 Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in cryptocurrencies and digital assets and break them down to bite-sized pieces. I'm sure you were expecting Rob's voice on this episode today, but lucky for me, Alex Masioli, I am here hosting this piece for him and it is another day of Christmas giveaways on Digital Asset News, so it's only fitting that today we're giving away Trade the Chain membership for free to a lucky winner. Trade the Chain now, I'm one of the co-founders of the team embarked on building this about six, seven months ago. It is an AI-driven sentiment alert for the average retail trader and we partnered with the Thai, which provides all this really important data to institutions and crypto hedge funds so that they have an edge on the market. Trade the Chain has a couple of different dashboards. One here is the spotlight page, which gives you all your relevant information real time on the market and various things happening in it from a social media perspective to a price action perspective as well as daily sentiments. Another one, daily sentiment, long-term sentiment, relative tweet volume, relative trading volume and the all-important one-hour projection range on price. From here, you also receive important alerts, listing alerts, news alerts, and everything else that might drive the market. All you have to do to win the prize is trade the chain in the comment section. Rob will pick out a winner tonight. Now on to the markets. If you woke up this morning, you were greeted with a little treat, well a big treat. Bitcoin has surged in the overnight and we hit a high of 23,500 in that neighborhood. Early this morning, Eastern Standard Time, you can see here, we're just shy of 23,000 on the price, but it is going parabolic almost. Our piece today that we're going to be covering may be one of the factors driving the price of Bitcoin. This is the news topic that I wanted to cover today. Now when I woke up this morning and went down to the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee, the sun hadn't come up. There's about a foot or so of snow in New York City. I looked down at my phone and I saw an exciting message coming from my friend Brian Henman. I've known him for years and he's one of those guys who came over from the traditional space and caught the crypto bug. He's an advisor for a firm called Ipid Paxos, which one of their operations is an exchange, but they do a whole slew of different other services. He's the former head of execution and global data products at Nasdaq, Bigwick. What he did was he said, Alex, today there's going to be some exciting news coming out on Paxos and I want you to be ahead of the game here and lo and behold, shortly afterwards, PayPal's crypto partner Paxos raises 142 million from Carlisle billionaire David Rubinstein Nuthers. And when I saw this story, I was excited. Now this is coming on the heels of a bunch of other institutions that over the last month have just announced one after another how they're getting into Bitcoin or planning on allocating to Bitcoin. And they're all recognizing this as an asset. So this is important because David Rubinstein is really not the average crypto type. He co-founded Carlisle Group in 1987, Washington DC. Carlisle Group has over $230 billion in assets under management and they don't invest in crypto. Now this particular allocation, which he was a part of, it came from his family office. So it's a personal investment and it really sticks out because these guys are a big white shoe firm in the private equity space. They don't like to deviate into unnatural waters, so to speak, that they're used to, whether it's their day-to-day real estate or other portfolio companies. And it was surprising to see this to say the least. But it was exciting. It really confirms that institutional money has found its place into the market and that could be one of the factors that's driving Bitcoin up so drastically. It's definitely a positive, so we're excited about that. Again, just still taking a back about this piece. I've done meetings in Carlisle's headquarters down in Washington, DC over the years with various executives. And this white shoe firm is very imposing. You wouldn't expect it to be involved in crypto or one of its founders to be involved in crypto. But this just goes to show that if David Rubenstein believes in this space, then he's joining the ranks of the Pultuder Joneses of the world and other various billionaires and high-profile fund managers and investors. This is real and it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Paxos, which you may know them from their big PayPal and Revolute deals that they did. Now that's a pay-for-order flow type deals and remittances. And so basically what Paxos did was they teamed up with PayPal and Revolute and they essentially get all the retail order flow that comes across those apps and platforms from the everyday person. And they convert it into purchases of crypto or sales of crypto, basically a large remittance processor. Now in the traditional side of things, there's various firms called Virtu and the old KCG night trading. And these firms are just powerhouses in the equities market. Paxos is mirroring itself to a fallen line on the crypto side just like the Virtus of the world. If you're not familiar with Virtu, they, when the average investor goes into their e-trade account or their TD Ameritrade account and they go to buy a bunch of shares of IBM or Apple, all those orders from those retail interfaces get bundled up and they sent enlightening seconds to firms like Virtu and traded across the street, either bought and sold. And so they collect tons and tons of order flow. I think Virtu is actually somewhere in the neighborhood of responsible for 17% of all equities trading I think on the New York stock exchange. So Paxos is doing this on the crypto side. This is extremely powerful. And then if you read down further in the article, you can also see that Paxos, while entrenched in the crypto and digital asset side of things, is not firmly aligned with just providing solutions for that. In February, the firm facilitated what is described as the first live application of blockchain technology for US listed equities with Credit Suisse and Nomura. They helped them settle equity trade on the blockchain and they're not the only ones. You guys have seen the headlines from JP Morgan with the JP Coin, Goldman Sachs interested in partnering with JP Morgan on the JP Coin and some of those features as well as news from firms like Wells Fargo looking to get into crypto. Now what does that mean? These firms are not looking to first dive into crypto like buying it up for their treasury like square and micro strategies. What they've developed is their own coins that go on the blockchain which in turn will help settle internal functionalities for them. So when you hear about JP Morgan creating the JP Coin and all this, it's not going to get listed on CoinMarketCap. It's not going to have some sort of airdrop into user wallets. What it's for is to allow the coin to help settle equities, to help settle derivatives, to help settle loan arbitrage instruments internally for them because they know that it's more efficient and it's immutable. And so it really helps in facilitating the efficiency of their back office. Exciting nonetheless. Haxos is a NYDFS trust company, a qualified custodian. Their exchange is close to volumes of Coinbase on some days. I remember being on their trading floor and on one day they got excited because they had outdone Coinbase and volume, really looking to see how this snowball effect happens across the market. Again, I believe this is a driver in the price action of Bitcoin today and will be in the future. Now, Bitcoin going up so drastically is not only just for Bitcoin, it's dragging a lot of other coins up in the market as well. As our good friend Rob likes to say, the rising tide is lifting more boats. What's hot out there? What's really hot out there that's going up are some of the DeFi coins. Now DeFi is just one of these remarkable things that had its big uprising and went through a little trough in the market. But now it's starting to settle and products are starting to be built around it that are actually really, really useful. Now, in talking to my friend Stani, who's the founder of Ave, we're talking about how he's looking to create mortgages based on DeFi. These things are huge. These are going to penetrate the market as an alternative for people to borrow money, lend money, earn money off of loan arbitrage. I think it's a powerful space. I'm waiting for the first person to get a DeFi mortgage for their house. It'll be a huge, huge thing in the marketplace. But that's what Bitcoin's doing. It's rising in price, it's bringing up others with it. It's a great day to be had right now, new all-time high, and I hope everybody just is enjoying themselves and the money that they're making, and I will hand this show back over to Rob. Guys, thank you for being with me today, and happy trading.