“What do you think about Ethereum?”

A question all Bitcoiners should have a good answer to when their friends and family ask them.

A few thoughts beyond the “shitcoin” meme...

1/ ETH reached 18-month low today and there is this narrative that the price of is dropping because ICOs are liquidating their treasuries. Well, it’s completely wrong. Let’s look at the data!

https://t.co/yG0vecC7VT

2/ The sum of ETH holdings of ICO treasuries is now a little over 3.57M ETH (3.5% of supply). In April, the treasuries held 4.65 million ETH (4.5% of supply) indicating that they likely liquidated (or moved) about 23% since then.

3/ Despite the decline in ETH price, the selloff hasn’t been as drastic as many analysts anticipated. In the past two months, treasuries of projects that held ICOs liquidated (or moved) 172,00 ETH, or ~4.6% of total holdings.

4/ The most aggressive sellers were Status, district0x and Tierion (in order), which sold (or moved) nearly 55,000 ETH combined since September 9. Out of the 57 companies I tracked, 50% didn’t touch any of the ETH in their treasuries.

5/ At least 11 ICOs currently have a smaller “market capitalization” than the amount that they hold in their ETH treasuries alone (see table below).

1/20 Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for payments. We all know this. To solve this problem, the Lightning network is being built on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. Will it be the end of XRP?

(Video version @ https://t.co/7zJCuKrpqx)

A thread. 👇

2/20 On a normal day outside a bull run, Bitcoin takes ~10 mins to transfer, at a cost of about $0.50. Any time network activity ramps up, those times and fees multiply. Bitcoin's Proof of Work system is painfully slow and can only handle 7 transactions per second.

3/20 To attempt to solve this problem, the Lightning Network is being developed. It's a 2nd layer network that sits on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. It's been in the works since 2015. Yes, 6 years. Do you know anybody who uses it? Me, either, but I'll get to that.

4/20 Lightning works by opening "channels" between parties. Those parties can perform as many Bitcoin transactions as needed and then close the channel. Because the transactions aren't written to the Bitcoin blockchain until the channel is closed, it's much faster.

5/20 Individual payment channels between various parties combine to form a network of lightning nodes that can route transactions among themselves. The resulting interconnections between various payment channels is the Lightning Network.

Will start this thread with a disclaimer. I have never invested a rupee in cryptos 😀

But I have studied bull and bear cycles and financial bubbles extensively. Saw 1992, 2000, 2008 with own eyes. The first one as a novice, the next two when I knew to analyze

The amount of chatter I am seeing in friends, family and social media about cryptos has gone through the roof. For everyone, it's a dream to make 100x or even 1000x easily. Basically, become stinking rich easily
( it never happens )

In any financial bubble, the top is made in extreme speed and violence. The distribution happens on the way down. Unless one saw the rates of 65k on bitcoin, one wouldn't buy at 30-35k or 20k. That 65k is an anchor point which leads to greed

During the tulipmania, a single piece of tulip reached a price of $750,000 in today's money. When we see that history, we think "what idiots". But consider this, as of now meme coins generated by someone in their garage are being traded at absurd prices

Then there is this joke called NFT. A piece of "digital art" basically made by someone on their computer ( who is not even a known artist) are being sold for millions of dollars

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

So, let's break down the basics of some of the top protocols.

First on deck: Aave (@AaveAave), an Ethereum-based money market protocol.

A 🧵

TL;DR: Aave is a protocol through which any user anywhere in the world can take decentralized loans by collateralizing their assets.

Aave also allows those will idle assets to earn a relatively safe return on capital from lenders, whose rates are determined by a curve.

1/ For years, most crypto assets had no indirect or direct utility.

Users would hold BTC, ETH, and other assets (including many ERC-20 tokens) with no expectation of a native yield or dividends.

ETH, for instance, was long just an asset for transaction fees, as was Bitcoin.

2/ If users wanted to borrow against their assets, they were relegated to centralized platforms—which were few and far between years ago.

3/ Aave, formerly ETHLend, is a protocol allowing users the ability to lend and borrow on-chain, without KYC and untransparent fees.

Users can deposit a variety of assets as collateral, then use that collateral as ammo to borrow other assets to be used in DeFi or beyond.