etc. you lose people.

It’s all very abstract.
Read 8 tweets

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