 ever since I got into crypto since 2017 there was always this undertone narrative which was crypto and gel assets would go away at some point and it was all tulip mania and it was all a bubble and things were just ridiculous and at any moment it could poof just go away and everything go to zero and we tend to prove that time and time again that's not true but there's some stories today which just makes me realize that we're not going anywhere and there's really it comes out of five stories and one of those this is an older story uh but I I never talked about it and it hit me today when I read this this little piece and most of you already know this but uh Microsoft first Microsoft's you know PC computers I'm sure you know some of you have PC some of you have Mac but nobody uses the edge browser I mean very few people honestly do usually it's going to be something like with Brave or Chrome or even Firefox but not Edge but what Microsoft is doing is they're looking to the future and what they did is they just came out and said you know what we're gonna build a crypto wallet into our edge browser and it's kind of funny because it says right here uh a controversial feature I suppose is coming to Microsoft browser just as the crypto markets are suffering and that's when everything happens when everything is going down the tubes and we're in the bear markets that's when things uh work and not on top of that not only did Microsoft do that but they also you know just added chat GPT and AI they're going to implement that into their browser so they're looking for things that can really propel them into back into the mainstream I mean PCs make make a pretty good deal but this is just one thing where I see it like I'm like wow they're doing AI and they're also doing cryptocurrency wallets into uh their actual browser which I think is perfect so there's that first story and the second one which is the newer one is that the NASDAQ is going into custody or crypto custody launched by the end of the second quarter so you're looking at around June of this year and when I first saw this I'm like great you know this is fantastic but I just want to make make this very clear this is just custody they're not going to allow any trading that I know of it's not going to be listed anywhere it's just about custody service but again once you start with custody service what's the inevitable next step I think you know what that is so NASDAQ joins a growing pool of traditional finance firms that could fill the role of crypto middlemen following a spate of bankruptcies in the industry and I got to tell you it's kind of odd that these crypto banks went under and they were forced under and then all of a sudden NASDAQ is like you know what we can pick up the the slack here IRA hour back senior VP and head of NASDAQ digital assets said that they have applied to the New York Department of Financial Services for a limited purpose trust company charter which would oversee the new business the project was initially announced in September and I gotta tell you I had covered this in September and it's amazing how fast even I forget these things that are happening but there is one piece here that's I think you need to understand which is when I posted this yesterday people were saying well that means that the SEC is going to send them a Wells notice because they are dealing in securities there is a big difference between custody digital assets and selling digital assets on a particular exchange so they're pretty much the smart route like look we're not going to allow trading we're not going to do that but we're going to do custody service so they're not going to get a Wells notice but they're able to dip their toes in the water into the into the next new better arena and then to finish this up safekeeping Bitcoin and Ethereum will be the first step to building a broad suite of services for the group's digital assets division and this is from again the VP hour back so I want you to notice one thing Bitcoin Ethereum this is the second story the third story and again this is an older story but it's just something to to make note is Fidelity opened up for trading yes trading so maybe they will get a Wells notice I don't know for two cryptos and what are those buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum commission free so you got Bitcoin Ethereum Bitcoin Ethereum and I know some people hate Ethereum some people love it and some people hate Bitcoin for some reason some people love it but you have to see the trend and the trend is where things are going now I'm not saying that Ethereum will be the end all be all forever but you got to see to where big money is going into and for right now that's what it is so that is a second story and we'll see how that plays out with the SEC which I found it fascinating but then also you've also got this little small company called BlackRock and they came out with their this is Larry Fink the CEO chairman's letter to investors BlackRock's got trillions of assets under management correct me in the comment section I think it's over I want to say it's over three trillion martin dollars by now but they said this they go look as far as digital assets we believe the operational potential of some of the underlying tech and digital asset space could have exciting apps in particular tokenization of asset classes offers the prospect of driving efficiencies in capital markets shortening value chains and improving cost and access for investors they don't specifically say we're getting into Bitcoin and Ethereum but if they're talking about tokenization of assets you know you could pretty much guess where they're going for that one so that would be the fourth article and the last one when I just kind of feel like we're not going anywhere it's piggybacking on a story we did yesterday which Brian Armstrong the CEO of Coinbase they're receiving a well notice and they're receiving a well's notice from the SEC because SEC isn't giving them any any clarity and of course when we talked about this and we said how awful it is and whatnot but first of all they know they're going to get a well's notice which precedes an enforcement action but they're not for sure exactly what it is and we don't know if it's because they're listing of securities whatever SEC determines that to be or if it's because some other factor or if it's because of staking like with Kraken I am not a lawyer I don't delve in into securities but we don't specifically know and because we don't know we will always think the worst thing about about the SEC and you have to realize that it's only half the story so there is this interview we did this was a month ago and this is Simon Dixon a friend of the show you know he's back to the future he's done a lot of security type investments into a lot of the crypto and digital assets space one of those being Kraken and Coinbase and a host of other different big companies and I asked him this question point blank ago who's lying to us because the exchanges are saying that it's the SEC's fault not giving them clarity and the SEC is saying no we're giving you plenty of clarity just not doing your job and I asked him because he deals with securities all the time I go which one is lying he told me straight to my face he goes they're both pretty much not telling you the truth so just listen to this as a refresher it's four minutes long and I think it's going to make a lot of sense and then you're going to start to think yourself oh okay so it's not as bad as maybe I think it is so just take a listen we talked about yesterday about how Gary Gensler came on an MSNBC Squawk box and goes look he goes it's very simple all these guys got to do is register you got to register your exchanges you're not doing that you guys are going afoul of the law we made it super simple it's crystal clear that's Gary and then on the flip side of that we had your friend Jesse Powell from Kraken said wow that's the only reason I had to do it then I wouldn't have lost 30 million dollars and I wouldn't be banned from doing any kind of staking then we took a look at Hester Pierce and a couple of different people who said that is not true it's very difficult to go through so this would be my fourth question which is the SEC states it's easy to register exchanges say it's not existent doesn't happen who's lying right here or who is telling the truth and is there something in the middle and you've had experience with this yeah there's definitely something in the middle they're both telling the truth and they're both missing out missing out a vital part of it so my experience is that we created a US broker dealer that we later sold to Coinbase in 2018 and they don't use we built out and you know a broker dealer it was a registered ATS so you can trade securities you know we built we use that in order to onboard US investors but then when Coinbase took it over they haven't actually been using it the reason for that is because they'd have to have the same onboarding experience that we have at banks of the future which is you have to find out the source of funds or some wealth you know the the different documents you have to collect and ensure that the products you're selling them are suitable which significantly reduces the number of transactions you can complete you know it's a it's a it's a very different business to what they've been used to so the SEC comes out and says well everybody needs to fall within our regulations okay so I do agree that there are regulations for different regimes if you look at Celsius Celsius was an illegal bank you know and there are lots and lots of regulations you can register as a bank if you want to engage in rehypothication if you want to sell an earned program that offers yields like you know Gemini and Genesis and Voyager and Celsius were then you can register it as a security if you want to hold funds in custody that is fully segregated and has all the investor protections unlike FTX rather than co-mingling those then you can register as a you know either a trust bank or a custodian and then if you want to engage in lending activities then you can register with these different lending providers and none of our industries were you know registering in those ways they were just registering as money transmitters and money service businesses um so the reason that they're not is one because the the user experience is not what the crypto people are used to right and but secondly it's it's impossible as well so after we sold our broker dealer to Coinbase and we acquired a stake in another broker and then the SEC said if you are engaging in anything to do with virtual assets you need to tell us so we told them and ever since then we still haven't been able to put a deal live because they haven't given this new permission class which is called virtual asset they then introduced a new regime a couple of years later called a special purpose broker dealer SPBD now I know a lot of companies that have applied for that including our broker dealer two years later none of them have received a license and have spent millions so it's not just the the little fee in the little form what Gary Ginsler is referring to is when you're dealing with accredited investors so if you do an offering for an with an accredited investor then you can fill out a form and you can notify the SEC but if you want to do it retail it's like applying to be a public company and when you add the word crypto or virtual assets in your name none of them have been approved as these special purpose broker dealers so it is a complete misrepresentation of the reality from both sides so they haven't been applying because it's very hard and it ruins their user experience and they know that they're just not going to get where they want to go and they're the reason for that is because the SEC has all these different regulators have all these regulations but they don't issue the licenses once you're in the crypto and virtual asset space right so look I mean we can say all day long that it's it's it's this guy's fault or is this person's fault this organization fault but really when it comes down to it there's the truth is somewhere in the middle so let me what you think about all those stories in the comment section and then just to finish up news the day there was a very interesting airdrop by arbitram arbitram is a layer two solution on top of ethereum and if you missed it don't worry you are eligible potentially for an airdrop of arbitram and arbitram i'll do a video on this someday it's zk rollups and layer two solutions to help ethereum scale and so on and so forth but if you go to the website arbitram.foundation link in the description click on this connect wallet it will connect to your i mean whatever wallet that you have rainbow coinbase wallet minimask wall connect trust wall wallet ledger live and it's going to search through all of your of your wallets whichever ones that you connect and what it's going to say is if you're eligible and to be eligible for the airdrop here's the criteria you have to at some point bridge transactions into arbitram or a number of months in which transactions are made on arbitram number of transactions made or smart contracts interacted with aggregate value of transactions or activity on arbitram one in arbitram nova so that is the possibility uh then you can have that airdrop but i will just warn everybody that's you know just because uh you airdrop and free stuff not it's going to be awesome uh some people this is what happened this morning i went all the way up to eight dollars and forty four cents somehow and then it's all the way back down i think it's like around a dollar twenty five and it could be fluctuating so i mean it is free money essentially i don't know if the liquidity is there but uh that is how you would do with arbitram we'll see how it all pans out and if it's the next big thing then lastly uh just a shout out to uh freddy from uh shield folio or the stonebook yeah he was featured on the news and it's all about how you protect your uh mnemonic phrases i love this one just take a listen and since you don't want to lose your crypto password freddy hernandez created a special notebook called shield folio where you can write it down i created it because my wife threw away my seed phrase because of that i noticed how important it is to write down a seed phrase and keep it safe there's even a pen with invisible ink outer edge is filled with unique concepts yeah so shout out to freddy we've uh he there's a link in the description for a shield folio it's what i i've got a like three or four of those books and not myself and they work out pretty well and that is it for today so look i know it's a little bit longer a lot of information going on but i gotta tell you i feel pretty bullish about the sector right now i mean back in the day we didn't know it was gonna be around but here we are so like today's video give it a thumbs up like it consider subscribing but that is it for the news today so thanks so much for stopping by i appreciate it and i'll see you on the next one