 Welcome to Digital Asset News. Take a tough story. Is it cryptocurrency or digital assets? Nah, I'm breaking out of bite-sized pieces. So today we've got some pretty major news as Visa highlights crypto settlement. So what is going on is that they are going to be integrating into the USDC stablecoin on top of the Ethereum blockchain. So we'll take a look at why this is so big as far as they are bypassing banks in general. What USDC is, what Visa actually does and is, and finally we'll take a look at the dark horse, which is how USDC could actually be run and is run on Stellar. We'll take a look at that on top of what I think is a bigger story. Americans are concerned about rising inflation, prices for goods, or soaring. And I'm going to talk to you about a personal experience and why I believe that when inflation starts to really take off, we're going to see a massive influx into cryptocurrencies and digital assets. So we'll take a look at all those things. The first take a look at what's going on in the markets. So today it is March 30th, March 29th, 30th, somewhere around there. I'm in Puerto Rico today. It is 5 p.m., I guess Puerto Rican time. And that is what is going on. So we've been here for just a couple of days or so. We did a video yesterday with Alex Massioli and Ryan Gorman. We'll take a look at what's going on in the markets. And pretty great place. We're just down here to take a look at certain things. And who knows, might even move here at some point. But this is what is going on in the market. So it's a fantastic day. News of this really sparked an incredible massive influx as far as price action goes. And we are at 1.82 trillion. And I think, you know, 2 trillion flat is right around the corner, which is great news. So let's take a look at the most bullish coins. Obviously, USDC makes a little sense. Everybody is tweeting about it, talking about everything else. Wanchain, comp, OMG, and of course, Ethereum, because of what we just talked about. What I think is interesting is that no one is really talking about the whole stellar connection as far as USDC, because it can run on that, which makes a lot more sense for the millions of transactions. We'll get into that in a second. But we have that and then the most bearish coins, AGI, AVEX, GO, BOW, and EGOLD. So that is essentially what is happening in the market. Let's take a look at the specific prices real quick. Bitcoin 57.3. And if you take a look at this, but just let me blow this up so you can see what I'm talking about. What's interesting about this is that Bitcoin is at 57,323, yet we're almost at a pretty fantastic market cap of almost an all-time high. So what's going on? Well, everything is flowing into these altcoins. You see a lot of different projects outside of top 100 that a lot of investors are getting into because they know of the massive gains that are out there. So like I've always said, once Bitcoin hit $30,000, I stopped all the cost averaging in. There's no point in it for me. I think it's going to go back down to that after it hit $150,000. Ethereum, me personally, I haven't been buying it up for quite some time. I think passed around $13,000 or $14,000 because I started to take profits. I don't think it can really go up. I thought I could hit $10,000. This bull run, I think, if we get to $6,000, it'll be good and we'll go from there. So I don't know. But the other ones I'm putting a little bit more money into, which would be things like Voyager, things like Cardano. I'll just take a look at StormX and buying that every single day because I think it's a pretty small cap and it could do pretty well. So what else do we have? Tethers? Tethers, nobody really cares. Polkadots, still doing pretty good. Actually, everything's really going pretty good around the horn. Theta tokens still up a little bit. $13, amazing. I remember when Theta was like a quarter. 2812 for Chainlink, same thing, USDC going up there at 12. And then of course, Tethers still sitting at the number four spot. I wonder what's going to happen after this announcement. Anyway, let's take a look at what's going on in actually today's top story. So this little article is what really drove the price today, as I think everybody's talking about. They're telling you what's going on. And that's great. I mean, this is a big catalyst. So what exactly happened is, as part of a pilot program, Visa is using USD coin to settle transactions over Ethereum. Great. With the help of the crypto.com platform, sounds pretty good. And Anchorage, a digital asset bank, these are the three, are the two things that they're using. Visa will offer service to more partners later this year. Jack Forestel, Visa's chief product officer, so the firm's move is partly an effort to serve financial tech companies. And that's pretty much the whole story. So this really hasn't rolled out, but they made an official announcement, which is always good to see. And they're going to actually progress into moving forward with USDC as far as settlement for their millions of merchants. So that's great. But the real question is, why is this so big? Obviously, it's big because it brings people into the cryptocurrency world, right? But this is from Jeremy Alair, Alair, I don't know how to say his last name, but he is the CEO of USDC, or no, Circle, excuse me, which is with USDC. And he just lays it out like this. He goes, this is why this is so important. So for Visa, this means that they get the money as fast as blockchain moves. So instead of having to settle through banks, and everybody thinks that Visa is super fast with their transactions per second, and there is final settlement instantly, it's not the case. Actually, it can take hours to days. So these things that are happening, people are always talking about, well, the traditional world is so much faster. Are you out of your mind? Have you ever tried to transfer any kind of money using Swift? That is slow. Visa still has a great messaging service, but final settlement still takes quite a long time. So to move funds without reversal risk, without the time delays and costs of Swift, ACH, et cetera, and this is huge. And essentially what they're doing now is just going, hey, all the traditional finance systems that we have in place, all the ones that the banks are using that we've had to rely on for quite some time, we're going to simply bypass that, and we're just going to use blockchain. So the faster that blockchain moves, and the more inexpensive it can be, the better it is for Visa. So when I saw this, I'm like, why in the world did they use Ethereum? Because right now, we all know it's slow, and it is super expensive. The fees are outrageous. And then there was a statistic that was quoted by Kim.com, and he talks about how 50% of the transactions globally are $10 and under. So if you're using a transaction that's $10 and under, and trying to use the Ethereum network, I think you got a long way to go, and I don't think it's going to work out too hot. So it leads me to two conclusions. One, either there is some type of layer two solution that is just going to knock our socks off with Ethereum and drop the gas fees down to nothing, and it's going to be super fast, which I got to tell you, I don't really think it's going to happen anytime soon, even with what was happening in the past, and the layer two solutions that actually were not delayed. Or what could potentially, this means is that they are going to, they want to use USDC, Visa wants to use USDC, even though it's an ERC-20 token, they're like, yeah, but we won't use it on their blockchains like a stellar. I'll give you that in a second. So real quick, this is what USDC is. It is a stablecoin, $11 billion in circulation. It's a transfer on chain of $555 billion, which is quite a bit of numbers, and it just is pretty much a stablecoin. There's nothing really sexy about it. That's just what it is. However, it's being accepted more and more places. I use it all the time in Voyager. I like to use it. Unfortunately, since the ERC-20 token, it still has those fees, and it is still slow. Tried to transfer it over to a friend of mine. It took a long time, and again, the fees were pricey. So I'm like, well, this sucks. So even though Tether is Tether, that is also an ERC-20 token. So again, they're plagued with the same problems. Makes me wonder though, if you're trying to have world dominance, then why build everything on Ethereum right now? Because you're kind of tailed in that. I guess it was the best thing of the time. So we'll see. I mean, could Ethereum do it? Sure, but it's got a long way to go. So let me take a look at Visa and actually what Visa is. So just so you know, this is why this news is so important. First of all, they have 3 billion cards worldwide. There's 46 million merchant locations. So imagine this. This just opens up the entire crypto world to all these merchants. So they can, yes, they're going to settle in USDC, but how far away are they potentially from introducing something else? Because stablecoins are kind of like the gateway. Once you have a USDC, a Tether, or whatever the stablecoin that you want to use, you can buy any kind of cryptocurrency that's within the ecosystem itself. And that's why Tether was such a mainstay. Also, you got 65,000 transactions per second, messages per second, TPS is pretty high. And the volume is 11 trillion total volume. I think that's per year. It's like on a daily basis. So you can see why this is such a big deal for USDC now being implemented into Visa, but we knew this was going to happen. So again, the question is, why Ethereum? So I thought it was a layer two solution because there's the things that people are always talking about, but this was just delayed until July. This was optimism. Then postponed until at least until July. And opening mainnet to the public is something we cannot do alone, send optimism. It will be a collaborative effort between us, projects, and core infrastructure providers. They are doing these things called optimistic rollup based Ethereum scaling solution. And it aims to increase Ethereum's throughputs or the transactions per second and reduce its gas fees. Great. We all want that. Well, first of all, who's going to use it and how does it work? Well, Unisop said it targets an L1 Ethereum mainnet launch over the version three on May 5th and L2 deployment optimism will follow shortly after. So that's great. Again, dropping the fees, making it faster. Optimism was known as plasma. Think if you remember those for the OGs out there. And it's a, it's pioneered optimistic rollups. And this provides scaling by bundling or rolling up transactions into a single transaction. So instead of having like three to 10 or individual transactions that is rolling all together, then shoot them across the network. And then that will increase it because they're all bundled. And of course, the fees hopefully will go down. Hopefully the transaction received by the main Ethereum blockchain, but it's executed on a layer two solution. It's then sent back to Ethereum. And of course, it's, it helps with everything like we just talked about, and it doesn't sacrifice security. So this is the big thing. Now again, so this sounds great. Again, this is if this happens in July, it's already been delayed. And let's say it does hit in July and there's no hiccups. Well, great. But what if it does? And who knows how much the gas fees will go down? I will just say this, like if you're going to purchase something for $10 and you have to use USDC, even if you have these rollups, it's still going to be expensive. Even if you had to pay like a dollar or 50 cents or whatever else is people like, I don't want to, you know, that's, that shouldn't be how it is. So this is why I think this is a bigger deal because USDC has been live on the stellar network since February 2nd, 2021. So if everybody has forgotten this, this is what is going on stellar. You've never used stellar. It's super fast, and it is super cheap. And I just don't understand why people don't adopt it more and more. I think part of the reason is because it's so closely tied and related to XRP, XRP is going through that litigation process for the the SEC. So in that situation, maybe a lot of companies are like, you know what, we'd like what you guys are doing, we'd like how fast is now cheap it is. But let's see what happened with the SEC because if XRP gets deemed as security, then maybe this could flow over to that. Man, it's just one of those thoughts that I have. But again, if USDC can be on, it can be on the Ethereum mainnet or the blockchain, and they can use stellar at any time that they want to flip a switch, whatever you want to say, then why wouldn't they just use that? And I think it'd be a win-win for everybody. Anyhow, that's what we have in that situation. Let me know what you think of the comment section. Let's move on to our next piece. So next up, this is a big story. And I think it's a it's a bigger story than what people are really covering. And it's inflation. And it talks about how Americans are concerned about rising inflation. Rices are goods for goods are soaring. And I will just say this, when we go through this article, it's going to talk about, you know, the media has pretty much been, you know, bypassing it just kind of like laying into the wayside. And there's a lot of more people out there, you probably yourself included, which is probably why you're here are thinking to yourself, if there's so much inflation, and there's so much quantitative easing, and there's so much money printing, which all the money that's going into circulation, which dilutes the actual spending power of the dollar, that means that everything else is going to go up. So what can I do? How can I hedge my bet? And that's why a lot more people have been getting into crypto and digital assets. And when I talk with the story, you're going to see just how quickly this can actually happen. I forgot the quote, but who actually quoted it, but it says, it starts off slowly, then quickly. And it's the same thing like with like being broke. It starts off slowly, and all of a sudden, you're broke. And it's the same thing with inflation. I think you can start off slowly, then all of a sudden, type of inflation. Now, do I think it's going to happen? I don't, I don't know, I'm not an economist, but it does scare me, especially with some of the things that I've seen. So this article just talks about how they, they got a direct, direct quote from an Atlanta Fed president, Raphael Bostic, and he said that he would not be concerned if inflation rise above 2% or even 2.4 if prices are firm and not volatile. Well, I'll go with that. At least it's not too crazy. Cleveland Fed president Charles Evans told the public that increased inflation is welcomed and to flow inflation is no good. Sure, to flow inflation. I guess the, the, the option of that would be even worse. This is where it gets interesting. Meanwhile, mainstream media publications have been telling us residents not to worry too much about inflation and it called the theories meme economics, which is, I don't think that every single mass media publication is really just saying it's just meme economics. And there's some, I'm pretty sure that there are some different outlets that are covering this adequately, but for the story that's what they're talking about, but I will just say this, I don't think people are very stupid. They can look around and look at the prices and go, wow, that's going up and that's going up and that's going up. And guess what? I haven't gotten a raise. Nothing really going on here. I don't, I mean, I have gotten this, this fantastic stimulus money, but the stimulus money that I get, guess what? Everything else has just increased in price. So what did you really do for me? I mean, you helped me out temporarily, but in the long run, how good is this going to be? And the, it says, there's a survey that was done and says 77% of US residents are worried about rising inflation. And this is across all different age, ages and genders. So 18 and 24, 25, 34, 35 to 44, and so on and so forth. And then lastly, there's two things. First of all, if you look at Google Trends, and you just type in the word inflation, right now inflation, because it won't give you exact number of search volume, but it will tell you on a spectrum of zero to 100 how much this is being searched for. And I went all the way back to 2004. And as of March, 2021, it is the most surge term right now since 2004. So that is on the forefront of everybody's mind about inflation, about what is going on, because they can see it and they're not stupid. And it makes total sense. So there is that part. And then there's these little snippets of information where people are saying like this was from Bruce Fenton. And actually, I heard this on Max Kaiser's show. He says, this guy says, our local lumberyard prices have risen so fast, lately that we can't quote accurately. We have now moved to weekly price quotes. If you're a builder near an estimate for your customer, that lumber estimate is now only good for a week. Sorry. And then off it goes. So pretty amazing, right? I can remember when prices didn't fluctuate that much to where they would say, look, it's only good for a week. And after that, it's going to go up. So don't quote anybody any prices. So that puts a lot of strain on other people. Same thing with us. I was talking to Jose, he was our contractor for the investment property, and we wanted to redo the entire bathrooms and kitchens. And he said, sure, he goes, we can do it. And he gave us a quote. And he says, I'll just tell you right now that when I go to Home Depot to get these different supplies, that every day in the morning, as a contractor, when I go in, there are people responsible. The only job they have is to increase the prices of all these different items that are in there. And he says, before it wasn't that many, just a little bit, and then they'd restock. They go, lately, he goes, I've seen it go up drastically. He goes, so if you guys want to do this, the best time would be to do this now to get the supplies. Because if not, I have to, I have to work this into the numbers and just gonna be that much more. So even me, I can see it. And I'm sure out there, even you can see it, not just on construction supplies, but on food items, perishables, maybe even medications, everything's going up. So again, when I look at crypto and digital assets, and I see that, okay, I have my bank account and I have X amount in there, I'm like, what do I do with this? Because all I'm doing is just having money in there that's really just appreciating. So why would I keep it in there? Gotta make it work for me. And that's why I put in the different assets. Anyhow, so that's it for today. So look, if you found value in that video, thanks. I appreciate it. And yes, take it with me. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. It always helps the channel tremendously. Also consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about are time sensitive. And that is it for today. So thanks so much for watching the end. I appreciate it. And I'll see you on.