 Welcome to Gelasset News to get top stories in Crypto Currents to Gelassets and break them down into bite-sized pieces. Today, bombshell. CFTC charges BitMEX with a legally operating derivative as exchange. This is a big story. It has huge repercussions potentially. What is more telling is that the people up at the top are going to get off with basically nothing and I'll explain in detail. Also, Winkleboss Twin's crypto exchange now allows users to withdraw Zcash confidentially. It's pretty amazing because security coins were on their way out, but with this, it looks like we're going in the opposite direction. Also a crypto venture capitalist thinks Ethereum will hit a 1 trillion market cap, but it's going to have competitors and I can tell you which ones they are. Venezuela's president Maduro says that he's going to bypass sanctions with cryptocurrency. So the question really is, is this a good point for cryptocurrency or actually a bad point? And finally, we'll go over a cue of the day where we're taking a look at what could potentially be another scam. And why is it important that you know about it now so you don't fall victim? So before we get into all that, which is a ton of stuff, let's go over what's going on in today's market. So it is October 1st. It's pretty late, almost 5 p.m. getting done late because a lot of things are going on. But here's what we got. Bitcoin down 1% and not surprising with the news. How far is it going to tumble? We'll get into that in a second. Ethereum down 1.8 at 352. I expect it to fall farther. Tether's tether. Nobody cares. XRP 23 cents. Watch out. Cash 0.7 down a little bit. I mean, everything's going to be down. That's just how it is. So I'm not even going to go over it. Just down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Oh, hey, look, maker's up 1.9. Anyhow, I mean, it really doesn't matter. So if you're new to this space, welcome. Great day to pick to start off. But here's what I'm going to tell you. It doesn't matter what happens now. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. There's been no hacks. There has been no issues with the source code. There has been no types of issues with breakdowns in the structure or deals falling through majorly. We just have what is, I think, is a hiccup and actually a good thing of the space, which is BitMEX is going to get closed down. I was never a fan of leverage trading. I think we all know that if you've listened to the show at any length of time. And I'm glad it's gone. I'm glad it's going to go away. So what exactly is happening? Well, let's jump right in. So here we are. So BitMEX. It's amazing to me how it was clearly stated that if you're a US resident, you could not trade on BitMEX, but with VPNs and whatever else was going on, people were just signing up and of course these guys knew. And they were doing leverage trading and there was a lot of shenanigans. I just never got a good feeling about it. I think people lost a lot of money. And I think they're the biggest shills out there. So I mean, if you want to talk about different things about people losing money, I think BitMEX is top of my list. So what's going on here? So the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFTC has charged BitMEX derivatives exchange with operating an unregistered trading platform and violating anti-money laundering regulations or AML. Individual charges include Arthur Hayes, publicly known as the CEO of BitMEX, as well as Ben Dello and Sam Well-Reed. The CFTC alleges that these individuals are owners and operators of BitMEX through a maze of corporate entities and these include HDR Global Trading, 100X Holding, ABS Global Trading, Limited Shine Effort, Inc. Limited and HDR Global Services, blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter. So here's the thing about corporations. It's pretty normal to actually have multiple because you have to minimize your liabilities. You have to minimize the chances of being sued. You should have a holding company. You should have an S-Corp, C-Corp or everyone incorporate it, but different entities so you can mitigate the risks. And if you don't do that, you're setting yourself up for failure. So I mean, I can understand that part of the whole thing. I mean, that is a lot of corporations and how they all separated it. And of course, with all those corporations, there's going to be different heads of that. So yes, it might be a maze, but in all honesty, a lot of companies, I mean, yeah, my business is included. They have to have different entities around it to minimize risk. Anyhow, which I guess really didn't help them. So the commission believes that BitMEX has offered illegal leverage trading services to traders to the tune of, get this, $1 trillion in national value since its inception in 2014. So here's the thing, do you think that that $1 trillion was a lot of traders who hit it big? I'm sorry, I just laugh at that right now because that is a ridiculous statement. A lot of traders got wrecked. A lot of people got wrecked. A lot of people lost a lot of money. And you know, I've always said the same thing. If you want to trade, go ahead and trade. It's not, I mean, it's okay if you're going to put a small percentage. But if you are, and really what it is, I know gamblers, I lived in Vegas for years and it was always the same thing. I'm like, hey, Pete, how's it going? Pretty good, Rob. So what happened last night? Oh man, I had a huge hand. Oh, what was it? He's like, I hit five grand. Well, great, Pete. Well, how are you doing for the year? I'm down 30. I'm down 30 Gs, but I mean five is pretty good for the night. Yeah, it's the same thing with leverage trading. Again, you can do whatever trading that you want to. And as long as it's not like a hundred percent of your portfolio, I think that's crazy. But again, these guys really screwed over a lot of people. And that's part of the reason why there's these regulations in place. I know people are going to say, well, it's decentralized and people do whichever you want to. Yes, that's true. That is the great thing about decentralization. You can do whatever you want to, and especially with these exchanges. But you see the repercussions, and there's going to be a huge fallout. And that could affect actually your bottom line if you're just an investor. Just for a bit. I'll get to that in a second. In addition to civil charges, the U.S. Attorney for the District of New York indicted Hayes, Del O'Reed, and Gregory Dwyer, that maxed his head of business development for violating conspiring to violate the Bank Secrecy Act or BSA. If now here's the crazy part. If convicted, that's a big if. The executives could face a whopping five years in prison, and a massive quarter of a million fines. So this is the same thing with banks. We saw the different things that were going on with money laundering, with JP Morgan, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank, which happened what, a week or two weeks ago. And of course, they're going to pay billions of dollars. But guess what? I mean, they made two trillion. So that's just the cost of business. So here again, we have a prime example of big money who is going to really get bailed out if they serve any time, which I do not think that's going to happen. It's going to be in a very minimum security prison if, and that's a big if. And this, I mean, the penalty could be a whopping quarter of a million dollars. But I mean, I think you're laughing yourself is going yourself to just think to yourself, wow, you made a trillion. You only have to pay a quarter of a million. What's that? It's a good deal. It works out pretty well for you, not so much for the rest of us. Anyhow, according to FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney, one defendant went as far as to brag that the company incorporated a jurisdiction outside the U.S. Because to brag outside of there, which cost them just a coconut, which is pretty ballsy. A statement by the Department of Justice that read Bitnexa CTO was arrested on Thursday in Massachusetts. Hayes, Delaware, and Dwyer remain at large. And Bitnexa terms of service explicitly prohibit residents of the U.S., certain problems in Canada, China, and a host of the countries from using the exchange, which they did not. So here's what I'm going to tell you. I have an anonymous source and I will not tell you her or his name, but that person confidentially told me Hayes doesn't care. Hayes doesn't care. He's already made his millions is 80, a hundred million dollars, whatever it else it is. And he already made plans and never come back to the United States or leave the United States, never come back, whichever one it is. And he knew it was coming and he's gone. If he's smart, he's out of here and he's not coming back. So if that remains to be true, I mean, maybe it's true. But I do think that someone who was as smart as Hayes would probably plan for this day because it only makes sense, right? And that is just that part of it. So again, there's different rules for people with a ton of money. And that's just how it goes. Now on the flip side of that is there might be a dip. I mean, 1% is not a big, huge dip to me. I mean, for us, it's not a big deal, right? For traditional finance, that's huge, one to 3%. Oh my God, but it's not. I mean, for us, 10%, 20%, you're like, well, that's just a Thursday. So if it does have a dip, here's my recommendation for myself. I can't give a financial advice, obviously, I'm not a financial advisor, but I'm going to buy, buy, buy because nothing has changed. Bitcoin hasn't been hacked. There hasn't been a major deal that's come through. The government hasn't come down and said, we're cracking down. We're going to eliminate the internet plus Bitcoin, which is ridiculous. I can't do that. Nothing has changed. So it's just this little part with this exchange. And even if there are Bitcoin that are caught up in this whole thing and people lose their Bitcoin because it is confiscated, then that's money out of circulation, in my opinion. I mean, who knows? Maybe Tim Draper can go pick up more Bitcoin at a government seizure like he did in 2014 when he bought a bunch of Bitcoin from the US Marshals. So again, it's going to be a bump, potentially, maybe not. I don't know. That's what potentially could happen. On the flip side of that, if there is no dip, like a big dip, like 5%, 10%, then that is signaling enormous strength for Bitcoin. If this would have happened in 2017, we would have heard these types of stories. It would have been huge, huge waves. And it wouldn't have been 1% over the last, because this was like three hours ago that I heard about this four hours ago. It happened today. Today's Thursday. So if you have something like this and have 2017, we would have seen a huge massive drop, but we haven't. So what does that say? Potentially, this is great news for Bitcoin. This is great news for cryptocurrency. This is great news for digital assets, because we are showing that we are stronger than one weak link that is out there called BitMEX. And that's all I can say. So lastly, I will say one thing. I'm glad I dollar-cost average. I don't just, you know, follow into positions where I'm pretty much broke. I've got reserves on the side for days just like this. And that's why I'm always saying, don't FOMO in. I mean, and if you're going to FOMO in, don't FOMO in with all your money. FOMO in with like 20 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever you can afford. Have some money on the sidelines for crazy days like this, because that's what we're into. All right, let me know what you think of the comments section. Let's move on. Next up, and these are going to go fast, because I spent a lot of time on that first article, because it is the big news. But this one right here, Winklevoss, Twins, Crypto Exchange, Gemini, you're going to be able to withdraw Zcash confidentially. And this is a big, it's a big thing to me, because I thought that privacy coins were going out the window, but here's the thing. I'm not going to read the rest of this. This just happened a couple of days ago. There's two big things. Gemini was able to offer confidential Zcash withdrawals after received approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services or NYDFS. So they did it the right way. They went through the proper channels, did all the hard work, and now they get to pay the, you know, here's the payoff. They actually could do it legally. So before that, you could buy Zcash and you could send Zcash, but it had to be pretty much transparent and out the open. However, now you can use private Zcash addresses. They can hide the sender, receiver, and also the transaction amounts, meaning that Gemini customers can now transfer their Zcash to shielded addresses. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the whole privacy coins, actually Uptit and OKX, as well as Coinbase in the UK, they had slashed away all Zcash, and they had gotten rid of some other privacy coins. So now it looks like there's a thing going in reverse. And real quick, this is from the Gemini, the official blog post where they talk about it right here. So just so it says, you can protect your identity as well as assigns your transactions. So with private, totally private transactions, you have your Z address to another Z address. That's totally private. Right now it's just T address to a T address. So basically open source, open types of accounts. But there is one little wrinkle, and that is that when you take your fiat money and you put it in Gemini, that gets recorded. When you transfer the fiat into Zcash, that gets recorded. However, whatever you do with that Zcash, whoever you send it to, and the amount is totally shielded. So just so you know, if you're gonna do that, that's on you. And if you send it to somebody else, whoever that is, then no one's gonna know. So that's all I'll say about that. This is a big win for privacy coins. Let me know what you think in the comment section. Let's move on. Next up, VCs thinks that Ethereum will hit a trillion, but it's gonna have competitors. So who do you think that is? So real quick, this is from CryptoSlate. And the one that they're talking about is Chris Bernsky. He's a partner at Placeholder Capital. And they got like a couple hundred million dollars assets under management. And you have to understand, because they're into cryptocurrency, they probably hold a ton of Ethereum. So of course, Chris gonna say, hey, I think it's gonna go to a trillion. Of course, I say the same thing. I think that Ethereum's gonna go to a trillion. And people are like, what? That's ridiculous. How can it go to a trillion? Look, everything is built on Ethereum right now. There are so many years between tokens, DeFi is essentially being built on Ethereum. There are problems with Ethereum, which we know about, right? Slow transactions per second are awful. You have the gas fees, which are just outrageously high. This is not sustainable. We know that. That's why Ethereum 2.0 is gonna come into play. However, Ethereum 2.0 is gonna happen over two years. So is that fast enough? I'm not sure. And it ain't looking good, but there's a lot of different people out, and there's a lot of different projects out there that can definitely take over. This is why as far as smart contracts, I've invested into Tezos, Eos, Cardano, and then who knows what's going on with XRP and this Spark or Flare Drop or Air Drop that's coming up. They're gonna have a smart contract functionality and maybe they're sort of building things as far as DeFi goes. I'm not sure, but I'm trying to hedge my bet because guess what? I don't know if Ethereum can actually make it because it seems to be a long way out to get things done. Look at what has happened with DeFi in the last month. It rose and fell and is back again already. So if you're talking about like a 30 day time period as opposed to over two years, not for sure. However, I will say this. I will hedge my bet because I think one of those is likely to be the winner and they're going to be built on that. So if you are a Bitcoin maximalist, hey, God bless you, good luck. I just don't think that Bitcoin can do it all. Just one of those things that I think about. Anyhow, I will say lastly about this. If Ethereum does hit a trillion dollar market cap, which I think it definitely could, especially with what's gonna go on, especially with 2021 coming up, especially with all the different industries and institutions and people coming in and all the track being laid, I think it could definitely do it. And if we do hit a trillion, you know what that means? Well, that means it could be $10,000 per coin, which is what I predicted about a year ago or so. And I think it's gonna happen. So let's take a look at the numbers. So if the current price is $10,000 and it's circulating supply is, well, what is a circulating supply? Great question. Circling supply right now is $112 million. And its market cap is $1.1 trillion. Ah, excuse me, it's only off about $100 million. So that's what I think could actually happen. Again, the reason is because everything's built on it, I don't know if it can sustain that because everything's slowing down and different issues with transactions per second. But if they can pull it off, if they're able to be one of the big winners. However, the ones I just talked about could also be, I don't think it's just one platform to rule them all for DeFi. I think it's multiple platforms. I think you really have to look outside the box and see what's out there. That's just my opinion. Let me know what you think. Let's move on. So lastly, before Q the day, crypto to bypass sanctions? Absolutely, said Venezuela. And this is a concerning trend. So I don't know if this is good for the US, but I know it's good for cryptocurrencies. Here's what's happening. During a speech, President Maduro said this, the anti-sanctions law is the first response to give new strength the use of Petro and other crypto, national and global and domestic and foreign trade, so that all cryptocurrencies of the world, state and private could be used. This is an important project that is under development. So if you don't know, Venezuela has a real big problem with hyperinflation. Their fiat is basically worthless. So what they did, Maduro did, is he created his own cryptocurrency called the Petrodollar and he airdropped it to all the citizens. Now here's my question. I don't live in Venezuela. I have no Venezuelan friends. And I don't know exactly what is being used. Is it Bitcoin? Is it Tomato Coin? Is it the Petrodollar? What is going on over there? Or are they actually using fiat or some other type of unit besides that? So if you are from there or know anybody from there, please drop that in the comment section. I would love to hear what is actually going on. Moving down, so when I said this isn't good for the US, it's not good for the US because they can pretty much bypass sanctions just the way Russia and China are gonna do with cryptocurrencies. I'm gonna get into that in a second. But this was a study done by Blockchain or Blockchain and Cryptoanalysis firm Chainalysis and they found this. Venezuela represented an excellent example of crypto adoption in developing countries and now citizens use it to mitigate economic instability. And yeah, when you have hyperinflation, what are you gonna do? Well, you could use something that has quantitative hardening such as Bitcoin or I guess the Petrodollar or some other type of cryptocurrency. But if you notice down here, the South American nation was ranked third in terms of global crypto adoption by the study as seen in the image below. So what have we got for the first through fourth? Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela and China. And why do you think that is? Well, I'm gonna tell you why because Russia has been trying to ditch the US dollar for I don't know how long because they're trying to get out of the reserve currency and it's really important to do that because you can bypass all the sanctions. If you don't have to use the dollar and go, hey, let's just use Bitcoin, let's just use the Petrol, let's just use whatever, potato foot. It doesn't matter. Whatever they can use to bypass that and they can communicate amongst themselves, so much the better. Now, is it gonna be this cryptocurrency or is it going to be some type of crypto that their nations actually build or actually create just like people have talked about the banks are gonna create their own cryptocurrency. I have no idea, but I can tell you one thing. A lot of nations don't trust each other. So if they're gonna be able to say, yeah, Russia, we're gonna use your central bank digital coin or China, we're gonna use yours. It'll be interesting to see. I don't know if the trust is there. I think there has to be a trustless, open, decentralized platform and I don't know what that could be. Maybe you could help me in the comments section. Anyhow, moving down to finish up. On top of that, Brazil has also announced plans to launch a central bank digital coin soon, which along with the Venezuelan crypto could further drive the adoption of crypto in the Latin American region. So there's my final thoughts. This is going to happen. This is going to happen and it's going to hyper accelerate, especially with all the different economic problems globally. Now, the United States had an opportunity to be the leader and show exactly what we were all about and say, hey, we're gonna take the bull by the horns. These are the types of the cryptocurrency we're gonna use. This is what we're gonna actually implement and we're gonna do these things in a global manner. However, we can't even get a debate right. So it's a lot of problems right now. I don't think anybody's gonna step up. Maybe it could be, who knows, Russia and China. Going, you know what? Crypto is the best way out. Anyhow, I'll get off my soapbox and let's jump in for a cue of the day. I got an interesting segment about what could be a potential scam. So let's jump right in. All right, everybody, welcome back to the office for a cue of the day. And this was a pretty, it was pretty interesting. This is, I got this in a message on Twitter. This is from Jay Rowe. That's what his the handle was, but it was a pretty good question and this is what's going on. It says, hello, Dan. First of all, thanks for all the wonderful content. No problem, thanks for watching. And he goes, I think I have a question for the day. Today, I realized that I and some other people I know received valueless tokens on our trust wallet. First of all, I have no idea. I mean, trust wallet, I hear about it in the comment section. People say I should check it out. On top of the 30 wallets, I just haven't got around to it. Anyhow, he says I received a 360 app or DAPP. Hotlove, HL. Yi, Yu, Bao, or YYB. Jun, J, Mi, YJM, and Xie, Huaveira, or Xie. But I could not find anything online about these tokens. On either scan, I did see that at least Hotlove has been around for 800 some odd days. What be fuddled, that's a good word, be fuddled. Me even more was that none of these tokens show a transaction history in my wallet. So he's like, what's going on is this a scan. So I'm always gonna tell you the same thing, really. First of all, everything's a scan until proven otherwise. And that's what I've always pretty much lived by. And it seemed to work out okay so far. So for this one, I reached out to him, I said, my man, I go, what it could be is that maybe this is one of those airdrops that you get. Like I own EOS and in EOS, you get all these crazy airdrops. You only know what the heck they are. And of course they're not really valuable whatsoever, which is one of the things that sucks about EOS. You know, maybe it'll change in time, I don't know. So I said, maybe it's something like that. And then he wrote back to me, he says, you know what, the only thing that I actually have in there is V-Chain and V-Thor. So that can't be it. There's no airdrops for that, it's okay. So I said, well, maybe that's it. And then I remember another type of scan that was going on not too long ago. It was for XRP holders. And they were getting the same type of thing of these little insignificant transactions or tokens. And they would click on that and it would leave different problems. And it was out of scam type of effort. So not to be undone, I actually reached out to the people that I know which are way smarter than me. One of those is Digital Dave over at Crazy for Cryptos. And the other one is Hashoshi. So which out of Digital Dave I said, hey man, what's, I don't know what this is. So, you know, help me out. He says, he goes, hey Dan, I am miffed or hey, Rahul, I'm miffed that I didn't get any hot love or anything else. Nothing to worry about. They're probably all just ERC20 tokens that people can send to anyone with an ETH address, maybe no transaction history because the trust wallet doesn't officially support these or maybe the history will show up later. Atomic wallet is sometimes tardy. And of course we're talking about trust. So that was Dave's thing. So I wanna say thanks Dave for reaching out on your busy schedule of hanging around Thailand and doing absolutely nothing. Just, you know, putting out great content. Anyhow, so that was Digital Dave. And then Hashoshi, if you don't know, I mean, I've talked about Crazy for Cryptos a lot on my channel. I like what he does, dollar cost average guy. So, you know, he's in my club of thinking. Hashoshi, me and him are on a show called Vian Crypto and he's actually a developer. So when I wanna know things, you know, development side, I'll go to Hashoshi. And as you can see on my channel, I reach out to people because I need people around me who are smarter. Works really well in business. I just grab smart people and that usually how it works. So like on one of the Q of the days, not too long ago, I'd actually reached out to Shihan Shadrosakara who is a CPA. I reached out to when I have like institution questions, I reached out to Alex Maskioli and it's just kind of like how I do things. So for this one for Hashoshi, I said, hey man, the same thing. So what do you got? And Hashoshi, thankfully, gave me a little shout. He says, hey, hey Dan, sorry for the delay here. Crazy, crazy times for me right now. Probably so, cause his channel's blowing up. It's got a really good channel. We've got a lot of great content. So you guys check that out. He says in regards to this, likely these are airdrops that occur for tokens he or she once had in the wallet. For example, if you have ETH in your wallet, when the snapshot occurs for a global airdrop, even if you move it out afterwards, you still get your airdrop tokens. And that's what I was like, that's right. I forgot about that. Snapshots are important. Make sure you have it in your wallet at that point. Same thing's gonna be coming up for the XRP snapshot for Flare Spark. So make sure you have it in your Celsius wallet, which is what I have. Anyhow, he says, or if you use your address on certain ERC contracts or et cetera, there are bots that scrape addresses from them and send these nonsense tokens to you without permission. And then he got back to it later. He says, hey, there's others having reported the same. It's all a bunch of BS tokens. And I said, hey, thanks, man. So I didn't know. So again, it's one of those ones thing where like, if you think it's a little bit, you know, odd or too good to be true and you think it's a scam, it's probably a scam. And that's usually what it is. So again, thanks so much to Digital Dave, Crazy for Cryptos and Ashoshi for helping me out. I really appreciate it. And that is the solved mystery of what the heck's going on with my trust wallet. All right, let's jump back. And that's it for today. So hopefully that I answered that question. Could be something big, could not be, but I just wanted to cover it. And lastly, I just want to tell you that I've got a second channel. It's called Digital Asset News Clips and I made it for two reasons. First of all, it's because sometimes I get a little, little low-quacious. I get a little bit too wordy and some of the videos go a little bit long. So what I try to do is save everybody time, break them up into segments. Instead of having it for 30 minutes, we'll do like 10 minutes and two minutes and five and whatever else because time is money. And also on that channel, I do what's called Dan Clips Exclusives, where I just make a couple or one or two different videos that are just exclusive to that channel. And the second reason why I did it is because I don't want YouTube to come in and go, hey Dan, thanks for all your hard work. We're shutting your channel down. So I just wanted to back up. So two reasons. So if you could find your heart to go over there and just give it a subscribe, watch some videos that'd be fantastic. I'd really appreciate it. Also, if you like these types of videos, these are gonna be two months gonna pop up on your left and right, now for sure, YouTube controls that stuff. And you can check those out. So again, thanks for sticking with me through the whole video. Super appreciate it. See you on the next one.