The Weekly Wizard: Recent Episodes

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Michael Silberling is considered by many to be the best Wizard working on Dune today. He currently works at Optimism as a full time data wizard, and puts out amazing dashboards every week. We uncover his origin story, explore Optimism through his dashboards, and discuss how he overcomes the challenges of on-chain data today.

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Tom's Dune: https://dune.xyz/tomhschmidt
Tom's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt

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Richard is one of the most legendary Dune Wizards and also General Partner at crypto VC firm 1confirmation. This episode is a really interesting dive into Richard's story in crypto, how he evaluates potential investments, and his thoughts on current market trends. We also get deep into some of his best Dune dashboards and hear some great insights on the NFT market in particular. 

Check Richard out on Twitter: https://twitter.com/richardchen39
His Dune Dashboards: https://dune.xyz/rchen8
His NFT data website: https://cryptoart.io/

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Elias Simos from Coinbase

On this 5th episode of Weekly Wizard, Florian welcomes Elias Simos to discuss his history as a protocol specialist for coinbase and a longtime user of all things Dune. The pair opens up the conversation by delving into data analysis in the blockchain space, how they decide which blockchain data matters, and how they subsequently use that data to make educated decisions about the market. They note that this information explains how humans and the market behave. Elias argues that Dune has been a hotbed for activity over the past two years and deems it helpful for tracking the market and the psychology of its participants. This leads the duo to discuss the importance of collective intelligence and how dashboards are a useful asset when making predictions.

After sharing their screens with each other to engage in analysis and make predictions, they urge that liquidity is inherently attractive and valuable. This serves as a nice segue into the future of stable coins and the power of crypto in the wake of a recent deal made with the Washington Nationals. It’s a perfect example as to why crypto is here to stay, although that brings Elias and Florian to ask a new question: How far can crypto be regulated? In response, the pair argue that a new set of leadership must be on the horizon, because the boomers currently in charge are hardly up to date and less than adequate leaders to navigate the ever-changing world of finance and cryptocurrency. On that note, Florian and Elias open up the discussion to the audience where they pull questions from live listeners and answer them in real time.

The Finer Details of This Episode:

• How to decide what block chain to use
• How you use blockchain data to make decisions
• The minimization of trust necessary for exchanges of information
• Dune as a hotbed for activity over the past two years; Ethereum and Solana
• How to track and understand the market
• Psychology of the market and participants
• The importance of collective intelligence
• Sharing screens and predictions
• Why liquidity is attractive and valuable
• Elias’ personal journey with crypto
• Stable coins and a lucrative partnership with Washington Nationals
• Predictions in relation to COVID recovery
• How the government has used COVID-19 to its advantage
• Why crypto and non fungible assets are here to stay
• How far can crypto be regulated
• Strauss-Howe Generational Theory and the boomer culture clash
• Q&A

Quotes:

“Dune is principally like application layer data, but you can also go and look at, you know, what the polygon chain is doing and how it’s behaving—by various metrics—you know cluster transactions do like all kinds of cool things and say like, you know, how much activity is potentially MeV related, how much is not, and how much that impacts, you know, the block chain space.”

“Blockchain data, a human can read it and make any sort of… meaningful conclusions from looking at that data. Blockchains are powerful, because they minimize the trust necessary in order for multiple parties to sort of operate on that.”

“The blockchains can say a lot of interesting things about how humans behave and the more we get to everything running on a blockchain: a ton of the world’s transactions, a ton of the world’s commerce and so on.”

“Dune is this incredibly amazing tool that helps take the truth or some part of the truth or in some small subset of the whole you know, the world that’s operating on a blockchain and actually give it some sort of meaning. Is number going up, or is number going down?”

“There’s huge synergy effects if you’re not working alone, but rather with a few other people. They can audit your work, you can work together, you can split up by different sectors.”

“It looks like the stable coin market is really, really growing. It has tripled since last year.”

“Also one thing about stable coins is that very rarely, in the history, at least the more recent history of the industry, even like 2019, when the market was choppy as hell, you didn’t really see liquidity being withdrawn from the market. It just stays… because then it’s that flywheel that we were talking about before. So exciting stuff.”

“In the next couple years, I think wallet infrastructure is getting better. We talked about this demand for block space increasing. There’s infrastructure work happening to be able to service that demand, there’s new types of applications being developed and so on. There’s financial worlds in blockchain content growing. So I think it’s very likely that we’ll get there.”

“The next five, six years is the boomer swan song, right? Boomers will, for better or worse, they will not really be around anymore, like not in positions of power, because they will be way past their prime, right?”

Links:

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