 Everybody welcome to the Saturday stream. Thanks for showing up. I appreciate it So today it's like the thumbnail and title suggests it was kind of shocking to me Just how fast the institutional domination really came into play as far as Bitcoin and of course I'm talking about it's a great website. It's called buy bitcoin worldwide com forage last treasuries links will be in the description and I was taking a look at this and just how fast The ETF so the institutions have actually acquired everything actually let me pull up here And we get to see that I mean the black rocks the fidelity of the grayscales They have a boatload of Bitcoin and when I take a look at the percentage of as far as 21 million It's almost 4% and it's only been what we're talking about a couple weeks something like that So just imagine that in two weeks. This is what they've accumulated. Can you imagine what's gonna be like in? I don't know four weeks six months ten years It just makes me kind of concerned about a concentration Of course, you know people will say that's not a big deal because there's you know There's so much Bitcoin out there and of course, we'll never sell. I don't really think that's true I think at some point along the line people will sell a little bit And I'll just kind of just get into those hands, but that's either here or there That's just speculation. I just want to show you just how fast this actually happened What was crazy to me is that these ETFs actually have almost double than what the countries do and of course public companies Private only 1% and Bitcoin mine come in 0.18 and we're gonna actually break this down We can just see how much the concentration actually is across the board as far as private companies and of course Michael sailor I mean, they're almost at 200,000 Bitcoin which is roughly the amount that is in the estate of mount gock So I find it quite interesting about how much they've accumulated over time and they've been doing it the right way Dollar cost averaging OTC using coin desk so on and so forth And of course Mara one of the big Bitcoin mining operations 15,000 and Tesla who had over 60,000 Bitcoin at one point trim its position is still in the number three position I think that's very bullish for us. So we think take a look at it. How day coin base Galaxy digital Mike and his his crew and also I was looking around here. I couldn't believe it, but Voyager digital as 2200 so see that works out as time goes on So that is the companies USA and of course the USA just filed a addendum looks like they're gonna sell off some of their Bitcoin Roughly about a hundred and thirty million dollars worth, which isn't a big deal But they have roughly the same amount as we took a look at a micro strategy It's almost 207,000 China Assuming 194,000 Ukraine and so on and so forth and then this is the interesting one mount gock still has 200,000 I know everybody gives it a bad rap like mount gocks is gonna, you know dump on us and it's gonna happen But even so I don't think people are gonna sell 200,000 of Bitcoin right off the block They know anything about Bitcoin. They probably do if they got him back then 2013 2014 They probably know that it's pretty good idea just to hold until after the having but it could be wrong So that's what we have and then moving down into the whole point of this the trusts Gray scale Unfortunately is has the lion's share they'll drop off, but they have almost a half a million Fiber and 12,000 Black rock is almost 50 coin shares 48 fidelity 43 and so on and so forth So I know people will look at this and say that's a lot I mean for what it is and it's kind of worrisome, but I wanted to just Talk to you about this the reason why I bring this up is because Out of all the things we just talked about the number of Bitcoin and It's only 2 million Now the total max supply is roughly well tall max flies not roughly tall max flies 21 million straight It's not scarce. It's finite and roughly 19.7 or so million have already been mined. We won't see the last one mined until 2140 So I think we got a little bit of time and the value today out of those 2 million Bitcoin is 85 billion Dollars, what is that that is 10% of the total amount? So even though people will say, ah, you know institutions are really you know getting into it's kind of worrisome There's still a lot in the hands of the general Joe and Jane just like you and me and I think it's Not too bad and not too much to worry about now now as time moves on It could be a little bit a little bit worrisome And if you want to take a look at you can always check that website also if you go to blackrock.com You can find out they're holding. This is as a January 25th, and it matches up Exactly with the Treasury website. We just took a look at They've got 49,000 of Bitcoin and market value is just under two billion dollars total. So again I think it's an interesting case and if we're talking about Bitcoin dominance right now as far as like who holds what It's the institutions any elementary thing about that in the comment section. Yes, we are holding more But institutions are making their way up also The economy I know people are kind of concerned Still about this. I think you know we hear rumblings of recessions here and there and of course yielding versions and such and so forth And there's something to be said, but there was a report that just came out on Friday And it looks like things are positive. I didn't hear too much about this I think everybody was been talking about the ETF. So here's something to be a little more bullish about So this was from blockworks. I said that personal compute consumer expenditures or PCE index date released Friday was in line with analyst expectation They showed a zero point two percent increase in December and a two point nine percent high year over year Numbers are a sign that while inflation is still up, which we can all feel It is trending lower and that's what we want to hear We want we want to hear that inflation is going down That means that Jerome Powell on the gang can finally maybe to talk about a little bit of pivot action Of course once they pivot we know that there's going to be a recession on the corner But we get out of the way and that's exactly what we want Spending last month increased zero point seven percent. I find this interesting spending last month increased almost a point Comfortably exceeding the zero point five percent that was expected again. I believe this is adjusted for time frame Because of course last month was holidays That was expected Craig Earl I'm a senior market analyst at Oanda he states It's another sign that the US consumer and economy on a very healthy shape going into the new year I would just make a little preface which which is this right now if you take a look at the amount of Debt as far as credit cards right and near all-time high So we're looking at roughly a trillion dollars in credit card debt So I know that we've spent a lot I think a lot of that is on credit cards and debt So we'll see how that all shakes out as time goes on and then also a little bit bullish news Truflation you can find them at trueflation.com where they have they point all the on on On-time data as fast as they possibly can a lot of different data points Of course, these are the things that the Fed doesn't use but they're they say that's the inflation is actually Even lower than what the government's reporting at 1.82 percent. I know people will say well We don't really care about that. Let's know what Jerome takes looks at I'm just taking a look at it for future-looking and it looks like Inflation may be under control and we'll see if those rate hikes or those rate cuts come in anyhow Let me what you think about that in the comments section. I find that quite bullish and also Solana this was a good one So there has been a lot of airdrops coming up and people love airdrops You know I love airdrops. It's free stuff the problem with airdrops is that there's a lot of scams out There's just be careful as much as you possibly can get the information for somebody that you trust instead of some guy Who knows a guy who knows a guy who says get this airdrop connect this to your ledger and see what happens He could drained this one was interesting When this was a big airdrop. This was on Jupiter the Solana exchange and If you don't know when is I think it's kind of goofy all this stuff is goofy to my personal opinion, but people love it When is a community token based on fractionalized NFT of a poem? Yeah, you read that right? Fractionalized NFT of a poem using tech from all those NFTs Jupiter exchange split founder Where Mao's poem a love letter to when bros into a trillion pieces Can't make that up Anyhow as you may or may not know according to data reviewed by coin desk just under half of the wallets who made WEN's white list had claimed their tokens by press time Each eligible wallet gets the same amount of WEN which is 643,000 tokens which if you think about it's not back is worth about 70 bucks. That's roughly Well, it's almost one Solana. I think Solana's roughly around 98 bucks right now So not too bad or a heck of a lot of XRP. So If you haven't done this already, I'll show you how to do it WEN's creators minted 1 trillion WEN earmark 700 billion of it for this three-day airdrop which is going on right now and What did that mean for? The wallet the wallets will phantom wallet, which I used to I use phantom and Titus. They're both hot wallets They had a big problem with that They said while we did our best to prepare the WEN airdrop showed we still have more work to do Solana ecosystem operating at an unprecedented scale in crypto Proud of helped and some of the stuff they say so essentially what they said is like look Solana the ecosystem could handle it We couldn't handle it and we're gonna try to do better when we do the Jupiter airdrop So if you are so inclined to do this, I did this actually last night It's very simple. You go to the website jupe. AG jupe. AG the links in the description Don't try to search for it. You'll probably go to a scam website I put the link in there not just to waste my time, but so if you do do it you do the right place When you go there if you've used the Jupiter Decentralized exchange at any point in time you just hook up. Let me show you how this works. I actually recorded it This is my phone actually So you just click that button you say hey, is this you yes, it's me you connect your phantom wallet connects and then you click that button claim when and Then like and then you confirm it and of course there's like no fees because it's Solana I mean, there's some fee, but it's like ridiculously low. That's it So I got 70 bucks for essentially doing nothing anyhow. That's what's happening there and then Again, here's the website. This is what it looks like jupe. AG and Everybody was excited about this was supposed from Marty party says Jupiter passes uniswap in 24-hour volume during when airdrop The flipping is real uniswap Jupiter and Marty's right As far as like 24-hour volume everybody there's a lot of people going into that But just be just be aware that when we take a look at this this on-chain data that Marty here is just talking about Jupiter versus uniswap versus Orca, but if you take a look at Artemis This is one of my favorite websites because it's free and it's got a lot of good data if we just take a look at the decks volumes across the board for all The decks is that are on aptos near Solana sweet Ethereum polygon so on so forth You can see that as of yesterday Ethereum still had 1.24 billion in volume. That's a boatload Solana did pretty good at 635 But it's roughly path avalanche way back aptos 3.67 sweet 70 Polyon or five so Yes, there was a flipping for the exchanges, but just be aware of the data can be you know parsed out any way that any way shape or form and that would lead me to our last topic which is near now You have to understand that on this channel. I am super biased I usually talk only about the things that I own so if I talk about it I probably on it a near I own a boatload of it, so I will probably talk about it a lot But there's a reason why I like it First of all, I just had an integration with MetaMask And if you know, you know MetaMask only has so many different chains on it I personally dislike MetaMask. I find it to be cumbersome and a trashy wallet That's just me in my personal opinion. You're welcome to sound off in the comment section But hey, they got a lot of users. So why not? So they did that Also, I know that Ethereum talked about sharding and a lot of different things, but you know that since September 2022 Near is already done. It's already completed. They're sharding near phase one They've already had that implemented and that's why they're so fast and so cheap They actually struck up a deal between them and Polygon to build the a ZK L2 roll-up as they again collaborate together It's because they want to be abstraction and also Another one of my projects I talk about or used to talk about a lot and I'll talk about as much anymore Sweatcoin they were able to bring this beauty Sweatcoin's been around since 2018. They brought their 100 million users on a web 3 and didn't skip a beat There was no downfall There was no pause of the network and they brought everybody over during that during the tge And that's when I actually stood up and took a took notice and we take a look at daily active addresses again an Artemis It's always near in Solana. It's always like near Solana and BNB daily transactions near Solana and BNB And then also on fees as far as like the low cost. It's always like really near in Solana. So there's that piece but This whole thing about abstraction I did a interview with Ilya who's the founder of Near and he kept talking about chain abstraction. So I just want to play this out for everybody chain abstraction is essentially If you can think about the days Before the internet was smooth like in the late 90s early 2000s when I was around It was a big pain in the a like to kind of move around and you had to do these Different services and dial-ups and it was a big big hassle and you actually were kind of seeing under the hood The whole thing with chain abstraction And we know it sucks. We know that that that that the blockchain is kind of cumbersome to use wouldn't it be great to use all these different I Mean cross chains and not have to bridge and port things over and just you know You could use like a coin from our token from arbitram and then go all the way over to to roots or near or to Solana and just swap things out and not know what the hell is going on in the background That's essentially what near is trying to do and kind of be this a chain abstraction layer So we did this interview with Ilya and when you see his background just know that there's always a There's always this meme. I always think about Because when I was interviewing him I was like Ilya are you one of those guys It just doesn't have furniture and like just works all the time like the meme He's like no no we just moved in this house So this is about an eight minute interview between me and me and Ilya needs to talk about what's happening What's going on and what's happening in the future? So just take a listen. It's about eight minutes We'll come back and do a little Q&A of Near so Ilya welcome to the show for the first time. Yeah, thanks for inviting. Oh, yeah So here's the thing. I I know you guys have a lot of a lot of happenings going on I'm an investor so when I talk about this stuff, of course, I'm severely biased everybody should know that by now on this channel But Ilya talked to us about what makes near so great Why the transaction fees are so low? Why is it so fast and of course what's going on everything between so kind of bring us up to speed with what it is What's going on and what's in the future? For sure. Yeah So on a high level what we set out to do is not just build another blockchain is to truly build a Platform that makes web through usable that it unboards next billion users and to do that you do need a blockchain And so near has a sharded kind of scalable low fees Blockchain underneath but there is also a lot of other pieces that coming together Okay, and and so a lot of kind of the way we've been framing it is calling it blockchain operating system because it allows to kind of as a user to use Applications across the whole that three is that really needing to think about you know what blockchain runs under the hood? How to pay for the fees which developers build it etc. And so yeah, what you're looking at right now is near the door Which runs kind of off? Blockchain operating system which you could actually use applications on near But you can also use applications on ethereum and on other ebms and kind of how the chains are coming So so kind of at the high level this what we call a chain abstraction We're building kind of the platform Where as user you don't need to think about the kind of details and specifics of the blockchain You don't really need to think about fees etc. It's all kind of taken care of for you now to power that we have kind of set of components or you know a stack of Infrastructure that we build and the first part is near blockchain Which is sharded scalable layer one? it's built with a few things in mind how to make it the most user friendly the most developer friendly and the most scalable platform and From this perspective the way to build scalable platforms is to follow There's similar pattern to web 2 so generally the way to scale any system is to add more computers that parallel In parallel process more, you know problems right more transactions more data store more data, etc. And Right now we see kind of various Ecosystems taking different approaches right cosmos took approach of having a bunch of different chains and each chain is its own Application and now you as a user need to think about where where which application it is do you have fees there like duty to bridge? Ethereum took a roll-up approach, which is still a parallel processing if you have multiple roll-ups But what we see is every roll-up has the same thing right there pretty much kind of just mirrors of each other right what what near took is approach where you Have kind of underneath the same parallel processing lots of machine doing different work accepting different transactions But as a user you don't need to see it You don't actually see that you know, we have multiple shards that processing things in parallel You're just interacting it as if it's a single blockchain and that is again user friendly But it also allows to continue growing the capacity of the network so we can keep adding more shards to the network to the level as The demand growth without users need and developers in this case to think about Kind of capacity of the network. They don't need to care about it. They don't need to worry about it and actually for developers on near You can have your application anywhere from you know Nobody's using it to actually as if you had their own up chain as if you had your own cosmos chain or roll-up or subnet or whatever Because the near network can actually scale to that and let you have your full capacity of kind of a single shard So that's kind of generally how we enable both Scalability and through scalability. It means we can have Lowest fees right and so you have a graphic here that shows that we actually have lowest fees right now on average in the market Enabling pretty much the most transactions you can do If you're you know spending ten dollars Yeah, so so okay, so that's a lot to break down But let's just talk about and you said it right Everybody wants something that works in the background They don't have to see and it's fast and it's cheap and it just works That's really all we care about and it looks like that's what's happening right here So you did that there was a graphic here. This was from office is January 20th of this year 2024 how many average transactions you perform with ten dollars per chain? Obviously, I just used Ethereum this weekend as a matter of fact to do some kind of crazy D gen play and I've paid $15 and 14 cents or something crazy like that just for one transaction. That's not gonna happen It's not gonna it's it cannot work and it cannot scale like that That's what they're gonna layer to is but I found this interesting that if you're taking a look at ten dollars per chain You're saying with avalanche you can get roughly a dollar Because we're looking at 1199 I think this might be laying into the fact of when they had the problem with their ordinals Which is the same as going on with Bitcoin by that smart chain 21 Adam 56 Solana 132 And then you guys over here with 849 transactions for ten dollars. Is that pretty much accurate what we're looking at here? Yeah, exactly. This price is actually in dollars at the bottom So near is like fra like one cent or even fraction of a cent Solana is like five five seven cents And then yeah avalanche. I mean 80 cents, but even like 40 cents. It's pretty expensive It is pretty interesting because when we're talking about near because I'm a big believer in in sweat coin and I I'll be honest with you Really, I did not think you guys are gonna pull it off when you guys did the tge for sweat because you took a Product from web 2 would hat which had over a hundred million users and brought them all the way under the chain And even have a hiccup there was no shutdown and actually worked and after that I became a believer I'm like if they can do that if they can take all those web 2 people and actually make it work and not shut down I'm like there's something to be said On top of that when we're talking about these dApps and you see you said it you talked about how It can scale regardless of if reduces a couple people or a lot of people and here when we take a look at dApp radar And everybody who's watching this video right now the links in the description There's a project that I keep seeing at the very top Kai Ching and then yeah, so when you're talking about this you guys really I mean, I mean actually two of your Projects are in the top So three three out of top ten in monthly actives are that's right play ember you have your game on here. That makes sense So I always am impressed by also taking a look at the active addresses Transactions and fees because we just that's what we talked about There's a great website app that Artemis that XYZ for its last chains I'll link that in the description and we're gonna see that just taking a look at like January 15th For example the daily active addresses you guys are almost number one and You're right behind Binance chain. I think you guys flip-flop here and there but you have one point one six million Binance change has one point two six Lana's five hundred seventy-three roughly some around there and then transactions And here's the thing about about this one with transaction Solana here You're looking at twenty two million or so now you guys have two point three three million on there be there be a discrepancy Based on if these transactions are voting transactions or they are actually real transactions or group together Regardless doesn't matter the thing that I always like to look at is those two Metrics and then the fees and you guys are again on the very low side So how exactly are able to do that so well is it all the sharding or is it the new technology guys have coming out? Yeah, I mean it it's pretty much sharding, but Kind of the way we outline our roadmap back in 2020 has been Really a set of milestones to kind of get us to like an end game of sharding and so Yeah, right now. We are running with four shards, which is you know plenty of capacity for this apps It was plenty of capacity to indeed launch this kind of massive Consumer applications that we're having on near but over time Obviously, you know, we want to have billion active users, you know, even daily and so to get there, right? We need to continue scaling the capacity. And so the thing we have coming out Is what we call phase two. This is where we transitioning our validators To actually being able to process more transactions per each individual shard five to ten X more improvement performance per shard and then it allows us to have a lot more shards Kind of right now like we just went through four to five, but we can actually go Way beyond that was this new transition. And so we have this right now Kind of as one of the intimate like milestone major milestones for the near sharding design Which again, we'll really make our network more decentralized improved performance and Also validators We're gonna have a lot more validators with lower requirements to join the network to participate So I'm really excited. This will kind of, you know, continue showcasing and in many ways relate to what People were talking in 2018 2018 about sharding We actually have that all coming now To fruition. Wow, that's crazy. Well, Ilya, I gotta tell you that's a lot of information condensed in a very short amount of time I don't want to I don't want to make people's heads explode So let's just leave it there for now and what I like to have it as as you start to upgrade and do these things You talked about I'd like to hold your feet to the fire and have you come back on and talk about it Especially with the different upgrades you have. So how does that sound? That sounds good. Okay. So everybody you can check out Ilya I'll leave his X profile in the comment section or in the description, but that's it for today So Ilya, thanks so much for stopping by we appreciate it. Thanks, Rob Yeah, great. So thanks Ilya. We appreciate it and it's good information But you know again as great as these projects are just remember that they're all companies They're all businesses. They're all vying for the same thing. So hopefully they can take to the next level But again, it's difficult because there's so much competition and really I think as time goes on We're gonna see who are the winners and who are the losers But I do like how nearer makes things easy makes things cheap They got a lot of people on it. So now that takes care of today for the news everything else. Thanks so much for stopping by. Appreciate it