 Interesting times today, everybody. As we move along our little endeavor to take a look at our portfolios and things that are going on the crypto and digital asset market, we tend to focus a lot on the price action, what the price is doing, is it going up, is it going down, how can I do a cost-based analysis and see where I'm going, and how, of course, do I make any type of revenue or funds as we move forward in the market. And I have to tell you, there's a couple of things I think we're missing. I think we're missing the big picture as to what is going on as far as utility. So I'm going to give you three different indicators to take a look at as far as utility and where things are going. Also, we're going to talk about grayscale. It looks like they're in trouble, which means that the spot Bitcoin ETF is in trouble. Also, we'll take a look at Polygon. Looks like they're doing some major big things as far as tokenization of assets here in the Southeast Asia region and a couple of other things at the very end. So the first thing I'd like to talk to everybody about is I'm here in Korean Blockchain Week, and that is why I've been streaming at a very different location at a very different time. And one of the things that I've learned around here is that price action is great. But when I look around and I see what's happening, I have to tell you, I must be honest, I hear the same things that I heard in 2018. This is going to be the next big thing. This is going to change the world. And really what it comes down to is what are you really doing? What is actually happening and how do you actually have real utility? So it starts off with this. There was an article that I had highlighted, wanted to tell everybody about. And we actually, this is about Coinbase L2, which is base, suffers a block production stall. Team says the fix is deployed. We actually met the base team as we're moving forward with our project, which is a Web 2 to Web 3 game. I'll talk about that much, much, much more later. But we actually met them and we want to see if they were a good fit and potentially they may be, but you know, who knows. But one thing I will say about base is that they've done surprisingly well in a very short amount of time. But here's what's happening as far as utility moving forward. So base dates we have deployed a fix and are starting to see the recovery of block production and gossip. Others may have issues submitting transactions. We are actively investigating and we'll provide updates as we have them as again from the base team. And I found this interesting, which is that this was from a follower, a base itself, and they said, wait, it's based down. There's no block in eight minutes. This is the type of world we live in now. Everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be now and everything, if anything breaks down, then of course it's the worst thing of all time. But you know, people, some people say, well, it should never go down. Absolutely. There's different ways to look at that. You can say, well, it went down because there's so many usages or it's so new or whatnot. But you know, we're in such a new state. I think this is bound to happen now. Did I, how much got affected? Well, we'll see. But this was the crux of it. The Layer 2 network built in Optimism's OP stack went live in August. Right now we're in September. On launch day, the total bridge value exceeded $150 million. League's following announcement base announced over 140 integrations. Base is then unusually successful in attracting value from both cross-chain transactions and DeFi activity. So you have to ask yourself, well, first of all, you can't buy base. Base is a Layer 2 solution and it's built on Optimism. Coinbase right now has no plans for a token. If you would like to get into that on a secondary basis, that would probably be with Optimism. But base itself is not a token you can actually buy. But this is built on Optimism. That may be a play for you to consider. I'm not a financial advisor. You do whatever you want to do. But when I took a look at this, I said, man, it's pretty fast for just under a month. Of course, you know, having a backing of Coinbase is a pretty big deal. So when I thought about it, I go, well, this went down. What happened to the price? Because this is what we always think about, right? Price, price, price, price, price. What's my portfolio doing? How am I doing? Am I up? Am I down? Now, if we scroll down, I think it's 42, not a big deal. Optimism itself, you know, 0.6%. That was in a 24-hour time period. 0.8% in one hour. So it's up, actually. So it looks like it's not a big deal. And it got me to think, I'm like, well, with these metrics, is this all that really is? Is it just all about the amount of money that we make and how things are going? Is that really what it comes down to? Well, let me tell you. People that I've met here in Korean Blockchain Week, a lot of VCs and people in crypto since 2013. Price action itself is there's a lot of people that do a lot of things to move the price, we'll just say. And from the stories that I was told, especially about the older days and a lot of different projects, it's a lot easier than you think to move price around. And it's just not people like you or I just buying it up and everything is all dandy. Really, what we want to take a look at instead of price is how things are moving as far as utility. So there's three different websites I want you to take a look at. I'll link them in the description. One is L2 Beat. This is all layer two solutions. And the one is DeFi Lama, as far as total value locked for all chains. And the next one is DAP Radar. So let's just start with L2 Beat, first of all. So L2 Beat is an interesting website. And it takes a look at the actual total value as far as like locked up for layer two solutions. And you can see that there's one project that I'm very bullish on, it's Arbitrum. We met the team down here in Korea, very great people, nice people, they know what they're doing, they're growing and it's a very new chain. And you can see as far as it's number one, 5.17 billion. Now, OP Mainnet, Optimism, they're doing pretty good and they're right on their heels. Half of it, 2.48 billion. And of course, this is the total value locked in escrow contracts on Ethereum. And then you've got base down here. And remember, 150 million under a month and now it's already doubled that. So we can see that some of these projects that are new are crushing the products that are old. Remember loop ring? It's supposed to be the next big thing. Yeah, not so much. And then polygon down here is ZKEVM. I don't know any of these, honestly. Fuel F1, Canvas Connects. But we're talking about L2s. This would be a website to take a look at who actually has it locked up. Now, if you want to take a look at all the chains, we can go to DefiLama. DefiLama.com forward slash chains, again, link in the description. We can see that, you know, as far as locked up, Ethereum is, and I know people talk about, well, this is going to be Ethereum killer, that's going to be Ethereum killer. The only thing they can kill Ethereum right now is Ethereum. If they can, you know, work together with the L2s and who knows, maybe an L3 coming about, it's going to be hard to really overtake Ethereum. And you've got other layer ones, Binance Smart Chain and Tron over here doing pretty darn good. Now, from what I understand, my big question was this all the time, as far as like Tron, which was why does Tron do so well? And I got a pretty good answer over here. They, a lot of people here, because this is my first time in Asia, in Asian countries, especially in Korea's first time. And so, you understand, Rob, Tron has a pretty good lock hold on their stablecoin. So if you want to use the stablecoin itself that's built on Tron, you need Tron. And they do a lot of transactions and they go, it's not just, you know, Justin Sun being a fantastic marketer, there actually is really utility for the stablecoin. That's why you see someone like Tron do so well. And then of course, Binance Smart Chain over here, but look at this, as far as all chains, Arbitrum. Almost 5%, total value locked. Avalanche, which had a major, a massive jump on it. 2.7, Polygon, 1.9, old Tron, 1.7, all right. Optimism, Solana, all the way down here at, jeez, 1.34. And then base, not even a percentage point. And then all others is 8%. But you can see that, you know, this is why like, when I take a look at who has utility, who's actually using it, I mean, that's why I have Arbitrum. That's why I have Avalanche. And really, I should really start thinking about Tron, quite honestly, but I just can't do it. Solana, sure, Gapes can't do it, but all others. So that's just second to three. And then if you want to take a look at this, of course, DAP Radar, who's you actually using the DAPs? This is great as far as like DeFi, everything's locked up. And we can see it over time. We can't just take a look at like, you know, TA and take a look at the price action, but you take a look at DAP Radar and you can break it down. There's different timeframes. You can highlight this 24, seven day and 30 day. And you can see that if people are using it, there's actually utility. Look at this. Kai Cheng, you ever heard of that? Neither have I. What it's built on? Neer. Neer is a pretty good platform. Not too many people use it. It's just going to be one of those things where we'll neer break out and we'll see. Farmers world on wax. How many people talk about wax these days? Not too many. Are people actually using this DAP? Pancake swap, I think we know about. Elean Worlds, and again on wax and Binance chain. Web three game and then Sweat economy, when I've been talking about forever since over a year ago. And of course, they're going to launch in America, September 12th. So we got to what? Couple of days to go and uniswap and so on and so forth. But so I take a look at this. I think myself, okay, these are the things that I look at to see who has real utility. L2B, DeFi Lama, DAP Radar, and you can break it down by games NFTs and so on and so forth. But what I thought to myself was, what the heck is Kaicheng? So I just tickled real quick. Kaicheng is built on Cosmos, not the Cosmos you're thinking of. COS MOSC, which is an AI project. And they just reached a 500 million evaluation after near this partnership. It looks like they're actually investing into them. So here's what this is. Cosmos is Kaikai. Kaikai app will utilize Neer's blockchain to make online payments cheaper. Kaikai has its native stablecoin Kaicheng, the one you just talked about, equivalent, we just talked about, equivalent to a penny. You just kind of unwrap fiat and then convert it to Kaicheng to use it for payment purposes. Why is this important? Me as it, for online transactions for my businesses, I can understand why this is going to be big. Here's why. Myronik nailed it. Founder of Cosmos believes that Kaikai can reduce the cost of transactions by approximately 50 times compared to present payment leaders such as Stripe or PayPal. So now the next question that you're probably having is, Rob, why isn't my crypto being used for that? Why isn't XRP being used for that? Why isn't Bitcoin, the lighting network being used for all this? Why do they pick that? That doesn't make any sense. My answer to you is, I don't know. Talk to your project leads or whoever it is that actually deals with these projects and go, you know, there's a lot of different opportunities out there. Why isn't this, you know, growing like it's supposed to be? And of course, people will always point me to, you know, there's this use case and there's that use case and then just take a look at the metrics that are out there. So I can't tell you exactly why this was chosen over something else and why your crypto is fantastic. And maybe it is the same. This is actually what we have. And then actually further break this down. This is on TechCrunch. It's the same thing. And it was put together pretty well by the founder of Cosmos. And he said, look, it's like this. And I understand because actually I should take payments. He gave the example of buying a $5 cup of coffee. We always like this analogy, right? Especially when we're talking about Bitcoin and Lightning Network and so on. And he says, look, stripe and PayPal charge effectively over 10% for small transactions. The seller ends up increasing the price, forcing the buyer to pay 6 to 10% more. In a year, the coffee drinker could easily be spending an extra $200 just because the transactions are handled by intermediaries like Stripe. What they're talking about here is this. If you use Stripe or PayPal, it's going to go 2.99% plus 30 cents per transaction. Maybe it's 1.99% or lower. But the base is 30 cents per transaction. If you're buying these small type of items, maybe a cup of coffee at $2, that 30 cents really gobbles up a lot of the room there. So you're essentially paying, like I said, 10% roughly, depending on how much it is, $3 and so on and so forth. So if you use something like this and you can reduce the amount, the cost to the user, then what you can do is you don't have to keep raising your prices. And what's even great, and Steven from Puerto Rico will appreciate this. You can lower the prices on your products because you don't have to pay so much for the transaction fees because you're using those cryptos and you can reward the people that are actually going to use it because some people say, well, why the hell would they do that? Why would they go through the whole process of getting a wallet, using the crypto, going through that, and then paying for when they use their Visa card and have it for the merchant? And the reason is very simple. The merchant can say, if you pay with this, I will cut your cost of your bill by X. And of course, they will look at that and say, well, that's a pretty good deal for me. And then I can come back to this because it's a little bit cheaper as opposed to everybody else who has to raise their prices because of the transaction costs that they have with Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and Stripe, and so on and so forth. So when I look at this, I get it. And that's real utility moving forward. Not so much about like this could be it, and this is the price. So when you're taking a look at what these products are, take a look at the actual utility and what's happening. So that's it for that section. Now, if you have something to add on, please put that in the comment section or in the chats right now, we'll go over it because there's everybody who's got, you know, this is my project, this is why it's going to be big. Let me know. So there is that part. Also, as far as utility goes, polygon. Now, before we go on, you have to understand. If you're new to the channel, welcome. I don't think you are though. I think you've been here for quite some time. If you're new to the channel just understand that I'm very biased and the things that I talk about and things that I own. So I usually direct my attention to these types of projects and I talk about those. So when I talk about polygon, I have to understand that Rob talks about that because he owns a boatload of it. So here's what we have. Korean finance giant links up with polygon labs and tokenized securities. This has been a big thing. Larry Fink came out from BlackRock, 10 trillion asset center management and talked about the next big thing is tokenization of assets. And here comes polygon down the pipe and saying, you know what, we can do that. And here's what they got. So they just ain't to deal with Meret asset securities as far as tokenized assets. Polygon labs is set to be a technical consultant in the Meret asset security token working group. And so we will focus on building the infrastructure for tokenized securities platform securities. The thing that Gary likes to talk about all the time and don't worry about security. Security is just stocks, pieces of the company. It's not like it's some magical mythical thing. They make it out to be some awful thing. It's just I deal in securities all day long. You know, if I open up my Robinhood account and trade stocks and just so you know, the Meret asset financial group is not just some small group here in Korea. It looks like they have half a trillion or 565 billion asset center management as of June. That's a pretty big thing. So the things that we just talked about, tokenization of assets, total value lock, the things that are going on. Well, what does that mean for our market right now? How does that look as far as where we can potentially go? It's a great question. And there is this chart I love to whip out. Every so often when I'm talking about these things and this is two years old, three years old, excuse me. All the world's money and markets that want visualization. And you see this little square right here, this little square. This represents a hundred billion dollars. And this is crypto back in 2020. It was only worth 244 billion. And now we're over a trillion. Actually at one point we're over 3 trillion, but hey, welcome to the bear market. And you can see that military spending. It's quite a bit. America leads the way, a third. Coins and bank notes, the Fed's balance sheet. Here's the billionaires, Zuckerberg, Bezos Gates. Here's gold, almost 11 trillion dollars. So if we can tokenize that, that's pretty good. How about Fortune 500 companies? You're looking at trillions and trillions as well. And if we could tokenize some of these assets for people that can't get it, just like Larry Fink talked about, I think it's pretty big. Here's the stock market. Here's the money supply. Here's global debt, $233 trillion. What if we could tokenize that? Here's the real estate market, which I believe personally is the next big thing as far as tokenization of real estate. I know some people will say, well, what about an REIT, a real estate investment trust? Yes, you can do that. But wouldn't it be a little bit easier to put everything in a blockchain and make things a little bit more observable and not so much hidden away? But look at this global real estate, $280 trillion. Here's global wealth, $360 trillion. Here's derivatives. Derivatives. I always think this is a mistake when I'm scrolling because I think it just repeats. But no, this is derivatives. It's one quadrillion. So we take a look at what polygon is doing. Total value locked up in DeFi and loans and things like that as we just took a look at it here at DAP radar and the all chains and all that stuff. Where could we go? Go pretty far. The problem is when we're going to get there and it's always about the time. So let me just think about that. And that is the great news for the day. Now let's get to some not so great news. Well, I guess this is actually pretty good news. Alex Machinsky, been on the show three or four times, talked about Celsius. Light right to my face. Right right to your face. We all lost, right? Six figures on the tube for me. And thankfully, Alex Machinsky just had all of his assets frozen at the Department of Justice in August. So hopefully we get the claw back and we get some of the back. We'll see how it goes. Now I'm not going to read this. It's a big repeat. I'm just happy that this is actually happening. This guy was a scammer and he's running a Ponzi scheme in my personal opinion. And data kind of supports that. But I'd like you to follow somebody and that's Aaron Bennett. I can't keep up with the Celsius news and what's going on. But Aaron and Tiffany Fong and Cam and Simon Dixon do a fantastic job. Aaron just had a great video. If you're a Celsius user, watch this video. Step by step voting guide, how to vote on the Celsius and Fahrenheit plan. And there's a new one that he just had out. Let me see here. Make it a live stream. Nope. How was it? Sorry. Three days ago. How to vote on the Celsius plan. And of course nothing on the Bitcoin mining company. So watch those two videos. There's a link in the description. Check it out. And to get to the next big story is grayscale. So grayscale had a fantastic win against the SEC. And we were all very happy with that. Grayscale came out and they said, look, if you're going to approve these futures ETFs, why can't you approve a spot Bitcoin ETF? And the SEC was like, no, that's just what we're going to do. So they won the case and the judge didn't say that they have to approve it. But they said the SEC must relook at the application process for grayscale and their spot ETF. And the big reason why SEC is shooting these spot ETFs down is because of market manipulation and fraud. Here's the problem. When you have grayscale and they're doing some potentially shady things, I'm not saying that they are doing it. I'm just saying this in the news reports that we have. This is not looking good to get approved for spot ETF and it could allow the SEC to go look. If this is one of the leaders out there, maybe of course, you know, Fidelity and BlackRock also being leaders. But you're going to see right here, there's fraud going on and it's rampant, just like I said, as far as Gary would say. And this is what we have. So Winklevoss twins from Gemini are filling an investigation of the DCG crypto empire. And really, it just kind of comes back down and say, it's like, look, well, actually, this is what it, the best way to do it. This is from David Bailey. You can follow him on Twitter. And what's happening is here is that very cyber and the grayscale Bitcoin fund, GBTC, was that they're borrowing cash from Genesis trading platform to prop up the grayscale Bitcoin market, 500 million, 300 million of it happened on May 10th, 9th or 10th. He then borrows 18,000 Bitcoin June 18th at unbelievable terms, no collateral, uncollateralized loan. If you watch the show anytime, you know that I'm not a big fan of uncollateralized loans. That's what led to the collapse of Voyager as they took in, oh, I don't remember, 334 and $20 million from three hours capital, which led to their collapse. So if these are the things that are going, you're borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, we've got big problems and this will come out and the wash will see how it goes. But again, that's something that I would say is a positive for that spot ETF that everybody wants to get approved. And that's it for today. So look, we are flying back today, so probably no video tomorrow and then we'll probably pick some things up on Saturday and go from there, but that's it for the news for today. So if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing, let me talk about it. It's time-sensitive. Now, if you wanna do, just hang around, we'll do a little quick Q and A and we'll talk about anything that you want to and answer all your questions and we'll go from there. But if not, take off. Thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate it and I'll see you. On the next one.