 So as time is going on, the big question, or one of the questions really comes out, is how would everything do with futures for Ethereum? And actually, that just dropped today. So the question is actually answered, and what we have right now is a little bit of a lackluster performance. So first, everybody, welcome to Digital Asset News. We're gonna go over a couple of things today. Future ETFs, we're gonna talk about the job market and macro economics just real quick. And then also, we're gonna talk about why Bitcoin is pretty much unbeatable as we compare it to the last 12 years or so. So the first thing's first, how ETH futures ETFs fared on day one. And this was actually from yesterday. Today is October 3rd, 2023. It's from October 2nd. And here's what we got. Volumes today, nowhere near the volumes the inaugural Bitcoin futures offering saw two years ago. Six Ether Future ETFs launched by ProShares, Bitwise, and VanX saw trading volumes of roughly two million. ProShares, Ether strategy all the way with nearly $900,000 in daily volume, 900,000. Sounds like a lot, but it's nothing. VanX Ethereum strategy eclipsed the $400,000 mark. So what does that look like over time? It looks like this, as a matter of fact. Here's the volume of Ethereum futures. Now we can see that this isn't the first time, this isn't the first rodeo going around, but we can see that back in the day is quite a bit of a volume. And of course, we could see that this was roughly a year ago. Now, we are on the grips of a bear market. So take this with a grain of salt. I know everybody's excited about ETFs, especially when we talk about Bitcoin spot ETFs. And the question always is, well, how will that translate if it actually gets approved this year? This year, I don't think it's a big deal. But I think if we move it out to March of 2024, I think when everybody believes that it'll be approved or, personally, maybe not approved, I think that's the bigger play. And right now we can see that this is the same thing. When we don't have the liquidity in the market, when we don't have the desire, when we have the narrative of the bear market and we have that narrative of higher for longer from the Federal Reserve and the macroeconomics are pretty much in the toilet, this is what we get. So it's not just my opinion, Bloomberg intelligence, Eric Bauchunis, call the initial Monday volumes of the funds pretty meh, meh. Knowing the first Bitcoin features ETF did about 200 million in its first 15 minutes. Let me say that again. 200 million dollars first 15 minutes Bitcoin features ETF. That fund, the pro-shares Bitcoin strategy launched in October, 2021. Again, the height of the bull market. So of course it's gonna do that. So when people say, ah, there's not really that much difference between the bear and the bull markets, it is painfully obvious. It saw roughly 950 million in trading volume over the on its first day and reached a billion in assets under management in two days. So if you wanted to know where things were going as far as with the ETH futures ETF, there you go. It's lackluster, that's just how it is we're in a bear market, boohoo. But it's not all bad news. There are some bright spots in the horizon. This is from Brian Kentons. He is the former head of the CFTC. And he said something very interesting. He says, by approving the ETH ETFs based on ETH commodity futures contracts, the SEC has officially provided clarity on ETH status as a non-secure. I think we can all get behind that. With so much innovation being built on Ethereum blockchain, this creates a clear path for builders. It's ridiculous and insulting that it took so long to get here but it's a big win for the crypto space. And again, this is the former head of the CFTC but take this also with a grain of salt because you have to understand where does Brian work now? He works head of policy at 16 Z crypto. That is a huge, massive Andreessen Horowitz VC fund which is all focused on crypto and digital assets. So again, take out the grain of salt but I will say that Brian, when he was at the CFTC he was a huge proponent of everything crypto and he wanted everything to be regulated under the CFTC and man, I wish he would have. And yeah, let me know what you think about that in the comments section. Here's what we have for that piece. But again, going back to that narrative about the macro environment. Well, how is things going? Not so great. So it depends on how actually you look at it. This just came out. Again, I'm stealing all of Ben's stuff from the Cryptiverse, links in the description, 10% off the first month. Job openings, now what the Fed wants to do is what they want to raise rates. And what they want to do is they want to increase unemployment. And of course, if they raise unemployment they're looking to decrease the job openings. Unfortunately, lately, it hasn't been the case and we just got the numbers today and it massively exceeded what we thought was gonna do. But you can see it's actually putting in higher lows, in all honesty, over here, back down here. Now we had job openings of 10.3 million. Now we put it over 8.92 million, higher low of 9.61 million. I expect this to actually keep doing the same thing and going down and down and down, but this is not looking good. So when we have the Fed meeting in November, expect them, if you didn't think they're going to go higher for longer, they're going to. Maybe you didn't think they're gonna raise rates. Jerome Powell even said it in his last meeting. He said, we could potentially raise rates in the next two meetings and November could be it. Also, if we take a look at the job openings, take a look at the initial claims for unemployment, we can see that. We blow this up so you can actually see it. Of course, this is the surveys of virus. And over here, we can see there's a little bit of an uptick in initial claims so people are not working. The jobs are opening. You know what I'm curious about? Let me see if I can find it right now. The unemployment rate right now, actually, well, this is an August. It's 3.8% went up a little bit from 3.5 to 3.8. This is not something we should be cheering for, quite honestly. When people get out of work, it's not great, but unfortunately, this is the natural cycle of things that's what's happening. So with all the stuff that we just talked about here, here's what, as far as the FedWatch tool is saying, is going to happen for the November meeting, first November, 2023. Right now, the federal funds rates between 5.25 and 5.50, everybody's believing that it's going to be there the same. They do not believe it's gonna be, it's not going to be increased. And only 30% think that there will be an increase. However, it is something to note that if you click on this little button here called historical, and you can take a look at what everybody believed to be, if I could pop, pop, pop, pop. There. There. Historical. We'll do this again. So you can see, it's kind of tough to see actually. I'll just read it out. But over time, what people believe that the rate is going to be, see this one in red? This is where they think it's actually going to raise up. And over time, it was actually around 0%. They didn't think it would raise at all. And then it peaked over here, and now as the new data has come out, this is coming back to September 25th. It was only 18% of people thought that we'd actually see a rate hike. And now from September 25th, all the way to now October 29th, we can see that. It went from 18% all the way up to 30%. So if we keep getting the same news, same people will say, yeah, I think it's actually going to raise up. And then we could see a rate hike. And what'll happen with the market? Well, same things that happened today. So we got those numbers. Here's the S&P 500. The last day, has it been too great? But let's take a look at five days. Again, not too great one month, not too great, but six months, not too bad one year. And of course, five years. We're not at the all time high, but we're seeing a little bit of a drop off. And the same thing can be said for the crypto market. And we had a great couple of days, Sunday and Monday, but now it's time to pay the piper. We were dropped off by 1%, Bitcoin, everything else in the last 24 hours, but not as bad as you would expect it to be, especially with the S&P 500 going down 1. something percent. Same thing that happened with, well, Bitcoin's 1.8. So not too bad for a risky market. And that's what we have right there. So having said all that, and talked about the Ethereum futures and how bad it could potentially be and all that good stuff. How does Bitcoin stack up to everything? And this is why I remain bullish in this sector. And I believe things are going to do really well, especially with these ETFs coming out and institutions coming in and people building and all the different institutions coming in. There's this great chart, which is actually released by Charlie DeLeo. And he took a look at the total asset class returns since 2011, since 2011. And what's at the top is Bitcoin. What's at the very bottom, long duration treasuries. And everything in between. You have real estate investment trusts every year since 2011. You've got bonds, stocks, goals, commodities, U.S. value, U.S. cash, mid caps, convertible bonds, U.S. large caps, grow up in Aztec 100 and the very top Bitcoin. And you can see that Bitcoin beats out everything over the last 12 years. What is that number? 8,908,509% cumulative. That's kind of ridiculous. Let's just do annualized, 144%. And we see that, not bad. Nasdaq has 17, U.S. growth is 14, large caps is 12. And when you see this, and I remember seeing these types of things back in 2017 and it wasn't that big of a deal folks were like, well, you know, what's going to happen in the future? From here, of course, we have the same thing always happens as far as the four year cycles. We get a halving in 2016. We get an all-time high the next year, 2017. We get a huge dip in 2018 and a reset in 2019. We get a halving in 2020. We get an all-time high in 2021. We have a huge dip year in 2022. And we get a reset, which right now we're still beating everybody. 61.7%, 2023 year to date. 2024 will be a halving, come hell or high water, which will happen in I think April or May, quick minute comments. And after that, maybe we'll see the all-time high in 2024, maybe 2025 or maybe something wacky happens with 2026. But the reason why I'm so bullish is because it's not just us looking at this. It's all the large institutions. It's all the large caps out there. And it's everybody that's taking a look and going, where am I going to invest? My portfolio, my retirement account, all the different stocks that are eating it this year, or maybe all the different real estate investment trusts or gold or whatever else. I think they're gonna look at this and go, maybe I should allocate a small percentage to Bitcoin and maybe some crazy old. So that's what we have for the news day. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.