 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Beginner's Guide to High-Yield Crypto Investing. My name is Josh Levitin. I'm the senior instructor here at Cybertrading University. Welcome to all of us joining us here live and if you're joining us on the recording side of things as well, welcome on back. Now, first and foremost, before we begin, I just have to show a quick little warning sign. First and foremost, just if I can pop this up, there we go. Results can and will vary from student to student. No guarantees, promises, or warranties have been made that suggest any trading will profit or not result in a loss, so on and so forth. But folks, for all of us joining me here live, let me just ask us a quick question. Is there anyone here who is currently holding Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies? I'm sure there's a bunch of us that are not actually, so I'm asking actually at first if there are any who are currently holding on to any crypto as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche. Let me know. Got a few of us here on YouTube right now, which that's where we're doing our live streams. So with that, of course, we can go further into how long you've been holding on to your crypto for. But for anyone who does not own any cryptocurrency to begin, well, first and foremost, notice how many people are saying that they are owning crypto to begin with. So it seems like the majority of us are already, but for those of us that are not owning or holding on, investing into any crypto so far, well, I'm sure that you have your reasons. And to me, naturally, I think the biggest reason would be that you're already pretty comfortable with just saving money, putting it and storing it in a traditional bank, right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, the issue is, is that it's starting to get broken. The system is starting to break down, and it has been for a long time. But in terms of traditional banks, I'd like to kind of just share the differences, but also the similarities between a traditional bank storing your money or assets in a traditional bank versus what we'll talk about coming up, that being a protocol or pool that you could store your crypto in. So for most of us, as we know, a traditional bank, it has a couple of different roles. The primary roles of a bank are simply to be a custodian, to allow you to store your assets. Now, we'll go into what custodial means. What it means to be a custodian for depositors. But in essence, you're able to store your assets in a bank, which is very straightforward. But also, it still offers loans to anyone that's looking to seek one. You can ask a bank for a loan. Now you'll have to pay an interest fee on it, and we'll get to that next. But those are the two main roles of a bank. Long story short, those are the same roles that a protocol will have. With that, it's just to say that a lot of us are pretty secure and comfortable with putting their money in a bank because they know it's insured. Not only is it insured by the FDIC, but it's also regulated by our government. There are set policies and regulations instilled, so to each their own, but if you've been putting money in a bank for as long as you have, I'm sure that you feel pretty comfortable continuing to put money in the said bank, right? So that's what I say. If it's not broke, don't fix it. In terms of putting money into a traditional bank, these are the two roles. A bank is used to store money in a savings account, and for anyone that looks to store their money in a savings account, as you know, you get paid an interest rate on it. It's not big. It's not a large interest rate, but you get a little chump change off it. Well, otherwise, with a bank, they're able to offer loans as well. For anyone that's looking to get a loan, the way that banks make money ultimately is that although they'll distribute money as an interest rate for depositors, they'll look to receive a higher interest rate for anyone that's looking to borrow. So in essence, that is how a traditional bank will operate. It seems pretty straightforward, right? Now ultimately, when it comes down to storing crypto, there's a couple of phrases that we'll introduce here. The first of which, I got a bunch of us on YouTube right now chatting with me here in this live stream. Is there anyone here that knows what staking is already? Because if the question is, is that what staking is, well, yes and no. There are similarities there between storing your money in a traditional bank versus staking your cryptocurrency. Is there anyone here that already knows what staking is? If not, you come to the right place. Don't have any answers on that. That's all right. Let's jump right into what staking is. Staking is essentially storing your cryptocurrency on a blockchain and the way that you do that is essentially by putting your crypto into what's called a stake pool. Essentially what happens is that once you put your money into one of these pools, you could simply, within a click of a button from your crypto wallet, look to do this. You could look to stake your crypto onto a pool or protocol. With that, the network uses these holdings. They're going to forge new blocks on the blockchain. A blockchain is essentially used to verify transactions and secure transactions as more are made. It's essentially built by a giant network of computers. With more computers joining this network, well, it makes it that much safer for you to invest and store your crypto. With that, you're going to see more blocks forged on the blockchain. Essentially, with each and every block, there are rewards that get paid out. Different stake pools or I should say different blockchains have different payout methods on their staking. Typically, it's every three or five days that you'll be able to receive these rewards. Essentially, that is what staking is. There's a few different blockchains that offer this type of staking. Namely, that's called the proof of stake blockchains. If you look up what a proof of stake blockchain is, you'll get a long running list of which ones are, which ones aren't. There's a bunch here that are not shown that offer proof of stake or offer staking on their blockchain. Cardano, EOS, Cosmos, Ethereum. Ethereum 1.0 does not offer staking. They are coming out with what's called Ethereum 2.0, a major change to their blockchain that will legitimize them as a proof of stake blockchain to where they'll be able to offer this type of staking ability. Polkadot, there's Avalanche, which is not shown here, and many others. For instance, Cardano is one of the major blockchains out there. They've been one of the major ones for a little while now. I ended up jumping into Cardano. This is back in June or July of 2020, shortly after the bottom of the pandemic. With that, I didn't necessarily know at that very time that that was the beginning of the bull market for all of crypto, but at that point, I learned what staking was by owning Cardano. Each cryptocurrency or each blockchain, I should say, has their own wallet for the blockchain. This is just one simple example, folks. You could stake across any of these cryptocurrencies that you see here, and as I'd said more. But for Cardano in particular, they have a couple of different wallets that you're able to store your assets on initially. This is what's called Daedalus wallet. That's the name of their wallet. This is where I have my assets. I blocked off a good number of the numbers here, how much I totally own and whatnot. I showed a couple of transactions still here, back from November of last year. But essentially, if I'm looking to buy Cardano, I could buy Cardano, store it right on my wallet here. Now through this wallet, I'm able to stake. There's actually a button that I would click where my cursor is right here that gives me the ability to select a particular pool that I could stake my Cardano in. Now you would have to do your research for the cryptocurrency that you're looking to stake and do research on the number of stake pools that you're able to choose from. But ultimately, depending on which pool you choose, you're able to receive rewards every three or five days. For Cardano here, it's specifically every five days. But every five days, at the end of every epoch, it's called, you're able to receive rewards. Now for whatever cryptocurrency you decide to stake, whether it's Cardano here, whether it's Avalanche, Polkadot, Solana, that's another big one, you'll likely get paid. The reward that you'll get paid on is typically in the cryptocurrency that you are staking. If I'm staking Cardano, I'll get paid out in that crypto, in that coin. So here you could see this is just a series of weeks or months that I had back from last year where I ended up staking my Cardano across two separate pools. These are two different stake pools that were on Cardano at the time. And the rewards fluctuate for every epoch. At the end of every epoch, I got a reward. Well, each reward was different, right? Each reward was a different amount compared to the next one. They're not the same. There's a bunch of different factors that come into play when it comes to receiving rewards at the end of every epoch. So that depends on the amount of people that are in the pool, how much crypto is taken out of the pool from the last epoch. So there are a lot of moving parts to that. I don't really focus as much on that part of it. I'm just showing you a very basic introduction to what staking is and just the fact that if you're able to store your crypto within a certain pool, you're able to receive rewards over a period of time. So Cardano right now, I'm just using Cardano as a quick example, but Cardano is like $1.20 per coin right now live. So of course, with each epoch, I'll receive a new amount of Cardano as a reward. So that amount of Cardano is going to be reflective upon the price that it's trading at at the time. So if the overall value of the cryptocurrency you are staking drops off, like we had back from the end of 2021 heading into this year, a lot of cryptos dropped off by more than 50%, 60 plus percent. Well, hey, you're still going to receive rewards via passive income, but the overall value of that reward is going to drop off as the value of the coin may drop off. So when it comes to investing, you have to make the decision yourself. You know, personally, you have to do your own due diligence for the cryptos that you're looking at asking, well, is this something that I want to hold on for a year, two years, five years even more? Or is it something that you're looking to trade? Is it something that you're looking to swing for a number of months? You know, those are questions we need to ask before we look to, you know, stake or really do anything with, you know, our assets, because if you're going into this with the mindset as a long-term investor, but if you jump into a crypto at a bad price and if you're looking to hold on to it, what's going to happen when it drops off, you know, 20, 30, 40% over that period? Well, you may end up getting nervous. You may end up closing out the position and because of how you're mismanaging it, well, the crypto may look to bounce right back up and you not be in the position at that point, right? So before you consider staking or even farming, as we'll talk about next, well, you just have to make that decision yourself before you risk anything. Am I looking to do this as a swing or am I looking to do this for the next two, three, five years of my life? If you're looking to just store crypto and that's it, then it's much less of a stress. You're not worried about, you know, the retracement or pullbacks on the short term, right? So, you know, that's just something I wanted to make mention at least here. Now, there are a couple of different protocols that offer staking in particular. You know, there's a couple of different decentralized financial protocols, DeFi protocols or apps otherwise. One here being Lido LIDO. It's one of the bigger protocols out there in the DeFi market. I could have picked any of them. This just was one of them, one of the bigger ones. But this protocol actually gives you the ability to stake not just one particular crypto, but a number of them. Solana, actually Terra here, which I know a lot of us in this live stream are familiar with. Here's Ethereum 2.0, not 1.0, but 2.0. And then another one here I'm not familiar with. Kusama, but nonetheless, there are a couple of different DeFi protocols out there that offer staking. But to be transparent, most of these DeFi protocols that you'll tend to see, especially for those of us that already have the high yield crypto investing course, you guys out there know that a lot of these protocols offer farming rather than staking. Now, there is a big difference. There is a big technical difference between staking your cryptocurrency and farming as they call it, yield farming. The biggest difference between the two is the fact that with yield farming, you're essentially the market maker out there. It actually gives people the ability to take loans out through the protocol. Staking does not offer that ability. Staking, you're not able to borrow money with a wallet on staking. Through farming, through different protocols that offer farming, well, they offer the ability to take loans out as well. So that's the main difference. A lot of these protocols offer the ability to farm your crypto. It's similar to staking because you're storing it in a pool, but the main difference is that you're able to basically act as a money market. The liquidity pool that you're in essentially acts as a money market because you're not just able to store your crypto there, but in these pools, you're actually able to borrow crypto. Now, you would have to pay an interest rate on that just like you would as a traditional bank, right? But that actually is possible with crypto nowadays through yield farming. You're able to borrow crypto and request a loan for it essentially. All right, so a lot of these different protocols you could see here, one of them being compound, they have different markets for supplying crypto, but also they have borrowing markets. The ability to take a loan out here is the APY that you would be paying on it. Here's the liquidity that's being borrowed through the protocol. So this is what's known as compound. This is one of the bigger protocols out there across all of DeFi. You could say the same on this one here as well. This is what's called AAVE, you call it. So essentially you could see where they have a deposit APY so you can gain interest on putting money into these pools, but otherwise you can look to borrow crypto and you would have to pay an interest fee or interest rate, I should say, an APY on that, but that's the main difference. That's how these markets are run basically. All right, now here's another one and for anyone that's new to cryptocurrency, new to Bitcoin or Ethereum or crypto as a whole, just to be really transparent, a lot of the names of the protocols that you tend to see, it could actually detract a lot of the people who are just used to having USD and using a bank, not really looking to dip into crypto as much. For instance, the name Pancake Swap. I feel like just by looking at that name, you probably don't think it's too trustworthy of a pool or protocol to use, right? You see the name like Pancake Swap. What's like a five-year-old making these things up? So try and take the name out of it. This is actually one of the bigger protocols across all of DeFi together. This is a protocol that is specific to the blockchain Binance Smart Chain. For anyone familiar with Binance Smart Chain, this is the biggest protocol on that blockchain. So this is very similar to the others that you see, but in the sense that with farming, you're able to farm cryptocurrency by putting your crypto into one of these pools. Now with yield farming, the main difference as well is that you're not just staking or farming one cryptocurrency. You're typically farming two. And the way that these money markets are operated is that one of the rules with farming is that you need to supply an even balance of cryptocurrency. So for reference with Pancake Swap and a lot of these others, you'll tend to see a pool consisting of two separate cryptos. So for reference right here, we could actually use this one that I'm trying to shadow with my cursor. It's the cake BNB pool. So in order to farm and use this pool, you would need to farm 50% of your assets as cake, the token for Pancake Swap. Again, it's a funny name. But otherwise, the other 50% that you would need to supply is in the form of this coin, this token BNB. And that's the Binance Smart Chain Coin. So if you, let's say have $1,000, a thousand US dollars that you're looking to put into this pool, well, you would need to put 500 of those dollars in as cake token. And then you would need to put in another $500 worth as BNB. So however much cake you have and however much BNB you have, it equates to $1,000. And initially, it's balanced out, $500 worth of cake, $500 worth of BNB. Now with that though, it's to say that once you join this pool, once you begin farming, you're going to be able to earn an APR, it fluctuates, so you would need to monitor the APR over time. But in this still shot, you're able to earn a 34.2% APR on this one particular pool. Certain pools will have a much higher APR because they're more often offering a higher incentive for you to supply that money market. Now, that's not always the right thing to do, that's not always the smartest thing to do. So we'll talk more about that throughout the entirety of the high yield crypto investing course. You would wanna make sure that you are putting your funds, your assets into a pool that has a lot of liquidity already added to it. So if so fact though, a rule of thumb would be, hey, a smaller protocol as a whole is likely going to have pools that have smaller liquidity as a whole. Pancake swap here is one of the biggest, throughout the entire DeFi sector. You could say the same on the others, like AAVE and Compound and plenty of others as well. I could refer you to a quick website that actually gives you a nice list of all these different protocols that you could look to sift through and for you to join one of these pools. But ultimately though, by doing this, it gives you the ability to earn passive income at a very high rate, mind you. I mean, 34.27% for this one is very high to begin with, but you actually have the ability to compound the rewards and that way you can earn even more as a tool of passive income. Does anybody have any questions so far across our stream, across our live stream right now? We got a bunch of us chatting from earlier. If anyone has any questions just as a whole with staking or farming your cryptocurrency, just type letter Y in the chat board here and as we continue to go through, we just have a couple of more slides to finish up, but any questions that come in, I'll have the chance to answer here at the end. One question that just came in right now really quick. How are the rewards paid out for yield farming? So with yield farming, actually the rewards are paid out daily. These rewards through yield farming, unlike staking are paid out daily. Day to day, you could receive your reward. You could do it really at your rate at any point in time. So you could look to compound this, not just on a weekly schedule or monthly, you could do it daily. So that's a good question that came in right. So I guess a question that otherwise could be asked is, hey, without traditional regulation, without the FDIC kind of securing these protocols, how are they actually secure? What are they backed by? Who are they essentially backed by? Well, one of the quick answers for that is that these protocols often ask a lot out of people if they're looking to borrow cryptocurrency to begin with. So that is a major way as to how they're able to provide collateral because they're asking borrowers to provide extra collateral, often a two-to-one ratio. If you're looking to borrow $1,000 in cryptocurrency on one of these protocols, they're gonna ask of you to put up $2,000 worth of cryptocurrency upfront. Jeff asking here on our stream is PancakeSwap or perhaps just generally any of these other protocols, I'll slip that part in there, are any of these really a purchase platform? Could you purchase cryptocurrency on these platforms? You could swap cryptocurrency on these platforms. So you can't technically buy with USD, but if you have cryptocurrency on one of these protocols, Jeff, they offer the ability to swap that crypto for a list of what they offer. The protocols that you could choose from, they'll offer the ability to swap into different cryptocurrencies, but not all of these protocols have the same list that you could swap into. They'll often have the same stable coins that you could swap into if you choose to swap into stables, but they're going to have different assets that you could swap into. Like if you have USDC, which is a stable coin, and if you're looking to swap into any coin, any altcoin, let's just say like, let's say just phantom, FTM. If the protocol has the ability to swap into phantom, then you could do so. Yes, you would need to pay a fee in order to do that. The fee is very small in the grand scheme of things. You know, the word fee obviously has a negative connotation to it because nobody wants to pay a fee. It's a very small fee in the grand scheme of things. Now, if you are on the Ethereum blockchain, and this is maybe a bit more specific, I didn't necessarily want to go too specific in this hour-long workshop, but it's to say that with Ethereum, you're paying a very high fee compared to other blockchains if you're looking to swap into other cryptos. So if you join our high-yield crypto course, then you'll tend to see that for the alerts that we post bi-weekly, I tend to write alerts on a bi-weekly schedule and post them for all of our members there. You'll note, and some already have noted, that I'm not choosing any crypto or any Ethereum-based protocols because it's just too high, it's called a gas fee. So for the protocols that are on Ethereum in particular, you're paying a higher fee. So that is one thing to note. If you're looking to store money or stake or farm onto any of these protocols, I would strongly recommend for you to use a blockchain that is not Ethereum, use a different blockchain, whether it be Terra, whether it be Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, really, any of those, you're gonna pay a smaller fee in relation to what you would pay on Ethereum. All right, folks. Now, there are specific insurance-based protocols that back up your assets too. So we talk about that as well throughout the high-yield crypto course that we have. That being Ensure, Ensure Ace is the biggest. Solus is another one as well. We mainly talk about Ensure Ace as one of the insurance-based protocols that you could use to back up your cryptocurrency. Question coming in, and this was hard for me to catch from actually our live trading room. If you have questions, folks, if you're joining the YouTube chat, just make sure that you send it in the YouTube chat. I'm like lucky that I saw this year. He's asking, how are crypto passive incomes taxed? So that's something you'd have to talk to your accountant about. I am not a CPA, I'm not an accountant. I don't know the first thing about taxes aside from sending them to my accountant who is one of my close friends' brother. So that's where on top I could just say, actually, if you go to just websites like Coinbase, if you go to Binance.com, not to say these protocols, websites, but even just looking at more of like a regulated company like Coinbase or Binance or Nexo, they have information in regards to taxes. I don't know in particular about the staking rewards that you would receive and how that plays into it. So you would need to talk to your accountant about that primarily, Mike. All right, folks, anything else? Any other questions that you have? Let me know. Actually, one thing I will show here very briefly. I have made reference to a website that you're able to go to in order to see not just all of the different protocols that you could check out, but also really just a running ranking of all of the different protocols and blockchains collectively. It's another funny sounding name or website here, this one is, but defylamma.com, defylamma against funny sounding website, but incredible wealth of information that this website offers. So, you know, for reference, this is just all of the different protocols that are ranked by what's called TVL, the total value locked in. So with that, you could see Lido anchor protocols, one that we talk about heavily in the high yield crypto investment course. Here's PancakeSwap number 10. So it's, you know, in the top 10, this was actually number 25 about a week or two ago, probably two weeks ago. So, you know, a bunch of these will go up and down based off what's called the TVL, the total value locked in. You know, if one goes down, doesn't mean that, you know, it's a bad protocol to use. It could just be based on the token that represents the protocol and how much that may increase or decrease. All right, folks, we're gonna finish up actually right now. If you have any questions, first and foremost, coming off this, you know, workshop here, whether you're watching this live or on the recording, feel more than free to shoot on over an email to Josh at C2Trading.com. If you're a member already inside our live trading room for stocks, you could always chat me there during market hours, but if you're not, and if you wanted to talk to me about crypto or any questions you have from this workshop, feel more than free to send on over an email to Josh at C2Trading.com or otherwise folks, if you were interested in taking up our offer on the high yield crypto investing course that we have as well as that, including the alerts that we have that we send two times a month, you can go right down to the link below right there, that being ctu.co-hyc. Once again, that's ctu.co-hyc. We're actually doing a $500 deduction on the total value of this course. It was originally listed at 1997, so for this week, we're going to be offering it for $14.97, $500 drop off. All right, folks, but again, any questions that you have prior to joining this, if you're not ready to join just yet and have a couple of questions, feel more than free to send on over an email. Once again, my email address is josh at ctu-trading.com. Any questions that you have beforehand, I'll be more than happy to answer. All right, folks, for all of us otherwise, if you're joining us in the high yield crypto course, I look forward to seeing you in our next class. Talk to you soon.