# module imports and set up the notebook
This review is supposed to give a quick overview over the 2018 cryptomarket development as this year marked the first bear market in the short crypto history. We focus on how MakerDAO held up during the extreme market conditions in 2018 and compare those conditions to scenarios modeled in the Celo stability analysis.
The MakerDAO system allows to generate USD-pegged stable coins, so called DAI, by locking up collateral in form of ethereum (and other tokens in future versions of the setup). To mint a new DAI, a minimum amount of ethereum has to be send to a smart contract which in turn provides the new DAI. The exact minimum amount depends on the collateralization ratio - usually about 1.50 USD worth of ETH have to be locked up to generate one DAI.
Such a position is called Collateralized Debt Position (CDP). If a user wants to regain the locked up ethereum, the issued amount of DAI has to be send back to the smart contract and additionally, a "stability fee" of 2.5% p.a. has to be paid via the MakerDAO token MKR. If the collateralization ratio of an outstanding CDP drops below a critical threshold due to a price drop of ETH, the user has to provide additional ETH or pay back part of the DAI - otherwise the collateral will be (partly) liquidated. Currently, about 1.5% of the overall ETH supply is locked up in MakerDAO CDPs (see https://mkr.tools/).
The drastic drop of the ETH price did not strongly affect the stability of the DAI and, somewhat surprisingly, not many CDPs have been liquidated or closed by users (see https://medium.com/pov-crypto/makerdao-what-doesnt-kill-it-makes-it-stronger-7902285542ab). This suggests that DAI users where willing to provide more and more collateral as the ETH price decreased. That the DAI remained rather stable during this market downturn will likely increase the confidence in the MakerDAO stability system and thus reinforce the stability going forward.
# starting on
start_date = '2018-01-01'
We select five of the biggest cryptocurrencies to show how the market in 2018 developed. As can be seen from the figures in this section, prices were at a peak level in the beginning of 2018. During 2018, all depicted currencies lost more than 60% of their value. BCH and ETH lost 93% and 87% respectively and MKR fell by "only" 62%. Trading volumes also dropped considerably compared to their beginning of the year levels.
Note that it is well known that trading volumes are manipulated and/or falsely reported by many exchanges. Thus the displayed historical trading volumes should be seen as a very rough first indication only!
# Get basic information about the selected set of coins
last_updated | name | |
---|---|---|
symbol | ||
BTC | 2018-12-04 13:13:21 | Bitcoin |
XRP | 2018-12-04 13:13:04 | XRP |
ETH | 2018-12-04 13:13:17 | Ethereum |
XLM | 2018-12-04 13:13:04 | Stellar |
BCH | 2018-12-04 13:13:15 | Bitcoin Cash |
# historical prices (top 5 + MakerDAO coins, cryptocompare data)
# Developement of 100USD investment
# Year-to-date returns
Year to date returns until: 2018-12-04
0 | |
---|---|
BTC | -0.729276 |
XRP | -0.837397 |
ETH | -0.870796 |
XLM | -0.729496 |
BCH | -0.928343 |
MKR | -0.616903 |
# historical USD volumes (direct USD trades)
Note that it is well known that trading volumes are manipulated and/or falsely reported by many exchanges. Thus the displayed historical trading volumes should be seen as a very rough first indication only!
At the end of November 2018, we saw huge negative weekly returns of more than -30% with Bitcoin Cash losing even 40% in a single week. The correlation of daily returns seems to have increased during 2018. Such an increased correlation during crisis periods is an effect that is well known from traditional asset markets. We however also see a very high correlation during the boom phase. Historical correlations in the cryptomarkets are highly dependent on the observed time frame (daily, weekly or monthly).
# historical weekly returns
# some descriptive statistics on weekly returns in 2018
count | mean | std | min | 25% | 50% | 75% | max | skewness | exKurtosis | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BTC | 48 | -0.02181 | 0.11673 | -0.30165 | -0.10726 | -0.00756 | 0.03541 | 0.28853 | -0.00852 | 0.64559 |
XRP | 48 | -0.02192 | 0.21885 | -0.39956 | -0.15603 | -0.02373 | 0.03736 | 1.0331 | 2.35708 | 10.8198 |
ETH | 48 | -0.03523 | 0.14847 | -0.34236 | -0.12629 | -0.02325 | 0.06218 | 0.33298 | -0.14826 | -0.0062 |
XLM | 48 | -0.01532 | 0.18298 | -0.38462 | -0.14088 | -0.05291 | 0.08111 | 0.44027 | 0.49201 | 0.22598 |
BCH | 48 | -0.03578 | 0.18548 | -0.39255 | -0.15597 | -0.0277 | 0.06413 | 0.52885 | 0.39936 | 0.7213 |
MKR | 48 | -0.00872 | 0.16823 | -0.44928 | -0.10046 | -0.00274 | 0.06631 | 0.51002 | 0.08998 | 1.46007 |
DAI | 48 | 0.00025 | 0.01539 | -0.05044 | -0.00446 | -0.00077 | 0.00438 | 0.05832 | 0.57613 | 5.67366 |
The weekly mean return of all depicted "no-stable" currencies is negative in the 2018 period. The weekly volatilities of all currencies were very high with XRP being the most volatile and BTC being the most stable (except for DAI). MKR had a week where it lost 45% of its value.
# Pearson correlation matrix of weekly returns
BTC | XRP | ETH | XLM | BCH | MKR | DAI | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BTC | 1 | 0.6 | 0.76 | 0.79 | 0.76 | 0.68 | 0.12 |
XRP | 0.6 | 1 | 0.59 | 0.72 | 0.57 | 0.46 | 0.09 |
ETH | 0.76 | 0.59 | 1 | 0.79 | 0.81 | 0.82 | 0.3 |
XLM | 0.79 | 0.72 | 0.79 | 1 | 0.7 | 0.66 | 0.27 |
BCH | 0.76 | 0.57 | 0.81 | 0.7 | 1 | 0.68 | 0.1 |
MKR | 0.68 | 0.46 | 0.82 | 0.66 | 0.68 | 1 | 0.06 |
DAI | 0.12 | 0.09 | 0.3 | 0.27 | 0.1 | 0.06 | 1 |
MKR and ETH are highly correlated but correlation seems to have loosened since the end of September 2018. On September 24th, a16z announced a 15M investment in MakerDAO (see https://a16zcrypto.com/2018/09/maker/) which could explain the rise of the MKR price during the end of September and beginning of October. Also, MakerDAO is getting closer to bringing Multi-Collateral DAI to the market which makes the system less dependent on ETH.
The DAI is pretty stable but had short periods during which it drifted further away from 1USD. On January 11th it dropped to 78 Cents but regained its peg one day later. The Maker-Team attributed this to a malfunction of one of their trading bots. Since then, the price has remained rather stable.
Trading volume of DAI and especially of MKR is tiny compared to the volume of a major currency like ETH.
# The pice of dai
# plot mkr, dai and eth
# Historical volumes (direct USD trades)
The 2018 market development was extreme with a drop of the overall market of about 80%. The DAI stable coin of MakerDAO survived this crisis period without considerable depeggings. The Celo simulation analysis considers similar and even more extreme market scenarios - approximately 0.1% of all simulated years show a drop of more than 80% in the cryptomarket in our simulation. Since we generate 48,000 paths of 30 year length, about 1,440 years that show an even more extreme one-year cryptomarket decline are included our analysis. The Celo stability system remains perfectly stable in most of these scenarios. More details about the simulation analysis will be provided in the reading group this Thursday!