 Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in crypto and break them out of bite-sized pieces. So today we've got, I think this is one of the biggest stories that really goes unnoticed because people glance it over and it's massive and really what it comes down to is Brian Armstrong just met with the Fed Chair Jerome Powell and he says US needs to be a major crypto player to stay relevant and he talks about a lot of different things. One of those being the digital yuan and he talks about how it is a threat to national security. We'll take a look at what he says there. Also, we're going to take a look at how the Bitcoin money difficulty dropped 28%, which is the largest drop ever. On top of that, we'll take a look at some a little bit of pain that is coming up as far as the grayscale Bitcoin trust being unlocked. On top of that, that's going to go in conjunction with what CEO of Celsius, Alex Moschinski, said as he gives his price prediction and he talks about a couple of pain points, one of those being the unlock part of grayscale and gives his price prediction for Bitcoin. So we'll go over all those things and finally, at the very end, after the end of this premiere, just so you know, we're going to have a live viewing of what I call the final predictions with my friend Jerry Hall. So after this premiere, stop on over on the live stream and we're going to go over all the different predictions that we have and then the new ones that are put into my portfolio that I picked up lately and we'll go over everything that I have in my portfolio. So that'll be after this live premiere. But first, let's take a look at what's going on the market. So right now, it is the 4th of July. Great day for Americans. There's nothing really going on for me right now. I'm just waiting to go to a cookout. So I'll do that later tonight and then I'll watch some fireworks and all that stuff and probably eat a little bit too much and maybe drink a little bit too much. But hey, America. So anyhow, the market cap today, it's looking good. Usually we have a Sunday dump, but it seems like after everything that happened with China, we don't see too many of those Sunday dumps and those Asian markets just, you know, poo-pooing all over the place. And like I hope it continues, but it seems like Sunday isn't the dump day. It seems like sometimes it's like a Monday or Tuesday, but we're at $1.48 trillion. That's pretty good. And then Bitcoin price is about $35,000. And over the last 24 hours, I mean, we've seen some pretty good numbers. Anything fantastically blow this up so you can see on the C, 24 hours. Yeah, Bitcoin 5%, 3% for XRP. Watch out. XRP 3.9, 11% for Uniswap. Man, on a massive tear. Good for that. Three points. So look, everything's up primarily. And that's great. We'll see if it holds up. But I'm not a big day-to-day person. I'm more really about long-term. And this story that we're going to talk about right now, this one, the Coinbase and the Fed, this is probably the biggest story out there. And I know people just glance over it because it's regulation. Nobody cares about regulation because it's boring. But let me tell you right now, this is what's going to shape this entire industry, entire cryptos and digital assets. This is where things are made or broken. And if we get this right, it could be moonshot for a lot of different things. It was the same thing with the Internet. They got regulation with the Internet correct, which was a little bit of regulation and mostly hands-off. And if they don't screw this up, America, we could do some great things. So Brian Armstrong, I got to tell you, I haven't been a fan of him in Coinbase, as you know, on this channel. But he has made some great points. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So Brian Armstrong meets with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Not that Jerome's an enemy. He's just Fed Chairman. What are you going to do? Anyhow, this meeting's details are unclear. But most of the discussions revolved around the construction of an American Central Bank digital currency, a CBDC, and countries that are already ahead of the game, China. China is crushing it right now with that digital yuan. They've already rolled it out. They've already had some big things happen. They've actually put it into the hands of commerce industry. And they're going to beat the tar of everybody because they've got it going on. There's not a great thing about it. I mean, it can really do some damage as far as the world economy. You could see the US dollar being overtaken as the world reserve currency. You may laugh now. But in this article, it's been talked about to a lot of heads of state. So anyhow, Brian here has met with a couple of high ranking people. One of those, you've got Nancy Pelosi. You've got Ryan here. He used to be a big congressman. I think he was head of Congress for a little bit, and probably just took a nice little job in the private industry. So he's a mover and a shaker. And this is what happened. Brian states, I spent most of this week in DC, meeting with members of Congress and heads of various federal agencies. The goal was to establish relationships and help answer questions about crypto and to see what we can do to help the US get more regulatory clarity in this space as part of the newly formed crypto council for innovation. He goes on to further talk about crypto is as important as the birth of the internet in terms of jobs, GDP growth, and innovation it can create. The US will need to be a major player in crypto to stay relevant long term. And I got to tell you, this is a perfect way to phrase it to Congress, because if you just go in there and just talk about, we're going to make a lot of money and it's going to be great. They're like, we don't care. But if you sort of say this is a national security issue, and if you guys don't get on board, you're going to see all the different other countries just pass us by. So we need to take the bull by the horns now or get left behind. And we saw that as we leapfrogged everybody after World War II, and we just caught up with everything, became the World Reserve currency, and we became a national or a global dominant force. If you want to lose that, here's one of the ways you do it. And that will make Congress and people in power sit up and go, hmm, maybe we should look in this. I personally believe that there's a couple of things that's going to lead to global domination. One of those is artificial intelligence. The next one is, of course, commerce. The third one is blockchain, crypto, and digital assets. So to finish this up, Armstrong says, legal uncertainty is a major problem. And I have to 100% agree with Brian Armstrong on this. I know people are shouting at their screens and now saying, crypto doesn't need any regulation. Let's just keep going. Forget everybody. We don't need anybody. We'll just get there on our own. That's true. If you want to wait 50 years, 30 years or something like that. Right now, it's best to play a little bit nice and get into the game as a Trojan horse and then take over everything. It's a lot easier to get in that way than just to bludgeon yourself and try to just overtake everything. Trust me. And as we talk about regulation, it'll make sense. Armstrong further said that he thinks China's digital yuan advances could be a threat to the US dollar. Absolutely. I mean, look, if you had a digital yuan, CBDC, I think a lot of people could pick it up. I don't think Americans will. Are you out of your mind? Do you think digital yuan? Look, America banned TikTok for a little bit because they didn't like what was going on with the industry as far as telecommunications and what was going on with these, whatever was in the program itself. So do you really think they're going to do a lot of things with their digital yuan and monetary policy? Yeah, right. But other countries could and that could be a problem. He says it is real digital yuan. They are moving quickly and I believe it represents a threat to US reserve currency status. Let me say that again. I believe it threatens the US reserve currency status long term if the US doesn't move quickly to create their own. The CEO of Coinbase stressed that the bureaucrats and agency heads he met with were all thoughtful and committed individuals and some cryptos might be securities as regulated by the SEC. Some are commodities and should be regulated by the CFTC and some are currencies or property and should be regulated by the Treasury or the IRS and some are none of the above. And this is really what it comes down to. This means fewer startups who are able to brave the legal uncertainty, they're going to be the ones that are going to be caught in the crosshairs. Some of them wind up founding their companies abroad or not at all. That's a major problem and that really is what it comes down to. Regulatory clarity. If you're a startup industry, why would you start anything in America as far as crypto and digital assets? You're going to go to Singapore. You're going to go to the EU, not UK. You're going to go to a lot of different places because in America you can't even do a private sale for these digital assets. Why would you do that? And on top of that, let's say you do launch something and then you get hit with like a billion dollar fine by the SEC like EOS, but you're not EOS and you're just starting up good luck covering that expense. Now you just got crushed. So all the people that say we want to do something in crypto and blockchain, we have this great idea glued to innovation. It could lead to jobs. It could lead to national security, whatever. They're not doing that here. They're going someplace else. So just like we see with Wyoming, just like we see with Texas and just like we see with Florida, as they open things up to the crypto and digital asset market, people start flooding in, jobs start being created and a lot of different things that are supposed to be done actually get done. Just let the free market work. This, I believe, I don't really care so much about the short term stuff. TA is great if you're looking at a very small finite amount of time, but for the longevity of this entire industry, it all starts with regulation. If we screw this up, it's going to take a heck of a lot longer, a heck of a lot more money, a heck of a lot more time to get where we want to go. This is super important because of that, just because of that. I'll reach out to any senator or congressman that I can, just to get this going. Also, one of the reasons why I'm going to follow Brian Armstrong on Twitter because, again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Brian Armstrong, I think, is doing a pretty great job. Now, if he could just drop those fees on Coinbase and then maybe get some more customer support, I'd love them to death, but that is what it is. Let me know what you think in the comment section, but I truly believe this is the biggest issue we're facing right now. All right, so that is that piece. Let's move on to just a little quick one. So the Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped 28%. And this, just as we've, let me comb over here, just as we've seen it before, the Bitcoin difficulty, the reason why it dropped, well, on-chain market analysis, Glassnode, there was a 28% decline, biggest adjustment in the history for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's total hash rate at roughly 86 tera-hashes, our total hash rate is now at a 19-month low, or they might say, some might say, it's not tera-hashes, it's ex-hashes, whatever. It went down 28%. That's all I care about. So why is that? And the rest of this is kind of boring. So I'll just sum it up like this. With all the Bitcoin miners that are in China, they shut down all their rigs, and they are moving it over. The thing is, and we've talked to a couple of different CEOs of Bitcoin mining companies, they can't just start right up away. It has to be built with infrastructure. And one of them told us that they said, hey, if you want to start this up, we're looking at 2023 for you guys to come over here, get the infrastructure in place, get all the electricity, get all the things that you need, and set it up correctly. And they're like, huh? Yeah, it takes that long. So when we see this Bitcoin mining difficulty drop, it's because those miners that were churning and burning for all that time, those football fields, rows of Bitcoin miners that were 30 feet high, and just these huge warehouses, they're all stopped. And they're all trying to relocate. And they should have done their due diligence. They should have done their own research and said, look, maybe China isn't a great place to do this. Maybe we should get out of here a little bit quicker. And they didn't. And now, good luck. They can move to Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, I think I said it but they even just put a law in that is raising electricity specifically for Bitcoin miners. Again, we won't do that here. Come on down to Texas. We love you. We'd love to have you. Wyoming, love to have you too. Florida, same thing. Maryland, love to have you. So just come over to America. It's great here. All right. So let me know what you think about that in the comments section. But yeah, as those Bitcoin miners drop off, the difficulty drops, you're down almost a third. And of course, it's a lot less difficult for these home miners to do everything. And that's just a difficulty level. So great, I'm happy. And guess what? Network is still secure. I'll take it better than having it all in China. Just my two cents. Speaking of which, well, I guess not speaking of which, our next piece, the grayscale unlock. And this was actually sent to me from First Coast Crypto. First Coast Crypto, thank you so much. I have to follow you for this. Thanks. So what this is, is that the grayscale Bitcoin trust. As you know, people are not like us, right? Some people, all they want to do is they say, we don't want to deal with exchanges or do deal OTC or whatever else. We just want to pay somebody like the traditional way. And then for them to invest us into Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever kind of trust that you have. And then you guys custody it, we don't want to deal with, we don't lose it. And then if the appreciates, great. And we'll cash out later. Or, you know, you can give us the Bitcoin. And that's what's happening. So after so much timeframe, whether that be six months, eight months, 12 months, 18 months, there is a unlock period where that Bitcoin that the people have actually given their money into for the trust, now they can sell all that Bitcoin. So just so you know, this is potentially, and this may be priced in, I'm not for sure, but look around these dates. This is one about 4,000, 10,000, 6,000, up to 16,000 in one day. That looks to be about 18 July. All the way to 27 July, there's going to be an unlock period when all these people are going to be able to get their Bitcoin and sell off massively. And if they got it before, you know, a while ago, and it wasn't worth too much, and now it's worth 35, 40,000, probably going to sell. So just so you know, just like I've talked about before, July is not going to be a great month for crypto. And it's nothing's going to really happen until August. Ethereum will go up because of EIP 1559. And that'll happen in mid July. But after that, I don't see a lot of things happening. I think it'll just go sideways. And for me, I just dollar cost average. This is a great accumulation time. And it's where I make most of my money. Not when it goes up and it's all exciting. That's for rookies. I just invest when it's boring. And that's it. And I'll sell later. So just be aware, that's about what's going to happen. And this one was interesting because right after I saw that, I saw this from Alex Machinese, the CEO of Celsius. And he gave a nice price prediction. And he says, we have seen two capitulation selling events for Bitcoin in the past two months. Retail FOMO bought the run up to 65k and then sold 33 billions worth. Flash selling last week of three billion that include miners in China retail and some FUD selling and people just got scared. And we're about to see the third and last wave. He says we're about to get one more wave of selling mostly from the FOMO 20 billion worth of grayscale Bitcoin, institutional trades, hedge funds use leveraged loans from Genesis Trading and others to buy Bitcoin in January, February. And oh, wow, it's only in January, February. That will become unlocked for the first time starting next week. So January, February, March, April, May, June. Geez, that sucks. Like six months. So at least five billion will have to be unwound off grayscale Bitcoin, which may take Bitcoin prices back to the 29k levels. And I've said this before, I think it was always going to go to 28k. It was either 28 or 26k. I thought it was going to be somewhere around there. And then we just blast off. But that's what I got. But he did say after this July sell off, we should see smooth sailing for the rest of the year as we break new all time highs on our way to the 140 to 160k price range. I like what Alex says these things because Alex actually said that in January 16th of 2020, he says Bitcoin will finish the year above 30k. Well, he was wrong by like 500 bucks. So check this out. This is actually from CoinGecko. Here is the price from, I just pulled up for January 2020. It was $7,300, $7,300 bucks. And around that time, what was this? What was this? What was this? What was this? January 16th. So when Bitcoin was below 10k, it's going to hit 30k. And people were like, you're insane, whatever. And then of course, it just kind of goes sideways for a while. This is when I accumulated matter of fact, dollar cost average. And then what happened at the very end of the year? On 31st December 2020, I hit $29,022. So excuse me, he was off by about 900 bucks, $980, 978 bucks. So not too bad of a prediction for last year. Let's hope he's right this year. And that is it and brings us to the last point, which is after this premiere, that you're sitting here watching with me and I'm typing away, answering everybody's questions. Come on down and chat with me and my friend Jerry Hall as we go over the price predictions for everything from Bitcoin to Ethereum and to Cardano into the new ones that I bought just recently. Basic attention token, Solana, Polygon, BTT, Mana, Mana, Mana, Mana, Digibytes. And I'm going to talk about Melden World Mobile Token. So that'll be right after this premiere. And that's it. So look, if you liked the video, first of all, thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. I appreciate it. Give it a thumbs up, give it a like. Also consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about on this channel are very time sensitive. And that's it. So after this, I will see you at the live premiere and the link will be in the description or we'll just send you there automatically. Hopefully I can see that up right. And that's so much for today. So thanks so much. Appreciate it. See you in the next one.