 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the good top stories in crypto and bringing on a bite-sized piece. Today, what we need to go over is a new report that just came out, a little report called the CPI Index and Inflation. So, we're going to take a look at just how high inflation has actually gone and what this actually means for the crypto and digital asset market. Also, we're going to take a look at a company, a 175-year-old company that's getting into NFTs and they're going to, or actually they've already created their own NFT marketplace. We're going to talk about an article where banks are just pretty much giving up and what this means for of course crypto and then we'll just do a recap of the meetup that we had last night here in Puerto Rico. So, we'll go for all those things but first let's take a look at what's going on into the market. So, today it is Wednesday, it's the 12th of January, another great day here in Puerto Rico and market cap continues to actually go up. We are at plus 11% or 2.07 trillion. Let me tell you, it is not easy, even me being in this space for years and years, to see everything just go down and down and down and down because at some point you're like, well, how far is going to go? That's why I dollar cost average in and dollar cost average out. I try to buy all the dips but like I said yesterday I'm all dipped out. So, this is like one of the few ones I could even buy but I wish I would have because you know 11% in 24 hours, not too shabby and we take a look at what is going on with the actual price action themselves. It's looking pretty good. I mean if we take a look at the Bitcoin price, almost $44,000. It thames up massively, almost $3,400. Binance coin is at number three space. Tether drops down because people aren't tethering up thankfully. Salon is up, everything's up. Cardano up 11% in 24 hours and XRP, you know, hey, good for XRP. Polkadot 12%, 12%. But just remember, even though we're up in 24 hours, if you look at this seven day change on the right hand side here, you'll see like there's still some gains to be had hopefully and some ground to make up. I mean Ethereum is down 12% over seven days. Binance coin 5%, Bitcoin 5%, Cardano 3, XRP 3. I mean you're going to see that there's still a lot of ground that we need to make up from what just happened. I mean except for near protocol. That seems to be immune to everything. And now in that number 17 spot, I actually picked some of that stuff up yesterday. So actually excuse me, a couple of days ago because I didn't have much money to do anything. So that's what we have as far as the market. Let's just break into today's top story, which I think you're going to hear this all over the news. You're going to hear this all over YouTube and Twitter and things like that, CPI inflation. So the consumer price index, this was just released. And it's going to be important because we want to see, we want to measure the sentiment of the actual consumers and what they think about what's going on. Because remember in this market, it's really what people's thoughts and feelings are. Sometimes it's just not so much about data because we are unfortunately emotional creatures and people sell out of fear or greed as they buy things up. So consumer price rises half a percentage in December and pushes inflation rates to nearly a 40 year high of 77, 70% of 7%. So not as transitory as the Federal Reserve thoughts, they thought it was around 4% or 5%. Now we're seeing 7%. Maybe down the road we'll see 9%. Some people say, some people have been saying it's a 7% for a long time. Some people say it's even a 14 or 15%. We just know that things are up. It's an insidious tax that kind of eats us all away. So how do we do that? Well, whatever you're investing into, you got to make sure that you at least keep up with inflation. And that's why if you're sticking things into your savings account, you're losing money left and right. Not financial advice, just financial opinion. Actually, that's just facts. I can't even say that's opinion. Okay, so here's what we got. Consumer prices rose a half a percent in December to push the increase in the cost of living last year to nearly a 40 year high of 7%, indicating a high US inflation is likely to persist into 2022. So right now, you at home as you're thinking to yourself, have you had a raise in the last year, three years, five years? Are you keeping up with the rate of inflation? Are you keeping up with the cost of living? If not, it's pretty much important and will actually behoove you potentially to take a look at some different things to invest into. Of course, in this channel, we talk about crypto and digital assets, but I get worried. I get worried when I see these types of numbers come out because how many people can actually keep up with inflation? Not too many. And I think it's just eating things away at a very slow pace. And before you know it, it becomes as they say, gradually then suddenly. And here we are today. All right. Inflation is stored due to strong customer demand and ongoing labor and supply shortages. You can see that all across the nation, probably globally. I even said here in Puerto Rico, it seems like you can't find anybody to actually do construction because either the people that are working, they already have jobs or people just don't want to work. And you see that all over the place. By contrast, while price pressures are likely to ease in 2022, economists estimate the rate of inflation will probably exceed 3% by year ends. I think it's going to go down a little bit, but sure. Okay. By contrast, inflation averages over 1.5% a year in the decade prior to the pandemic. So everything is pretty much going on with this pandemic. Pretty tough to do to create goods and services when everything's locked down. The statement is here from Chairman Jerome Powell. He said, the economy no longer needs or wants the very highly accommodative policies we've had in place to deal with them pandemic and the aftermath. I have to disagree with Jerome here. I think the stock market would love to have them step in and just pump money all day long because that's what has led to one of the biggest increases in recent memory for the stock market itself. And because of them injecting all this money and quantitative easing and pumping it into the markets, that's probably seen such a huge rise. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people will also be like, Jerome, we'd love you to keep pumping in money. Maybe I'm wrong. Let me know in the comments. Rent rose 0.4% for the third month in a row as housing emerges as a bigger flash point of high inflation. Then to finish up, with the Fed moving to try to head off price pressures, investors don't appear as alarmed about the latest reading of high inflation. So right now it is 11 a.m. here in Puerto Rico, meaning that's Atlantic standard time. It's 10 o'clock in New York. It is 9 o'clock for the central time zone, 8 o'clock mountain and 7 o'clock Pacific. So this is the most early information that we can actually get. So we saw what's going on with the crypto market. Let's take a look at the traditional finance space and see if it affected anything. No, doesn't seem to seem to be like people like, yeah, we knew that the whole time. So not a big deal. We knew that the Fed was going to come out. We knew that the inflation rate was higher. We knew the CPI was going to go up and we knew that they're going to taper off things because they already said it. So maybe not a big deal. And even if we take a look at the NASDAQ and really seem to affect them at all as well. So if we take a look at this, maybe, maybe, some of that jitteriness, jitteriness is over and some of the consumers and some of the investors might actually have a steely spine and go, okay, we know what to expect. We know what's going to happen. But again, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and then off we go. Speaking of preparing, if we're talking about the inflation and the housing market and everything else that's going on, just remember, I have a wealth preservation strategy. And one of those is using Masterworks because I buy fractionalized share of pretty expensive art pieces because guess what? The super rich don't care what's going on in traditional markets or anything else. They just want to buy these super expensive. They want a Basquiat. They want a Banksy. They want a Pablo Picasso. And with this, I can purchase fractionalized share and they have 13.6% price appreciation from 95 to 2021. So again, you probably say, well, Rob, I don't care about that because I can make up a ton of money in crypto. True, but there's just different strategies and my goals aren't your goals. I'm just here to do a little preservation. Also, I trust capital. If you don't have a Roth IRA here in the States, remember it is tax free. And then also, all the trading that you do within your Roth IRA is taxed exempt. So if you feel like, hey, Bitcoin might go down, you can sell your Bitcoin, your Roth IRA, put it into cash, wait for it to go down, and then buy it back up within your Roth IRA, taxed exempt. And then also, if you're looking for different things about real estate, I've got a real estate playlist, all the things that I've used and me and my wife have used for short term rentals, how we purchase these houses, how we take a look and find the best places and so on and so forth. Just two videos. We're going to add a third one. We'll talk about this tomorrow. So if you're looking for those three things, there is a link in the description. It looks just like this. There's also an explainer video on iTrust and MashaWorks so you can really get your feet wet and understand it. And also all the different links are right there. And that's it. So check that out. Let me just think about that in the comments section. Let's move on to our next piece. What we're talking about this company, which is the Associated Press. I saw this and it didn't make much sense to me. I was like, why would the Associated Press do this? But now it kind of makes sense. So 175 year old news cooperative, the AP Associated Press plans to launch an NFT marketplace. And my question was, how the heck do they do that? And they did it by doing something very simple. I'll show you in a second. So the 175 year old news cooperative, the AP revealed that the organization is launching an NFT marketplace using the polygon blockchain network. First of all, great job. If you were going to launch this on Ethereum, I would be like, well, that makes sense because you know, you're kind of out of touch. But if you're using polygon, where the gas fees are next to nothing, and it's a layer two solution, then you can have a lot of people actually use these NFT marketplace and actually buy things without getting crushed with Ethereum gas fees. So if they're going to use a polygon, great, pretty good job. So looking good so far. And then this will allow NFT collectors to collect the news agency's iconic photojournalism. Polygon based NFT market will launch on January 31st, 2022. This is the statement from the AP, they say each NFT will include a rich set of original metadata, offering collectors awareness of the time, date, location, equipment, and technical settings used for the shot, which is, I mean, you can do that, you can buy the actual photography, but some of these things like the, like the settings and more the, the, the nuanced data, I guess you can put it in there. And you can do a lot of different things than FTs. I mean, you can give them like, as they, you can give them access to more, you know, different types of photos, you can give them access to like behind the scenes stories, you can do a lot of different things. And then as far as like the NFTs, it can be like, it's not just a copy of a copy, you have this particular one. And that's what the whole thing as far as a non-fundable token actually does. But when I was looking at this, I'm like, well, how they do it? I didn't highlight it, but they're using this system called X, I don't know how to say that, I'm going to say Zawa, probably nailed it. So Zawa will say, let's try not write this is pretty interesting. It's, they have a flagship product, the white label NFT marketplace, it deploys already to use end to end marketplace in just 45 seconds, meaning anybody can actually do this. And for crypto mainstream audiences, easy to use UI, user interface, fiat and crypto payments, custodial wallets, and non custodial wallets. And it's, I guess, a lot of different brands are using it, it's got full compliance and intellectual property protection, that's pretty cool protects against malicious users, royalties management, if you don't want to pay a company like that, well, you can just do it over here environmentally friendly, nice white label capabilities and permissioned or public chain. So when I saw this, I kind of thought I was kind of thinking to myself about just how we see the internet in the very beginning and how things were actually worked out, you know what a pain in the a it was to actually create a website, when they actually had like website builders come out, like with, what was it, geo cities, and then you had another one, I mean, GoDaddy has their own thing, and, and then all the different ones that are out today. So you don't really need even coding. So this is the kind of the same thing to do with like an NFT marketplace, just like, we'll just use our white label service. And if you take a look at that, I'm like, wow, I think that crypto and the internet have parallels. And this is a nice little chart. I think this was from real vision before, but internet versus crypto adoption. And you can see on the right hand side, total use total users and millions. And you can take a look at the timeline, the top 1992 thousand for the internet, 2014 to 2024, we're on our way. And just like Kathy Wood said, she thinks that Bitcoin will be well over 100k once we hit a billion wallets. And it seems like we're going in the right direction. So I'm going to think about that in the comment section. Let's move on to our second to last banks are giving up. And this one's sent to me by LM and thanks LM for this one. And I saw this and I'm like, that pretty much makes sense. So this is from a city bank to exit Mexico consumer banking business. And the bank sent Tuesday, just yesterday, it would exit consumer, small business and middle market banking in Mexico. So first of all, what's middle market banking? That's if you have businesses between that have revenues of 50 million to one billion. So they're going to just take that off the table. Also consumers and also small business. They're just like, no, we want to deal with you anymore. And this was best. This is best known as a Banamex. Those businesses that we just talked about those three consumer, small business and middle market banking account for about three and a half billion dollars in revenue in the first nine months of 2021, or about 6% of the bank's total revenue city bank city group will be keeping its investment banking and institutional business in Mexico, as well as private bank operations. And so I'm like, well, why, why change it over? This is why Ms. Frazier, who's the CEO in March, said that her goal has been to simplify the bank by concentrating on wealthy consumers and credit cards. So again, it's a free society. You can do whatever you want to it's an it's an open system. But I think banks are kind of and I don't know if this is what I crypto related. Well, you can debate about that in the comment section. But I think if you're looking at small businesses and different transactions, you know, you really do get eaten up in fees, like I use I use PayPal, and I use Stripe, but it's a 2.9% for each transaction plus 30 cents or 1.9% even 1%. But how much could you do as a small business? If you didn't have to have those fees, like we see in like El Salvador with the letting network, I mean, you can just have, I mean, almost free transactions, and just use a second layer solution such as that. So I think maybe banks are seeing the writing on the wall could be something different. But I just think it's something to note. And yeah, let me know what you think about that comments. And then lastly, and we'll get out of here, the meeting, the meetup recap. Let me tell you, yesterday was pretty fun. I must admit, it was, we had a Puerto Rico meetup here at Michalos, I think it was called. And we just made it very informal. And I was just on all honesty, I was like, man, I hope the great couple people show up. And then, as we got through, I mean, you know, we have a couple people here. And then we had, all of a sudden, it was like, before I knew it was like 30, 40, some odd people there. And it was interesting. And I want to say thanks for everybody who showed up. And I just want to do something like that just to kind of meet people and give back because some of the different meetups I've been to so far are kind of stuffy. And people just talking about things just way, way above the level, like again, like the Wall Street guy coming in and talking about how great Bitcoin futures contracts are. Sure. This was, I think, a little more productive for the people that listened to this channel. And we'll do it again. But that's it for today. So look, if you liked today's video, found a little value, give it a thumbs up, also consider subscribing, a lot of things we talk about are time sensitive. And that's it for today. So thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. See you on the next one.