 Good news. Good news. Good news. The SEC finally comes out and approves an exchange to trade crypto and digital assets. We'll take a look at what that exchange actually is and also we'll take a look at some more good news is Apple finally approves NFT sales on its platform and a couple other pieces of information. So these are the days that I like to report on the news because it gives everybody a little bit of a push, a little bit of hope and that is a good thing. So the first thing we have today is this was a article by Coindesk and it talks about coming and register. These firms say they actually found an SEC friendly crypto path. Now if you haven't followed what's going on with crypto lately, the SEC has not been very forthcoming and very giving as to what they want to do as far as when exchanges come in and try to register with the SEC to try to trade securities. Coindesk has done this and of course what happened with them they met with them multiple times and they got hit with a well's notice. And now it looks like the SEC is changing course just a little bit. And before I get the article it was interesting that I had talked to Simon Dixon and we did this in February and he talked about how when he did it through his bank of the future as he was trying to start up his own bank and how it was to register and register for securities. He says actually the way that these crypto exchanges are doing it is they're doing it in a wrong way and the way that they're doing it doesn't really lend itself to being compliant with the SEC. He also said the SEC is also not being very forthcoming. So he said it's not just on this one side of the exchanges. It's actually both people who are being a little bit non-compliant with what they're trying to do. So I always thought about that comment that he said and now it's starting to make a little bit of sense but you'll get to it. So there's what we got. The SEC quietly issues significant approvals for companies trying to stick to the securities rule book. The FINRA, a financial industry regulatory authority, industry funded oversight arm created by the SEC announced that it approved its first broker dealer with custody rights for digital asset securities. That was done today. This is through Promethium Ember Capital LLC. Aaron Kaplan, who is a security lawyer, is the founder and co-CEO of parent company Promethium. He said the firm will demonstrate that industry compliance or complaints about the absence of a path to US compliance are totally mistaken. He says those complaining about a lack of regulatory clarity, going based on others, were trying to put a square peg into a circular hole. Promethium Capital has only been approved as a special purpose broker dealer that can take custody of customers crypto assets effective May 17th, which is retroactively, but also as an alternative trading system or an ATX, ATS for digital asset securities. The company's platform will go live in the third quarter. So again, when we talk about this, it looks like this platform is going to allow exchanges of crypto and digital assets, whether that be a security or potentially a commodity, or somewhere in the middle. So it ends up like this. Kaplan, who wouldn't yet identify which securities he anticipates will change hands on his firm's exchange, contends that his platform will be able to handle the many digital assets that have sought exemptions from certain securities requirements. Unlike a full-fledged exchange, an ATS doesn't work with a company to list the security, but it only really links buyers and sellers to trade assets that Promethium Capital's compliance operation decide meets the definition of security. So again, they're going to allow trading of crypto and digital assets. I think this is a step in the right direction. So the big question is, is what's going on with Coinbase? Now it's a little bit of a different as far as like the nuance behind it, but at least it gives us a little bit of hope that there is a little bit of a way to meet in the middle. And yeah, let me just think about that in the comments section. And also more good news, Apple and NFTs. This is from an app called Steppen. And the issue with Apple is that they don't like to deal anything with crypto or digital assets or anything in between, especially with NFTs. And the big thing is the fees that they have to charge for that. So now it looks like Steppen, which is a move to earn app, got to around that in a certain way. Here's what we got. So let's scroll down here. So here's, here's how it's going to work. Is that, let me scroll up here. Apple and Google, just so you know, they charge a 30% fee on most in-app purchases. So everything that you put on Apple or Android, they're going to charge you immediately 30%. That's a bummer. That's what it is. I thought that was just Apple. That's maybe Google does. I don't believe that Google does. That might be incorrect. That includes NFTs, which means app developers will either need to charge users that extra fee or otherwise eat the fee as part of the cost of doing business. So a lot of places, what they'll do is they'll say, okay, this is $10 out in the real world now because of Apple. It's going to be $13. What we'll do is we'll charge $8 and we'll increase that cost to meet around that $10 fee and we'll eat the fee. However, what Steppen did is the exact opposite. They said, if you want to buy this NFT on the Apple Store, what you're going to do is you're going to pay for that. So here's an example. A pair of sneakers was listed for 110 GMT, which was about $31.40 based on the price of the token for Steppen. And then if you want to do that on the Apple Store, it was actually $44.60. So you could pay $31.40 outside or if you just didn't really want to deal with it and wanted to go through Apple, it's $44. That's like a 43% difference or 42-43% increase. So there is a way around it. I just thought it was interesting that Steppen's like, well, if you guys want to buy it and you want to go that route, then you can do it just so we're going to charge you. And it's actually going to be Apple and we're going to eat that cost. So I think, again, it's positive. I don't agree with them doing that, but maybe I missed something. Let me know in the comments. Also more good news, tokenized securities. It looks like they hit $225 million market cap. Now, this is something that you've heard people from BlackRock talk about, how the future is going to be tokenized securities. So they're going to be able to tokenize stocks. Instead of stocks sitting in some brokerage, you're going to be able to own the tokenized version of those stocks. And it's been ending up on Ethereum, Polygon and Gnosis. It's a $225 million market. Now, this was written yesterday. And if you take a look here, there's a website called dune.com for tokenized securities. I'll link this in the description. You can see that actually today, for Daily Global, it's $189 million. So it's still doing pretty good at 12% growth. And here's the market cap as far as issuers, Ando, Matrix Dock, VAC, Open Edge, Franklin Templeton, which I was kind of surprised to see that as an old school financial institution. They're getting into that. But it looks like this is actually going off without a hitch. There's one thing to note here though. And I thought it was interesting that the company I mentioned, Franklin Templeton, the old school finance, they use Polygon, which I thought was a pretty smart way to do things. They tap Polygon to host a tokenized version of what's NASDAQ listed on Chain U.S. Government Money Fund. However, just so you know, the majority of the activity is occurring on Ethereum. I don't know why that is. I mean, if you're a trader, I mean, do you really want to trade with those fees on Ethereum? Why don't they just use Polygon? But again, step in the right direction. I like that. Also, some good news, some not so great news. Ledger, they just had their Twitter Spaces, and they came out and said that they are going to hold off on the recovery option. If you haven't heard so far, Ledger just rolled out an option where they would be able to store your private keys. And it was $10 a month if you wanted to do so. And of course, they would back it up. This is, I think, I thought was a terrible idea, because that's the whole ethos of cryptos, be able to give you control and you power and you to keep it. But sure, I understand where they're coming from. If you want to onboard some more people, maybe a lot more people, they don't want to deal with it because they're not used to it. I think they can get used to it, but that's not for me to decide. I'm not anybody's dad. If you want to pay for that service and just give somebody else control, so go right ahead. I don't care. But for this one, they said, yeah, we've heard the complaints. We know what's going on. So we're going to roll back the firmware upgrade. We're going to not go through with the recovery option right now. And we're going to make our code open source. Now in the past, they made a couple, a couple of different parts of their process open source, but now they want to go through the whole thing and give the option for everybody to take a look at their code. Now here's the thing. I don't know if you know this, but I'm not a developer. So if they roll it out and open code, I have no way to know what's going on. If they do, and there's some information that some of the analysts can take a look at, so much the better, great, I'll report it. But I think this is good in the long run. Maybe people can look at it and go, Oh, there's a problem here. There's a problem there. I'll report on it. But for me personally, maybe you out there, maybe this isn't such a big deal. So we'll see how it is. I am going to have ledger on the show today is Tuesday. They will be here Thursday. So I'll ask them some questions. One of the big questions I'd like to know personally is if you're going to do this, because let's be honest, they're going to do it at some point. It's a revenue stream. They're going to tackle $10 extra a month from the plebs. If you can do that, why don't you just put that onto a different device and just let the people that are here right now and know what they're doing just to keep it the same way, keep it a different device for different people, and they can have the firmware upgrade and they can back it all up and we don't have to deal with it. I understand the whole process that it doesn't go through unless you opt in and unless you give your consent and unless you start paying for it, but it would just be nice if they could just separate it totally and everybody can feel safe. Anyhow, if you've got questions for them, link in the description. I'll ask them the best of my abilities. And lastly, just to finish up some bad news and some, I think some really good news. First of all, you may have noticed there was a little bit of dip yesterday. Apparently, there was an AI-generated hoax of a Pentagon explosion. This was making the rounds, being tweeted and retweeted that there was a reports of an explosion in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and this was by some pretty big names and they would put it out and then later on, they go, oops, sorry, that was AI. And just so you know, when that happened as far as like the dip that it was, US stock to a little bit of hits and then Bitcoin went on in 26.5. I think it rebounded to 27.8 somewhere around there. So if you were catching falling knives in a trader, congratulations, probably got a good deal. But this is a problem and it's going to be a bigger problem as we come into the season of a new presidential election in 2004 and everything else that's going on. I would highly recommend, if you haven't done so, subscribe to a channel that you'd like to get information from instead of hopefully not getting too much AI-generated nonsense like this. And lastly, and this is pretty good. I think we're in the right place at the right time. I think that the four-year cycle is still intact. And this is from Will Clemente. And just to kind of give you a feeling of like where we're going, he says, one of the biggest differences between this Bitcoin bear market. And the last one is that in 2019, hash rates didn't reach new highs until Bitcoin 3xed off its lows, which if you don't remember, 2017 we hit 20,000, 2018, 19 of like 3,300, 5,000 somewhere around there. And people just kind of were writing off Bitcoin. But now I think people don't do that so much. So today, the hash rate is over 2x. It's prior May 2021 high. But Bitcoin's only up 75% of its lows and hasn't even nearly 3x. What this means to me is that companies and minors and investors start to see that maybe this thing that they call Bitcoin and crypto assets would be something to get into. And you'll see more people putting money into the mining operation. And I think it actually is a good thing moving forward. But that's it for today. So look, if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up. That helps a lot. Also consider subscribing, like we just talked about. Don't get a bunch of nonsense information. Just pick someone that you trust and subscribe to them because this is not a set in the forgetting type of market. That's it for today. So thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate it and I'll see you on the next one.