 Welcome to Jalassette News, the top stories in cryptocurrency and Jalassette's and bring them down to bite-sized pieces. Today, interesting stuff. First up, Chainlink is on the rise. Also over 10 billion dollars in value has flowed through the Ethereum network and there's some good news for taxes. And we'll get to all that in just a bit. But first off, let's take a look at what's happening with the market. So today is July 7th, it's about 240 Texas time and it looks like Bitcoin holds strong at 92.28. How much really going on? Down by a little bit, not up by much over the 7-day period. So pretty happy with that. Ethereum slowly gaining ground, 237, I like to see that 244. Tether's Tether, XRP, 18 cents, watch out. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV over the last 7 days has made a miraculous jump 20% for some reason. I have no idea why. So anybody has any clue as to why Bitcoin SV is up 20% in 7 days. Please let me know in the comment section because I have no idea. Also Cardano up 15% in 24 hours and over around 30% over the last 7 days. As a reminder, the mainnet launch is coming up July 7th, well today that is today. And this is the last part and they're going to be doing a staking and there is a potential, albeit I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. A Coinbase listing coming up for Cardano. So if you haven't picked up any of that, maybe you should look into the Cardano blockchain. Litecoin 0.6%, somehow still in the top 10, Crypto.com, EOS, Binance, then Chainlink, which we're going to talk about a bit, up 15% over the last 7 days and 6% in one. So looking pretty good, nothing else really going on, let's jump into today's story. So first up, Chainlink, one of my holds is going up high, so I like to see this. Now before we go on with these stories, I think I should be transparent once you know exactly what my holdings are. So I hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Chainlink, Cardano, EOS, Stellar, Tezos. So if I get excited or talk about those products a lot, it's because I am biased and that is just the truth. I try not to be, but it is a little difficult when you have these holdings. So yes, I talk about these a lot and that's what's going on. So getting the article. On Monday, July 6th, the centralized Oracle Network Chainlink's link token started a really sought race from $4.87, it's previous all-time high to $5.40, a new all-time high in just an hour. That's a pretty huge jump and there really did not stop there on Tuesday, July 7th, Chainlink had managed to set another all-time high when the price got to $5.64. So if you're looking at gains, that's pretty impressive in a 48-hour period. I mean, try doing that in the traditional market. Not going to happen and this was a pretty good quote. Everyone who has ever bought Chainlink at any time essentially and simply held is in profit and that's very true. It's notable that link went above the 5.40 level for the first time in July 6th, one day after on-chain market intelligence startup Glassnode said that on July 4th, it had seen a daily net transfer volume of more than $16 million worth of link to Binance Wallet which caused some commentators to fear that some whales could be ready to dump some of their link holdings which could give a negative impact on the link prices. And I got to tell you, I'm so tired of listening to these different stories. I got to tell you, I sift through so many stories, news when I wake up in the morning just to kind of get the feeling of what's going on. And I'd say about half of them are, well, here's what it is, 25% are analysts who say that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is going to go up and 25% is analysts and cryptocurrency experts who think it's going to go down. And those I just glance right over because I'm like this is just so ridiculous, I don't care. And then there's also these stories about these whales and how whales are moving things around and that is causing this huge destructive process and blah, blah, blah. So here's the thing. Whales are always going to be around. They're going to manipulate for their own purposes. As time goes on, you have to understand whales will sell. That's what whales do. They sell and they buy back and you know, and some little parts. But as time goes on, people like me and you, if you are one of our, are just like me who just like to hold things and just like to just keep on with my positions and just hold on for the long haul. If you're one of those people at some point, all those are not all, but some of these whales are going to be selling and it's going to get into hands like people like us who are not going to sell, who are not big traders, who got other stuff to do and they're just going to hold on to it. And then you're going to have a supply issue or a demand issue and all of a sudden the price is going to go up. And that's what's going to happen. So it really comes out of this. Do you believe in the project that you are holding in the short term? And I'm talking like, like a month, well, two weeks, a month, maybe up to 12 months or even for the long term, like over a year, up to 20 years because that's where I'm at. I don't care what the whales are doing, how they're screwing around different things and making things. I'm like, go ahead, I mean, sell it and move it to your different wallets. I do not care because I can see where the whole space is going. And I know that these people aren't going to last. And that's just how it's going to be. And then I've, I got other traders who are just awful traders. I can trade to the hilt and I can do those leverage trading at 100X. Well, you're going to get wrecked and I'm just going to sit back and I'm a dollar cost average and it's going to be very boring. Like, I've been for the longest time and that's it. So it really just comes down to where do you want to be? Are you up for the short term and just here to like play a little bit of money or are you here for the long term because you actually believe in the space about how cryptocurrency assets are going to change and disrupt the whole environment that we're in? Moving on, going down, scrolling down, scrolling down for the year to date period, Link's return on investment or ROI against the US dollar is plus 220%. Let me read that again for the year to date period. Chainlinks return on investment or ROI is 220%. So when I saw that, I'm like, you know, there's been this talk about how there's this huge rally with the S&P 500 and the Dow and all these different metrics that have really shown the traditional market is just really super strong. And there's a lot of people making a lot of money in the traditional market and I thought to myself, well, how does that compare? How does that compare to our market and what's going down? Well, here's the S&P 500 index. And it's doing pretty good. I mean, look, it's down a little bit today, but it's over 3,000. That's pretty amazing, considering, you know, all the things that are going on in the world today. Thank God for the Fed. But if we scroll down, we take a look at the five day. Well, it's up 1%. The one month is down almost 2%. And three months, it's up a whopping 18%. So congratulations to everybody who's in the traditional markets and they got 18%. That's a huge year. And I'm not going to take that away from anybody. But year to date, you're still down negative 2%. Almost two and a half. And over the year, you know, if you look at 365 days, you're up a whopping 5%. So congratulations. But really, if you take a look at it, I mean, how does that compare to what we just saw with Chainlink? You just would have put some things in a Chainlink and you're like, well, I don't know about cryptocurrency. And maybe if you were to put like 5% of your position, even way ahead. So that's great. And that's in that sense. What about Bitcoin? Cause that's the big one, right? That's the King crypto. This is actually from on 30th of June and place a look at the S&P 500 and it states in Q1, January, February, March, the S&P 501 from 3,230, which right now again, we are looking at 3,166. So on day one, January one, it went from 3,230 to 25,84. That was the high and the low. IE loss of 20%. Since S&P 500 are currently trading around 3,041, this means that in Q2, 2020, it has gone up 17%. As for the S&P 500 year-to-date return, it is negative 5%. This was just on 30th of June. Bitcoin's price reached 7,7100 by the close of 31 December. And Bitcoin is trading at 64,23 by the end of Q1, 2020, which is a loss of 11%. However, in the second quarter, it went up to all the way to 9,100, which is where we're at right now, roughly 9,200. So Bitcoin's year-to-date ROI is plus 27%. So in other words, if things don't change too much in Q2, which already went and happened, Bitcoin has been tracked to beat the S&P by over 24%. So again, I know how everybody is like, we're making so much mind-touching market, and I'm like, yes, you are. 5%, congratulations, I guess, whatever. So I mean, great for you guys, but I'm just telling you right now, I just don't understand if you're looking out from the outside looking in, I'm just thinking myself, why wouldn't you just put just a couple of percentage of your portfolio in the cryptocurrency, whether it be super stable-ish Bitcoin, or something like Ethereum, which is going to be a $10,000 coin, or even like XRP, or even like VeChain, like we've been talking about, I think that's going to do extremely well, or Cardano, which is going to go up, I mean, I think Cardano is going to go up massively, I can see it, I can see at least a 5x by the end of the year, at least. So I just don't get it. Anyhow, let's finish up this story. So here are the last parts that says it's easy to understand investors' optimism when the Chainlink keeps announcing two to three new partnerships almost every week. Here are the three last projects. This was from Gelato, looks like it has a DAP, so they partnered up, then built with Cargo, it's an unfungible token platform for developers, artists, and collectors, and then also the last one was low volatility money protocol meter IO, and that's just the last three over just recently this week. So here's a question for you, because I can't really remember exactly all of them, but what has been the biggest Chainlink partnership to date? Put that in the comments below. Let's move on to our next story. So next up, 10 billion flowed through Ethereum and Q2. This is all about DAPs. So decentralized apps built in the Ethereum blockchain reach a transaction volume of 10 billion in Q2, according to DAP.com. In a new report, Ethereum led the way in terms of transaction volume, dwarfing all other blockchains. In Q2, the transaction volume of ETH DAP is still leading far ahead, maintaining a 10 billion scale, nearly 10 times the sum of EOS and Trons, which is depressing because I invested in Tron, not doing so hot, but that's just the way it is. So this is actually the Q2 DAP report 2020. I'm not going to go over to this in detail. I'm going to put this in the description because it's very long, very granular detail. So I commend the people that put out this report, but I'm just going to do the highlight. So the transaction volume of ETH has reached five billion in June, which counted 97 and a half percent of the whole DAP volume of the Ethereum network, which is DeFi. After the after the distribution of comp compounds diamonds increased from this is crazy, 131 million in the first half of the month to 3.3 billion in the second half of the month. That is a 24 X increase. That is amazing. So if you invested into Compound, if you're one of the early investors, congratulations, but just kind of came out and I think the big winners there would be probably be Coinbase. All right. And then a nice little summary here. And I think what was interesting was it took a look at the total DAPs from, you know, Ethereum, EOS, Tron, EOS team, Tomo chain. I almost thought it was tomato chain. I was like, wow, there really is that really doesn't exist. Tomato coin, Chili's hive and all that stuff. And Ethereum across the board leads pretty much everything. So as far as DAPs, totally unique users, you got 4.5 million. Tron's coming in pretty close. 1.4. And you know, I take that back. There's one called Clayton, K-L-A-Y-T-N has, looks like seven and a half, mine. So a lot of users, active DAPs, Clayton, 47, 575, 357, so pretty close. New DAPs, again, Ethereum leads everything, active user transactions. But here's the big thing, transactions. I don't really give that too much credence because we've seen how, you know, you can have whitewashing, you have just different random transactions that are put by bot. So I don't really care about transactions. What I care about is volume. And volume looks to be, like I said, 10 billion for Ethereum, EOS, almost 2 billion, and Tron at 260 million. And I don't think there's really much going on. Yeah, Clayton, 6,000. All right, 149 and 12. So in the grand scheme of things, I still, if I had to pull my money anywhere, and I really think about something that's gonna be strong, I think it's gonna be Ethereum. A lot of things are being built on Ethereum. It's got a lot of developers, a lot of things that are happening, and it's been a battle-tested project. It's been around for quite some time, and I think it's gonna do extremely well. How well, again, I can tell you, I have always believed it's a $10,000 coin or more. And that's it. All right, let's move on to our next and last story, which we're gonna give you some actually good news about taxes. So taxes, everybody hates them. And this was a great article by Sheehan Shandresakara, and I've actually covered him before. And we gotta know, well, who's writing? Who's putting pen to paper? Who is this guy? So this guy, Sheehan, is the head of tax strategy at CoinTracker. He is a handful of CPAs. He was recognized as a real world operator in a conceptual subject matter. So as far as is this person legitimate, I will have to give a pass to Sheehan. Looks like he knows what he's talking about. I am not a CPA, Sheehan is, so I will trust his opinions. Anyhow, moving into this, and he pretty much just sums up 2020 in a nutshell. He says, look, there was some noteworthy events that occurred in this quarter alone in the cryptocurrency tax base. Here's number one. I had no idea this was even a thing. The Virtual Currency Fairness Act was introduced to the house on January 6th, 2020. This bill includes a de minimis exemption of up to $200 of capital gains for personal cryptocurrency transactions. Essentially, this allows cryptocurrency users to buy the proverbial cup of coffee without having to calculate their taxes on the transaction. This makes small personal crypto transactions non-taxable and it's a great initiative to promote crypto as a medium of exchange for everyday use as opposed to a speculative asset. So that's pretty cool. I didn't even realize that was a thing. So if it's $200 or less, you don't really have to clarify this as a capital gain. So if you bought Chainlink on January 1st at, you know, you bought a couple of those and then it went up, you know, dramatically from $1.84. You know what, let me take a look. What, where did it go from? Let's see. Chainlink, Chainlink, Chainlink. VeChain, man, I missed this one. VeChain up 9%, 65% for the week. Everybody's on VeChain. Congratulations, you're doing a great job. Just hold on to that. Chainlink here, it's 566 now, looking good. What has it been? Let's look at the one year. Looking for January 1st, where am I? December, January 1st, $1.80. Look at that. That is sweet. I've been dollar-cost averaging Chainlink since 2019. And I remember those times, $1.80. I was like, oh, not too bad. I could have sworn it was under a dollar at some point. Anyhow, so you're from here and you go all the way up to here, that's a pretty good year. Not too shabby. So, you know, for this article itself, if you bought a couple of Chainlink and then it went up, you know, 200%, 220%, you don't have to claim capital gains if it's $200. That's a big thing. You can just use cryptocurrency for, you know, maybe what it was intentionally used for, peer-to-peer transactions, and using it as an actual currency. So, hey, great. Next part, staking income. I didn't know idea about this. This is interesting. In the absence of any tax guidance, it could be argued that staking rewards are taxed similar to rental income at the time of the receipt. Meanwhile, some experts argued that staking rewards should not be taxed at the time of receipt, whether they should be taxed only when they are disposed of. So, basically it goes like this. So, when you actually have any kind of gains, one set of tax professionals will say, yes, you need to do it right then and there. And the other one's like, no, you haven't changed out, you haven't moved, or you haven't sold this cryptocurrency, so you should not do it. So again, this really comes down to your CPA or tax professional. And there's one thing I'd like to make mentioned real quick and that is that when we're talking about taxes, a lot of people think, oh, this is only for the US. I don't really care about this. But you have to understand that this actually takes effect for a lot of different areas. So, I did see this, how that was interesting. 350,000 Australian crypto users are receiving tax warning letters. So, if you've seen this, comment below, because it says, hey, disposing of your cryptocurrency can result in capital gains tax obligations. This is from the Australian government, Australian Taxation Office. Our records indicate you have previously disposed of crypto, meaning you sold it, exchanging cryptocurrency for goods, cash or the crypto is normally considered a disposable for capital gains tax. Make sure to include your results because we know. And if you're in America, and now I guess if you're in Australia and probably Canada, I would guess, probably parts of Europe, I'm not a CPA. But I would say that if you use an exchange that reports the government's chances are, they know exactly what you got. And for me, they know exactly how much I have because I was using Coinbase for the longest time. Don't so much anymore. Or I have the issue where I was generated 1099 and every different trade and transaction the US government knows. So why would I not check off that guess I have virtual currency, which is this little thing right here in the 1040 SR. Anytime during 2019, you receive sell, send, exchange, or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency. I know it's not something that's very sexy, but I gotta tell you right now, what is not sexy is going through an audit like I did years ago. So I'm just trying to tell you, a lot of people in the comments section are like, hey, I'm not checking that. Yeah, I do have cryptocurrency, I'm not checking that. Okay, I mean, you don't have to, but I'm just telling you, Dr. ZPA, it's all I'm gonna say. Moving down, moving down, gaming tokens controversy. And I include this section because I want you to realize just how far behind the IRS actually is and what they're actually doing as far as digital assets and cryptocurrency. They're just about as lost as everybody else and this is gonna highlight how bad it is. So until early February, until early February, not too long ago, gaming tokens such as Robux and V-Bucks were also considered to be virtual currency for the IRS website. The IRS added until they deleted this guidance from their website, raising many eyebrows in the tax space. If it had stood, meaning they actually didn't take that back, this guidance would have subjected millions of parents to calculate taxes on their kid's online video gaming habits because it was such a broad swath or a broad interpretation of virtual currency. So the IRS is just kind of getting their feet wet with this and they're kind of like, well, we don't really know this part and there's gonna be some bumps, there's gonna be some bruises, but I think they're just trying to do the best job that they can, not that everybody was really rooting for the, no one roots for the IRS, let's just be honest. So, hopefully they can kind of figure it out and kind of make it manageable for everybody before it gets out of control because it's good that they actually went against this because they didn't, ooh, that'd been awful for all the different parents out there. Next up, it says for the first time ever, millions of U.S. taxpayers had to start answering the crypto question, which we just talked about. And then there was an IRS virtual currency tax summit. It was interesting to read about the next part of this but on March 3rd, the IRS held an invite-only virtual currency summit at the IRS headquarters in Washington. This event included stakeholders in the crypto community such as exchanges, crypto tax software companies, practitioners and crypto advocacy groups. And I took a look at the actual article, one thing caught my eye and this was directly from the IRS and said, hey, Bitcoin's not anonymous and we're paying attention. And it's a common misconception that Bitcoin is anonymous. It's not. I mean, there's different ways you can get around it but for the layman that's just got it and especially if you have it on like Coinbase, Gemini, any kind of Kraken, they're gonna report all that stuff to the government. So just be ready. Actually, Bitcoin's quite traceable. In fact, the event opened up with the IRS commissioner, Chuck Reddick, highlighting a new indictment against two individuals who laundered a hundred million of stolen crypto. So if you don't think they know, they know. And that's a bummer. But I'm gonna show you a way to make things super simple for you in just a second. Just stick with me. And then lastly, it talks about extending deadlines. So just so you know, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the IRS extended both the tax filing and payment deadlines to July 15th. So it is July 7th to get another week to go, which is pretty cool because I mean, every day counts. And what I use, and I'm just gonna tell you to make it very simple, is crypto trader.tax. This is exactly what I use. It took me 30 minutes to go through three years because I had to look back at all the different transactions and I'm gonna show you exactly how it is. So I'm gonna sign in to my account. Let me back up. Select exchanges. So once you get here, you just select all your changes. So I use Binance, Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Huobi. Huobi. So I can click Next. And that's gonna just have you fill this out. If you don't see your exchange on the last screen, you click on Manual Exchanges, upload your CSV file that you get from the actual exchange. Super simple. Then you're gonna click Next. This one, you're just gonna leave it just to default because it's just easier. And look at all these trades. And there's a boatload of them all the way from 2017 moving forward. So there is 579 items. Geez, that's a lot. And I am not in the mood to look through all spreadsheets and everything else and get it going and calculate all these things. I'm just not doing it. I'm just not, I don't have time. But this is pretty great. And out of all these 579 items, here's some warnings. Missing data has been detected. Out of all that, there's four. There's four. And the reason why there's four is because Huobi sucks and they won't give me my information. And that's a problem, but whatever. So I just, I've already clicked on this button here where it says Invite Your Tax Professional and you just give the email to your CPA, whoever it is, and they can look at it and they can just tell you what to do. Which is great, so I don't have to deal with that. And then you just create report. And then bam, you're done. 2017, 18, 19, all done. And that's the best thing and the easiest way I can do it. Also, if you look in the description of every one of my videos, there's gonna be a link to cryptotrader.tax which looks like this and you can get 20% off just for signing up. Now look, if you don't have to use it, you can do it by hand. But if you want to, have fun. And that's the big thing. I will just say this two things. As far as taxable events, just so you know, buying and holding your Bitcoin or crypto is not taxable. You only have capital gains or losses when you dispose of it, meaning when you sell it or get rid of it. So here are the taxable events. Trading the Bitcoin for money, trading Bitcoin for another crypto. So going from Bitcoin to Ethereum, that's a taxable event. Spending Bitcoin in good or service, that makes sense. And earning Bitcoin as income or crypto as income, mining, stake, et cetera. So those are the taxable events. If you have done any of those, it's a pretty good chance the government knows what's going on. And that's it. Lastly, this is one of the things I just learned about like a couple of weeks ago and I always like to make mention of it, is that tax loss harvesting, which what crypto trader actually allows you to do, I'm gonna sum up this paragraph pretty quickly. It says, wash sale rules are not applicable to cryptocurrencies under current guidance. And some crypto tax software helps you harvest tax losses. So what does that mean? What that means is, if you bought Bitcoin at 10,000 and it drops to 7,000, you can sell your Bitcoin at $7,000 and just lock that loss in right there. But here's the great thing. You can immediately buy it back at $7,000 for one Bitcoin. And you can have $3,000 losses for your taxes that just is for your taxes, which is great, right? You have your losses, but you still have your Bitcoin. So, I mean, you may have to pay a transaction fee for the exchange that you're using, but you just have $3,000 losses that you just created, essentially, from what is really wash sale. And since it's an unregulated area, wash sale rules do not apply to cryptocurrencies. I will link this Forbes column. This is actually also from Sheehan. He's a CPA and he has verified this and you can talk to this with your CPA. And that's one of the big things that I actually used to save a lot of money on my taxes. All right, so that's it for today's video. I wanna say thanks for sticking with me. I also wanna say thanks to all the supporters. I really appreciate it. Level ones, thank you so much. Level twos, all right, soft, win, mullet. Myself who else, Dave Plummer. Grant Sharman, Bruce Wood, Baking Benjamin's, Noel, Flippin' Vegas, Martin Lewin, Michael Ralph, William Howell, Crazy Crypto Canuck, Tessie Ryosaki Positive, Truck, LLC, J.C. Durick's, Matt Slack, John Miller, The Office, L. Murray, Michael Jeffery, The Kel Show, Andrew Herrera, Terry Prospery, XRP Carolina, whatever, AE, and Hero Soap Company. And also just watch out for this scam. My email is dandageless at news, at Gmail with an S. It's not dandage less at new. Somebody is impersonating me for some reason and they want you to do a trading challenge for something stupid. So just delete that and that's it. Also, just so you know, for level twos, this is gonna be deprecated. I'm going to just do random shout outs by the end of July. So we're gonna actually get rid of the level twos. Never is gonna be level one and that's it. So just so you know what's gonna happen and that's it. So thanks for sticking with me. Appreciate it. See you on the next one.