 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the good top stories in crypto-currents in digital assets. Man, bring them down to bite-sized pieces today. Concerning stuff, first up, crypto whale warns of growing DeFi scams as another protocol exits market with funds worth 20 million dollars. I just have to tell you, most of the DeFi out there are scams. There are some very few projects that are good and not scammy, but this article is going to show you just how bad it actually is. Also, IRS is in the news again as they double down investing another quarter million dollars into tracking crypto transactions. So if you're in the United States and you want to take a listen to what could potentially happen in the future as far as the IRS taxing the living heck out of you, then stay tuned. On a positive note, Coinbase is back at it again with the earn rewards and they've got a new token listing called Selo, which means just by learning about it you can earn cash up to 115 dollars. And in this economy, that's nothing to sneeze at. We'll go over all that and jump into the office for a cue of the day where this will be a follow-up from yesterday's interview with Celsius CEO Alex Mishinsky as we talk about insured assets on the Celsius network. But before we do all that, let's take a look at what's going on the market. So today is September 10th. It's almost 11 a.m. That is Texas time and it looks like nothing's really going on. Let's be honest. So Bitcoin's up maybe a percent, but down for almost 10 for the week. That thing was up four, but it's down 17 percent almost for the week. Tethered tether, nobody cares. XRP up a whopping 1.7, but down almost 12. And everything across the board. So I'm not going to jump into it big time because it's not really... It's boring. Let's just be honest. And the only thing that's really big right now is Uranfinance. They're back up to 30,423. Wow, massive. And they are inverted. So they are 10% up for 24 hours, only down 4% for the week. Aave up 7%, down 2% for the week, so not too bad. So even as many scams as there are out there as far as DeFi goes, you have to take a look at which ones are the good ones. I'm not saying these are the good ones and you should invest in them, but I'm just saying do your own research and be very cautious about what's going on. All right, let's jump into today's top story. So first up, growing DeFi scams. Somebody exits with $20 million. Not surprising. That sucks. What's going on? So a new liquidity mining pool in DeFi product, YFDEX.finance, that's interesting, has exited the market after defrauding investors of 20 million total funds locked in its protocol. YFDEX conducted a two-day major advertising campaign of different platforms, including Twitter and Telegram, with promised giveaways for retweets and hashtags. Following YFDEX's exit, its official website, Medium Story, Twitter, Telegram accounts that were used to lure investors have all been deleted. Surprise, surprise. Financial advisor and trader, Cryptowell, said this. Another day, the DeFi scam. After promoting themselves on Twitter for two whole days, YFDEX has taken a total of 20 million of investors' funds in their recent exit scam. That's the big thing. Exit scams. And it's everywhere. And it was actually talked about as far as SushiSwap, with the master chef taking all of Sushi, selling it for like, I think it was like $1.3 million. Correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. But I think it's about how much it was, which doesn't seem too bad. I don't even take a look at $20 million. But this part of the article is pretty interesting because it says, you know what? SushiSwap was an exit strategy, but it's not dead yet. And it states, the tokens price did plummet following the news, which is the master chef said, hey, I'm taking all my Sushi and getting out of your suckers, with many accusing the founder of carrying out a scam. However, there's a future for the DeFi project after chef Nomi transferred SushiSwap's control to FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, who's planning to migrate it to the Solana blockchain. And I've heard in the comments section, they go, well, we believe that master chef and SBF are the same person, but I don't see that. I don't think that's possible, but who knows? Who knows? It's cryptocurrency, right? Anything's possible. So we'll see how that project works out. Now that's on the Solana blockchain, but I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, that trust is a currency you just can't buy. And when you try to transfer over and do some more things, and you say, oh, now it's legit, it's just tough to really, just to bring everything back. It's tough to build yourself back up. Can they do it? I mean, maybe. I mean, it's happened before. I mean, look at Facebook. They stole all our data. People still use that like crazy. So what are you gonna do? Well, you will see. Lastly, to finish up, two China-based blockchain security firms, SlowMist and Peck Shield have also worn investors of EmeraldMind or EMD. SlowMist ruined a Wednesday that the EOS project is on the run with approximately 2.5 million in USDT and EOS. So if you're into EmeraldMind, let me know about that in the comment section. I haven't heard anything about it. I try to stay away from DeFi until everything kind of simmers down because I'm just not a very risk-prone person. I like to kind of put my money on more of the sure things. It's kind of weird because like cryptocurrency assets are just volatile anyhow. So I try to find the most, I mean, the stable as possible as I can get are the ones that I feel like have a good team, have a good track record, have a vision, have a use case and then just go from there. I'm not saying all DeFi is bad. I'm just gonna say I'm just gonna sit on the sidelines because I know a lot of people have lost money and I'm not in the business of losing money. I'm just not. It's just not my game plan. So I would have to sit back and just see what happens and then go from there. Anyhow, in April 2020 alone, five scam incidents involving both new and old DeFi projects including Uniswap, LendF.me, Curve, Pagnet and Hedgick were recorded as a result of compromised smart contracts. Now, not that these are bad products themselves, but they have compromised smart contracts. So I'll just say here's this. Just make sure that if you're doing DeFi, if you're doing crazy trading, just be as careful as you possibly can and just try to make it a small percentage of your portfolio and then try to invest in something a little bit more stable. That's all I got for you. All right, let's move on. All right, here's a bummer of an article. So IRS doubles down, investing another quarter million dollars in attracting crypto transactions. So I'm just going to tell you this. If you are not based in the United States, you just want to skip over this because this is just us dealing with some craziness that is the government trying to crack down and squeeze every last dime out of us. So if you're in the U.S., just go ahead and fast forward to the next piece, which is all about Coinbase and how you can make some extra money. But if you're in the United States, let's take a listen. So on September 8th, the IR, on September 8th, this was not too long ago. What's the date, 10th? Yeah, two days ago. The IRS's Criminal Investigation Department signed a quarter of a million contract with a blockchain analytics firm to expand its crypto tracing tools. This follows an overarching trend of the IRS stepping up its game when it comes to crypto. Look, we're all in the game. We're all trying to minimize our taxes and do the best that we possibly can. And the IRS has got their little power points too. And look, you're going to try to evade us or minimize us or whatever you want to do. Our job is to make sure that we shake you down as much as possible. And that's just how the game is played. Anyhow, moving on. The firm behind the contract, blockchain analytics and tax software, their only prior government contract was for little less than 10 grand with the U.S. Treasury for serving as an expert witness. And somehow they got this sweet contract for the quarter of a million dollars. So hey, good for them. Just last week, the IRS put out a request for submissions for a pilot program to track crypto transactions. That's always nice. IRS investigative capabilities played a major role in a massive seizure of a crypto bound for terrorist networks last month. And I gotta make mention of this. Kudos to them for finding terrorist organizations that was using cryptocurrency. Fantastic. But there was a new article out and it just talks about Swift says, Swift, our favorite software for the legacy bank system, says that criminals much prefer cash for money laundering, not crypto. Because cash is king. Cash is easy. It's very hard to track cash. Believe me, I've played the game before and it's much simpler for every kind of online transaction. They can find that all day long. But cash, very tough. So I don't see why they wouldn't want to use cash anyhow. Why didn't use cash? That's what's been using the whole time. They still got a bad name of it. What are you gonna do? I gotta finish up. Meanwhile, this year's tax forms in the US will put the question of whether a taxpayer use crypto in 2020 front and center. It's gonna look something like this. This is actually 2019. But you're gonna see this question. If at any time during 2019 as you receive sales and exchange or otherwise acquire any financial interest, any virtual currency, which is a very loose term I might add. And I put yes because I don't want to deal with it. Like I said, I've been through an audit. They'll make you cry. It is just so much problems that you have to deal with. You have to go to the IRS office. You have to wheel in all your receipts. You have to go over every single line. It just sucks. So I just said, yes, I'm gonna deal with it. And this was also a letter sent out from August 14, 2020. This wasn't to me. I found this on Twitter. And this is from the IRS and says, why were I into you? We have information that you have or had one or more accounts containing virtual currency but may not have properly reported your transactions. Involving virtual currency, which include crypto and non-crypto virtual. So they're going to tell you what you need to do. You're going to have to amend that and go through all this problem, blah, blah, blah. So here's what I'm going to tell you. If you've gone through any exchanges, you've done any kind of AML, anti-money laundering, or KYC, your customer kind of act, where you have put in your social or some type of government ID or your driver's license, or you put any kind of personal information into an exchange. They report all that to the IRS office. Don't shoot the messenger. That's just the way the game is played. Now, if you want to get out of this rat race and try to figure out, you know, like how do I not have to pay so many gosh darn taxes? Well, I did a great video and it talks about how I'm not going to pay Zippo in taxes and how you can too. I will link that at the very end of this video so you can check that out. But let's go on to the next story. So next up, I'm not going to delve on this too much, but Coinbase, I've had my problems with them in the past because they keep breaking down at the most inopportune times when Bitcoin goes up like 500 bucks or something like that. For some reason, multi-billion dollar company can't handle it. They've only been around for, I don't know, five plus years. Whatever. So, but there are some good things. First of all, I haven't heard about them crashing recently, so that's a plus. And second of all, they will give you money just for learning about new cryptocurrencies. And you don't have to like trade or do anything like that. It's like, you can get up to 115 bucks. So they have a new one. It's called Cello or Cello. I'm really bad with names. You can go in there and you can watch these videos, answer a couple of questions. It probably takes like 10 minutes max. And you get paid for it. And then you can do it for all different types. Like you can do it for Tezos. You can do it for Comp. You can do it for a lot of other stuff. So if you're looking, first of all, who doesn't have a Coinbase account? Everybody's got a Coinbase account, right? But one thing I want to make mention is the bummer of it all is things like this. Like I still have Tezos on there and they have an estimated reward of 4%. Which I think is pretty decent, I guess. I'm sure I can get them more somewhere else if I use a Baker. But that works out pretty well. I'm lazy. I don't want to do anything with it. So there it sits, right? But there's other parts that just suck. And this is one of them. USD Coin Rewards, 0.15. 0.15%, I think it's still better than the banks. Correct me if I'm wrong. But it's paltry compared to what you can get over. It's Celsius or Voyager or BlockFi or any of those other ones. That even you can really get really great rewards. So always look for the positives and negatives for everything that you look at, right? There is no black and white. There's a lot of gray areas. So Coinbase, if you're new, it's fantastic. Super simple. The fees suck. But you can also use Coinbase Pro. And that's not so bad. But if you're looking for interest rates and things like that, you can't do better than other places such as Celsius and Voyager and whoever else you want to use. Me personally, I just believe in the Celsius. I believe in that mission. I believe in the person behind it, Alex Mishinsky, some of the big fan. Voyager, we've had the CEO, Steve Ulrich on. And I believe in that too. That's why they're my one-two punch. All right. So continuing on with that theme, we had actually Alex Mishinsky on the show yesterday. And there were some lingering questions that I'm going to clear up right now on Q of the Day. So let's jump in the office. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the office. So it's been a great week. I mean, not for cryptocurrency assets in reality, but it's been a pretty good week for digital asset news. I mean, I had Roger Vier on this week. And I also had Alex Mishinsky from Celsius. And those to me are two titans in the industry. And I couldn't ask for anything better. So thanks for everybody who watched those videos. And thanks to Alex and Roger for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. They're welcome back anytime, especially with all the great information that they have. So yesterday we talked to Alex, and he told us all about Celsius. And that guy, let me tell you, that guy should be a politician because there are these talking points that he hits on every single time I've seen on every type of video that he's ever had. And he just is able to really maneuver things into it. And not that's a bad thing. That's actually an impressive thing. I mean, as far as a marketer myself, I can appreciate that. So when we start talking about Celsius and why I use it as my one-two punch, it's because of that guy. And I talked yesterday about how I took my cryptocurrency, my whole portfolio, and 25% of that is now at Celsius because I like to gain interest on things that I don't have to do anything for. I just let it sit there. And it's just passive income. I like that option a lot. And I think it's going to be great, especially when they start to open up the whole stable coins to US residents. I mean, maybe in some other states, but like Texas, I can't put it into USDC. But right now, I'm talking right now, for my three businesses, once they open that up, I will take a huge chunk of all my cash assets that I have just cash laying around a bank that's doing absolutely nothing and I will stick it right into Celsius. That is no problem for me. But one of the things that came up in the discussion in the comment section was somebody asked, this is from Arthur, and he states, I thought right from the get-go, Celsius and Alex were a great thing. My only hesitation is the funds aren't insured in any way, at least the last time I looked, has it changed? Still maintain the not your keys, not your crypto philosophy. And that's true. If you put it on Voyager or Celsius or any type of exchange, you got to understand, you're giving up some authority, some power because you're letting them handle it. However, you're letting them loan those things out. And with Celsius, they're going to loan those out to institutions. So if you want to go that route, then you can or you cannot. It's up to you, me personally, for me and what I want to do, I'm not telling you what to do. You do whatever you want to do. But for me, I mean, it's sitting the bank anyhow. And especially if it's sitting on exchanges, or like these little cryptocurrencies that you're like, well, I got a little bit of stellar here or whatever else. I'm just going to put it on to Celsius as opposed to having it sit on some exchange doing absolutely nothing. I'll, you know, that's what I did. I just crunched them all down, stuck them all on Celsius, and that was it. But the big question then is, well, if it's on Celsius, how do they ensure that? How do we know that these aren't going to just going to walk away or Alex Nyshinsky is just going to pick up and say, I'm taking all my sushi and I'm out of here. This kid needed a new sushi swap. But so the answer was actually answered by DJ Blindface. So DJ Blindface, thanks so much for, you know, doing my job. I appreciate it. And he says, he states, they are insured in the network or when they are with their custodians, but not when they are out on loan. That's why they take collateral. So I was like, that's a fantastic response. And I even went so far as to take a look at the FAQ on Celsius to make sure that is documented somewhere. And this is exactly what it says. And I actually put a link in the exchange list of my fees and exchange list of the Google spreadsheet. That is in every single description of every video that I do. And there's a link that's going to look like that. And you can find links to exchanges and everything that I use. And also, if you want to use the affiliate links, you don't have to. You can go right to Voyager or Celsius here and do everything you want to. But if you use the affiliate links, you get 10 or $25 depending on what it is. So in there, I put a link to this FAQ and it states, the question is, can you offer any insurance at all for my deposit? And the answer is Fireblocks and Prime Trust are custodians both provide insurance on assets. However, we generate interest rewards by lending out the assets to onboarded partners or institutions. When these assets are lent out, they are not insured. Let me say that again. When they lend them out, they are not insured. So you're probably thinking, well, that sucks. But the great thing is that they state all of our coin loans are collateralized up to 150%, meaning the borrower gives Celsius an alternative asset as collateral for the asset they are borrowing. So right there, that is the greatest thing. So you're like, okay, well, it is collateralized. So that's great. But another question that came up was, well, if they're given collateralized assets as far as US dollar, but what happens if they're given some collateralized in cryptocurrency? So these are the things with loans. And when they loan things out, even in March, what they do not want to do, and Alex has talked about this many a time, he says is they do not want to liquidate anybody because they want everybody to have a great experience, which makes sense, right? I mean, if you're having a great experience and you trust a company, you will come back. It is so much easier to retain customers than get a new customer, which is why I do not understand this 100x leverage trading and everybody gets wrecked. They're like, I, you know, pound sand, get the heck out of here. We don't care about you. So sorry, I had a bad experience, but we'll find somebody else. That's not what Celsius does. They go, you know what? We don't want you to get liquidated. And even in March, out of all the different assets that they had out, all the lens that they had out, they said, look, things really took a big tumble. We need you to update your collateralized assets and either increase or pay back the loan. And out of all of them, they only had three people that they had to liquidate. And that's a pretty good, I mean, in March, what was it? March 3rd, March 18th somewhere around there, when everybody went to hell on a hand basket. So they, you know, they did the right thing and they had a lot of happy people. So the same thing happens here. So I am happy with that. The next thing that came up, which is always the big question, which is this, which is, well, where is Celsius? Where am I able to actually use this? So, you know, I can't, there's parts of Celsius I can use as a Texas resident in the United States and there's parts that I can't, like I can't earn Celsius. Kind of sucks. I can get on Uniswap if I want to, depending on the cruddy fees right now. But that's about it. And I, you know, I can't use any kind of stable coins or I can't, I'm interested in stable coins. It's just Texas, right? What are you going to do? So the question then was, well, what about other states? What about other territories? What about other countries? How do I know if I can use Celsius? So I actually sent, I took a look at the FAQ, I could not find it anywhere. So I sent an email to customer support and I said, hey, I just want to find a list of like where Celsius is offered. And Melina, emailed me back, she says, hello. Unfortunately, we did not have a list of countries where Celsius is available because of the same reason I mentioned in the previous email, which was, hold on, let me pull this up. She states, Celsius accounts are not available where prohibited by law or by Celsius policy as updated from time to time. Currently countries like Iran, North Korea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Cuba, or any other country against which the United States, the United Kingdom, or the European Union imposes financial sanctions or embargoes. We can't do anything with those, apparently. Be advised that in some jurisdictions that are regulatory considerations, Celsius may not provide part or all the services, you know, for me, which may include some eligible digital currencies or the cell token. And then they just say that due to the changing regulatory issues, they're going to put the information on or they're going to let us know from time to time, which I thought sucked because I'm like, once you put on the website and then just update the website because I asked them again, hey, can you send me a complete list? I said, no, we won't do that. So that's a bummer. And in my email, I said, look, you can do it one of two ways. You can have, you can give it to me and I can post it somewhere or you can just keep getting people constantly contacting you and sucking up everybody's time and customer support going, is this offered here? Is this offered here? Is this offered here? So I don't understand the reluctance of just giving, just posting like, okay, it's available in the United States, but in this state, in this state, you can't do it. It's not available in these countries. It's not available in these territories. Just put it out and update the website. I don't see the problem. But I mean, we had Alex on here yesterday and the first question was, customer support is lacking. What are you doing? And he said, look, he goes, we're growing pains. We think he said double or triple or something like that in like six months. He goes, so we needed to onboard new customer support reps. Problem is when he gets somebody new, it takes a little while to get their feet wet and now they're up to speed. Everything should be better. I got it. So I mean, it's just me thinking out loud. I could be incorrect, but I just think it's easier just to not monopolize, to automate different responses so that it's just easier for customer service to deal with the real issues, which is whatever those are. Anyhow, so that's it for the queue of the day. Let's jump back. All right, so that's it. So hope that answered some questions. There was some questions that I had for Celsius, so that was good. If you don't know, I have a second channel and it's called Digital Asset News Clips. The reason I did it was for two reasons. First of all, people are short on time and time is money. So every subject that we cover here every single day gets broken up and put into the clip. So the big thing is just to save time. That's the first thing. The second thing is, is that YouTube likes to, for some reason, shut down and delete YouTube or cryptocurrency as your asset channels. This has happened numerous times to some of even the top crypto YouTubers. So I create this as a second channel just in case as a backup. Now, I'm also on library and some other different places, but those get like a whopping 20 views a day. So if you're into that, sure, but I would highly recommend or I'd highly hope that you could do me a favor and go over to Digital Asset News Clips and subscribe. I don't usually ask for subscriptions, but this is like my backup and I figure it might help you out too. You just want to have certain clips and I also do one bonus video over there. So if you have to want to find more information, there is a place to go for. Also, just want to give some shout outs to everybody who has joined up Digital Asset News and I just do random shout outs. So Mark, welcome. Mr. Toad, height me up. Who else we got? TTP911, Jimmy G. Babs, like that. Crypt and Crypto Swords, so fantastic. So thanks so much for sticking with me throughout the whole video. Really appreciate it. If you like these types of videos and me too, it's going to pop up on your left and right. Not sure YouTube pretty much controlled all that stuff, but I'm going to strangle them and put in that video on paying no crypto taxes. And that is it. So thanks a lot for checking those out and I'll see you on the next one.