 Welcome to Digital Asset News. My name is Rob, and today, just like a thumbnail and title suggests, there's some activity going on with, I feel, two of the winners, which are Cardano and Ethereum. And what I'm talking about is there was an article recently put out which states that Cardano smart contracts hit a record high as of February 2nd. So this is what we got. Last year's Vasal Hard Fork expanded Cardano support for smart contracts. Imagine that. A year ago, Cardano didn't even have smart contracts. And here we are, stuck in the top 10, doing not too bad. The gains in ADA could also be tied to Cardano's recently launched stablecoin JED. This is true. A lot of things were locked up with that. Smart contracts on Cardano are rising. There was 5,006 on February 2nd and 4,000 as of December 3rd. So you got 1,000 more programs in under two months. And that, to me, is progress. And on top of that, if you take a look at Cardano, this is a report that Ethereum activity is picked up with the Shanghai upgrade. And if you don't know about the Shanghai upgrade, this is going to be happening in mid-March. And this is all about unstaking or giving people the ability to unstake their staked Ethereum, which they did a while back. And they did that under the assumption that at some point, they would be able to unstake it. And nobody knew when it was. For them, I tipped my hat because that was, to me, kind of a risky play. And some people have thought, well, once they are able to unstake, everybody is going to sell, it's going to be a huge, massive problem, and we're going to see the market just collapse. And other people are like, no, I probably won't do much because those people are true believers. Me personally, I couldn't care less because I dollar cost average. If everything goes down, I'm super happy because now I get to purchase a lot of cheap crypto. And that is what I would like to do if it goes up. Well, okay, I'm in profits. But I think in the long term, because I have a horizon of two or three years until we hit the next bull run, maybe four, who knows. I am trying to prepare myself for everything. But it got me thinking about this, which was if we're talking about all these things about, well, there's a lot of activity, some more smart contracts, then if we see more activity, we should see more our fees rising up. And there's a great website called crypto fees.info. And we can take a look here that Ethereum, over the last day or so, has over 4 million in fees, 4.8 in seven days. So it looks like a little bit of a pickup for sure. And then actually everything's up, that we can see. And we take a look at Cardano. Well, Cardano is not here. Oh, there it is. Cardano is way down here at $11,000. Before we start laughing, I will just say this. Cardano is a lot cheaper to use. I want to say it's around $0.09, $0.10, correct me in the comments section. But if you take a look at Ethereum, for every transaction that you do, this is on white charts. And then we can just scroll over here. As of January, no, let's see here, February 4th, it was around $0.66. And this is all denominated in U.S. dollars. This isn't in Hue or Hue or how they say it. This is in U.S. dollars. It costs roughly $0.66. I never really believed too much in charts. So I did it myself. I set a test transaction, and my guess was $1. So again, average fees were $0.66. Maybe I hit it at the peak time, no idea. But $1 for every transaction that you do in Ethereum could, yeah, make a ton of fees up to $4 million, I suppose. But it also got me thinking about another part, which was we see a lot of people talk about, well, everything's locked up as far as like total volume locked up, TVL. And the best way you can find that is on DeFi Lama. There's a link in the description. And we can see the total value locked, total value locked for everything in DeFi at $58.6 billion. That's for everything, Ethereum, Binance, Cardano, Tron, Arbitron, Poly on Avalanche, Optimism. I mean, everything you think of, and they're all right here. It's only $58 billion, which sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it's absolutely nothing. Now, if we click on just Ethereum itself, it's $34 billion. It's more than half of everything that is locked up. And that's just for now. So when we take a look at Winners, so far, Ethereum is really, really crushing it. But there's this part here that confuses me. And see here, it says include in TVL. So it says to include the staking. So if we do that, let me click this off. Actually, before I do that, let me just show you this. This is stakingrewards.com, and it shows you what is being staked and the staking market cap, or how much is staked. The staking ratio is 14% out of $198 billion. So that's $28 billion is being staked in Ethereum right now, $28 billion. Remember that number. If we go back here, and I click this, because there's $34 billion right here, include in staking. If I click this off, we should see what, $6 billion, $7 billion? No, it's only $29 billion. So I'm not for sure they calculate that. It just seems a little bit off to me. I'm sure I'm not doing this correctly. But if I also go back to stakingrewards.com, I do the same thing. Let's take a look at both crowns number two. And I can see here the staking market, the total market cap is $13 billion. Staking, wow, $10 billion. Well, that's because they have almost 72%. Everybody's staking Cardano. Everybody. You got $10 billion. So again, if I go back to DeFi Lama, and I do a search, and I put in Cardano, and I click on that, the total market cap is a measly $103 million. That's not too much. But again, I'm not including in the TVL the staking. So if I do that, it should rock it up by $10 billion, right? No, $23 million. So again, maybe I'm not saying this correctly. They can put in pool two. It doesn't matter. Borrowed doesn't matter. And that's all we have. So that's all we have for that piece. Again, I think a couple of the winners for Layer 1 Solutions are definitely what I see, Cardano and Ethereum. I still think there's a lot of runway for that. That's why I dollar-cost average into Avalanche, into Cosmos, into Polkadot. I think there's another couple. I can't remember right now. But again, on this channel, you have to understand, I'm super biased. I only talk about the things that I have invested into. So if you're wondering, does Rob invest into that? He sure does talk about it a lot. Yes. Yes, I do. So let me know anything about that in the comments section. Let's move on to an interesting piece about FTX. This one, it makes me laugh because it's just, everybody's just, you go to the lowest volume, the lowest value denominator to what you want to do. So the FTX wants politicians and PACs to return donations and may sue to recover funds. Isn't that the whole point of a donation? I'm going to donate this to you. So here you go. Use this for President Joe Biden so you can actually win the presidency. Now give him that money back. Amazing. Here's what we got. FTX newly appointed CEO, John John, J, that can't be his name, right? John John? John J Ray, the third. Contributions or other payments, he states, will be returned by February 28th. He's talking to all the politicians. That going a previous warning that the company would go after funds, not return voluntarily through legal means with interest accruing from the date any action is commenced. So all those funds that they gave him, which was roughly $93 million, like give it back to us. We don't care if you spend it or not. We want it back. The FTX debtors are sending confidential messages to political figures, political action funds, other recipients of contributions or the payments. This is where it gets pretty dank. Recipients who've donated funds connected to FTX to charities are not off the hook and that company will still seek to recover the money regardless. I find this fascinating. Like, oh, you gave that to a charity to help homeless children or to help, you know, some kind of sanctuary. Well, tough. Give us that money back because that's what we want. On the other side of that, you have to think about all the people who lost all their funds. And of course, I'm sure they'd like that money back. But again, you got to do that for everybody. That's for the dirty politicians and then for the people who gave the charities and everything in between. Let me just think about that in the comments and then also not to leave any our friends Celsius. But this was a good piece from Pete. No stop. And Celsius and Voyager, matter of fact, hired this law firm Kirkland and Ellis. And there was a nice, nice little article above the law. A look inside. Kirkland Ellis partners new 38 million Malibu mansion. Very nice. So if you're wondering where all your funds went to, there you go. And I'm just going to tell you like this, nobody wins in chapter 11. And I'm going to call for it right now, liquidate everything, return as much funds as you can back, because every single day, week and month that we stick ourselves in this chapter 11, the less we're going to get back because the only winners are going to be the people who used to run this company as they do the clawbacks and the lawyers. That's why I say liquidate, give as much back. I will know what to do with it better than you and your stupid reorganization of a company. Anyhow, that's what we have. Let me know. And then to finish up, I thought it was interesting. NFTs are already here or coming to Bitcoin. And it's a big argument that's always been coming along about as far as like the Bitcoin maximalists and the purists. And they say, well, Bitcoin is this, we can build on top of Bitcoin, we can do all these things, we'll hold on not so much. So the launch of Ordinals, which is an NFT protocol, is on the Bitcoin blockchain that's coming out. Ordinals is a protocol that assigns trackable serial numbers to Satoshis. These Satoshis can then be added to digital assets like video or audio. And people are like, no, we don't want to do this. The criticism is that it's potential to abuse the network and populate its block size with financially irrelevant storage. The argument against onboarding dates back to 2010, when a proposal in a domain name system was rejected by Satoshi, the Satoshi, the Satoshi, and a number of other core developers. Satoshi said this, piling every proof-of-work-quorum system into one dataset doesn't scale in reference to the potential memory usage yet that users shouldn't have to download all or of both to use one or the other. So there's always been this thing about, well, Bitcoin is the most secure platform on the planet. It has the most computational power because we're using so much to mine Bitcoin. And all the Bitcoin Maxis would always talk about, we're just going to build on top of that and scale up. I just, maybe this isn't what they were talking about. I'm not sure. But they're like, no to NFTs. However, I found this interesting, not everybody. So my gentleman, my name is Dan Held. He's got a YouTube channel. Check him out. He's been around forever. He's a crypto Bitcoin OG. He says, this will drive the demand for block space and bring more financial use cases to Bitcoin. And also we'll get a, you know, the meme coins to people or a dog coins like, hey, this might be something good for NFTs. That's the way I have not really convinced on this one. And then lastly, you're going to see these articles pop up. And they're going to really start to question yourself about investing in the crypto. I know some people will look at this and start laughing and go, oh, that's Jim Kramer isn't always talking about, but you understand people outside of crypto, they really like Jim Kramer for some reason. And they love watching the show does, you know, recent, decent ratings. And when he tells them about how bad crypto is, it just leads itself to people just closing their minds down. So if you're new to crypto, I just want to explain to you this. Jim Kramer probably was a great whatever, but he's made so many bad calls as time has gone on. You just have to question yourself is like, does this person really know exactly crypto and all it is? He's already invested in crypto before he used crypto. He sold it, paid off his house. And now he's like, it's the most awful thing of all time. And you should never get into it. It kind of reminds me of what Kevin O'Leary did. He says, you know, up to the 2019, he was saying Bitcoin is the worst dumbest thing and no one would ever get into it on the flip side. And he admitted this on Squawk Box. He was actually buying it in 2018. Anyhow, so here's what we have as far as the article itself. Very quickly, Jim says I wouldn't touch crypto in a million years, which is pretty funny because in December, he said everybody get out now. And we just saw like a 50% rise. So whatever. And what he's talking about, he goes, there's a bailout loan from the federal home loan bank for a crypto bank to stem the run. And what he's talking about is this, the outcry. So you don't get twisted. The outcry comes after Silvergate Capital Corporation, a California-based bank that provides financial services to the digital asset industry, sought a $4.3 billion loan to make it through the crisis of confidence across the crypto ecosystem late last year. I don't see a problem with this. I mean, it's been a pretty rough year, year and a half actually. So when we have somebody that comes out and says, actually is still solvent and still making things. Hey, I just need a little bit of help. But the thing about this article is this, you look at a guy like Kramer and he seems so sure of himself. I mean, so sure. And when he's talking about these things, he's like, I'm 100% sure there's nothing against me in my thought process. Well, just remember this, that during the financial collapse, this was him. This is 27 seconds. Listen to what he says about Bear Stearns, which was insolvent and actually later went down and was only rescued by J.P. Morgan Chase. Take a listen to this. Hey, great job. All right. Peter writes, should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out there? No, no, no. Bear Stearns is fine. Do not take your money. If there's one takeaway other than plus 400 somebody, Bear Stearns is not in trouble. I mean, if anything, they're more likely to be taken over. Don't move your money from there. That's just being silly. Sure wasn't silly as they just collapsed. And then of course, this was actually an article fall up 10 years later. And it just talks about how Jamie Dimon, the CEO, J.P. Morgan actually regretted the decision to kind of bail them out as they became insolvent. I just think it's interesting just how sure of a person's self that they can be. But they're like, yeah, you got to do this. You got to do this. You got to this. And then it becomes the exact opposite. So that goes for me too. If you think like at some point, like I'm 100% sure, you need to question me and be like, even though Rob is 100% sure, does he really know? Here's a tip. Nobody knows. Nobody. Anyhow, to finish this all up, a little quick article, Binance launches a tax tool for crypto traders in France and Canada. That's great. For all the Canadians and French residents, you guys have a tax tool. Now for the rest of us, there's this thing above my head. It's called Coin Ledger. And it's what I use two years straight. They are a sponsor of the channel. If you hate using affiliate links, don't use it. I mean, you get like 20% off, I think. But if you don't, if you hate my fear links, just go to coinledger.io. And you can sign up for free right now. And you can just take a look at like a cost-based analysis, you know, to pay for everything. But if you do decide to use it for your taxes, I'm telling you it's super simple. For the time that I started this up to actually put all my taxes in, it takes me 30 minutes as an API integration into my MetaMask wallet to all my centralized exchanges to my DeFi, all the stupid NFTs that I bought for some stupid reason. It's got everything. And it puts it all in there and says this is what you have, this is how much you owe. Great job to better next year. And I just ship it over my CPay and off I go. So if you just want to see how that works, you can sign up for free. There's a link in the description. It's very simple, looks something like this. And there's actually a video on how to use it. And that is it. So look, that is it for today. If you liked today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. A lot of us talk about our time sensitive. But that is it for this show. So thanks so much for stopping by. I do appreciate it. And I'll see you on the next one.