 Welcome to Digital Asset News, taking top stories in crypto, current digital assets, and break them down into bite-sized pieces. Today, we've got some stories of mass adoption and they are big. First up, NBA legend Tracy McGrady, or TMAC, joins Voyager Digital as the key advisor. If you want to talk about getting the message out, there is nobody better than an NBA legend. And I reach out to Voyager for a comment and they sent me the CEO, Steve Erlich. So, I'm going to interview him about what exactly went on, how he was actually able to get TMAC to join up with Voyager. And while I got him here, I had to put him on the hot seat with a couple of questions from you guys. And also, 46 million worth of shorts are liquidated as Bitcoin touches 11.8. Now, I know it's a tough day for a trader when you get liquidated, but on the flip side, it is a good day because things are going up. So, we'll go over all that, but first, let's take a look at what's going on in the market. So, today, it is October 19th, about 1 p.m. Texas time, and things are looking pretty good. So, Bitcoin did retrace a little bit. Now, it's around 11.7. But it is up 1.9% for 24 hours and 2.6 in 7 days or a week. So, I'm pretty happy about that. Ethereum is right around 3.80. That's where I want to see it. I think you can break 400. It just needs a little bit of momentum, but things are going in the right direction for sure. So, 1% in 24 hours. And over the week, 1.3. I'll take it. Tether's tethered. Nobody cares. XRP, hey, up 1.5% to a whopping 0.246. Watch out. Bitcoin cash is up 0.5%. Finance coin's down a little bit. Chain link's up a little bit. Everything's down or up a little bit. That's really what it comments. Except for crypto.com. I've got a lot of messages about this, and there is something going on with as far as the rewards program and things are tanking and not looking good. So, they are down 29% over the week and 10% for a 24-hour time frame. So, if you're looking at crypto.com, this might not be a great time. Or actually, maybe it's an awesome time because it's down so much, but who knows how far it'll fall. Also, Monero's up 4.6. Stellar up 6.3%. And I can tell you, there's a couple of reasons why. First up, they're giving support for the USDC, so it's going to be able to be transferred on the Stellar chain. Also, they're going to be attending the IMF conference. So, that's a little bit of a push. So, good for them. And up 10% for the week. So, Stellar looking pretty good. What else? We have 2.8, 1.9. Any big huge loser? Whoa, 14.8% for Dash. Congratulations to Dash holders. I did not hold any of that, but congratulations to you guys for hitting a massive pump here. 7% for the week and almost 15% for one day. Hey, not too bad. I'll take it. And that's pretty much about it. Aave still going down 8.6%. I'm looking at Aave. I'm probably going to buy it. I'm just letting everybody know. I think this is a perfect opportunity. And I need to get Stani on the program to exactly talk about what's going on. But if you don't know, we talked about this ad nauseam yesterday. Aave is going to be the new governance token from LEND. So, everything that LEND has, it's going to be a 101 swap. So, right now, get your hands on Aave. That's all I'll say. Or that's all I'm going to say to myself. I can't give any financial advice, obviously. Anyhow, that's what's going on in the market. So, it's a good day. Let's jump into today's top story. So, these are the stories that I love to see as far as mass adoption. The only way to get mass adoption out there is just to get it into the public consciousness in any way, shape, or form. And this is a fantastic way to do it. Teaming up with an NBA legend, T-Mac, or Tracy McGrady. He joins Voyager Digital as key advisor. How the heck did this happen? So, let's take a look. So, today, Voyager announced that NBA Hall of Famer T-Mac will join Voyager as an advisor, helping you educate investors about the interest available on 17 coins and the ability to invest in the best performing asset of the past 10 years, Bitcoin, as well as 50 other cryptos which are available. Additionally, McGrady and his business partner Grant Haas. I don't know who that guy is, but apparently, it's not about what you know, it's who you know. And Grant Haas knows Tracy McGrady and probably knows Steve Verlich from Voyager. They'll be giving away $2 million, $5 per new account, opened under this promotion to introduce the general public to what is the largest number of crypto assets on one platform in the US. Voyager currently highlights 8.5% on USDC. So, that's not really a great deal, honestly. Five bucks for a new account for Tracy McGrady. I think you would get more. Hey, just looking at myself, I get $25 if you sign up under my affiliate link. That's all I'm going to say. Not that I'm better than Tracy McGrady, you're a better basketball player. Maybe. No, I'm not. But I will just tell you this. If you go into the description of my videos, there's the exchange and fees wallets. And it's just a spreadsheet of what I have. And I've got everything from Coinbase Pro, Kraken, Gemini, Abra, SimpleSwap, Crypto.com. Not at all. And if you use any of my affiliate links to get between 10 and $25, I'll see you can take a look at which ones I recommend and don't recommend the fees and the interest rate. And they're all pretty much laid off for that. So again, that is in the description. Looks like this. And you can click on that link and go to town. Anyhow, but it's up to you. So T-Max says, following my NBA career, I've been dedicated to educating others on how to better manage their assets and ensure financial security, especially young athletes as they begin lucrative careers. And that's a great thing because he's educating people around him and also new players that are going into the NBA. Hopefully he can also educate people who are in the NFL. If you don't know the NFL National Football League, it has another name. It's called Not For Long because a lot of those athletes, they end up going broke within five years. So this I think is a great step forward and also a person in the public consciousness that can really get things out. If you don't know who Tracy McGrady is, he's played for multiple teams like the Orlando Magic and the Houston Rockets. And here's this little, little highlight, little highlight reel to get yourself acquainted with who this guy was. So this guy is going to be talking about cryptocurrency and digital assets. I cannot wait. Anyhow, moving down and finishing up, McGrady, McGrady added, I'm so impressed by this commission free platform that I want my community to have the opportunity to invest smartly with Voyager like Grant and I have. And lastly, before launching his financial advisory program, Tracy was seven NBA All-Star, two time scoring champ over a 17 year hall of fame career. Pretty good. And Grant Haas is a leading business strategist and successful entrepreneur with countless exits under his belt. Currently, Tracy and Grant are partners at the Haas Portman family office where their top goals to educate players and help them make sound financial decisions. So here's my final thoughts. It's not just about educating a small group of superior athletes in the NBA. It's also about the reach that they have. I mean, imagine somebody who, let's just say it's a rookie coming out of Duke or wherever, it doesn't matter. And they have a huge falling on Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or whatever. It doesn't matter. And they start talking about cryptocurrency assets, especially by Voyager, and just saying, Hey, you know, we can invest in the best performing asset class of the last decade, Bitcoin, among other things that could really pop off. Just imagine, just imagine where that can go. And Tracy McGrady is a guy who's already been there and done that. So he's going to be talking to these individuals and they're going to get hooked and they're going to get involved because look, once he realizes or once he explains it, these are the things you can do with cryptocurrencies and the things that you cannot do on a traditional bank. It's game over. It's game over. So I was really impressed with this article about what Voyager is doing and I actually got reached out to Amateo. He's one of the one of the guys up there over at Voyager and he says, Hey, would you like Steve to come in and explain what happened? I was like, Sure, why not? So this is a, let's bring in Steve Erlich so he can talk about what went on behind the scenes with this whole thing, how they landed them. And also let's ask him some of the hot seat questions, which are, Hey, why can I take crypto currencies, digital assets off of the exchange? There's some I can't and some I can't. What's going on with the XRP airdrop? And then also, what can you do as far as taxes? So let's jump on the office. All right, buddy. Welcome back to the office. So just like we just talked about in that article, there's a lot of things that probably went on behind the scenes that I don't know. So the special guest is Steve Erlich. He is the CEO from Voyager and he's going to tell us what exactly went on because to me, this is huge. So Steve, tell us how do you get tracing the grade to come on with Voyager? Well, you know, make a long story short. You know, we've been looking at different avenues to help bring crypto mainstream over the last few months. And I think I mentioned to you before when I was on with you guys is that, you know, we have a lot of athletes that use our platform, a lot of professional athletes, whether NASCAR, UFC, MLB players, NFL, and I tend to start talking to them a bit. But a friend of our chairman is partners, Brand Haus, has partners with Tracey McGrady. And so we got connected to Tracey. We showed him the platform, showed everything we're trying to do to make this mass market the eight and a half percent standard USDC interest. And Tracey is really interested in bringing financial education to the masses. And it's doing a lot of work there. And this just fit in with what Tracey was doing. And so we had multiple calls trying to figure out the best way to do it. You'll see some more stuff coming out over the next few days that we're working on with Tracey, but really interested in helping us get this to the masses. And we feel we're the right company with the right solution to take this to the masses because of the ease of use of the app, the interest rates, the multiple coins, just to get people into the ecosystem. And right guy, he's got an impeccable reputation, NBA hole of famer. I enjoyed watching him. Usually he was killing my nicks, but everybody killed the nicks. That doesn't matter. But it was really good. And we're really excited by this. Yeah, this is huge. I mean, I've always said on this channel, it is not what you know, it is who you know. So connections of connections. And then all of a sudden we have somebody like this who can be a voice of reason to really bring about some type of mass adoption. And when you got a person like Tracey McGrady come in, that everybody knows and is a legend, he's one of those guys in the NBA who was really looked upon as like a favorable athlete, really nice guy. I think it's just huge to bring this to the masses, especially for financial literacy. So I think it's a great deal. But again, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Well, you said it, financial literacy. And I think the digital assets space, Bitcoin, and all the other coins around it, and the USDC coin, which we pitch a lot, is all about people gaining their own financial freedom, disintermediating the banks, taking control of their financial life. And we think with Tracey, we could really make some impacts here and bring this. I read something the other day, maybe 8% of all Americans have exposure to cryptocurrency. That means 92% of 300 million plus. So 270 million people have no exposure to this. They're missing out. And we've got to get that to 270 million people. Yeah. And people don't realize, people tell me, when I say we're early, they don't realize how early we are. I say, you can walk down the street and talk about Bitcoin, people like, oh, I know what that is. And then, okay, we'll talk about Ethereum, talk about XRP, talk about Polkadot. They have no idea. We are so early. And this is, we'll just catapult us, you know, hopefully into the future. Yeah, we're excited. Yeah, I'm excited after this story. So hey, thanks for doing good work. So I can't let you off the hook without asking you some questions from the subscribers because, you know, hey, we're just looking out for who's working for us. Steve's working for us. All right, Steve. So here's what we got. Let me first of all share my screens. We know what the heck I'm talking about here. And it's a, it's a, just a hodgepodge of different things. And a lot of them really comes down to this. When are we going to be able to move coins from the app? That's the first one. When are we going to move coins from the app? I'm trying to get them off. Or I went from Kraken now to Uphold. I can't leave Uphold but Voyager, what's going on with that? Would love to use Celsius to make interest without having trouble moving any assets from Coinbase to Celsius. I'll deal with that. Also, I need to sell all my DOT and Voyager and produce on Kraken to enjoy the APR because we can't get that. I can't move them. And then same thing, staking on Kraken right now, had the account for a while, API Y for DOT was too resistable. So Steve, it's the same thing that we talked about before. What's going on with getting these coins off of Voyager? Yeah, it's one of the top things that people ask us is, when are you adding more coins for the withdrawal and deposits? So I'll deal with that one first. We're working hard at that. Each one winds up being its own protocol. It takes some time to do that. We have a team working on writing to all those protocols and we've got to knock them up one by one. So you're going to see more out of us on that side over the next month or so. It is high if not top of our priority food chain to do that, especially XRP with the airdrop. We're working on that to make sure that's accessible for everybody and take part in the airdrop. We know it's the priority. We know more people want to bring coins to us. They want to take part in some of the interest on some of the coins that we offer interest, but we don't offer crypto deposits on yet. So we're working really hard at that. We understand it's a little weakness that we have, but bear with us while we're trying to add more on that front. On the poker dot side, you'll see some stuff out of us as well in the next couple of weeks where potentially we could be staking it on your behalf. You could start taking part in the interest with us on that. We're working on that too and it shouldn't be that far off for us to do something of that nature as well. We're testing it on some of that stuff. So you can hold it with us. We'll stake on your behalf just like you do on most places that you become part of the staking pool. So that's being worked on as well. Our job is to bring more of these coins so you can deposit, earn interest, stake. We'll do that for you. All that to make people create more wealth, right? Take part in the ecosystem. These are our top priorities to get that through. So between the XRP crypto deposits, withdrawals for more coins, and the poker dot staking, which is similar to interest, we're working on all these and I think you will see some stuff out of us within, definitely by Thanksgiving, I can tell you that. So we got, what is it? October 19th? We'll give you till November 30th, 31st, whichever one it is. I appreciate that. You got to give me a few extra days. Yeah. So look, look, okay, I appreciate that. And then this will go back to, so we talked about the coins, same thing with XRP going on. And then of course, the same thing with the airdrop. You said that we can look at, because how many airdrops going to happen? I want to say, is November 15th? Some around there? It's coming up. November or December? No, it's December, you're right. Yeah, I think it's December. I'm pretty sure it's December. So we should have everything in place on Voyager to get hit. That's our goal. Okay. That's our goal. Yep. Well, we will hold you to it. How about that? And then that's fine. And then last question was, it was a pretty good one with your connections of Voyager at the time of me. The only people I know of Voyager is the CEO. Could you ask when they enable the API plugin for tax software? So I know with mine, I use crypto trader dot tax, but to do that, we have to download the CSV and then stick it in there. Is there an API coming in place, especially for next year? That's another one on the roadmap. We're looking at it. I can't guarantee anything on that front. I do know, as you said, we could send CSV files. We could help people with some of that stuff too. We do have a partnership with Silver Asset Management as well, and they can help us prepare some tax stuff for people. We always say to people, if you need help on the tax, read some information, reach out to our service team. They're really responsive. We'll get you files that you need. You might have to upload them, but we'll look at the API plugin. No guarantees, but we try to help everywhere we can on taxes. Sounds good. Well, I like customer service, which is way better than some other ones out there. Who will remain nameless? So lastly, I will just say this, I just want everybody to remember that there is no perfect exchange of brokerage. There's nothing that can be like 100%. We're all going through growing pains, and I think Voyager is one of those places. However, having said all that, I want to remind you who Steve is. So this was a tweet that he sent out, and this was on October 15th. He said, send me a DM. I'm happy to learn more. And I have other people contact me via DM and go, hey, I'm having a problem with Voyager. Can you help me out? I'm like, I can't do nothing. But if you just tweet to Steve, he'll help you out. And sure enough, and I put this out on October 15th, and you actually answered questions. So I can only tell you it is a rarity to see that actually happen. So just remember who you're dealing with when you're putting or investing your cryptocurrency and hard on month. That's all I'll say. I appreciate those kind words. I mean, look, I think you and I have spoken about this numerous times. It's important for me to understand the demands of the customers, issues they have. We get better by it. I have a saying that says you don't get better by praise. You get better by, you know, the constructive criticism on how you could become better. And that's, you know, that's just been ingrained in our DNA. And we'll continue to do that. And I'll continue to answer tweets and telegram channels and DMs and everything I can to make sure the customer is comfortable with using Voyager and our team. Great. Well, Steve, hey, thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate it. If you're looking for the link, it's in the description below. And then that is it. All right, man. I appreciate it. All right. Have a great day. Good luck with the Giants. But no, no, no, no. Peace out. Have a good one. Peace, Steve. Hope you liked that one. That was pretty good. Thanks, Steve, for coming on. Last up, 46 million with the shorts liquidated as Bitcoin touches 11.8. So what's going on? Well, crypto is now down only 6.4% was 2020 high of roughly 12.5. The lion's share of all liquidations occur on the Binance exchange, shocker, 29% followed by embattled OKX. And this is a nice little chart. See how many people just lost their shorts in the shorts. The cryptocurrency has now completely recovered after OKX and definitely halted withdrawals, which tanked Bitcoin nearly 11 to do an ongoing police investigation. And this was written, I think today, yeah, today. So I'm going to have to ask you if anybody has an account with OKX, put in the comments if you're still able to are actually able to take anything out because that would be interesting to me. And lastly, cryptocurrency is now completely recovered. So finishing up US equities market is also under pressure today, both the S&P 500 and the Dow are in the red is uncertainty. Uncertainty uncertainty around the stimulus deal continues to lag or if you don't know the US is playing political football with the stimulus package, which a lot of people definitely need. So hopefully Congress can get their act together and actually put out some money and not give it away to all the banks and big corporations. We really don't need it. And if that happens, you'll see a nice little spike in traditional market as well as cryptocurrency and digital assets. I truly believe that just like last time. And then lastly, it states while bulls and bears can play tug of war, Bitcoin's fundamentals look stronger than ever with both hash rate and difficulty recently reaching new all time highs. So anyhow, if you were one of those traders that got liquidated today, let me know if you got wrecked. It does happen trading look, I've changed my view a little bit on trading. I think, you know, if you do a little bit of trading, it's fine, you know, go right ahead, have fun. I'm just not one of those people who says, Hey, go out there and, you know, trade everything away and, you know, do 100% of that. And also, you know, leverage yourself 50 to 100x. I'm just, I'll never ever say that. But a little bit trading, Hey, it does happen. And it can be can be fun. I just probably won't do it. I'm just an investor. I'm very boring dollar cost average. So that's it for today. So thanks for sticking with me. Before we take off, just want to give a random shout out to all the people who have joined up. Really appreciate everybody who's drawn up to the digital asset news such as David, Dr. Russ, Brian Pryor, Eric Hoover, who is also our big winner for the Kobo wallet. I'm not a fan of Kobo wallets, did a review. I thought it wasn't that great, but what are you going to do? Frank S stone Crypt, Chelsea McChain, McChain, Reginald Halisinski, I think I nailed it, Lincoln, Lincoln, six Echo K new mon. I am not I and no well flipping Vegas. So everybody, thanks for watching all the way to the end. Really appreciate it. If you like those types of videos, there's going to be too much going to pop up on your left and right and YouTube really controls all that stuff. So I'll let them do their thing. And that is it for today. So again, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. And I'll see you on the next one. We got some pretty cool stuff on the back of this coming over the next two months. I was on Twitter today, people asking us about ripple and deposits withdrawals on ripple. That's common. So that's definitely and I think some of your I listened to some of your some people, you know, it's you know, and the air drop and so forth. So yeah, that's coming. But we got some other stuff that