 Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in crypto. And I'm bringing on a bite-sized piece is today, we've got some pretty great news, especially if you're a big proponent of Cardano. So first up, we're gonna talk about some Cardano highlights, which Charles Hoskinson came out and just did a brief update where he talks about the new summit that's gonna happen. He's gonna talk about a new listing that's gonna happen. And also, of course, the Alonzo smart contracts. So we'll take a look at that. Also, we'll take a look at three mayors in the United States who are super pro-Bitcoin and they share their thoughts. And I gotta tell you, I thought all politicians were evil, but apparently not. And then lastly, we'll talk about the Golden Ouroboros from Cardano Combat, the NFT giveaway, which we'll be doing right at the very end of this video. So stick around for that. But first, let's take a look at what's going on into the market. So right now, a little bit of a down day. I mean, look, we've been going up for the last, what, 10 days for two weeks almost? And I told you yesterday, I told you yesterday, the same thing I told you last week, which was it can't go up forever. However, I was wrong last week because it kept going up. But I can just tell you what history tells us. And that is that what goes up must come down. And I just can't keep going up forever. So I can't really tell you specifically when and hint, hint, nobody can. Cause I don't have a crystal ball and nobody's notice you're down. It's especially not me, but you just have to take the bad days with the good and just think of it this way. Weren't we just talking about how Bitcoin was at 29, 31,000 somewhere around there and that the whole market was down, but we were feeling pretty hopeful. Now, all of a sudden it goes up, it shoots up tremendously. We passed the two trillion market cap. We were just at 1.28 trillion, not too long ago. And now people are like in the dumps. Look, it's not gonna be all up. But today, I still think it's a pretty good day. But yeah, we are down a little bit, negative 2%. Bitcoin's at 48,214. Ethereum's at 3,200, it's still pretty good. Cardano's just blowing things up to 80 of 40% for the week and 5% down for the five day average. But when we talk about the big thing, which is what's gonna happen tomorrow, it'll be interesting to see what happens. And that's the whole point of the thumbnail. So let me just do this. Let's just jump into today's top story and with the Cardano highlights. Oh, actually first, I wanna talk about this, which was the traditional markets. Cause I'm always interested to see what's going on. I mean, of course with our market, crypto and digital assets, but how does it correlate with what's going on in the traditional war? Because as we see, we know that there is a lot of overlap between the traditional space and our space. Well, this is from Charlie Baleo. He's always got great stuff. Give him a follow on Twitter, founder and CEO of Compound Capital Advisors. He's always got the great stats. And he just said, hey, look, today is the first day of all time that NASDAQ hit 15,000 or the NASDAQ composite 15,000. August 24th, that's a pretty good indicator. And I was thinking myself, well, I wonder how the rest of the traditional market is. So I always take a look at the S&P 500 and I just kind of scaled it back by five years. And you can see we're like at an all-time high for traditional markets as well. So, I mean, if you look at what's going on in the crypto market and what's going on in the traditional space, you can say, yeah, there's a correlation. What I want to see, and what I think a lot of people are hoping for is can we uncorrelate from these traditional markets? I don't know if we ever can because there's so many different big institutions and players coming into this space that it's kind of hard for them not to because look, what's open 24-7, 365? Cryptocurrency. All right, so that's what's going on there. Let's jump into it, shall we? So this was a quick or brief update that Charles Hoskinson, the CEO or head guy over there at IOHK, broke Cardano and he just gave a couple of different things. And the first thing was, it's all right here. I'm gonna link this video in the description, but I'm just gonna give you a quick summary of what's going on. Let me blow this up so you can see what I see. So he talks about dates and announcements. The first thing he talks about was this, are different listings. And this is what I was thinking about might be pretty big for Cardano, which is Cardano is gonna be listed on Bitcoin on the 25th of August. I'll get to that a little bit more detail later. But he also talked about the Cardano summit. And if you don't know, the Cardano summit is going to happen on September 25 and 26. And it's gonna be a mesh of virtual happenings and actual live in different cities. So you can sign up for there, it's 100% free. I'm gonna do that myself. Maybe they'll go to kind of Puerto Rico where I'm at. Who knows, but that'll be interesting. And then he also talked about the big thing, which was the smart contracts at five minutes and 15 seconds. And basically what he said here between the dates and the about the smart contracts Alonzo, there was two big things that he said. One, he goes, everything's on time. He goes, so don't worry about that. We did, he talked about how the audit with Quantstamp went about a year ago and how they're trying to play, they're not trying to play catch up. They've already done the actual audit. Quantstamp said, hey, there was a couple of things you need to change. Actually it was very rigorous. They did all those changes. They went back to Quantstamp and said, hey, reevaluate what we just did. And they go, yeah, sure, pay us six figures. And Charles is like, no. So they're looking out for somebody else to actually do it. But he said that all the different things that Quantstamp said for them to change that actually did. Another thing that he talked about as far as like the smart contracts is that September 12th is going to be the day and they're going to release the smart contracts. Now everything's gonna be on a test net first. They're gonna run it through its paces but that's pretty much how they do everything they're at Cardano just to make things that are safe. And the third thing he said, which I thought was one of the most interesting things was he said that they're partnering up with a lot of different players in the cryptocurrency space, competitors, he said. And they're trying to work together to bring about some change and some really great things. And I thought to myself, that's fantastic. I've always thought in my small mind was that cryptocurrency can't survive with 10,000 projects, it's just not gonna happen. I think what's really gonna have to happen is either they're gonna be a lot more collaboration or there's gonna be a lot more absorption where you're gonna see some big type of entities like a Cardano, like an Ethereum, like a chain like start to just merge and acquire these other smaller projects and start to become even stronger and stronger. It worked pretty well for the e-commerce space, Amazon worked pretty well for the social media space. I mean, depending on who you ask, if you're talking about Facebook and what's happened, Instagram and things like that, I think that would be the next wave of what's about to happen. And I for one am excited. So that was pretty much in a nutshell. He goes over a couple more things again in the video, I'll link it, but those are the big things and the big takeaways from me. Let me know what you think about that in the comment section. Let's go on to the big story and what the whole thumbnail was built around, which was this. Cardano is to be launched on the 25th of August and get listed in Japan on this exchange called Bitpoint. Now, I'm not from Japan, shocker. And I don't know anything about Bitpoint. I try to look up some things. There's different basic information about it, but Bitpoint and especially just how rigorous, I guess the exchanges are in Japan, they're a lot more rigorous than some of our exchanges. We'll just say that. And for Cardano to be listed, it's a big deal, but I didn't know how big a deal it was. And it states here that lists such as this aren't constantly occurring. You've got Cardano is now one of the currencies on Japanese exchanges like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. And when I took a look at Bitpoint, I didn't see a lot of listings. I mean, I saw those Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. And then I saw another different article where it says that to get listed on Bitpoint, and this is just hearsay, so I'm not from Japan. So correct me please in the comment section, if you are from Japan or know a lot of things in Japan, is Bitpoint that big of a deal because they were comparing it to like in that region to almost like a Coinbase or a Coinbase effective. If that is true, then Cardano could see quite a big pump tomorrow, the 25th, when it'll be listed on Bitpoint. So again, let me just think about that. That could be big, but you have to remember this. Last thing I'll say is these little ups and downs aren't the big play. The big play is what's gonna happen the next year, three years and five years. So always have that in the back of your mind. This is not investment advice, just investment opinion. I do not care what's happening in the short term. I do not care of all the different foot articles and things like that. I just see what's gonna happen in the future. And I've been doing this since 2017, just a lot of cost averaging. I think that if I just stick around for quite a long time, quite a bit of time, I think things will work out. And that's it for that piece. Let's finish up with two more, or actually one more snippet, US mayors of Bitcoin and we'll do the giveaway. So this was, it was an interesting article because mayors are politicians too. And politicians aren't really much to be trusted with, but hey, if you're speaking my language, I'll listen to you. And this was Mayor Scott Conger, I hope it's all right, of the US city of Jackson, Tennessee. And he states, as the feds continue to print more USD, this chart, and he was talking about the Bitcoin chart, will continue to rise, Bitcoin could be the present, could be the present, but is definitely the future monetary system and F 21 million, there isn't anymore. This is Scott Conger, so I will link him in the description. I've already followed him. I like that guy's style. I'll stick around and see what he's got to say. And he just references this. But what's more interesting, there was a couple more things. In April, he talked about doing a payroll conversion for city employees, as well as Bitcoin mining to add Bitcoin to the city's balance sheet. And then in July, he tweeted, how the city can accept property tax payments in Bitcoin and allow our employees to DCA in Bitcoin. Totally speaking my language, this guy's talking about, hey, look, we want you to be successful. You are a government employee. Here's what we can set you up with, dollar cost average, maybe they do like a little bit of education snippet, or maybe they just tell them to go to Dante Descripto. I'm just kidding. But yeah, I mean, that is a politician looking out for the betterment of his constituents. And I think that could play out very well. And lastly, to finish up Mayor Jason Stewart of Cool Valley, Missouri, said he's raising funds to give $1,000 in Bitcoin to every resident in the city. Another mayor who sounds like he gets it. And of course, Mayor Francis Suarez from Florida. But just so you know, Cool Valley, Missouri has like a whopping population of like 1,300 people. And then Conger or Tennessee, where is he in Jackson, Tennessee? That's like 63,000. So not like it's a huge amount. And hopefully everybody's safe over there in Tennessee. There's major floodings, but that's awful. But as far as this goes, it's a very, it's a positive step in the right direction, especially, I mean, if you take a look at, and if you work in the mayor's office in any kind of city that you are a resident of, just be aware that there's this thing called a pension crisis. And if you're not from America, we are like in deep in this type of thing. So nearly, let me just read this to you real quick, just as a little snippet. Nearly every state in the United States is facing a pension shortfall. States have a combined 4.2 trillion in pension liabilities. These are all types of government employees, different type of employees that just get a pension and live off that for the rest of their lives. But less than three trillion in assets that decide to pay for those pensions. Let me do some quick math. 4.2 minus three, 1.2 trillion dollars. That's a lot of money. So if you're looking for a way potentially to roll this all together, maybe cryptocurrency might be your answer. Again, if you're a mayor, that's just an investment opinion. You can do what you want, but it seems like a pretty good deal. All right, so that's it for that. Let's get into the giveaway. I'm gonna make this really quick. So this was for the Golden or a Boris. The group over at Cardano comments, send me one to do what you want with it. I said, sure, we'll do a giveaway. NFTs, right, whatever. So I just said all you had to do was just pretty much comment and follow me and follow the guys over there at Cardano Combat and what I'm gonna do. So I never liked that whole thing. We put it through a randomizer and we randomly found somebody and their name is Joe Smoh or whatever else. I'm like, did you really? So let's just do this. Who is this? Klein-Vock, great. First of all, did you do? Did you follow me? Whoops, let me go back. Follows you, great. Klein-Vock, congratulations, you're a winner. Let me do this, do this. You're a winner. You're a winner. Damn me. Okay, and that's it. So congratulations to Klein-Vock. He apparently is the winner and as you can probably see, just randomized it and that's what we got to today. So look, that is it for today. If you liked today's video and you found a little value, go ahead and give it a thumbs up. I know a lot of people didn't win, so I probably like thumbs down, but you know, hey, whatever. Also, if you like this type of comment where you listen to the things that are happening right now that could help you get into the crypto market and maybe make some moves, consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about are time sensitive and that's it for today. So thanks so much, I appreciate it. See you on the next one.