 I got to tell you, I'm not usually super bullish or an excitable person, but today's little video clip we're going to take a look at with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink makes me pretty darn bullish. And you've probably already seen this clip circulating around. It's been quite the talk today. And if you're unfamiliar, this is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Yes, that is that BlackRock that is going for a Bitcoin ETF. And what's amazing to me first is just the amount of 180 Larry has done. As you may remember, back in 2017, Larry Fink called Bitcoin an index of money laundering. And what is amazing more so is that BlackRock is filing for a Bitcoin spot ETF, a lot bit different than futures. And the spot ETF, you actually have to buy the underlying asset and futures, you don't have to do that. And of course, you insure it and do whatever you want to do. But BlackRock, not only do they file, but then you've had also other ones that have come behind them, Fidelity, Valkyrie, and ARC and a host of other ones. And they've had to do some little rearranging of the wording who will be the custody. It's going to be Coinbase, which I find quite odd because Coinbase is at odds right now with the SEC. But it's amazing to me that Larry gets up and goes on national publication on a news channel such as Fox Business and says this exact phrase on Bitcoin. So just take a listen. And also, I do believe the role of crypto is it's digitizing gold in many ways. Instead of investing in gold as a hedge against inflation, a hedge against the onerous problems of any one country or the devaluation of your currency, whatever country you're in, let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. It's not based on any one currency. And so it can represent an asset that people can play as an alternative. I would call it the foundation of BlackRock is about hope. You invest for retirement because you believe tomorrow is better than today. Have you ever seen a CEO look so happy after turning a 180 on his original stance? To me, I have to tell you, I'm not too convinced that this ETF is going to be approved, could be wrong, hope I'm wrong, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the largest hedge fund, the largest asset manager that is out there, which is BlackRock with 9 trillion plus assets under management, just came out and let everybody globally know exactly how big Bitcoin actually is and where things are going. So to me, again, I'm not usually majorly bullish, but you can't get much more bullish than that. Let me just think about that in the comments section. And to me, it's also interesting, you know, the timing. We can take a look right now that I don't know if you knew this, but the top performing assets in 2023, number one is Bitcoin. Next one is information tech, Nasdaq's up 38%, Communication 36, Consumer Discretionary, Russell and I grow 27%. The worst is crude oil down 12, energy down 9, utilities down 5, financial up 3. But when I took a look at this, I'm like, is that true, are we really up 80% for the year? It just, I mean, time goes by so fast. And I took a look at it and this is from January 1st, 2023, when we launched this year. It's 16,674. And now of course, we're roughly almost at 31,000. So yeah, we're doing pretty miraculous, not miraculous, doing pretty darn good. So again, I think it's just interesting timing that everybody kind of just sees it like, Hey, this is this asset really is crushing it right now. And I got to tell you, as time moves on, even though we're up 80%, I mean, Bitcoin, the white paper was in 2008, Genesis Lockdown 2009, there's still going to be people are going to say, you know, it's the Tula bubble. And those people are moronic, because I don't know about this, but Tula Mania only lasted a maximum of three years. So there comes a point when you have to really think to yourself, why don't I understand Bitcoin? What does everybody know that I don't know? And maybe how should I get on board? Anyhow, that's what we have for that piece. And then also, I don't know if you knew this, but Bitcoin is no longer correlated to US stocks. Cryptoanalytics firm Block Skoll says, and if you want to take a look at correlation and a host of other different macro and crypto launch and analysis, there's Ben's website on the Cryptiverse. I steal from it every single time that I possibly can. And right here, you can see the S&P and you can do whatever you want to. You can compare Bitcoin, TotalMarket, XRP, I don't know, Dogecoin to a secondary asset. And in this case, we're going to be S&P 500. And again, if it's zero, then of course it's just null and void. It's just inert. If we're talking about positive, then it's up to one, which means it's totally, perfectly correlated to the markets. And if it's negative, it's doing the exact opposite. And we're going to see right here, it is pretty much uncorrelated at 0.10. Now, we're taking a look at a correlation time limit of 90 days. You can do whatever you want to do and take a look at a 30 day. It looks a little bit more noise, 60 days, 180 days, and so on and so forth. But if we take a look at the 90 day, I mean, we are pretty much uncoupling at this point from the stock market, which would be S&P 500. How far will we go? Well, we're pretty down on correlated. We'll see if we match up. But right now, again, I have to tell you, the best asset so far in 2023, even though we're not at all time highs, is Bitcoin. And that is why I try to DCA and talk about dollar cost averaging as much as I possibly can. We had covered this story three or four days ago, but it's just a good reminder, as Wicked says here, that every single pleb who has been DCA-ing is now in profit, no matter when they started DCA-ing. And I take a look at this orange timeline here. And everything that's underneath that, that means that you are underneath this line itself, that everybody who has been DCA-ing and continually, even if you DCA-ed at the very tip top of Bitcoin and we're doing it from time on out, you would still actually be in profit right now. So again, it goes to show you that just sometimes, there as far as investing goes, it's not a bad idea to have a long time horizon. And unfortunately, that time horizon may be a little bit rocky, as this is from Dan Gemordello over there at Crypto Capital Ventures. And he did the hard work in heavy lifting for me. The FOMC minutes are in. And this is what they state, there's gonna be a mild recession later in the year, then moderately paced recovery. So just be aware that not everything goes up and to the right, and things are gonna get a little bit rocky, that's just how it goes. Also, possibly expect another rate hike here in July. Expect a slower policy tightening. Most of the members anticipate at least one more rate hike this year, maybe July, maybe August, who knows. Expect a slower pace of increases. And some officials have a reservations and suggest pausing rate hikes, which would be a second month in a row. We'll see what happens. But again, just remember that, even though we talk right now on the show, I talk about how great things are looking and I'm pretty bullish in this episode, just know that we're gonna see a little more rockiness as time goes on. And lastly, to finish up, I just wanna do a follow-up with one of the projects we had featured on the show called Meld. And we had been following them for over two years. And if you know what's going on with the Cardano ecosystem, right now they are crushing it. We've got some different parts of like liquid finance, also with Wi-Fi and a host of other ones, Indigo Protocol. And they're all built on Cardano and there's a lot of things that are just taking off. And one of those, not yet I don't think, is Meld. And the reason why I wanted to do a follow-up is because six months ago, they actually were getting a license to become a Neobank in 146 countries. And then yesterday, I saw this little piece where it says get early access to the Meld Neobank. And I thought it was interesting and then there was also an airdrop coming up. So if you don't know, there's a video, I'll link it in the description for the deep dive. And really what it is, it's DeFi Banking, which pays for the loans if you wanted to go that route. It sounds complex, it's not too complex. One idea is I reached out to Ken Olling, he is the founder and I just talked to him for about eight minutes or so and he's gonna tell us exactly what's going on. So let's jump into that interview. So here's what's going on. We just did a little piece and we talked about this Neobank that you guys have started up. And we had talked about this six months ago, credit or product became its own Neobank in 146 countries. And not surprisingly, we had talked about your project two years ago. I can't believe it's been that much time. And now here we are talking about the Meld Neobank and what's happening and MeldFi access. So the question I have for you, I've got threefold. First of all, just do a quick Meld recap for it. What is it, what's coming up? Second piece is access to Neobank. What does that mean and what's the benefits? And let's just talk about it. Let's get the, let's air it out. Primetrust versus Meldis custody, as it pertains to everything else that has collapsed, which should be the Voyager, the Celsius, the FDX's. And lastly, let's get to the big thing is how can we verify the things you're gonna say? So, Ken, let's jump into it. What the heck's Meld? What is it and what's coming up? Yeah, like you said, thanks Rob. We started two years ago now. And the basic idea was to have a lending and borrowing protocol that allowed you to lock up your crypto in a smart contract in a non-custodial way and then borrow a fee out against it. So that led us to needing to create our own bank because we weren't able to work with any existing institutions. We weren't willing to work with a crypto company. So we follow that path and it's been long and painful and a real struggle, but we finally got to the point where we are now allowing access for a crypto neobank to be able to offer both fee out services and connected to a non-custodial wallet. Gotcha. Okay, so that part all makes sense. And then just real quick, Meld, as far as like a high level, what is Meld supposed to do? Loans, loans that pay themselves. That's what we talked about before, but what is it moving into? Yeah, so Meld is basically allowing people to get some liquidity for their crypto. So you can take your whatever crypto you have and you can put it into the lending and borrowing protocol, generate a yield. So you don't have to borrow. You can just simply use it and put it into a liquidity pool and then generate a yield against that. Or if you want to borrow from it, then you can borrow and you can borrow the same way you could with an Aave or a compound or you can take out crypto. Or, and this is the unique component, you're able to actually take out fiat. And that fiat goes from the lending and borrowing protocol directly into your bank account. Gotcha. I gotta tell you, when people hear the word yield, everything puckers up, let's be honest. But I will tell you this, everybody who stakes with DNews, which is a Kodano stake pool, you guys are earning yield. And not too bad as a matter of fact, over the last two years or so. And you guys have based things on Cardano as well as Avalanche, correct? We started on Cardano and now we've expanded out to Avalanche. We're building our own layer one built on the Avalanche subnet architecture. So from a technical perspective, we're at our own layer one. And that's what allows us to have really capital efficient transactions. It allows us to do tight integration between the banking side and the blockchain. So one of the things we wanted to do is pull some of these banking transactions and put them on chain, sort of see the benefits of on chain data, not just simply take the traditional route of traditional finance. Perfect. All right, so that'll lead me to our next question. Let's get into it. Neobank, what does it mean? What's the benefit? And how can we trust you? Because I mean, prime trust, a lot of people are trusting them and they essentially are collapsing. We'll see what actually happens. So how does that work as meld as a custody provider? Right, and so two years ago when we started, the basic idea, the concept behind it was we don't like custody of any kind. Because custody doesn't work, we want to have control of our own assets, our keys, our coins. This is the basic mantra that we started from and that we are continuing to follow. So when it comes to the assets that you have, if you're going to do lending and borrowing, all of that is in your custody. It's through a non-custodial wallet, either MetaMask or the meld app or other wallets that you can connect to and adapt to. And kind of in a strange way, it's also the same case on the fee outside. So what we're getting is an electronic money license based in Lithuania. And that affords us to handle money so we can take deposits and do debit cards and do transactions. But we can't keep the money. We can't hold the money. We have no control over the money. We only facilitate transactions and we sort of facilitate the deposit of it. But the actual deposit happens at the central bank of Lithuania. So in that sense, also the fee outside is non-custodial for us. Gotcha. Okay, well that sounds pretty good. So when we're talking about access to a NIO bank, it is essentially an online bank that you can move funds through. But it's actually, you guys don't do the movement itself or the storage. It's actually in the central banks, right? We do the movement. We don't do the storage. We facilitate all the transactions. We make it so that you can take your fiat. We support 15 different currencies. You can convert it to different fiat. You can use it in a debit card. You can convert it to crypto. You can convert crypto back to fiat. We facilitate the movement of the digital asset and the fiat, but we just don't handle it. We don't keep it. We're just moving it from one place to another. Gotcha. Okay, so that would lead me to one of our last questions. And also, well, actually it brings up, there's two questions I have. First of all, where is this going to be allowed? I'm in America, so I don't think that's gonna come over here. Or is it America, Europe, Asia markets? Where is this gonna be available? Yeah, so we really wanted to go to the US, but in the current climate in the US and the sort of position that the SEC and Treasury have had, we think that it's gonna be too dangerous for us to sort of operate in that space. We need a bit more clarity as of right now. That might change. We really want to offer it to Americans, but it's just a big question. We will be offering it to expats, so Americans living abroad, like I said. That's no problem, but actually Americans are being in the States. At this point in time, it's gonna be difficult. Outside of that, other than sanctioned countries like Iran and North Korea, we can offer this, or we are offering this service to anybody who wants to sign up. Excellent. Okay, and then here's the last question then. Ken, I don't believe you. Yeah. So here's the thing. I've had a lot of people on the show and they tell me great stuff and then they've been lying to me. How can we verify this? Correct, exactly. It's true. How can we verify this? Because I mean, you can't trust it. You gotta verify nowadays. And that's part of the reason why we've taken what you might consider to be a difficult path. So on the crypto side, it's not a problem because it's an on custodial wallet, everything is on chain, you own it, you control it, it's yours. On the banking side, that's not the case, right? On the banking side, yes, there are regulations for what you can and can't do. So some of those regulations can help in regards to transparency. One of them is we can't do anything with customer funds. What that means is from the Bank of Lithuania's perspective, at the end of every day, the books have to balance in a simple manner. Can't balance in a sophisticated way because we can't do lending and stuff like that. It has to balance in a simple manner. The amount of deposits that are there have to be there at the end of every single day. So what we're doing is we're building our own banking stacks. We use an existing modern banking stack and we've been modifying it. So some of these transactions and some of these balances will be going on chain. So we'll be taking some of the banking information and bringing it on chain for this formal direct verification. So for example, if you take your Bitcoin, you lock it up into a smart contract and you want to borrow fiat against it, you get that on chain all the way to the point where the exchange happens from fiat, from crypto to fiat, right? So we're going to make it so that that last step in our banking stack will be reported be an oracle on chain. So you'll be able to validate it all the way to your account. Once it hits your account, then it's anonymized so that we don't sort of have to, you know, share private banking information with people or with the public, but up until that point it is. And then in regards to the balance, the balance will bring on chain as well. So every day you will see the balance of the bank and you'll know what the Bank of Lithuania has in regards to the funds connected to the Neobank. This is our goal is to, our starting point is DeFi, our starting point is non-custodial, our starting point is transparency. And what we're trying to do is separate the fiat and the crypto as much as possible and bring some of the best parts of crypto onto the fiat side. Gotcha, okay. That would leave me, well, this is the last question, last last, I swear to God, this is the question. So, I mean, this all sounds great and everything else. Like I know how to take a look at on chain data and take a look at it, but a lot of people don't. So like something like this, like if you take a look at ETHscan, you can see all the different transactions and people like that's great, but I'm gonna guess that some of my subscribers, the people or you watching this video right now, you may know how to actually take a look at this, but some people don't. Ken, how can we learn about on chain data analysis? Do you have anybody you could bring on that would show us specifically what's going on on chain as far as metal goes? And in a modern way, right? Because it's not on chain anymore. It's about multiple chains because you're bridging now. Right. So yeah, I mean, Pepe, our CTO, he's been leading us now for almost a year. He'd be a perfect person to bring on and talk about this. He can walk through all the details, but he also can talk about it in a very, very natural and sort of normal person way, not necessarily a technical way. Cool, well, okay, I'm gonna hold you to it. Well, Pepe on, we'll do like a quick video education series someone so we can show people how to take a look at on chain data analysis, especially as it pertains to meld on Cardano and Avalanche and move from there. Ken, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate it. Thank you, Rob. It's always nice to be here. All right, I'll see you. All right, everybody, let's jump back. All right, so Ken, thanks again for stopping by. I really appreciate it. Also as a little reminder, meld hasn't taken off yet and I'm not giving you financial advice. I am super biased because I've invested into meld. I hope you should know that. Everything I talk about on this channel is because I own it. But you can see here that even at it's all time high, which we're taking a look at May of 2023, which wasn't too far ago, we're looking at two cents. And right now it's roughly a penny and a half. So we're talking about 33% down, which is actually better than a lot of cryptos that are out there. This was in a heavily bearish market. So again, I think things looking pretty good for meld. I'll let you be the sider for that and what you want to do with your finances. And lastly, I just want to remind everybody that unfortunately in the comments section, there's a lot of spam because we use a service called YouTube Guard or YT Guard. And right now, for some reason, YouTube has decided to dispel them and not allow them to have integration. So right now you're gonna see a little bit more spam than you usually would for that, we apologize. We're trying to get YouTube or YT Guard back on and hopefully it can wipe out all the spam. But right now we have to do a thing manually because all the bots are out. But that's it for today. So look, if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing. A lot of things are going on. It's only gonna accelerate as we get into the Bitcoin halving which will be around April, March or April of 2024 and beyond. So that is what is going on for today. So thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate it and I'll see you on the next one.