 Welcome to Digital Asset News. Take a top stories in crypto and bring them out of bite-sized pieces. Tonight, we're going to talk about what's going on with this crypto bull run and potentially how long it could last. So the first thing we're going to take a look at is the Coinbase earnings report. And we're going to see that retail investors who we thought really were driving the whole show as actually incorrect. On top of that, we'll take a look at the supply squeeze and what's going to happen during this month. And what you can expect as far as price action. Now, let's take a look at Cardano smart contracts, which Charles Haustensen is going to announce on Friday as far as the implementation. And then also we'll take a look at the Avalanche ecosystem. And the last little bit is how to get your head right or what I'm doing right now. Because in all honesty, this is where it really becomes game time because this is the crunch and I'll get to that at the very last part. So first things first, let's take a look at what is going on into the market. And today, hey, it's a pretty good day. If you may have noticed, I've been gone for a week and that's because I was in Puerto Rico with the family doing the family things, also doing business things as we're going to move over there and do a lot of exciting things as far as the YouTube channel and integrations and pulling in a lot of other people. And I'll talk about that later as the months go on. But it was a pretty good week. I mean, let's let's face it. It was one we had $1.4 trillion. I think when I took off last week and then I come back $2 trillion. I was actually on Mike The Investor's show and it was shooting up at that time. And I was like, wow, I should just go away more often. But right now we've regressed to around $1.93 trillion, but not too bad. So the real question is, where does money come from? I mean, that's like $700 billion, $600 billion, something like that. That's a lot of money. You don't just find that on the couch. So where did it come from? Well, we'll get to that in a second, but let's take a look at what actually happened as far as like all the different price action. So everything's up. I'll just say everything's great. The theorem is doing fantastic, almost $3,200. Bitcoin, I think, topped out around $47,000, somewhere around there. Heather, nobody cares. Binance coin, three third position. Everything's just up massively. Cardano's up pretty good. XRP is a real winner here, 18% for 24 hours. Wow. Doge coin's up 31% for the week. And everything is just massively up. I mean, look at all these numbers. It's just a huge green day for everything. I mean, except for like stable coins and MakerDAO, that's not that much. So this is a pretty good week. And why? What happened? Where did this all come from? So really, it comes down to a couple of different things. And let's take a look at one of those things being the Coinbase earnings report. So this great article from bitcoin.com, and it talks about how Coinbase raked in $2 billion off a year back. Really, what it comes down to is Coinbase makes a lot of money from the fees, from retail and institutional investors. There are a different set of rules. If you are a retail investor or institutional investor, when you have billions of dollars, it really helps to do a lot of things on Coinbase as opposed to just people like you and I. And that's just how the world works, I'm sorry to tell you that. But it's looking pretty good for Coinbase. And also, they firm partnership with Elon Musk, PNC Bank and SpaceX. So what is going on here? This was interesting to me because it showed us where this all came from, part of it. So Coinbase has published data in the company's second quarter earnings. Retail monthly transacting users, that is important, MTUs, rose to almost 9 million. That spiked 44% since the first quarter. So Jennifer A. March, it went up almost 50% in just three months. That's amazing. So it doesn't matter how many people are on your platform, it's the monthly transacting users, the people who are actually doing something and they're getting paid for it and all those crazy fees over there in Coinbase. I still use Coinbase every so often. It's true for the things that I want to buy. Actually, right now it's Solana. I'm buying Solana like every single day. And I wish Voyager had it, I'd use them, but they don't. So what are you going to do? And it's just amazing to me that there's that much growth. But really what it says to me is this, people like ease of use. And sometimes I don't even care about being cheap. They just want to get in because they know where the hockey puck is going. They want to skate to that park. And they think, hey, you know what? I think I can make a lot of money here because they're fomoing in. So they don't really care about the retail or the fees themselves. You should because they add up like crazy and that's not a great plan of action. Anyhow, this favorable landscape was highly correlated with the firm's trading revenue. They state the crypto market environment heavily influenced our Q2 financial results. That is true. They had the massive bull run in March, April, May, and then, of course, June, it kind of dropped off. But April, May was huge. We hit all time high. So of course, people are fomoing in like crazy. It's amazing. Over there, we saw huge growth as far as with Coinbase. Even on the YouTube platforms and Twitter and TikTok and everything else, you see a lot of people start to engage in the cryptocurrency information. Like my channel gained like 50,000, 60,000 subscribers in like a couple of months just because of that time frame. And it goes to show you there are certain parts where everybody kind of comes in and certain parts where nobody cares. And the parts where nobody cares and then going sideways or going down, that's when you invest, that's when all the money is made. Not financial advice, just financial pain. We've been working out pretty well for me for the last four years. Okay, so to finish up, this is the interesting part. Institutional trading volume was 317 billion, which is an increase of 47% compared to Q1. Institutional volume comprised 69% of total trading volume, which is up from 64% in Q1. Let me say that again. Institutional volume took up almost 70%, almost three out of four of total trading volume in Q1. Institutional onboarding to the Coinbase platform increased rapidly as well as higher capital allocations into crypto. So here's the thing. If it took up that much in Q1, that's a lot of trading volume. How much do you think it actually is going to be in Q2 and Q3 and Q4? Well, Q2 and everything was going crazy. It was the same type of thing. I can't say that is exactly what it is. But when people talk about institutions are kind of dabbling in and they're really not much here, they're here. And I'll prove it right here. So the report highlights the 9,000 institutional users Coinbase has been working with a number of well-known firms and 10% of the top 100 largest hedge funds. In addition, in recent months, we have formed partnerships with industry leaders, including Musk, PNC Bank, Space, X, Tesla, 3rd Point LLC, and Wisdom Tree, the companies Q2 report highlights. So this, just again, more numbers just shows you just how much Coinbase is making. And again, really what it comes down to is they're making money hand over fist and fees and work with institutional players, billion-dollar players. And that, I believe, is who is really driving it. And to make my point even clearer, let's take a look at this supply squeeze. And this is where I think things get interesting. So this was some Z-crypto, long-term holding reaches 82%. This is from Glass Note Analyst that states, the majority of coins accumulated during the beginning of this year are still dormant. So from January 1st, the people who bought back then, and remember, Bitcoin hadn't reached its all-time high back then. We were looking at 22,000, 25,000 somewhere around there. So they're still holding on, even though it is doubled already, which you would think people would sell, but no, a lot of them haven't. This cohort now holds a total of 12 million Bitcoin. Let me say that again, the people that are holding on to Bitcoin is almost $12.5 million, not dollars-worth, $12.5 million Bitcoin. There's only $21 million in existence, and we've only mined $18.5 million. So $12.5 million is in the hands of people who are not selling. And of course, when you have more demand and not enough supply, what usually happens, price goes up. So the long-term held supply is now over 82%, which intimates, which I think it indicates, a possible upcoming supply squeeze that would spark a further bull trend. They say, while it's the supply squeeze based on the short-term holding supply ratio is not yet a 20%, which was a historic major supply squeeze. This was back in the day when it had 20% supply squeeze based on that. There are numerous indicators and trends in play that suggest it may hit it in mid-September, but that the conditions for a supply squeeze are already in place. So here's the thing. When we talk about what is going on as far as in this market, you have to take a look at where everything is and who is buying it and where all this big money is coming from. I do not believe that $600 to $700 billion just came from retail investors out there that were like, you know what, I'm going to get into crypto. I'm going to pull in my mom and my dad and my brothers and sisters. It doesn't work like that so much. It could, but that's not how I see it. I see that there was so much institutional interest. I mean, look, we've got BNY Mellon. We've got State Streets. We've got all these hedge funds and all these institutional players. And then there's some players like BlackRock who will poo-poo it and say, no, no, there's no interest, but we all know there's interest because even JP Morgan, who used to call it a scam, is saying, we're getting into it right now. So there's so much institutional money sloshing around. And of course, they're making deals like with Coinbase behind the scenes that says, hey, we're going to do some OTC trading. Remember when it came to the points of Michael Saylor or MicroStrategy, nobody knew about what was happening that he was buying up or the company was buying up all this Bitcoin until after the fact because they did micro transactions for weeks. And I think even months. And what that did is it didn't move the price of Bitcoin too much because they were able to buy and buy and buy and buy a little bit. But there wasn't these big players in. Now there is. So there's only so much of this backhand, backroom OTC things that they can do. And nothing against that. I mean, if you can get away with that and you're a big player, a big institution, it's legal, so whom I say anything. But at some point, the supply squeeze is going to come into play and they'll be like, hey, look, there's only so much that we can do. Now, how could they rearrange that? Well, they can spread some fud. You might see some more articles about a country starting to ban things. You might see another big, huge institution like a black rock coming out and go, we're not going to invest into it, even though behind the scenes, they're probably talking to everybody else that they can. So they can load the price and get into it. I'm not saying that is what's going to happen. I'm just saying be on the lookout for those. Get your head right now because as time goes on, you're going to wish, perhaps, that you may have held on to some of these cryptocurrencies and digital assets. So that's what's going on there. Let me know what you think in the comments section and let's move on to our next couple of pieces, which are going to go pretty quick, which is smart contracts. So on this channel, every time I talk about Cardano, everybody gets some Ethereum players that get so bad of shape. And I have to always say this, which is crazy to think about, but guess what? Bitcoin is my number one hold and Ethereum is my second biggest hold and behind that somewhere is Cardano. I am a big proponent, a big fan of all of them. I don't care which one goes up. I'm just an investor, not something that has to happen. I spread my bets around. I'm hoping that maybe they all go up, but I think there's enough space in this place for everybody to get a piece of the pie. So this was from Charles Hoskinson. I think this was today and he just came out, maybe it was last night, but he came out and said, hey, we're doing everything right. I'm not going to play the video. I'm just going to paraphrase it. What he says is everything's going right. Everything's going well. And it looks like we are going to, we are right on track to, we have already picked the date to when smart contracts will go live and we will have everything up and running. And we are good. And we're going to make that announcement on Friday. And he even makes a joke. He goes, this is like Justin Sun doing an announcement for the announcement. So right now, when you saw those, the price action of Cardano, it was around $1.47, $1.50. I think now we're around $1.80, something around there. Do not be surprised if we hit an all-time high of Cardano leading up to Friday, because everybody wants to get in before the big announcement. That could be a case of buy the rumor, sell the news, or that could just, which we all thought happened with Ethereum, with EIP 1559, but look what happened there. It just kept going and now we're at almost $3,200. So I will just be dollar cost averaging and that's it. So I'm just happy to report that smart contracts are, looks like they're not going to push anything back. Looks like it's actually going well. There's no bugs or anything detected. And I will link this video in the description so you can watch the whole 24 minutes. That's essentially what Charles said. So let me know if you're excited about this or not. I personally think it's a great thing. And once Cardano smart contracts come live, we'll see what happens. This is where the rubber meets the road. And then finally, just want to talk about real quick about Avalanche and their ecosystem. So we did a deep dive and we took a look at Avalanche and its ecosystem itself. And I'm going to add this in there, but I have to tell you the deep dive video will come out. It's going to come out this week. And when you just take a look at everything that's involved with Avalanche and it's another smart contract type of platform, it's made by some pretty darn smart people. The CEO was involved with Bitcoin at the very early parts and you can just see that there's already been a huge amount of interest in what's going on. So I think that Avalanche could be big. I mean, look at all these, I mean, just not the wallet integrations, but they also have oracles, chain link, gravity, the DeFi. And you can get it up pretty much everywhere. Tooling adapts, NFT in gaming, privacy, DAO storage. I mean, this looks honestly, this looks even better ecosystem than Cardano did when it was at the same point. But I think it could be massive and I'll let everybody know. I've been promising this deep dive video for like two weeks, but I had to wait for the interview from some of the upper echelon of Avalanche to get an interview and I did and I will put it out this week and we will go from there. But I think it's going to be, like I said, a pretty big one, don't sleep on Avalanche. And that is it. And the last thing I just want to talk to you real quick about is getting your head right. So look, on this channel, I can't give you any investment advice. I am not an investment planner or any kind of investment analyst or anything like that. This is just investment opinion, not investment advice, but right now we're at a crossroads and you can come and you can think to yourself, okay, this is it. This is the top. This is where it's going to just fall down and then sell everything. Or you can think that maybe it's going to go up even higher. There's so many different ways to play it. You could just take small amounts of profits and go from there. I can't tell you what to do. I can tell you what I'm doing right now. And that is that I'm just taking small, little bit of profits off the table, reinvesting them into other things, into my businesses, into my properties and things like that. And then just letting the less ride. But a lot of things have changed my exit strategy because of the availability of staking and because of the way of loans that we can take out for our cryptocurrencies. But right now, I don't know if anybody knows where things are going. I don't look at week by week or month by month. I kind of space myself out. End of year, next year, two years, three years. And I can just tell you that I continue to dollar-cost average things. Solana being one of them, buying them every day. I think that's going to be a pretty big project. But I think as time comes on, it's going to be big. If you've been here for any length of time, you've gone all the way through the roller coaster, you've gone through all the flood stories, you've gone through, which is pretty crazy. Think about it this way. We just had some pretty negative stories about the US Congress or the Senate coming through and passing that infrastructure bill, which had some pretty awful language as far as cryptocurrencies and how it's all laid out. And that was not good. Yet, the market did okay. And then we had that huge $600 million hack for a polygon network. And that was enormous. It was one of the biggest. And still, the market trudges on. So, and it actually went up another 10% after that the day after. So, when you have negative news, it doesn't collapse the market like we used to see just three weeks, four weeks ago, and it actually does nothing or increases. That's a good indication that the bull market is here. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but I can see out in the future as best I can in the next months and years. I think we have a pretty bright space. So, that's it for today. So, look, if you made it this far, I want to say thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate it. If you liked the video, found some value, give it a thumbs up. Also consider subscribing. I think we talk about here are all about the news and things that are going on. Over on Dan Clips is where we do more of the project reviews, the avalanche deep dives, things like that. And you can check that in the description below. So, that is it for today. Thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. And I'll see you in the next one.