Pat doesn’t get NFTs, and honestly, NFTs could care less as the market explodes and trading value goes through the roof. Amy and Pat discuss that plus the crazy BTC run up to $52,000, ETH’s trading on the CME, and Pat gives an overview of some of the different crypto index funds, focusing on PowerIndex and CVP.
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Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to the DFI daily I 10 minute or less defiant crypto update. I’m Amy Harris, Pat and today is Wednesday, February 17th, 2021
Speaker 1 00:00:12 $52,045 48 cents. Market cap 972 billion. Bitcoin is up 3.9% from its, from what used to be. It’s all time high of about 50,000 to over 52,000 in one day. And, uh, and I think really what we’re going to start watching it for now is that that $1 trillion market cap, um, at that point it will get, it will start approaching the largest companies in the world. Uh, it’s already one of the largest companies in the world by market cap, but it’s it’s, uh, man, it’s crazy. Uh, if they’re in across 1900 today, it’s, uh, it’s stabilized right now at 18 nine, nine, 18,000 $1,899 and 20 cents up eight, eight and a half or up seven and a half percent. But it was briefly at 19 100, somewhere in that range. So new all time high for Ethereum. It is now it is now knocking on the door for two, a 2000.
Speaker 1 00:01:10 So everyone’s in there looking overall great day on the markets. Pretty much everything was up except for be a Bitcoin, uh, or be a Bitcoin ABC, which was down. And I can’t even believe it’s still a token that’s out there, but you know, across the board, uh, you to swap up 10% Bitcoin cash up, another 2% hitting, you know, it’s up at seven 18 right now, ripple just keeps on doing whatever it is. Ripple does, uh, Cardona and PokitDok continue their run-ups. So Cardona is now at, uh, just about a dollar up 12 and a half percent today. Polka dot up a five and a half percent $31. So great down the markets. Everyone’s in a good mood.
Speaker 0 00:01:45 Yup. Always in a good mood. Thank you to our sponsor, but wave. But wave is a digital asset management platform that does defy and crypto task tracking, gain loss reporting, and more, you can check them out [email protected] or on Twitter app at, with platform. So up first one week after a theory and features launched on CME daily trading volumes reached a total of 75 million yesterday, almost doubling Friday’s volume of 40 minutes.
Speaker 1 00:02:15 Yeah. So CME, obviously the Chicago mercantile exchange Bitcoin is Bitcoin futures has been trading on the exchange for quite some time. Uh, and they have had, you know, varying like with, as things have changed varying levels of ups and downs on it. It’s a big deal because of a few things. First of all, it’s, it’s obviously a big deal because this is a, this is the preeminent, uh, commodities exchange in the entire world. This adds legitimacy. It adds, uh, liquidity to the overall markets. You know, anytime you’re injecting trading activity, you are increasing liquidity, even if it is a futures, but essentially like, you know, uh, you know, you think about what happened at GameStop. There was, there are these, there are all these knock on effects from people buying options and futures and all these kinds of things. So you buy futures that people sell it to, you might hedge by actually buying the underlying asset right now, um, or not, they might take the risk on it, but there is, there’s always underlying action happening.
Speaker 1 00:03:05 So this is a big deal. Uh, and this is also, you know, the, the other reason this is a big deal is that I think I get the sense that some of the Ethereum run out right run up right now has to do with how much gain locked into the Ethereum 2.0 contracts. So right now, you know, there’s almost $4 billion locked in the Ethereum 2.0 smart contract that is UN claw backable. I mean, essentially you can’t, you cannot do anything with the Ethereum 2.0 contract. The money is in there. It has to stay in there until, until they kind of get to the next level with the theorem to, uh, that means that there’s not a lot of like, there’s a lot of people that put a lot of Ethereum into that smart contract and are not selling it. And maybe they’re regretting that right now.
Speaker 1 00:03:44 Like maybe they’re looking at $18,000 price and they’re saying, Hey, I kind of, or 90,000 our president, Hey, maybe I wish I could have actually sold something right now, which we sort of lead to a secondary question, which is, I wonder if they’re going to see a big drawdown when we actually, when that contract finally unlocks, but as sort of a different, a different issue overall. Um, but, but the high level, is there any other mechanisms to add trading around a theory, um, without requiring the physical asset, which is an issue because again, the physical asset getting locked up a lock is a really good thing and we’ll probably, it’s probably good for the industry overall. So I think that’s why you’re seeing this. And it’s a great thing all around and we’re all happy.
Speaker 0 00:04:22 So Robin hood and announces plans to offer crypto deposits and withdrawals.
Speaker 1 00:04:27 So this has been a complaint about Robin hood from the very, very beginning, which is don’t that Robin hood, uh, we’ll let you bought crypto to buy cryptocurrency, but did not let you withdraw it, which essentially if you ask me, sure, sounds like they were a fractional reserving cryptocurrency don’t trust anyone. Okay. There’s, there’s two different levels of like don’t trust. Like there’s two levels of not your keys, not your coins. The first level is an exchange where now your keys, not your coins, but you can probably get your coins, especially with, with licensing, like Coinbase, which is a pretty legitimate regulated exchange. There was then the next level, which is now your keys. Now your coins can’t get your coins, which is Robin hood, a weeble, a few of these other ones that are out there, you know, serious. You guys, if there’s nothing else you take from this entire podcast, uh, as we are, as we are approaching our hundredth episode, there’s literally nothing you take from this. Please don’t put your money in these. This is not the, these are your you’re making derivative bets on this stuff, which essentially is meaningless. And we all know derivative bets and any type of bets on game style on a campsite. Well on Robin hood are essentially meaningless. Do not use Robinhood to buy cryptocurrencies. Just if you’re going to AML, just ammo all the way into Coinbase and use them. And then, and then store your crypto on a treasurer. This is, this is, uh, this is the way,
Speaker 0 00:05:47 All right, next bit with Bitwise launches, defy cryptic crypto index fund.
Speaker 1 00:05:53 I’m seeing lots of index funds, uh, launching, um, the one that I actually have watched the most. So, so Bitwise is a, uh, is doing a one of these kind of like over the counter ish things, um, that they’re hoping they’ll be able to offer to, to, uh, actual high net worth individuals like, uh, not, not a rake see, but a, you know, an accredited investor kind of investment. Um, the one that I like, there’s, there’s a few that are out there right now. And I’ll tell you the ones that I like, I personally have been kind of partial the power index. Uh, I think they’re doing some really interesting stuff. I think their coin, you know, you hear me talk a lot about token omics on these types of this show. Um, and I, and every now and again, I say, I genuinely don’t understand that token omics, if something, you know, power next is one of the, the actual tokens out there that I think is very interesting that it is doing some cool stuff, because essentially what they’re doing is, is creating a forum where they’re holding the index funds, but then allowing the, their, their overall governance token to direct voting power for the funds for the actual tokens held by their overall index fund.
Speaker 1 00:06:57 That’s really powerful and a lot of ways. And I think they’re onto something, a lot of these other guys that are essentially just doing tracking tokens or tracking index funds. I’m not really sure there’s a ton of value in it because you know, what, what power index is doing with CVP is concentrating voting power. That’s the whole point of the token, which is, which is actually doing something really, really clever. Um, just investing in a basket of defines, just do it yourself. Like, honestly, it’s not that hard to look at what these guys are holding in and just buy a basket of it, market weight, it, you know, readjust your, your weights once a week or something. Don’t worry about it. You know, hold the tokens themselves. It’s kind of like the, not your keys, not your coins. It’s kind of the same thing as if you’re, if you’re going through a disintermediator on this and you’re paying 20% management fees for them to track at a percentage, you know, worst case, just set up a balancer pool for it and put some stuff in it. And then as you, as you want to do it, so yeah, it’s cool stuff. There are some interesting projects on index funds right now, but I’m not sure the Bitwise one is particularly interesting.
Speaker 2 00:07:52 all right. So let’s talk about NFTs.
Speaker 1 00:07:57 Let’s talk about NFTs. You know, honestly, I, I bag on NFCS, um, I like art. Like I collect photography and I, and I’m a fan of, uh, physical art. Uh, I, you know, uh, I don’t personally, I am open-minded about cryptocurrency. There’s almost nothing in the world that I am more open-minded about than cryptocurrency. And if T’s, or one of these things that I still don’t fully get it, but you know what, at the end of the day, this market is absolutely exploding. Like there was a digital, I don’t know what you call it, cause it’s, you’re not buying the rights to a, a, like I get you’re buying a, I don’t know. I still don’t know even how to even use my words to discuss what an NFT really represents on the blockchain, but there was a over $1 million sale of a block and NFT the other day, uh, top, uh, top shot, which is a NFTE based, uh, crypt.
Speaker 1 00:08:58 Like it’s a NFT trading card, I think is probably the best way to scribe it, of moments from NBA games, uh, that you essentially own the moment from the NBA game. You don’t, you don’t own the moment. You don’t own the footage. You get no copyright attributes to that footage. You just get this thing on a website that shows the, this, the slam dunk, all that being said, the prices have exploded. And suddenly there’s like your people paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars for these, these top shots. So, you know, I, I will be the first to say that there’s, that I, you know, I don’t have to understand everything to know that there’s cool stuff happening. There is cool stuff happening in the, in the NFC market right now, my play on it is looking at the underlying blockchain. So there’s a few different coins that are, are doing that are actually supporting the NFT markets.
Speaker 1 00:09:48 Um, once I think NFTs we’ll find a place. I think that we will find a really cool use for them. I don’t think we’ve found it yet, but I do believe that we will find a really cool use for them when that happens. The, the blockchains that are supporting empties and then the, the exchanges they’re essentially allowing for the selling the, the sale of it will benefit from it. So that’s kinda my play on it. And maybe over the next couple of days, I’ll, I’ll do some research and find some interesting blockchains that are working with the NFTs that we can talk about. Because that, that to me is the play less than trying to buy, you know, a Michael Jordan top shot right now, but we’ll see, I don’t know.
Speaker 0 00:10:23 All right, that’ll do it for today. Thank you for listening to the defy daily. You can follow us on Twitter at the defy daily, have a good one.