 Welcome to digital asset news to get top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and bring on a bite-sized pieces. So today we've got some pretty good stuff and it's mostly about Cardano and Ethereum. First up, Gucci and Playboy want in on Ethereum NFT frenzy and this is one of the primary reasons why Ethereum is just crushing it right now. So we'll take a look at that and then the big eternal question is why is anybody building on Cardano? Well here we go. Cardano could soon see an on-chain liquidity boost and we're going to take a look at Occam's Razor, a new Piper protocol and what is going on behind that and we'll go over both of those things but first take a look at what's going on into the markets. Today is April 8th, it's 10 a.m. El Paso, Texas time and hey congratulations our market cap is teetering around the two trillion dollar mark. Now there was a 100 billion dollar loss of course we just made up that ground very quickly and just like we talked about yesterday, it doesn't matter what's going on in the market, just understand that this is normal so pullbacks are normal, these dips are normal and if you don't like the price just stick around for a couple days and it'll change and that's what we have right now. On top of that we're taking a look at the hottest on Twitter, this is trade the chain, sentiment analysis, the links in the description you can check that out and what I notice right here is that there's a lot of things going on as far as like sentiment and what is being talked about, 1-inch engine, KCS, OMG swap, Wi-Fi and the big thing is like why are these things being talked about and the reason is real quick is because there's a new listing over on Coinbase Pro which is 1-inch engine coin, NKN, Origin Token and they're all going to be listed on Coinbase Pro which means there's a Coinbase effect available and that's also going to go over to Coinbase so if you're wondering why there's a big jump in these prices that's the reason and that is what's going on. Now we take a look at the coins themselves as far as like what is going on with the price action, Bitcoin's at $58,000 Ethereum is holding above $2,000 Binance coins at $418,000 and I wish I had Binance coins it's just amazing how much it's gone up, 27%, 70% for XRP, congratulations to the XRP holders I know I have to say that because if not like when shall we XRP, when shall we XRP, well there you go, congratulations, watch out. Polkadot, 8%, 10% for Bitcoin and then of course the ones we just talked about so that's what's going on in the market, it's a great day, everybody's happy, prices are up, it's not going to last. What goes up, we'll go down and there's going to be dips but enjoy the day, take the W because you earned it. All right, so let's take a look at what is going on as far as today's top stories. So this is the big question to me and for a lot of you out there which one is it? Is it Ethereum, is it Cardano, which one's going to be the winner? Me personally, I don't think there is going to be a specific winner and it's only going to be one chain and that is it and that is all. I think there's room enough for both especially in the next couple of years. I'm 10 years, 20 years debatable, right? But right now, Ethereum crushes it. You can't really do too much on Cardano. Smart contracts are here, there's a lot of problems on there. No one's really building on it right now so Ethereum is just gobbling up everything and here's an example of that. Gucci and Playboy won an Ethereum NFT frenzy. I thought it was interesting because NFT is just another use case for Ethereum and this is why everybody's building on Ethereum. Matter of fact, I had a friend who wanted to build out his token, his coin and took a lot, looked at all the different projects out there and actually reached out to a lot of them. They're like, we can't do that. We can't do that. Ethereum, we can do that and here we are. So this is what it says. This was a release from Playboy. I think we all know who they are works and it states we're excited to announce a new partnership with Nifty Gateway, the premium platform for NFT art tweeted Playboy this morning. Our entry into NFT art builds on Playboy's long history of providing a platform for artists and creative self-expression. Great. Now we're going to have NFTs as far as Playboy and they did not miss the boat, good for them. They realized what's actually happening and then Gucci comes along and first of all, me personally, if I'm thinking about NFTs, I'm thinking about three things, pictures, videos and MP3s. So for Playboy, that makes total sense, but for Gucci and like the handbag, I don't understand why they would get into it and it was revealed to me in this article. So it states here that Gucci, and this was their actual tweet, it says, ever since the 96 million people sale that brought headlines everywhere, we've seen a lot of saturation in the market. I believe we've hit the stage of mainstream exposure, more NFTs, more collectible projects, more corporations like Gucci and Playboy entering. Sorry. So this was from Lupify and then top artists like Murakami and Damian Hearst creating NFTs. Now these corporations, big artists and celebrities and we see it in line with Tom Brady is going to come out doing an NFT. We had Gronk, Gronkowski, he minted his own NFTs for football cards and all the different artists and celebrities. Of course, they're getting on a bandwagon. So again, Gucci, I don't get it, but Marjorie Hernandez, founder of Luxo, a blockchain platform that works with fashion brands explained, luxury brands were behind the e-commerce trend. And that's true. You didn't see too many people or too many groups getting and jumping in Amazon going, hey, we can't wait to sell Gucci on here. Hey, we can't wait to sell Levi's. Hey, we can't wait to sell, name the great brand. They just kind of let it pass. And all of a sudden just they're like, what happened to our sales? They're behind the trend. So there's now more of a willingness to experiment with new technologies like blockchain. She added the question is just who pulls the trigger first? I don't know if you really think about it. Gucci, they're a global brand. So they have a lot of great artists and creative types who work with them to create these great handbags. Not a big, you know, I don't really care about handbags, whatever. So if they have something like that and they can just put it out there as an NFT, that's more revenue for them. That's more marketplace. That's for marketing. So why wouldn't they do it? And that just makes sense to me. So let's see how much NFTs are actually going to explode this year. I think it's going to be big. And those things are being built on Ethereum. So here again is the question with Ethereum being the number one, really, you know, marketplace for NFTs and smart contracts and everything else. As far as market cap, I'm not going to say about, you know, the fees and the timeframe. What happens with new technology? Well, if you take a look at new technology, I'm going to show you two things. So Ethereum maximalists don't freak out. Codonal maximalists don't freak out. You'll both have your fair share of time. I'm going to show you there's a great little video from data is beautiful. And just real quick, it just talks about if you're talking about technology, take a look at browsers from the early days. Now again, we can't, this is not apples to apples. Ethereum is not a browser. Get that smart contracts. You can build a lot of things on it. NFTs, great, great, great. But just talking about technology in general, right? Because I believe we're in the early days of crypto current digital assets. So remember Netscape Navigator? Some of you do, some of you don't. Some of you are very young. Some of you are very old, like me. We remember Netscape Navigator. And this was the dominance in 97. Then all of a sudden Internet Explorer came out. Why? Well, it was because Microsoft pretty much own all everything and all the computers were PCs. So they bundled it with Internet Explorer and it went up pretty high. So you'd think that Microsoft would dominate forever because everybody uses a PC, right? Well, Mac came out and they kind of solved that. But I mean, I use a Mac, but still the majority still use a PC. Then Firefox somehow ate into their bottom line. Then all of a sudden Google came out of nowhere and just said, you know, we got a better, a better device. It's called Google Chrome. And before you know it, even though you had a PC and an Explorer kind of sucked, it kind of went to the wayside that it sucked. I didn't mind it so much. And then, you know, Chrome became that big dominant factor. And so on and so forth. I personally was brave, but whatever, this was a dominating factor. So that's technology in that way. So if you look at Ethereum, you can say, well, Ethereum could be the Netscape Navigator. Again, don't freak out. I'm going to give you both of your options here. So if we take a look at technology, let's take a look at e-commerce, for example, okay? So here's another one. This is also from Data's Beautiful. If we take a look at, these are the number of visitors per year on a website. Again, not apples to Apple, but going into 1998. And let's just move forward. There's a little website that's going to pop up pretty soon. It's called Amazon. And you see that Amazon is dominating everybody. I mean, for the most part, we're not excited. And LightGoes and Yahoo, which seems ridiculous to me nowadays. Look at AOL used to dominate everything, right? But that went to the wayside. So e-commerce, Amazon was the pretty big thing, right? And you would expect since it was the first one, it would maintain and never fall off. Well, here's the thing with Amazon. At some point, Amazon's here, you're going to notice another company going to pop up. It's called eBay. And eBay comes in, another e-commerce site. You could go there and bid on things. And it just started to kick the tar off out of Amazon. What happened? Well, Amazon, they wanted to acquire a lot of different companies. They had a little bit of growing pains. And before you know it, they lost a lot of market share, a lot of visitors per year went over to eBay to buy all their things. And that just happened. But here's the most important part. As time went on, they figured it all out. Jeff Bezos had a really good focus on customer acquisition and customer appreciation. And he was relentless. And I think it was actually Simon U over at StormX who talked about this. He goes, Jeff Bezos had such a direct line of thought. He's like, if we just make sure that the customer is taken care of and we make them super happy, we will be a dominating force in e-commerce and everybody will go to us. And he was laughed at. And of course, eBay was like, we'll be okay. And then before you know it, time moves forward. Here we have Amazon. I mean, let's say, I'm as fast forward here. Amazon, of course, eBay goes away. And Amazon becomes a more dominant force 2008, 2009, 2010, 2021. So it's not like once you have this dominating force or factor that you're going to stay at the top forever. Again, you could actually fall down. And then you could start to go, you know what, what did we not do? We didn't do that thing to make sure that we are correct. So I see a lot of parallels between Ethereum, their transactions, their gas fees, the timeframe and everything else to where they could actually bring it around. However, you never know, because Cardano could be right behind them. Avalanche is right behind them. All these different types of smart contracts, Tazos is right behind them and going, hey, we're in the top 30 and we're competing. Will that happen? I have no idea. But again, I don't know which one's going to be great and which one's going to be awesome. That's why I hedge my bet and I own both. And I haven't sold any of my positions so far. Actually, that's not true. Once I hit 2000, I sold a bit of Ethereum because I was on my exit strategy and I try to do what I say I'm going to do. So that is that for that piece. Let me know what you think in the comment section and let's give equal opportunity to a little bit of Cardano. So this was a new article that I just read. I thought it was pretty interesting because the big knock on Cardano was, look, you guys are super slow. It's taken a long time to get things done. Nobody's building on it. What the heck is going on? Wait, for a second, you have to understand. Gogan era just came about as far as smart contracts. The very hard fork just came about. So you can't compare a Cardano to Ethereum so much because our theme is way far ahead. But just be honest, you cannot build too much on Cardano. And I think that might change. So this was a nice little piece about Occam's Razor. So massive expansion of the Cardano ecosystem could see a massive expansion of its on chain liquidity with the launch of Occam Razor, a decentralized funding platform, and liquidity solution specifically built to suit the needs of the network. The network, talking about Cardano, has been notorious for its slow development and bootstrapping process. I've been critical on it as well. It's just how it is. I like to make things move a little bit faster. But when you're trying to do things globally, maybe it's not a bad idea to slow down, learn from other mistakes, fix those mistakes, and then move on. With the network now fully decentralized, that is 100% of the state pull operators are now minting blocks. It's doing pretty well as far as Cardano and decentralization. The time has come for projects to launch on Cardano and utilize the functionalities that took years to develop. Again, this is the year for Cardano to really start to see things. If nobody builds on Cardano this year, I'm going to pull the Mike Novigratz and hang up my spurs because there's no reason why they shouldn't. And time will tell. Occam Finance, this is from Occam's Razor, has set its sights on making Cardano the go-to network for fundraising. The first division's components will be Occam's Razor, DeFi funding platform, blah, blah, blah. According to the company's blog post, Occam's Razor is fully production ready and will host the first project raising funds soon. To support the Occam ecosystem, the company will launch the OCC token utilizing Cardano's native assets functionality. Very interesting stuff as far as what is going on. I don't know a lot about Occam's Razor. I don't know exactly. It's great to have liquidity and things like that. I need somebody smarter than me, which is not hard, by the way, to explain what the heck is going on. I'm going to bring in Mark Berger. He is the president of Occam's Razor. I'm just going to ask him the questions. What's going on? How does this work all into Cardano? Are people going to actually build on this thing so we can actually hit the next level? Let's jump right in to this interview. So like we just talked about with that article, interesting stuff going on with Cardano. A lot of things I actually need help on to really clarify what was being said there. I reached out to a couple of friends and they introduced me to Mark Berger. He is the president of Occam's Association, a non-profit, which is going to work to help to raise Cardano and all the things we just talked about in that article. So Mark, thanks for coming on. Talk to us and simplify it like we're five. Tell us what is going on and then just clarify some things. So first off, what is Occam's Razor? Well, thank you for having me. So Occam's Razor is a launchpad for Cardano. It will enable Cardano developers to get the desired funds to start building on Cardano. Sounds good. I can see that. So then we need that foundation. We need that liquidity, right? That's what is going to build on. I believe that this is kind of like the year for everything to happen. Smart contracts are coming on the pipe. Golgan era is here. We had the merry hard work. So is that the big thing that Occam's foundation or that your association is going to be doing? Or is there more pieces of the puzzle? Because if it's just liquidity, I mean, that's great. We all need liquidity to bring over these developers. Anything else going on? Yes. So we are building this, first of all, in Ethereum. We're having a beta test right now and will be releasing in April. We're building this on Ethereum to capture liquidity from a other chain to enable Cardano developers. And then in August, we'll be ready to port it over to Cardano and then we'll live on both blockchains. Okay. So we've got four months here. We're going to build it on Ethereum. You're going to build everything on Ethereum and then bring it all over for native assets so that people, not everybody, but the people who are building over there can make it very easy to come on over to Cardano and the course of liquidity that follows. Okay. So that is that part. Is that correct? That is correct. On top of that, we have partnerships with centralized exchanges that are going to enable a centralized bridge, Ethereum to Cardano or vice versa bridge. So the first use case is going to be that our OCC token can be deposited to those exchanges, either as an ERC20 or as a Cardano asset. And on that exchange, you can switch the chain and then withdraw it into that chain where you need it. This is of course only the first use case. Over time, you'll be able to withdraw a Bitcoin and hunt for some interesting yield on the OCC platform as well. Okay. Well, I like that. Everybody likes yield. We'll take it. So now that we have all these things going on, I did a little bit more research. I took a look at it in the background. Is there any plans for a DEX, decentralized exchange, something like that? Because if you're going to build on Ethereum, Ethereum is great. And it's going to do well. But there's one big problem. I think we all know that problem. It is the Gaspis and of course, time constraints. So anything like that's going to happen down the pipe? Yes, exactly. So after the release of OCCM Razor, we'll have a release of OCCM X, which is a Uniswap version for DEX that has many, many improvements. Those improvements, they mainly come from my or my team's past, where we have been working on centralized digital asset exchanges and where we exactly know how such an exchange works and what the mechanics are in there. And we sort of analyzed what is out there in DEXes today and are going to fix many of these problems. The same thing here. First, it's going to be live on Ethereum. Right now, we're testing on Testnet and we're confident that we can release the first version in, let's say, two, three months from now. And then the same thing as well, we're going to port this over using Plutus in the summer this year to make it happen on Cardano and benefit from all the things that have been happening on Cardano that we can utilize there. Gotcha. Well, that sounds pretty good. I'll take that DEX. I'll take that DEX because I don't want to pay outrageous fees. So we'll see how that works out. And I really should have started with because Danish introduced us, Danish Chaudhury over there at bitcoin.com. That's a little fancy exchange that's going on. And he said, hey, this is Mark. He had to talk this guy and he knows what's going on. But tell us real quick, I'm a big believer in investing in people, other people that are on my channel, my subscribers kind of are in the same type of vein in theory as me. So Mark, tell us like, first of all, how did you get into this? Is this like something that is new or have you been doing this for quite some time? Because I took a look at some history. Looks like there's been a lot of history. So just tell us, just ease our fears and tell us where you came from. Yeah, so I have around 20 years of experience running startups in the tech environment. And I had a short three-year engagement with the bank where I had to build custody from scratch, a trading desk for digital assets from scratch. All those things back then didn't really exist. So I had to build them. This is true. But a bank remains a bank. So I had to get some freedom and get out of there and build stuff. I believe by building stuff, you have more impact anyway. This is true. So I'm going to guess this was not an American bank because this was, and first of all, what year was this? I don't know, this was last year. Yeah, so the engagement with the bank started in late 2015. So it was a bit before the 2017 craze, which went really well for the bank. And after the 2017 craze, I left to go build again. It was not an American bank. It was a Swiss bank called Fontobel. It's the biggest bank for structure products in Europe. And yeah, so I'm Swiss myself. So it's only natural that I had to end up in a Swiss environment somewhere. Probably makes sense. And then, but this was 2015, but even before then, you were in blockchain cryptocurrency and digital assets, right? Yes, I had my face where I was interested in Bitcoin and where I started making sense of what this is and how this works and if it will eventually impact the world, what it is and what it does. Gotcha. So okay, so we go from there all the way up to the present. Now we're talking about Oculus Razer. We're talking about the whole liquidity process. We're talking about a DEX. And then what about like for self-governance and DAOs and things like that? Yeah, that's our third product. So the OCC token basically has this function that it can be used on in the OCC DAO. So what we're trying to achieve is that we have a wide distribution of the OCC token so that over time, we can decentralize the OCC protocol and get it in the hands of the users so that they can write proposals that they can get them voted, etc. Gotcha. Okay, so we got three. Okay, so I'm talking about these things and you're telling me about, okay, we got this probably, this probably, any other projects that you have in that little arsenal that you've been talking about? Is there anything else I missed? Yeah, I think those three products are the main ones. So OCC Razer, Launchpad, OCC X, Advanced DEX, and then the OCC DAO represented by the OCC token. There is a few like side things, for instance, a centralized bridge where you can swap tokens from Ethereum to Cardano and the other way around, which should give exchanges, centralized exchanges, freedom in the future so that when people want to withdraw tokens and don't want to spend too much gas and want to put it on a blockchain where there's interesting yield to capture, then they can do that using that bridge. Gotcha. And I think that all comes down to when you were working, I think you were working with exchanges in the past and this is where it all comes from. That is true, that is true. So my old company, Scalable Solutions, is running many exchanges throughout the world. So it has a global reach. It's about 22 exchanges and about the same amount of wallets and overall the technology is processing roughly 10% of the global spot volume on a daily basis. Gotcha. That's one of the things I remember Danish actually telling me, in between drinks. So yeah, that makes sense. All right. So first of all, Mark, we all appreciate you coming on here to help us make sense of what's going on. Sounds like a pretty good project. Last bonus question I'll just ask you is this, Cardano gets a lot of flack because let's be honest, it is not the fastest in development. They take it very slow, very nice. And in the beginning, because I'm an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, we like to get things done and throw things at the wall, but sometimes it's not a good idea to do that. A prime example will be like Boeing or Airlines. I don't want them to figure out all the mechanical problems when they're up in the air, when I'm on that jet, make sure you fix it before I get up there. So when we're talking all these things, where do you see Cardano going in? Let's just take it simple. Six months a year and then try to go till out of three years. Where do you see everything happening with Cardano? Well, we're closer than ever for things to happen for real with Cardano. So basically, all we have to do is wait until the smart contracts are fully functioning, which should be happening later this summer. And once that happens, it will be a fantastic ecosystem that can prosper in too many ways. So you mentioned that a plane should be in order before you board and take off. And this has been happening to Cardano behind the scenes over many years. So there has been a lot of thought put into it. It's already today, the most decentralized proof of stake blockchain, which has, at least for me, decentralization has a core value. It's going to be super important going forward. Then speed is another thing. Security is the most important factor. And then there is a lot of things they have been putting thought into to be ready for also institutional adoption, which is going to be the game changer over the next year when the real money is going to be on the blockchain. Yeah, we'll see how this all unfolds. I think this is, like I've always said, and everybody out there watching, I think 2021 is the year for the thing to really take, just launch or launch path off. So we'll see how it all goes. I personally own a lot of different cryptocurrencies. I do not own any token with Oculus Raising or anything like that. But Cardano, I'm one of the state co-operators. So I have a financial interest. Also, I have a financial interest in Ethereum. I don't know which one's going to be great and which one's going to be awesome. I have no idea, but it's looking pretty good for this year. Mark, thanks for coming on. I appreciate any last words before we take off. Well, thanks a lot for having me and go and check out our Twitter or Telegram. There will be frequent news coming out that should get many people excited. Sounds good. I'll put it in the description. All right, let's jump back. All right, so that's it. So thanks again, Mark Berger. I appreciate it for you coming on. I'll link everything in the description below. And that is it for today. So first of all, thanks for sticking with me all the way in. If you liked today's video, give it a thumbs up. You found out how to value. Also consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about are time sensitive, like the stories in the beginning. And that is it for today. So thanks so much for being here. I'll see you in the next one.