Thriving Maestro's Paradise

  How bad do you want your financial freedom? I sent you a crypto newsletter because I want you to be rich and escape the rat race. However, it seems that there might be a few things stopping you.   I wanted to take a minute to talk about the two of them...   1. Money blocks.  Most people think that money is the root of all evil (personally, that’s how losers think). But the reality is it’s the root of all goodness. Wealth is what will give you the means to lift yourself up and help those around you.   As my Rich Dad said,  “Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it affects everything that is.”   2. Patience and discipline.  Most people give up before even starting (again, the mark of a loser). But achieving financial freedom is not an event… it’s a process. And it will only happen if you take the first step… and then the step after that.   In short - there’s no way to really avoid the pain or the scary parts. Inevitably,...

Rule #1: You must know the difference between an asset and a liability.  Then buy or create assets.    If you want to be rich, this is all you need to know.   This is rule #1, it is the only rule.    This may sound absurdly simple, but most people have no idea how profound this rule is.    Most people struggle financially because they do not know the difference between an asset and a liability.   An asset puts money IN your pocket. A liability takes money OUT of your pocket. Here’s a question for you…   Is the home in which you live an asset or a liability?   In my view, your house is a liability. Even if you own the property with no mortgage, you still pay property taxes, utilities, insurance, maintenance, etc. Therefore: money is being taken out of your pocket. Once you understand this simple rule… all you have to do is follow it to gain wealth.   To your wealth building, Albert X Ariho

  Have you ever heard a story about a lottery winner who wins BIG… but then loses everything a few years later?   Or the sports star who’s popping champagne and kissing models at 21, but working at a carwash for minimum wage at 29?   Maybe you have that friend who thinks he’s a millionaire because his house, his luxury SUV, his fine wine collection, all add up to a million dollars.   Or the one that wants to become a millionaire, but she decided to get a loan, get an Ivy League degree, and then—maybe—get a “safe”, salaried job.   Financially ignorant people come in all shapes and sizes. But I won’t let you be one of them.   So, I want you to drill these three principles in your head:   #1. If it doesn’t put money in your pocket, it’s not an asset.  The house you live in, the car you use every day, they take money out of your pocket. So don’t call them assets. They are liabilities.   Assets put money in your pocket, and the only real assets ar...

Tinym an is upgrading to 2.0. Tinyman, by the way, is the Uniswap of the decentralized trading of Algorand. Now, Algorand is another interesting thing. Algorand was another good short, another good hedge because it jumped up like crazy to 45 cents because it was kind of the official FIFA NFT platform. I hadn't heard anybody buy anything from there. In my network at least. And it's also down. So this is down from the week when everything's up. And the reason why is because the World Cup has started and nobody cares about. You sell the news.  When it happens, like the World Cup happens, all these things that propped up these coins are going to sell off. And that is an opportunity to buy. When you have everybody selling off, there's no one left to sell, that is always good entry point. So Algorand is another good entry here. Poloniex has merged with Huobi. This made Huobi token shoot up. I'm not sure exactly if people are actually speculating on this, but it is up 46% ...

 Ribbon, by the way, is offering a staked Ethereum vault, so you can actually earn money on the staked ETH and on the vault, which is doing a cover called Strategies. They also announced a VIP program, so ribbon is just firing on all cylinders. They have another L1 chain coming out called AVO. I just love it when you see a project just continuously delivering stuff. I've used Ribbon, I think it's actually a great product. I have a small holding in Ribbon. I just bought some and then played with it, but it's up 21% today. And it was one of our, I believe it's one of our top five coins this month as well. But it's already up so much that I don't want to make this a spotlight coin of the week again either. It's just tough when it's up 56% over the last week. It did get hit hard from the FTX fallout. I don't want to hide that.  And then Aave, we talked about last week just having gone through a crazy attack. Someone was taking collateral, then making it ...

 Ethereum is up 10% and Bitcoin is up 4% for the week. So this is coming off of one of the worst possible weeks ever. Binance coin and LINK, were our spotlight coins and Binance coin did outperform quite a bit. Dogecoin is up - this retail FOMO with Twitter and stuff is probably driving it up. Litecoin's the same way. Chainlink's up 24%, more than double than Ethereum. So we did pick some good spotlight coins from last week, especially with the staking coming for Chainlink. ApeCoin announced staking last week as well. It's up 30%, which is really crazy. A lot of people are really buying into this narrative. So in terms of hedges, if you want to do some shorting, if the market gets too much on a uproar, Ape is one of them. And the other one I actually wanted to point out is Gemini dollar. If there is a collapse with Genesis (mentioned in the beginning) this could be impacted. If you short $1, you have almost zero risk. It's not going to go to $1.01 or $1.10 even. It'...

 Injective (INJ) has a couple things coming up. Injective is a layer one now on Cosmos. It's actually able to connect with Ethereum, which is actually really cool. I don't know anybody using Injective, though, which is a problem. They have a thing called Project X coming out, which has both yield generation, which I think is outdated now, and launchpad fundraising and listings. You may remember we talked about Injective a long time ago. I think we rode this up almost 10X back in the day, but it's back down to $1.60. It was like $2.75 not too long ago, and it's at one $160 million total valuation. So actually, most of the supply is out there, so I'm not as worried about it in terms of inflation. But INJ is the first Custody staking token on Binance Custody. Since there is a huge gap now with FTX out of the picture I am extremely bullish for INJ. You have two catalysts. One is that people that want a stake on their Custody platform, they're going to diversify thei...

  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...

Right now we're waiting to see if Digital Currency Group, DCG, is going to go bankrupt or if Genesis Trading is isolated. DCG is a venture capital company that owns Genesis. If Genesis goes bankrupt, which I think everybody has already priced into the market, then a lot of the lending is gone. For example, people that deposited money into Gemini Earn, that money's gone. All this money just vaporized because people were over levered on other bets and then these bets became worthless, essentially. All this money's gone. Think of it like you have a neighborhood and every house is worth $10,000, and then somebody comes in and borrows a bunch of money and says, "I'm going to offer $100,000 for every house," 10X its value. Then, eventually, the market brings that up to $1 million a house. But the true value is still only $10,000. Sudden people are not buying it for a million and the price drops all the way back down to 50,000. All that money that just got poured in ...

 Every week we talk about inflation calming down. This week there is a hint that maybe December’s interest hike might only be a 50 basis point move as opposed to the expected 75 basis point move.  This is why you’ll hear markets “cheer, everything is still going up. They're seeing an end in sight to these interest hikes. This is important because if one can reasonably assume the interest rate peak is going to be in February, then they can start deploying their funds accordingly.