 Welcome to Digital Asset News. Take a top stories in crypto and bring them out of bite-sized pieces today just like the thumbnail suggests PayPal really is raising the bar and they're doing some pretty great things as they are going to greatly expand crypto services. So we're going to take a look at everything that's going on and all this information was captured during this week's PayPal earnings call. Also take a look at UBS, the Swiss bank to offer European hedge funds with brokerage services for crypto ETPs. Kind of odd considering that they were telling everybody to stay away from the crypto market and also we're going to take a look at a new partnership between Meld, Vent, and Polygon. So we're going to take a look at why this is and I'm going to bring in the CEO just to talk about you know why this is actually going on and finally we'll just take a look at my final thoughts about this whole market and what I think is actually doing pretty good. So first up let's just take a look what's going on in the market. So right now we're at 1.55 trillion. We did drop a little bit. I think we went to like 1.6 and now here we are at about a percentage down and again just going sideways. Nothing fantastic, nothing great and I'm okay with sideways. Like I've always said this is when I like to dollar cost average and this is where all the gains are made but nobody seems to want to believe me because they just think oh everything all the gains are made when everything goes up in that parabolic hockey stick and then I'll buy at that time. That's too late. Now that's just investment opinion on investment advice. I've been dollar cost averaging for four years seems to work out okay. So here's what we got today for prices. So Bitcoin is just shy of 40,000. It's been going back and forth. Ethereum is doing pretty good. $2,300 looking very nice and seven days 14% increase for Ethereum 22% for Bitcoin. That's amazing. Binance coin down a little bit. Cardano sticking around the $1.28 not too bad. XRP up 19% almost for the week. We'll take it. Anything good? 9% 1.5% for Solana and Solana is making a great place and then that's pretty much it. Just pretty much sideways not a big deal. So that's what's going on here. Let's take a look at for all the traders out there. Let's take a look at the sentiment analysis and if you're looking at something let's see here with 90% assurance you got between negative 9% and 20% or the second one's pretty good. Third one's pretty good up to 5%. What do we got here? Look at Loom Network, Funfair, Pirate Chain, Horizon, Green Power and one of my favorites that I really should get into with a graph and if you're looking for all this information that's a trade the chain links in the description. So let's just jump into today's top story. I find this exciting because I like stories about mass adoption and what's really going to push it and to push mass adoption I think you're going to need something that's really fast hopefully very cheap and something that's very easy to use. Well PayPal is pretty easy as far as like the fees debatable. So here's what we got. Here's what's going on. So PayPal unveils a plan to greatly expand services. PayPal customers will soon have access to a greater range of crypto services through the global payment platform. This is from CEO Dan Schulman and this was during the Q2 investor update call which was just yesterday. Amazing. So Schulman says and this is the interesting part he describes the upgrade as code complete. The wallet should be fully available for customers in the U.S. in the next several months and they're probably rolling out to EU you know six four to six months after that new features such as now this is great high yield savings. First of all if they just have that they beat every bank in the world with high yield savings. So that depends is high yield savings like one percent as opposed to the bank which offers point zero two percent are we talking like four six eight ten percent. That's high yield savings to me. I hope they don't do some craziness we're like oh yeah we're at one percent but the banks that's still not good enough. I can get a way better yields at like a like a Celsius or a Voyager. So hopefully they come correct. Also early access to direct deposit funds and messaging functions and it'll be driven by advanced AI and other machine learning capabilities. So here's the thing when it talks about that that's why the thumbnail you see like I have like a little debit card right there because when you're talking about high early access to direct deposit funds don't forget that everybody who has PayPal they're going to be able to pay for services or goods for all the merchants that are in the PayPal network and that's hundreds of millions of different merchants. I'm one of those those people and I wouldn't mind getting some of your bitcoin to pay for my products that'd be great. So if you're going to have something like that and it says early access to direct deposit funds. So usually in a PayPal account you can't like in my business account I can't send funds from my bank to PayPal and do it that way. It all has to come through transactions through the people that I have. I can't go from a bank. Now I can go from like my person when I can go from person to person. So when they say early access to direct deposit funds I'm wondering if they're because direct deposit funds aren't transaction funds as the verbiage is right there. Direct deposit funds would be funds that I deposit from any of my banks or my other institutions where I have money and that means I can transfer it to PayPal. If that is the case then that means that PayPal becomes a bank and if that's the case I don't need my banks anymore because well they suck. Well USA is pretty great I must admit but the rest of them all the ones I've ever had like Walls Fargo I still got to deal with suck. So if I have something like that that also would mean that a debit card is coming or a credit card. Actually I have a debit card for PayPal right now so what am I talking about. So if you have something like that that sounds pretty good. Now this driven by advanced AI and other machine learning capabilities I'm not for sure what that is but it doesn't really matter because they're just trying to make them move things forward. Let me know what you think that could potentially be but this looks pretty promising and now getting back to the article just remember that PayPal owns Venmo and Venmo launched crypto services in April and they had 58 billion in total payment volume. Let me say that again 58 billion in total payment volume for the quarter across 76 million active accounts that's a lot of accounts. Now it doesn't say in here if that's from crypto purchases I doubt that very much but it all is encompassing and they all just want to piece the pie. So it doesn't matter if crypto is you know 75 percent and it's not or if it's just like two to five percent or whatever else it is it doesn't matter. They're just capturing that certain percentage and then as as they capture more and more and more that's where banks get squeezed out and that's why they're going to get block buster. That's just my personal opinion but that's what we got. PayPal itself reported 400 million active users has a lot of 400 million active users during this quarter with 300 billion in total payment volume. If we can just get a fraction of that for crypto payments that's that's a lot of volume. PayPal and also this PayPal recently increased its crypto purchase limit for customers in the U.S. to a hundred thousand dollars a week. Let me say that again a hundred K a week you can purchase cryptocurrency and digital assets I think that's pretty fantastic and then this is following early PayPal announcement that it would allow the transfer of crypto funds to third-party wallets. I do not believe that they've gone through with that yet but I could be wrong. Check me in the comment section. That was one of the biggest things is that they were just like Robin. They weren't allowing people to actually get into crypto if they didn't allow it to transfer onto your ledger or something like that but it looks like they're going to do that. Jose Fernandez de Pante, a vice president of PayPal said he saw payment platforms as the natural way to distribute central bank digital currencies. He believes that this is a way for private payment platforms like PayPal could help deliver government stimulus and that's just it. So PayPal is making great moves. They're doing great things with cryptocurrency and as far as like merchants I think it's just one step to what they're trying to do. If you get the CBDC in here which I think at some point should be coming even Jerome Powell said you know if we have CBDCs we won't need cryptocurrency. He knows that's not a great true statement but when we get something like that where how can we get this to people because it's all about the wallets. Now you're just changing wallets. Well PayPal can come in and go look government if you guys want to do the CBDCs that's fine but who's going to manage these wallets? Who's going to help the customer when things go down? Who's going to help them as far as like security to get things over and fishing attacks? Well don't worry about that because that's what we do. So you just do us that part. We'll do the CBDCs on top of the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and everything else that we want to do. So let's just do that huh? And then off we go. So I don't see a problem with that. Let me know what you think about it on the comment section but I see PayPal as being a major player in this space. Alright so next up UBS crypto ETPs and this is UBS to offer European hedge funds with brokerage services for crypto ETPs. And it states here, let me blow this up a little bit so you can see what I see. UBS is currently doing an internal review of its brokerage service and has launched a pilot scheme for its premium clients. Who are the premium clients? People with a lot of money that's really what it comes down to. Its prime brokerage service has started offering clearing and settlement of crypto exchange traded products to a limited number of clients. Who are those people? People who have got money. Two people familiar with the matter further added that UBS is already operating this pilot. The matter currently is under an internal review process by UBS. Also don't forget Wall Street Giants Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have also jumped in the game offering hedge fund clients clearing and settlement of crypto ETPs. And before I forget there was this guy from BlackRock. I don't know if you know him. His name is Larry Fink and he was just recently quoted as saying he sees very little demand for crypto. That's very odd because everybody else around him sees an amazing amount of demand. They've actually got numbers to back it up. We just saw this nice little article about PayPal and what they plan to do. UBS has come out and let's not forget that JB Morgan and UBS plan to get into that game heavily. And let's not also forget that JB Morgan, here's the evolution of JB Morgan lest we all forget. In 2015, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JB Morgan says virtual currency will be stopped. And then in 2017, he says Bitcoin is a fraud. And then, gosh, where are we here? I can't see this. There we go. In 2018, Jamie Dimon says he regrets calling Bitcoin a fraud and believes in the technology behind it. And then, of course, here we are in 2020 where he says Bitcoin is not my cup of tea, even as JB Morgan has warmed to crypto. And then all of a sudden, in 2021, this year, JB Morgan says investors could make Bitcoin 1% of its portfolio. And then in April, JB Morgan may offer Active Manager Bitcoin Fund report. And then, of course, now it comes to life. This is what's going on. This was an article for a couple of weeks ago. So that's what's going on. And it's amazing to me when we have all these big institutions and players, at first they're like, that doesn't make any sense, right? And then all of a sudden, I think it's like the light bulb turns on and they're like, whoa, we got to front run all these retail investors and drop this price a little bit so we can get our customers, affluent customers, the best deals. And I know some people say there's no manipulation in cryptocurrency. Sure. And that's what we got. So whatever foot articles are out there and things that are going on, I don't really care about the short term this week, this month, maybe the next three to six months. I'm looking at for like a year, two years, three years, where are we going to be with all these huge institutions getting in and really just sacking away a ton of money? Let me know what you think in the comment section. And let's move on to our next piece where we talk about a little meld and vent and polygon. So I don't really understand this. I did a live stream yesterday, but I don't really get it. So I'm going to have Ken Oling, the CEO, come on in a second and explain it. So meld and vent, present Atomatic. What the heck is this? So Atomatic built on polygon is a two-way bridge to bridge your polygon-based assets to Cardano and back. If you don't know, this is polygon, polygon.technology. It's Ethereum's internet of blockchains. It's a protocol and framework for building Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks, scalable solutions, layer two solutions to kind of speed things up. Okay, great. So that is what polygon is. This is as well as giving polygon-based DeFi users on ramps to the unique DeFi-based financial services that only meld offers. So first of all, I guess we got to probably want to ask yourselves what the heck is meld if you don't know. So meld is essentially a payments platform or a loan platform, DeFi. The loan that you take out is backed by crypto, and you pay back the interest and not the principal. How does that work? Well, real quick as a refresher, we actually did a video on this about a month ago or so, just search for digital asset news and meld. I'll link it at the very end of this video so you can watch it and explain it in much more detail. But this is how it goes. You take out a loan using the meld app. You choose how much cash you like to borrow and your crypto is collateral like twice the amount. So like if you want to take out $80,000, no, let's say I want to take out $40,000. Well, you got to allow them to have two of your Bitcoin as collateral. But what they do as opposed to other different platforms like SLCS or like a Blockfire, whatever else is that they don't lend that out to institutions such as like, I mean, any kind of hedge funds or any kind of exchanges. What they do is they put that Bitcoin or that cryptocurrency that you put up as collateral and they put it into their pools as liquidity pool and you gain the rewards off that and helps you pay back your principal. So essentially they take a very small cut and they take your cryptocurrency and they allow it to run through. So you take out a loan, you get your cash, you earn yield in your crypto, your crypto collateral is added to meld's liquidity pool that we just talked about. You pay back the loan, make monthly payments that pay back the interest and principal of applicable of your loan. Once the loan is paid off, your collateral will release to you and you get to earn all the time. Regardless of if you are borrowing, lending, staking, or holding, you're always earning yield from the crypto in your meld app. And they're one of the first ones to do this thing called an ISPO, initial stake pool offering. So instead of having like a private sale for these coins because meld isn't out yet, it's built on Cardano. Smart contracts have to come out as first, which will be August, September. And that's when everything starts to roll. So right now you can delegate your ADA to the meld stake pool and instead of getting paid or your rewards in Cardano, your rewards are in the meld token which will come about and actually be active in round November. So that is polygon that is meld and then back to this one. Here's the objective, essentially. The objective is to leverage the highly scalable and efficient infrastructure that polygon and Cardano are providing, support the creation of business opportunities will benefit from cross-chain liquidity enabled by the Atomatic Bridge and DeFi products on polygon have been growing at a staggering rate. Okay. The last part, which is vent, because it was the partnership was meld polygon event, this is what vent is. It's a community launchpad, kind of like card starter for Cardano. It's a simple way to research, apply and invest in early Cardano polygon projects, same thing like with card starter you can inject, you can invest into early projects in the Cardano blockchain and you can sign up. Links will be in the description for all these different things. That is essentially it in nutshell. Look, I know what we talked about as far as like with these bridges. We've already got a bridge that goes from Ethereum to Cardano. Cardano, IOHK have already made that available. So with this one, I'm kind of unsure about what's going on and why this is needed. I mean, I could kind of get the interoperability polygon layer two solution that people are going to be using that for quite some time. Even Mark Cuban is a big investor to that. So I really want to get down to it and just ask Ken what this all means because he's a CEO and he can kind of bring some light. So let's jump into the interview. So as promised, when I was looking at this, at this article, and I looked at it, I go, okay, why is vent and polygon partnering up with meld? And as promised, I've got Ken here, Ken Olling, he is the CEO of meld.com. I had to reach out to him and go, Ken, I don't understand this partnership. I don't understand why you guys did this. So Ken shed some light as to why you guys partnered up with polygon and vent. I just, sorry, I don't get it. Sure, no problem. So when we started meld, one of the key things that we were looking into was liquidity. We wanted to make sure that because we're lending and borrowing protocol that we have access to a lot of liquidity. We are not maximalists on either sides of the fence. A lot of my background comes from the ETH DeFi side of things. So we want to play nice with everybody. We've always said that composability is important. And with that, when we, when we looked at the market and we said, okay, how are we going to approach how we're going to engage composability and engage all this liquidity, polygon made the most sense. I mean, they're the hottest thing on the market right now. They're doing fantastic. Their technology is great. It's very mature. They've been developing it for years. And so we reached out and we were talking to vent and then vent brought in polygon as part of a conversation. And we decided to build the bridge. And so now the three of us are putting together or we have put together a partnership and we're building the Cardano polygon bridge for an L2 onto Ethereum and back. And so it provides us with or polygon has a very high degree of capital efficiency. And we went on to Cardano for the reason of capital efficiency. So it just makes complete sense for us to work with polygon in order to be able to go back and forth between the Ethereum world and our world. Yeah, that makes sense because God knows we got enough of toxic tribalism out there. So at least in this situation, we can say, hey, you can do whatever you want to do. You can move back and forth. You can go eat, you can go curve, you can go whatever else you want. You can go Cardano. Great. Okay. That does. Okay. Thank you. That doesn't make sense. And then there was a second question. Well, surprise. Yeah, I was sent over a video from Kaizen Crypto. And in there, you had talked about some specific language as far as American investors because the MELD project is going to be an ISPO, an initial stake pool offering, which is very different than what we're used to. But you made specific comments about Americans and investing. So talk to us real quick about what you said and has your thinking changed in that regard. Yeah. So in that interview, I very much overstepped my bounds. You can think of it as foot and mouth disease. And I said some things that I wasn't supposed to say. So I have to apologize for that. Basically, what it comes down to is I am not a legal advisor, and I do not and cannot provide legal advice to anybody in regards to what they're doing. So anybody interested, regardless of your jurisdiction, you have to seek legal advice to find out whether being able to participate in the ISPO is for you or it's not. So I made some statements that were that overstepped my bounds in regards to that. And yeah, I screwed up and I needed to I've cleared it up. I've sort of put it out there on Twitter and I've made it clear that, you know, that is and not it was and is not legal advice. And hopefully that will be enough. And if people are curious, then they need to find out they need to seek the legal advice on their own based on their jurisdiction. Yeah, I know I know specifically what was said. It was something about Americans and not being able to participate. But you're saying right now, hey, you got to seek your own advice, you got to, you know, for legal legal reasons and everything else, because there's a tricky situation where we're in right now. And who knows where the government is going. I don't even know if the government knows where they're going. But it's a gray area, right? It is a super gray area. And let's just be honest. I mean, even Gensler can't really, you know, say, well, we're going to do this and this and this, even as the head of the CFTC and the OCC. So I'm just going to leave it up to the viewer. Again, this is an investment opinion, not a investment advice. But I do like this project. I hope I wish you guys the very best. So Ken, thanks for coming on. We appreciate any last words of wisdom, like I always ask for the crypto investor. No, just to just stay tuned. We have lots of announcements over the next two weeks that are all very exciting. The Cardano Polygon bridge is just one of the first ones. We have more things coming up. So yeah, it's going to be a very, very exciting next couple of weeks. Great. Makes sense. Ken, thanks for coming on. And then let's jump back. All right. So I hope that cleared things up. I want to say thanks, Ken, for stopping by because I just didn't really, really get it until this came about. So thanks so much. Look, if you made all the way in, I want to say thanks. It was a little long. A lot of things are going on, I know. But that is the good part about crypto. My final thoughts are I know everything's moving sideways and people are very uninterested in crypto. But again, for me, this is where all the money is made. So that's it for today. So thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate it. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. Also consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about are time sensitive on this channel. And that is all. So thanks so much. I appreciate it. See you on the next one.