Real Vision Pro Crypto AMA - 29 March 2022

Below is a recording and transcript of the Real Vision Pro Crypto AMA call our team did on Tuesday, March 29th, 2022.

Highlights included:

• Bitcoin price support levels (06:18)
• Older vs new AMM designs (09:40)
• Notes on the Terra ecosystem and LFG (14:06)
• Cross-chain, IBC, & LayerZero (27:13)
• Web3 Identity (38:07)
• ApeCoin & Yuga Labs (47:09)
• Areas we’re watching (55:21)

Real Vision AMA Transcript

05:25 · Kevin
Welcome back everybody to our bi-weekly Pro Crypto AMA. Really excited to be here, as always. There’s quite a bit that’s been going on in the crypto space in the last couple of weeks. We’ve got quite a few questions to get through. As always, if you have any questions, certainly submit them live. We’ll try and get through as many as we can and tie them together in some type of cohesive narrative. As we’ve got a couple of people trickling in here, I think a great place to start before we jump into some of the community questions, is I want to kick it over to our markets analyst, Jason, just to give us some quick commentary on what’s been going on in the markets recently. Obviously, Bitcoin’s had a pretty strong move as have a number of different pockets of the crypto market. Jason, what are you seeing? Are there any key levels that you’re watching right now?  

06:18 · Jason
Hey Kev, thanks for kicking it over to me. Anybody who’s interested in crypto markets has seen Bitcoin’s move over the last week or so. Up until about seven days ago, prices were still consolidating ,making lower highs, and it wasn’t until two or three days ago where Bitcoin really broke out of the range that it’s been trading in for the entirety of 2022 so far. Over several weeks ago, we’ve written and identified this 2022 price range. We noted that when price eventually breaks out and starts consolidating above or below that price range, it’s probably not something you want to fade seeing as though it accounts for the last three to four months of price action heading back to the end of December. Depending on which way price decides to move, it essentially puts everybody over the last several months who chose the opposite direction underwater or proves them wrong, so they have to make up for that and cover their position, so to speak, and get on board with the trend that Bitcoin decides to go with. That being said, this is the first time Bitcoin has gone positive on the year, breaking above $46K which is roughly the 2022 open. If this is indeed a trend shift, from a bullish downtrend from the all-time highs made in November to now, you would expect that any subsequent pullbacks from here should get bought up quickly as buyers’ step in, if it is indeed a trend shift. In terms of some key levels, in terms of support that I’ve been watching, given that we’ve broken out of this range, if it is indeed a bull shift, you’d want to see buyers step in at the higher end of the support structure, so around $42k-$44k. I think if you lose that on any subsequent pullback from here, it’s probably back to business as usual and back into the 2022 price range from about $34k-$44k, which is why you’d want to see that significant higher low being made around that $42k-$44k high volume area. You mentioned some other pockets of the crypto market that are interesting. I’m sure some other analysts will hop on them with a lot more detail, but Luna and AVAX, given the recent fundamental catalyst of the AVAX Summit, a bunch of fundamental catalysts heading into Q2, as well as everything that’s going on with the Luna and Terra ecosystem – those are two names, in addition to the privacy basket which has outperformed Bitcoin significantly over the last three weeks – those are some areas that I’m keeping an eye on right now. 

09:16 · Kevin
Awesome. Thanks for the color for kicking us off. I want to bring in one of our VPs of Research, Aswath. You all should be familiar with him. He joined one of our co-founders Yan Lieberman on the latest Crypto Insiders talks for March. We’ve got a question here on a particular topic you were covering a bit in that Crypto Insiders interview. The question is: do you feel like the older AMM such as Uni, Sushi and Balancer will be able to continue to build and adapt to best practices, or will new AMMs completely replace these older protocols? Do you have any thoughts there? 

09:56 · Ashwath
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think with Sushi and a Balancer it’s a bit of a question mark. They never really saw the traction that Uniswap did. I would say Uniswap is in a much comfier place in terms in the market with the product market fit and their ability to cater to DeFi. Sushi and Balancer, they haven’t performed at the level of Uniswap when it comes to things like TVL and volume. At the same time, Sushi and Balancer have been throwing incentives at the market, so they’ve been depleting their ability to be an incentive powerhouse. So, as new projects come in that have similar or better tech and can fill in the gaps that Sushi and Balancer do, they’re going to be coming in with more tokens than these projects have to be able to incentivize users to jump over. 

11:00 · Ashwath
So, yes, I think when it comes to Sushi and Balancers, it’s a bit foggy in terms of how the future looks for them. Uniswap is in a unique position. It’s the most successful DEX across all DeFi, irrespective of ecosystem. They’ve seen the success that they have so far by throwing a negligible amount of incentives at the market. So, they’re still sitting on a very large token treasury, and when and if they do decide to start throwing those tokens at the market, it could wreak some havoc. I think the fact that Uniswap still has a the vast majority of their token treasury to play around with, puts them in a very comfortable spot. The fact that they’ve achieved what they have so far with basically no incentives is and an additional boost to their product and their ability to have built something that people in DeFi find useful. 

12:07 · Ashwath
So, yes, just to sum it up, I think you Uniswap is not in a position to be threatened at all, and they have the ability to fight some of these newer protocols, but can’t really say the same for Balancer and Sushi. 

12:20 · Kevin
Yeah. That’s really helpful. Just while we have you, a quick follow-up question to that. When you talk about being able to throw around a treasury balance, for example for some of these AMMs or some of these DeFi protocols, can you just quickly elaborate on what you mean by that or how that treasury could be used? 

12:38 · Ashwath
Yeah. Typically, you’ll see AMMs incentivize liquidity provision. So, you get your fees from providing liquidity, the organic fees that come from swapping tokens from one another, but there’s also the token aspect where you can basically pad those yields with the project’s nat