 Welcome to Digital Assets News, the top stories in cryptocurrency assets and bring them down to bite-sized pieces today. We had a lot of stories to go over, but I narrowed it down to just the one topic and this is the one thing that is really driving everything in the cryptocurrency assets space and it really comes down to the global economy brought about by a pandemic, quantitative easing and just basic uncertainty. If you think things were bad, they could potentially get much, much worse and this is the catalyst for cryptocurrency digital assets. Also that's going to lead us into the queue of the day which talks about Celsius and how to insulate yourself in these uncertain times. We're going to talk about their issues with customer service and how they plan to fix them, alterations to their app to avoid glitches and what the CEO thinks about interest rates, tax minimization and decentralized finance and how it all stacks up. Before we do all that and those lofty questions, let's take a look at what's going on in the market. So today it is September 9th, it's about 1pm Texas time and let's see what's happened so not a bad day. Bitcoin up to 10.3 looks like a 3.3 increase but again over the 7 days it's down 13% and that's the big number. Ethereum is busting past that 350 so at 357 maybe they could reclaim that 400 but I got to tell you Ethereum didn't drop too much I'm pretty happy with even though it's been down 25% for a 7 day mark, I'll take 7% up over the 24 hours. Fantastic. XRP is up to 24 cents. Wow. Chainlink 9% up. I like to see that 1250 but again everything this 24 hour part right here in the middle I mean it's interesting to see but if we really just take a look at the 7 day everything is just getting their teeth kicked in and that's just how it is in cryptocurrency assets. Hopefully we see a rebound and I think we will but that was a heck of a little pullback but what are you going to do? That's how it works. Anyhow I usually spend a lot of time on the markets themselves but there's really not a ton of things going on so I'm not going to delve into the price action. Again, over 7 days that's the big indicator for me. 24 hours we do see some reversal so I hopefully we will actually see that trend continue but again it is anybody's guess especially with the information we're going to go over right now. So I had my whole day planned and it was going to be pretty much a typical type of video interesting stuff that was happening I had a nice little article here about there was a guest Joe Rogan, Adam Currie to be specific and he just talked about how Bitcoin is you know everybody is going to need to own at least one Bitcoin or you're going to need to own at least one Bitcoin for the apocalypse which is ridiculous because there's only 21 million so good luck with that. I think he just talked about fractions of Bitcoin so it was an interesting one I'll let every other YouTuber talk about that today. Also there was a story about IRS doubling down investing another quarter million dollars into tracking crypto transactions so if in the US and don't think about paying or talking about your cryptocurrency holding is the IRS get ready. And also there was something you know good story about Bitcoin's correlation with gold hits record high and they're all fantastic stuff but really just comes down to the root the base and the base of what is going on is that there is just economic turmoil throughout the whole global community and like I talked about with the pandemic with the COVID-19 whether you believe it or not which I think is ridiculous if you don't you have to look at what is going on with businesses the GDP and the whole global economy in general and we if we take a look at that the uncertainty with the presidential election is going to happen in two months on top of what Jim Rogers here is talking about which is the potentially the end of the dollar dominance as US kind of tensions escalate. There is just a lot of problems throughout the world. I think we can all agree on that one subject but there is one positive which I mean if you look at as a positive it is what it is the uncertainty that you have in the economic forum is what is going to drive Bitcoin digital assets cryptocurrency even blockchain in general to new highs so the more that we see this uncertainty the more we're going to see Bitcoin go up gold go up because they are a hedge against the traditional market so this article really is to the crux of what is going on so what's happening let's jump right in so Jim Rogers who is this guy well he co-founded the quantum fund in 1973 with billionaire investor George Soros which was considered one of the most successful hedge funds in its heyday if you are in any kind of political circles you know the name George Soros so I'm not going to delve into that firstly Rogers explained that the US is now the largest debtor nation in the history of the world and it's getting higher and higher every day and I didn't mark this part but it's something to note the US national debt is currently more than 26.7 trillion that's trillion the T and this guy says traditionally US dollar has been the soundest currency in the world but tradition changes the US dollar is coming to its century or so of dominance and something else will replace it the only constant thing is changed there is no way the US dollar can stay on top and be the world reserve currency for a millennia it just does not going to happen moving forward I can only see the dominance the dollar going decreasing just like the buying power or purchasing power of the dollar going down because of the inflation and all this quantitative easing you cannot print this much money and have no repercussions just doesn't work like that investment girl pointed to the examples of the British pound and Dutch gilder which if you're sitting there going what's the Dutch gilder or you know British pound is that so much of a big thing in the global economy well here's the thing it was just like in a hundred years people were like well remember the US dollar that used to be big and now it's not moving on knowing that both are previously considered the most reliable currencies meanwhile the world's second largest American debt holder China is planning to cut its US debt holdings as tensions with Washington escalate and this is not just on top of China this is also Russia and we covered this story a couple of weeks ago where we had talked about the different economic powerhouses you know China and Russia being one of them how they are trying to kind of squeeze out the US dollar which is in their best interest and I talked about I don't see why they hadn't done that previously before because if you love sanctions and you're in your country well then just keep using the US dollar and that's what's gonna happen but here you see that Russia's ditching the dollar for book was expert of China and in this article and the next sense it sets its states experts in Beijing expect China reduce its US debt holdings by 20% from 1 trillion to 800 billion which if you think about it's like well you know it's 800 billion that's a lot of money 1 trillion but 20% that's a huge amount the paper further warns that it could even sell all of its US bonds in an extreme case like a military conflict so let's just play devil's advocate let's just say for one second that China goes you know what we're calling all our debts so pay it back America's like well so I'm gonna default so what do you think's gonna happen as far as the tensions go with that route I can only see economic uncertainty which again is only great for cryptocurrency assets finishing up Roder's emphasized that China reducing American debt will put pressure on US interest rates and that they should be going up it's a smart economic and investment move one that would strengthen the Chinese Yuan which he noted has already been happening for several weeks and he states if they sell us debt they sell dollars therefore their currency goes higher and why wouldn't you do that if you're a China sell all the debt get rid of the American dollar move to the Yuan especially the digital Yuan which is CBDC which is what they're trialing right now why wouldn't they do it and move forward to becoming even more economic powerhouse it only makes sense to me let me understand the comment section and let's move on so before we get into Q of the day I did a poor job of introducing Alex here he is the CEO of Celsius and there was three specific questions we'll get that in a little bit but the reason why Alex has credibility with me and with what he is doing is because what he's already done so real quick this is from the Celsius network website here's Alex's bio and it's just a very quick snippet so I'll put out the actual great stuff so to begin Alex one of the inventors of VOIP or voice over internet protocol so all the different zoom applications everything that you're listed to right now the voice over internet protocol this is the guy that created it he had a foundational patent back in 94 now working on MOIP money over internet protocol this is the same guy that says cryptocurrency digital assets essentially are going to swallow up the internet so why he has credibility with me is what he's already done besides that he's a serial entrepreneur founder of seven New York City Bay startups he's raised more than a billion and exited over three Alex founded two of New York City's top ten venture backed exit since 2000 one of those first companies air Bennett IPO in 2004 with a market cap of 750 million another venture transit wireless which valued at 1.2 billion at time of exit so this is a guy who has already done all the things and I have talked about this in previous videos where I talk about what will you do when money really is in an object if you don't really need money so what do you do so this is a prime example I don't think Alex is out there going you know what I really hope I can make my mortgage payment or I can really hope I can make you know pay for my apartment which is what a lot of people out there doing right now I must add it's not that he has that he is one of those guys who is just like you know what I think I can make things better I think I can improve things and this is why he has Celsius and this is why I was excited to get him into the office and it's asking some questions so let's jump in to the office right now somebody welcome back to the office for the cue of the day so today we have it's pretty much an aggregate of specific questions that were brought about from subscribers and it ranges from everything from and all has to do with Celsius the app the first one was about customer service and growing pains because we see that around a lot for the different areas especially exchanges and wallets there was a technical issue with a subscriber named Tiffany and there was also the third part which talks about taxes and interest rates for things like Celsius like a crypto IRA account and this magical thing called decentralized finance so I reached out to Celsius because I never have all the answers and they let this guy come out and here he is his Alex Mishinsky he is the CEO of Celsius Alex thanks for coming on how you doing so thanks for having me I watch it regularly I love the summary of the news and your opinion on it so definitely you do a great job for the community so a great question on the customer service look I first let me apologize to the there was a delay people got impacted we did hire we doubled the size of the customer service team and so now it's about 12 people but but unfortunately again the new people sucked up a lot of the time of the people who were there and knew all the answers so the productivity of the existing town and we were just not ready for that so we did bring it back down to 24 hours so all critical issues are responded within 24 hours and items that need the extra attention are within 48 hours that is seven days a week so that includes Saturday and Sunday and our team is based in Europe so they are actually of the clocks if you're disco based person you're probably not going to see an answer for a few hours but they'll handle it overnight and so on but just to mention more than it is a five days a week so we do we've seen a lot from our user base 165,000 people all over the world on the weekend and we basically made sure that agents are covering weekends and giving people immediate answers gotcha so it sounds to me I'm just gonna summarize it sounds to me like it's it's a growing paint type of issue which is a good thing right this is a good problem have the so you double you double is in six months and you're gonna have some growing paints you know so that's how it is and but but the big thing is we know about the issue or you guys know what's happening and you're gonna fix the problem as time goes on because you're like look this is what we're this is what's happening we're growing but we have a plan of action that's the big thing and we've also raised the caps of for example we had a $20,000 a daily cap of the amount you can withdraw without extra authorization meaning you didn't like if because if you withdraw more than 20,000 we want to make sure it's you we want to video authentication things like that so we raise that to 50,000 that really sure and the daily limit is thousand meaning you can do three transactions of 50,000 without a special authorization so we automated some of the processes as well to make sure that customers can handle their own issues and don't need an agent to help them with this or that that's huge yeah one of these days I'll be there 50,000 transactions like that okay so Alex thanks for answering that first one the second one it's it's it's more of a technical issue this actually came from Tiffany has a pretty good question she said hey I've been customer service issue again she goes I was trying to sell my OMG this is when OMG came about and they were helping out with the Ethereum fees so everybody was excited about OMG and the price went up she shows I tried to sell it I couldn't do it don't know what happened then a couple days later she came back so I figured it out myself when I hit the max button to sell the max there would be everything and it wouldn't go through because there has to be a little bit left over so I she said I figured that out myself can you ask Alex what they're doing for that if that's already been fixed it might have already been fixed yeah so we're actually releasing a new version today which has a new look and feel as well and we're also launching and so it will be a matching look and feel and part of it is also fixing a bunch of bugs like this one where again we we're gonna exclude the last three or four digits of your seven digit balance to make sure that there's enough there for the gas fees or some other fees so again we normally pay the withdrawal fees we don't we don't actually charge you the withdrawal fee so if you've seen Celsius you've never paid a withdrawal fee on Celsius right so so we have to really look and see what happened with OMG you don't pay any withdrawal fees on Bitcoin or Ethereum anything like that so it comes out of Celsius it comes out of actually the earnings that we have we cover all of your withdrawal fees that's huge okay make sense so it comes down to hey nobody's perfect but we strive for perfection right when you move fast you break things and the key is to fix them fast as well not just break them fast so so we are we experimenting we improving we iterating and a lot of it has to do with feedback we're getting from the community and sometimes that causes other bugs we actually for every release we have about 200 testers community people who test the app so like the version that's coming out today has been in tests for last three months already and and I think it's amazing it has again you can feel and I hope the community loves it but we would love to get your feedback tell us what we can do better and we'll work on it oh you know what my audience has no problems with giving feedback you got to take a look at the comments exactly and you know what not to get off track but this is this is the whole thing about entrepreneurs that are after my own heart this is Alex because he says the exact same thing that I truly believe you have to go out there and just throw things at the wall I mean a responsible amount to see what actually sticks and then go from there because if you don't it kind of slows on innovation so I can appreciate that Alex makes sense to me and it sounds like everything is going to try to work itself out as time goes on just gonna take a little bit of time because no one's perfect yeah and look we don't compromise on security we don't compromise on the kind of the foundational things what we experiment is more in the areas of enabling the users to do what they want to do so we have a very large a chunk of the community who just huddles and then huddle mode they never touch the coins and they just earn the yield but other people want to transact if they want to leverage they want to go against the asset so so it's a balance of kind of all of these different side the Celsius community the field that you're working for them yeah you know but at the same time you're delivering for everybody and I think Celsius has done that better than anyone else we kind of invented this category of interest income invented the idea that you can earn a token for deposited coins if you I know everybody thinks DeFi created that compound 2.0 is a copy of Celsius even even the Uniswap is a copy of Celsius because Uniswap effectively allows people to transact but then takes the fees and gives it to the people who are hudlers gives it to the people who are staking their coins as well which is exactly what Celsius does with the BTC pool with the ATH pool and so on so we love Uniswap we love and you know but I think still Celsius pays more than anybody else on any coin you know why well I'm not gonna I'm trying to stay on on topic Alex for the things you talk about are pretty good so like the reason why I believe in you I believe in Celsius it it's because the vision that you have and the same message that you have which is every single time I've attended an AMA I don't get to them regularly because I'm always so busy but it's the same message and it's on point and it's it's not just about that but it's also like you watching this video right now you're gonna hear Alex say the same thing every single time because that's what you have to do in marketing you have to let people know seven to ten times before they really get it and in every single video I've heard Alex say the exact same thing the exact same way well a little bit different and yeah but but but it helps to push it into the public consciousness and that's what you have to do so like I always talk about I have a one-two punch Celsius is what I do too I I store a lot of my crypto on there I don't put everything on there because I store someone in the Nano ledger and the other one is Voyager and just for you watching this video right now I want you to make mention or make note of who is actually on the who actually takes the time to come on these YouTube channels and actually talk to their customers you got Alex Machinese right here we had Steve Ehrlich from Voyager we've had people from Nano ledger we've had people from Unstoppable Domains you're not gonna see a Brian Armstrong get out there and be like hey everything's going good and just not gonna happen so when you're thinking about who you want to put your cryptocurrency with take a look at what's being done so by the way just Voyager is using Celsius Network so when you put Voyager they end up with Celsius Network but but Voyager has a lot of other features great app obviously that allow you to do things that Celsius can't and we have over a dozen partners like that like mode or Bitwala or we just launched with with line Japan right so we launched with their Bitfront with their US and so when you deposit with Bitfront you're actually putting coins with Celsius so so the fact that all these major brands trusting Celsius is a very important endorsement for us our business model is also I think is being validated more and more every day because it's sustainable we're lending to institution we're not lending to the retail guy who just re-deposits the same coin the farming look we're doing sustainable farming with versus this crazy farming that you're seeing of so Alex you're you're walking right in the third question fantastic work so this comes from this is from Thomas and I answered it myself but I wanted you to answer it and it talks about taxes and interest rates for Celsius he says Dan enjoy your videos that are down he goes I didn't realize crypto IRAs existed thanks for the heads up what's essentially saying this what should I do should I put my cryptocurrency into Celsius for for the yields for the APR or APY should I put it into a crypto IRA account or and I'm just gonna add this in for decentralized finance so Alex the question is is a very broad one but let's say you have $10,000 so look I'm not a tax advisor I'm not an investment advisor we provide a utility for many people and each person has his own unique situation to really think about for example if you're putting it in your IRA and you don't plan to touch that money for 10 or 20 years then obviously that is the most efficient and tax efficient way to defer the taxes we also allow you to borrow against the assets so you can also borrow in case of emergency without triggering any tax events which is most IRA programs allow you to do that anyway but but here you don't have to sell the coins to to get access to that cash so the only reason to go straight into DeFi is if you first you have time because it takes tremendous amount of time and you know you're very very technical because you know everything about everything you have to know who passed and ordered and who didn't you have to make sure that you know like we've seen many many situations where again if you you sat on your tokens for too long didn't matter if it was sushi or yams or something else you ended up losing a lot of value right so so part of what Celsius does for you is really automate all of that and gives you 80% of that value but because we also blend our earnings from DeFi with most of our earnings which comes from institution and retail dollar loans we have three sources of income our average in our average interest that we pay to the community is actually higher than what you could get by yourself because you cannot lend to institutions no institution is going to work with you as a retail user because you just don't have enough coins right these guys bought 10 20 million dollars a pop so Celsius is the only one of size that can fulfill these type of words right so so what we've done is aggregated 165,000 retail users pulled all of their assets and then landed out to the institutions or exchanges and we charge them higher and higher fees the reason we're raising our fees raising our rates right we're charging in interest is because there's such high demand for these coins we raised stable coins to 11 and a half percent right this is you paid you are paid in USDC or in USDT but if you're earning in sell you can earn 15 over 15 percent right no one has ever seen the rates like this on stable coins and you can deposit 10 million dollars Celsius one deposit we're not gonna say no it's not it's not like it's only working like on Binance you can earn a little bit of money but it's for the first 200 people who went through the raffle and got selected to do the deposit right so and there's a max amount that you could put in so the beauty of Celsius is it's for the community by the community again most of the value is being captured by the users and you get to select for each coin if you want to earn in kind you want BTC on BTC or you want to earn in sell and 41% of our users have chosen to earn in sell and that's why sell is outperform Bitcoin by 800% in the last 12 months so if you earned in sell you earned a higher and it outperform any you would have held otherwise so the model is proving that the fly with again unlike DeFi DeFi only works as long as a showering those free tokens on you right Celsius works day and night seven days a week high markets low markets side markets and so on because our source of income is different than guys who are trying to copy us exactly and that's why they call them a sheen right there ladies and gentlemen because there was the message on point again same type of thing Alex thanks so much for for coming in I really appreciate it I think that answers with without going into the tax advisor situation that was a it was a well put answer as far as what you would do as far as Celsius as far as DeFi yeah yeah I'll just add to that the what you what you want to do is really maximize the yield by the same time you need to diversify aware from the dollar meaning that for example if your choice is oh I see a 15% yield on stablecoin on Celsius earning in sell but I'm only seeing 6.2% in Bitcoin and it's not that it's three times better it's the because Bitcoin is non-correlated asset and most of your assets already are your house your car your your income is all in dollars you need a non-correlated asset so actually even earning less in Bitcoin assuming Bitcoin doesn't move I can doubles triples of course it's great but if it doesn't move the diversification is one of the most important things so it's less important if you put it in IRA or you put it in in directly from your from you did an ACH and bought the coins and put it in the key is to look at analyze your financial situation your savings everything else and ask yourself do you have do you have enough gold do you have enough crypto because those are the things if if what I think is gonna happen is going to happen meaning the US dollars gonna lose another 50 to 90% of its value and we're gonna go through a massive recession or depression that that pool of capital is gonna be what's gonna save you because your dollars your home all the other stuff is not gonna get you you know out of the out of trouble it's gonna get you even deeper into trouble if you have a mortgage or loans or credit card debt and all that stuff so my recommendation is put as much as you can in these non-correlated asset if one passes and I'm wrong great nothing happened but if I'm right you will be happy that you did that yeah and I've always said once small businesses realize what's going on and they say hold on I can put it in the bank or I can put it into Celsius oh I didn't get loans against that oh it's good it's really much lower after jump of the hoops when small businesses like mine figured all out I think it's game over it's 1% interest per year 1% right so you can't be bad and and I think you know a lot of people are recognizing this all over the world and and look this community is growing super fast now I'm very excited to see fresh faces when I see a lot of basic questions it tells me that we're not just talking to the same people every week right so I'm very happy to come on the show answer any question and and help educate the newbies and make sure that they're they're doing making the right decisions because we don't want to burn them we don't want them to get caught in the wrong project or in the wrong you know protocol and lose their funds right because then they'll never come back and and for us to make this mainstream and make this the way that most people earn their their income or yield it is we need to convert them one by one yeah make sense to me all right Alex I do not want to keep you because I know you can go for another hour thanks thanks for doing this and keep doing what you're doing all right Alex thanks all right so that's it so like we talked about there was two things first of all if you're looking for the my one-two punch which is Celsius and Voyager in the description of every one of my videos there's gonna be a link it's gonna look just like this it's gonna take the exchange fees and wallet information and these are all the different exchanges and wallets I've ever used and if I recommend them or not and everything from Coinbase to you know Celsius and Voyager Gemini Binance Uniswap Abra Kraken Cash App I mean everything yeah I don't eat recommend tour but it's all right there it also gives you all the different fees and rates and everything else that you want to see as far as the breakdown if you you can you can go to dreaded it to the exchange or to the wallet and sign up that's fine but if you want to use the affiliate links they'll give you between 10 and 25 dollars so it's whatever you want to do also just like me now if we're talking about as far as a cryptocurrency specific IRA fund there's a video I did recently which talked about how I pay zero in cryptocurrency taxes which you can find the link to that video right here which is also in the description so you can check that out lastly if you couldn't tell I'm a big believer in Celsius and I really like how it's all put together here are the rates for this week September 4th through 11 2020 if we're gonna get if you have these cryptocurrencies in your Celsius wall you don't do anything just have to be in your wallet so Bitcoin you get 6.2 each 6.2 USDC 15% gold 6.13 to the gold Celsius and everything else you can see it right there now every place is gonna fluctuate and I'm sure you can tell me oh this one has a little bit higher here this has a little bit higher there that's fine go ahead and do whatever you want for me I but I don't believe just in Celsius I believe in the people behind Celsius and that's why I'm gonna stick with them and that's why as of today September 9th 2020 I put 25% of all of my crypto assets is now in Celsius so I'm not gonna put everything into Celsius but I'm gonna put a huge chunk in there because if you're looking at the some of the top interest rates it's not doing anything and especially if you have any type of cryptocurrency on another exchange why is it on that exchange just what I would do which is what I did is I took them off all those exchanges and stuck them on this other Celsius app because I'm gonna gain interest now since I live in Texas I can't gain interest on any stablecoins but once that hurdle is released on my three businesses I will probably put a huge chunk of the money that is in there into stablecoins and accumulate interest on Celsius because it only makes sense and this to me is the death of the banks so that's there for today's video I want to say thanks for checking it out really appreciate it if you like these types of videos and be too much gonna pop up in your left and right not sure YouTube kind of controls all that stuff and go ahead and check this out so that is it really appreciated and I'll see you on the next one