 If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. And that is Circle CEO Jeremy O'Lear pretty much just came out and said, you know what? I think the path forward is a digital dollar, aka a CBDC. And maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way and we'll take a look into what he said. But to me, I don't think it's really good. But before we get into that, let's just take a look at not the market itself, but just to see how things are going. Now we've had quite a little bit of a ride with the different bank collapses and the reapplication and the stocks going up and everybody getting made whole. So how did that work out for crypto? Well, we had quite a little bit of a run. And if we're taking a look at just risks, I always like to take a look just quickly at Ben's site. And it's like, it gives us a nice little summary and it takes a look at the price metrics, on-chain metrics and social metrics. Give us overall risk factor and it's pretty low, 0.24. But what I like to do is kind of just drill down and just take a look at how things are going as far as risk levels. Now for Bitcoin, we can see that right now, the latest risk value is 0.40. Which is pretty much a little bit higher than in the middle. And if we take a look at what that means as far as like time and risk bands, 0.40 is actually on the other side of the cliff to where things are kind of heating up. So this to me is not a date to where I'm gonna sell a bunch or buy a bunch. It was gonna dollar cost average. But again, when I start to see like we go into these 0.1 band levels or 0.7, 0.8, 0.9. That's when I start to look at either dynamic DCang, which is buying more or selling off a little bit more. And then also, because of what's happening lately, of course, CPI numbers came in and it looks like they were just on target, which everybody was happy about. So the risk level, if we take a look at it, it's dead smack center. It's neutral. So Fearing Grade Index, this is to me, not the time to do a bunch of different trades, I'm not a trader anyhow. But if you're a trader out there, just be careful. But to me, it just looks like a day just to keep going. What does that mean? Well, as time has gone on, I think some people have taken a bit of profits. Because over 24 hours, you see Bitcoin down about almost 5%. But a heck of a run, 7 days, 13%, Ethereum and so on and so forth. I think everything's down today because, look, people are going to tell you diamond hands and diamond hand this, diamond that. And you can do that. But not honestly, sometimes it's better to take a little bit of profits, which I personally did a couple of days ago on some alts. And we'll see how that works out in the future. So that's what we have in the market. Now let's get into the story. And this was a tweet from CEO of Circle, also Circle USDC, which was DPEG recently, but hit back to its peg. And Jeremy comes on and says this, look, moving to a full reserve dollar digital currency is our best hope to insulate the internet financial system from the systemic risks embedded in the fractional reserve bank system. There's a nice little article. I'll link it in the description. You can check it all out. But really what he's saying is this, I'm going to read this one more time. Moving to a full reserve dollar digital currency is our best bet. What I think Jeremy is trying to do here is hedge his bet and go, look, we are a digital dollar. You can use us as Circle. You don't have to use CBDC. But essentially what he's saying is, let's do a CBDC. Now I know he wants his company to be picked out. But when you start to talk about these things, there's some people in the comments will just say, look, this guy's playing his cards right now. We're starting to see what he wants to do. They've been working with the government, not saying that's wrong. But for me, when I take a look at this, I'm like, man, are CBDCs just inevitable? And what we have to really break down first, of course, is what the X is CBDC. So just so you know, right now, here's how it works. Central Bank prints a bunch of money, real money gets spit out, goes to banks, goes to you, there's the end user, and in between do fractional reserve lending, which is what Jeremy alluded to. And this is what they want to do. In the future, it's just going to be the central bank, essentially to create zeros and ones in the computer, which they do anyhow. But it's going to be a ledger, essentially a ledger, not a blockchain. You can call it a distributed ledger, but it's just going to be a ledger on these different central banks. And maybe some of the large banks will be the middle person, I don't see the smaller ones going out, and it's going to go right to you. And they can do whatever they want with those zeros and ones. Now, the one thing that Jeremy did talk about, which I have to agree, is fractional reserve banking. This will definitely help if we have a fully collateralized. Because what he's talking about here, a reserve digital currency has our best hope to insulate as far as the risk of fractional reserve banking. And fractional reserve banking is this, you don't know, I'm sure most of you do. But this is a real little recap. If you put in $2,000, then the bank, and this might have changed, I always get this confused, it's 90% or 100%. But they can take that money and loan it out to $1,800. Now, if you come back and go, give me my $2,000. Well, they're going to have it from other people. But if everybody goes to the bank and they start loaning out all these different funds to everybody, guess what? As time goes on, they're not going to be able to pay you back in dollars. And that's what we saw with Silicon Valley Bank and others. Because there was a run of the bank and they were loaning out, that is fractional reserve lending. And the thing that got to me is this. Jeremy looks like he wants to go for a CBDC. He wants USDC to be that digital dollar. I don't think the government's going to go for that, but I could be wrong. But he talks about having everything collateralized. And this was actually a statement from Custodia Bank. And this is Caitlin Long's bank, a matter of fact. And she has to agree here. She goes, look, if we backed everything by dollars, would be okay. And she states right here, the US urgently needs to put in place safe business model to the banks that bank the fast moving industries, like that proposed by Custodia, which is in Wyoming. So that the Federal Reserve does not need to backstop such banks, Custodia proposed to hold $1.08 in cash for every dollar deposited by its customers. And I can see where she's going with this. I can see where Jeremy is right, CBDC's sure. I mean, I don't think it's going to work out. But the last part is this. If you think that that sounds like a good idea, why don't we just do that? Why don't we just have everything collateral? And then we don't need CBDC's. Maybe we can just have the central banks or the banks themselves just overcollateralize and not do fraction reserve lending. Well, they already tried it and it failed. This is an article from 2019 in Bloomberg. A link in the description. The Fed versus the narrow bank. This is in March of 8th. And what it came down to is this. The idea of the narrow bank or TNB, TNB, the narrow bank, is that you can open an account with them. It'll take your money and park it at the Fed, Fed Reserve, and that's it. The Fed will pay it 2.4%. It'll take a small cut and it'll pass the rest on to you. That makes sense to me. Makes sense to I think everybody. Cause like, well, that seems very safe. Fed has so far refused to open an account for TNB. TNB, and they said this is our objections. The first is macroeconomic. The Fed worries that narrow bank could mess with the implementation of monetary policy because they can't expand. Because if they succeed, they will keep a lot of money at the Fed increasing the size of its balance sheet. Number two, it worries that narrow banks will take funding away from regular banks, making it harder for those banks to trade stocks and bonds, again, fraction reserve. And number three, and the most important one, in times of stress, which we just saw, everyone will flee from the regular banks to the super safe narrow banks, which will have the effect of bringing down the regular and big banks. And that's essential we have. So if people think themselves, oh, this sounds like a pretty good idea, essential banks are always said, no, we're not gonna go for that. And we're gonna keep this up and not approve anybody's charter, which is what they did with Castoria Bank because we don't want it, because we see problems and we wanna do a CBDC. And lastly, I will just say this. We had Simon Dixon on the show yesterday, and if you want, and he's a gentleman who's been in crypto for a long time, but also a person who tried to start with his own bank earlier times, and he's gonna talk about just how difficult it is, just what the central banks want, and it's gonna be CBDCs, and he talks about how it's pretty much inevitable. So I'm gonna link that, link in the description, and also, if you don't think that these CBDCs are coming, watch Guy from Coin Bureau. He's got three videos out over the last three days. I'll link in the description, and you can be your judge on that one. So let me know what you think about that in the comments section. I will just lastly say this. There's only one way out of CBDCs, because what could happen potentially? Well, CBDCs, things can just be shut off. They can do whatever you want, total control, right? But you can opt out of that, and we have that perfect opportunity with crypto and digital assets. So for me, I think it's gonna work out just fine as long as people hear the message. Anyhow, let me just think about that in the comments section, and we'll finish up with a couple of things which is macro-wise, meta, or what was called Facebook is wanting down NFT support on Facebook and Instagram. Just so you know, there's no word on when, or if at all, meta will completely cut ties with NFTs. Company will still plan to integrate financial technology into its platform, but that's, I think, a blow to the industry because it's still a pretty large company as they cut ties and allow people to use NFTs. Also, meta in the news, again, they're gonna lay off 10,000 workers. And this was actually after they laid off 11,000 employees in November. I think they have around 86,000, so through the math there, that's a lot of jobs lost in that sector. Zuckerberg pit 2093 is meta's year of efficiency. So the things that the Fed is doing, maybe it's working, but we've seen that the unemployment rate has gone up just a little bit. And unfortunately, that's the positive sign that the Fed is looking for. And lastly, lastly, I would just say this, that remember how meta was involved in a tussle with the SEC because they wanted to get out their own blockchain called Libre, well, it didn't work out too hot. But they didn't stand up to the government, unfortunately, and now they just stuck and relegated to doing what they're doing. I appreciate the people that do stand up to the governments. We have Grayscale, which is fighting them. They brought them to court, the SEC, for not allowing a spot ETF, only a futures ETF. Of course, the Ripple case, Kraken tried to do his job. And then lastly, one of the things that I like to see is Coinbase actually stepping up and saying, look, we know that there's a problem with Kraken and what they were potentially doing as far as taking, but if you want to handle this in court, we have no problem. So I appreciate the ones that do that. And I'll let that, I'm gonna add one more to the list and that is Sweatcoin. So I sat down with Oleg Fomenko, co-founder of Sweatcoin and he told us that the crypto, which was already launched globally, but was left out of the United States, is coming on September 12th, 2023. So I just sat down with him and said, how'd you do that? Why'd you do that? Because this isn't a really good time. And he set me straight. The big news was this, we talked about a couple of weeks ago, which I honestly, when you told me that you were coming into the US with the securities and all the different things with Gary Gensler, I thought, well, okay. I mean, he said 2023, but I'm like, maybe they'll push 2024, but you didn't. It looks like the September 12th, the Sweat wallet, the cryptocurrency wallet is coming to America. So everybody that has accumulated their Sweat coins can now put those into Sweat, the crypto. So just talk to us real quick about that and then we'll get into like some roadmap and some other things. Sure, absolutely. And despite the kind of the scary nature of what's going on in the US and kind of all the kind of recent events, actually there is quite a lot of clarity that is emerging around types of products and propositions that kind of US regulators are having issues with. What also emerges very loud and clear is that the remit or the objective of their existence is to protect US investors or US retail from crooks and thieves and scammers, et cetera, et cetera. And kind of one of the things that we're realizing is the nature of current enforcement is that it feels like that objective but to proceed it with something a lot simpler which is okay, just whack them all, anything picked up. And in many ways, they're right. They're totally right because we let sort of fox in the chicken house. There are a lot of examples of unscrupulous and just frankly nefarious projects and individuals out there. However, I think that we also have grown ups and if you really put your main principle at heart to protect US retail and US citizens from harm then you start thinking, okay, what is the definition? What actually needs to be happening and what does the project need to do in order to be able to accuse of causing this harm? And one of the things that we're doing extremely well and all around the world is we're actually making the world more physically active, making people move forward. We are able to monetize this user base not by charging them, not by extracting value from their pockets, but monetizing this business and effectively giving these users value from their physical activity. So it is going to be an extremely difficult and a very onerous thing to do to kind of accuse us the project of kind of that whose goal and whose mission has always been to make the world more physically active of coming into the US for the benefit of kind of extracting value and pulling it from people's pockets. We would like to be regulated. We would like to be fully compliant. We would like to be able to bring the value that we have in other countries in the world into the US, but we are fully realistic that in the given situation, if you follow the path that you supposedly should follow, you're just not going to result in absolutely anything kind of constructive and it will set us back by multiple years. What we would like to do is come in an absolutely good faith and do everything to make sure that there is no opportunity to claim that we are doing anything wrong and we are operating in any way in a different fashion as if we were regulated in the United States. It is definitely a risk-based decision, but we would like to have a constructive dialogue with regulators where they understand that, again, we're not coming in with nefarious objectives or whatever, but we're coming in because the market needs us. The market asks for us and we are doing absolutely everything to make sure that we are compliant and taking absolutely every box, with exception of probably actually the box being ticked and the paper being signed, which we know has not happened ever. Ever. So a great answer, a couple of things. What you just said is exactly what all the centralized exchanges and every single crypto product out there wants to do. They want to be compliant. They don't want to be on the bad side. They don't want to do the right things, but there is no clarity being given. And the second thing that I will say is that when you say, because I know some people haven't, they know I talk about sweat coin, they know that I want a bunch of it because I am super biased. And the only thing I talk about on this channel are the things that I actually own. When you say things like we monetize in a certain way, we're not monetizing you, you have to understand, and we talked about this in the deep dive video. And this is actually the question number three, the revenue generation of how you do these things. One of the things right now for everybody who was watching this video at home, you probably watch this on YouTube. And before you watch this video, there was an ad and there may have been two or three ads. And that's one of the ways in which they monetize their app. They don't sell your data or anything like that. They do those things. And also there's different products that you can purchase within the app itself, which is how they also monetize. So it's a little bit different that you may have heard of like other move to earn type of programs where you have to like purchase a very expensive NFT or actually now a cheap NFT. It's not like that. Everything's free from the beginning. You earn those tokens. Those are your tokens and you can use them in a certain way. But you guys have figured out a way to monetize it. And that's why you were one of the, you're either one or number three of the top apps in the global for health and fitness for 2022. I think that's one of the reasons. Was I often anything I said, Oleg? No, it's absolutely spot on. So the full interview, I'll release that over the weekend but a lot of good information there. And of course, yes, I am super biased. I have a lot of sweat coin. I was an early investor into sweat coin. So there should be no surprise. Anybody could talk about all the time. And then if you were looking to take a look at that free app, there's a link in the description. It looks just like this. And you can use it and download unfortunately right now still takes 3000 steps to get to one step. And that's one of the changes that it's done. So that's it for today. I will just say that tomorrow we've got the NFA live with me and Ben from the Cryptiverse and Guy from Coin Bureau. And that'll be at nine AM Eastern. And we've got a lot of things to talk about. But that is it for today's show. So look, if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up, like it, subscribe, all that good stuff. But I do appreciate you stopping by. Thanks so much. And I'll see you on the next one.