Thriving Maestro's Paradise

  And this segues into our NFT section where Coinbase is adding support for PYR (the primary utility token of the platform). It's called Vulcan Forged. Remember, anytime you see an exchange listing, you should sell. Because the coin will pump, and nine times out of 10, probably 99 times out of a hundred, actually, the thing's going to fade back to the pre-listing price. For that reason, I do think this is going to fall back to $3. It did bounce to $3.30, which is about 10%. But that's always a great time to sell. You can always buy back in for 10% less in theory. But you have no idea if the market is going to keep it going but statistically, that's just what happens almost all of the time. We also have OpenSea launching on BNB Chain. Now the funny thing is I never thought of BNB Chain as a very NFT centric chain. Solano is the other bigger player, and Polygon is catching up. Also, a lot of these other chains like Avalanche are trying to get onto it, but it's not rea

 MasterCard is a filing for a trademark. They're going to have some sort of crypto secure product coming out. Reebok has also done the same thing. Adidas and Nike have made their wearables. Reebok is getting into the Metaverse, and they're going to have some sort of NFT, virtual footwear stuff as well.

 Fidelity, this is actually huge news that nobody cares about right now because of all the FTX drama as well as all the attention Elon Musk is getting for Twitter and his war with Apple. But Fidelity, one of the biggest traditional finance organizations, is now open for crypto. I think now that FTX is out of the way, there is a gap for them to take the market share. Obviously, Coinbase is still a big player, but a lot of people have their retirement accounts on Fidelity and huge, huge, huge bank accounts on Fidelity as well, where they can diversify into crypto. The main problem is that sentiment has never been this bad for crypto. That's why I keep saying last week that we are probably at a bottom. We've not gone below $1100 for Ethereum strangely. And to be honest, I've been waiting for $800 or $900 to buy back in, but it just never hit it. It just keeps staying at $1100 or $1150 to $1200. I don't know who is buying it up right now but I'm trying to figure out who

 Kraken settled with the Treasury's office because they broke some sanctions, allowing Iran to get money. Kraken paid $362,000 to settle.

  Silvergate’s stock is down 80 to 90% this year. Silvergate is a bank that specializes in helping all these crypto companies out. Now we know why a lot of traditional finance or traditional banks don't help out with crypto companies. And you can see Silvergate keeps losing money with all these crypto funds that are stuck here and there. The latest is because of BlockFi declaring bankruptcy. 

 The other big thing this week was ConsenSys. ConsenSy owns MetaMask and they use Infura, which is a API that interfaces with the Ethereum blockchain. They're going to start collecting your location/IP data. And what is a controversy here is the question “does this mean crypto is no longer anonymous?” So what we'll do is kind of post some alternatives on MetaMask and different RPCs. So RPC is just how do you communicate with Ethereum essentially and the API to Ethereum. And basically, we can give you a few alternatives. And you could also VPN, and I think it also solves a problem. We’ll post those in our monthly “State of Crypto” Newsletter coming out later today.  Okay. Now, let's move on.

  Binance is leading the charge now. They're the main crypto titan left in the industry. They're publically releasing their proof of reserves, which takes all of the wallets that they have and, shows us how much they owe. This is a proof of reserve system. And it can't be faked. If you have missing funds, it's going to be tracked. It's all on there and recorded. Binance is also creating a customer support fund, or a rescue fund, for the entire industry. They've put in $2 billion total now and they say APTOS and JUMP have also joined in now to save crypto. A lot of people are speculating this could go into the Genesis liquidity issue. And, remember, Genesis is not necessarily a lost funds issue. Maybe they lost some funds in FTX, but when they need to give funds back, they lent funds. What is important to note is that they have collateral, there are “stuck” crypto assets there. Maybe the collateral is staked in Ethereum. Maybe it's locked into a pool in DeFi.

 BlockFi filed bankruptcy this week and had $355 million that is now frozen on FTX. We suspected this would happen. BlockFi was going to go bankrupt and FTX saved them. But now there's a battle going on. Basically, BlockFi is fighting for more assets. They're trying to get $620 million of HOOD (RobinHood).

  Sam Bankman-Fred, founder of FTX, just had an interview yesterday. He says that FTX U.S., they will get back $1 to $1, but only a quarter for ftx.com. There's some other interesting revelations that he donated money to the Republican party, but his donation to the Democratic party was double that amount. It's really weird because everybody's like, "Oh, he's a Democrat donor." But he claims he donated to both sides. The other thing was he says he shouldn't have filed bankruptcy and that more liquidity came in. I don't believe him on that, to be honest. But he did say that people did wire money to Alameda instead of into FTX, which is one of the red flags there. Let's keep going. FTX hearing is going to be in two weeks. That is going to be very impactful to crypto. The sentiment from the government is going to be very interesting. Our best hope is that they realize this is not a crypto issue. It is a “how do you run a company”, risk management, iss