Rapture: Mattison Asher's Crypto Takes

Rapture #163: NFT Bear Market

Well, it looks like my gut reaction in the final paragraph of January 31st's Rapture #127 [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-127-where-did-retail-go/] regarding NFTs peaking is largely playing out. While NFTs were bucking the downward trend of crypto markets overall for December and January, they are undoubtedly crashing as

Rapture #162: Optimistic vs. ZK Rollups

Yesterday, I covered [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-161/] some of the major scaling solutions from a high level. A significant portion of the research for these newsletters on scaling solutions comes from my old boss Preethi Kasireddy's posts [https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/a-normies-guide-to-rollups], so check those out

Rapture #161: The Different Scaling Solutions

My old boss, Preethi Kasireddy, [https://twitter.com/iam_preethi] has recently been producing some excellent content. In particular, she wrote an informative guide explaining the differences [https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/a-normies-guide-to-rollups] between various scaling solutions. I thought I would write up some of my core takeaways. If you

Rapture #160: Moment of truth for crypto

We are shortly going to figure out if the crypto industry has been able to successfully convince the broader markets that it is a censorship-resistant inflation hedge. In fact, we are even getting called out by ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein for the lack of positive price action. Lloyd has

Rapture #159: Dev Retirement

Today marks a big day for DeFi. Famed developers Andre Cronje and Anton Nell have announced they are retiring [https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/03/06/andre-cronje-leaves-defi] from DeFi and crypto. While both Andre and Anton most recently were working on Fantom, an EVM compatible sidechain, Andre is most well

Rapture #158: Uniswap Continues to Gain Market Share on Polygon

I saw a terrific thread [https://twitter.com/Derekmw23/status/1499845974876844034?s=20&t=jU7JVFCioBjepdeek7Xx4Q] posted by Derek Walkush yesterday, who works at the venture fund Variant. In this post, Derek outlines how Uniswap now has more than half the market share of DEX trading on Polygon. Additionally, Derek

Rapture #157: ETH will Become the Premier Digital Store of Value

Up to this point in time, the investing market has settled on BTC being the optimal store of value in digital assets. With a 21 million hard cap and little to no chance of cap that being changed by the Bitcoin core devs for cultural reasons, there are definitely strong

Rapture #156: Volume Attributed to Active Users for NFT Marketplaces

Recently, I was thinking about how one could effectively map out the differences of the major NFT marketplaces. From a product perspective, there is little differentiation between them all. Some might have gasless minting, while others might have credit card transactions enabled, but these features are by no means innovatively

Rapture #155: Crypto's Influence in the Russian War

While this conflict has only just begun, crypto is already taking a larger role compared to any previous war. Since crypto allows for effectively the near instantaneous transfer of value to anyone, anywhere around the world via an internet connection, crypto's influence in times of conflict will increase

Rapture #154: How I Learned to Design Tokens

I recently got off the phone with someone who is looking to join ConsenSys as a new token designer. She asked many questions regarding the process that I use to design tokens. While I cannot talk about the specifics of the various projects I am working on, I thought it

Rapture #153: What a Rebound

Crypto is having a killer day. BTC is up more than 15% on the day, and ETH is up more than 12%. Even more impressive, crypto started increasing even when US equity markets opened around 1.5% lower initially. Furthermore, the equity markets actually followed crypto's rally today

Rapture #152: Speculative Circularity

I have always posited that DeFi, like the other major industries within crypto, is largely circular in nature at this point, making it incredibly cyclical. DeFi's success in terms of revenue is directly correlated to the macro crypto cycle, just look at the revenue [https://www.tokenterminal.com/

Rapture #151: Coinbase Surpasses Expectations

By nearly all metrics, Coinbase had a solid 4Q 2021. Monthly transacting users, trading volumes, revenue, and platform assets all dramatically increase in the final quarter of 2021. While Coinbase is projecting a far worse Q1 2022, which is why their stock is down on the filings, Q4 and the

Rapture #150: Recent Price Action

In the past two days, the crypto market has been on a tear. Bitcoin is up approximately 13% from its low on the announcement that Russia was invading Ukraine, while the rest of the market is also experiencing similar price action. While I am far lass concerned about the market&

Rapture #149: Geopolitical Domino 1 Falls

We are a living in a very different world than 48 hours ago. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the entire geopolitical landscape has drastically changed. If you want to read a book that really predicted this war, and various other dominos that have yet to fall, you must

Rapture #148: DAOs Need More Structure

At EthDenver, respected industry leader and previous CTO of SushiSwap, Joseph Delong, had a panel where he discussed the need [https://thedefiant.io/joseph-delong-sushiswap-postmortem/] for hierarchy in DAOs. In his talk, Delong pointed out that structurlessness isn't a viable methodology, which is a direct criticism to how most

Rapture #147: Was The DAO Hacker Found?

The past 24 hours have been fascinating for a multitude of reasons. Probably one of the most longstanding independent journalists in crypto, Laura Shin [https://twitter.com/laurashin?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor] , released her new book The Cryptopians. The book largely covers crypto events across 2016

Rapture #146: Crypto Sentiment is Cooling

What a wild ride the last few weeks have been in the market. While everyone is focused on macro events, from the potential Russia invasion of Ukraine to interest rates rising, few are actually discussing the clear decelerating interest in crypto that can be inferred from sentiment indicators. Not only

Rapture #145: EthDenver Takeaways

After more than about 2 months of posting these Rapture daily, I missed a couple of days because of all the activity at EthDenver. Once EthDenver is over, I can assure you that I will get back to my daily cadence. But since I had some free time now, I

Rapture #144: Multicoin Likely Has the Best Fund Record of all time

While I thought I was finished writing about crypto funds for a bit, I came across an article from Axios on Multicoin that was published on December 29th, 2021 that caused my eyes to nearly pop out of their sockets. Who is Multicoin For those of you who do not

Rapture #143: My Favorite Crypto Funds by Strategy Part 3

Just as a quick sidenote, if you are here at ETH Denver and want to meet up, feel free to shoot me an email! Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. In part 1 [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-140-best-crypto-funds-by-strategy-par-1/] of this series, I discussed how Arca is my favorite fundamental

Rapture #142: My Favorite Crypto Funds by Strategy Part 2

In part 1 [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-140-best-crypto-funds-by-strategy-par-1/] of this series, I briefly covered why Arca was my favorite fundamental fund and why Three Arrows Capital was my favorite macro fund. Today, I will discuss my favorite venture fund is and my favorite HFT fund in crypto. Venture There are

Rapture #141: Crypto Super Bowl Commercials

While I will get back to the “my favorite crypto funds” series tomorrow, in celebration of the best American holiday, I thought it would be fun to cover some of the crypto related Super Bowl ads. 2022 was the first year to have crypto related ads in the Super Bowl,

Rapture #140: My Favorite Crypto Funds by Strategy Part 1

As someone who committed to trading as a lifestyle, I am always deeply interested in keeping up with the strategies run by the most significant funds. While I have written about top crypto funds before, I wanted to share some insights once again since it has been so long.  Over

Rapture #139: The Argument for why Inflation is not here to stay

Personally, I am not convicted on if inflation will continue to rise or these consistently 7%+ increase year over year prints will subside. Currently, I do not think the market is pricing in persistently high inflation, though that does not tip my opinion on the matter one way or the