Bitcoin pushes for $50K! Is the downtrend finally over? FLUX, HNT | The Market Report w/ Sam Bourgi

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Hello friends and welcome to another episode of the Market Report. I am your host Benton and we are joined by our expert residents Jordan Finesseth and Marcel Pegman. For those who don't know Jordan, he uses his background in psychology and human behavior to spot the emerging trends in the crypto markets. And Marcel Peckman applies his 17 years of experience trading derivatives options and futures in the crypto derivatives markets. What is up gentlemen? How are we feeling this week? Marcel and Jordan, what's going on boys?

I'm doing good, Ben. I'm happy to see the market bouncing back a little bit after the FOMC meeting from the Fed. We'll see if we can't get that face ripping rally that we've all been experience are expecting here in the next month or two. Like fingers crossed.

You call that a bounce back? Come on, we're still under 50k. Are you using a microscope?

We focus on bitcoin all the time. I look at the altcoin market too, man. It's not just Bitcoin.

Ethereum 4.1000. Come on. It was 4.45 just a week or 10 days ago, man.

Come on.

The market is weak. We're still in a mini bear market. I don't know what's going to take for us to come out of the bunker, but we will eventually.

Hopefully we're going to see some bigger bounces and like Jordan said, that face melting skyrocket to the stratosphere. Hopefully that's coming for us before the end of the year, maybe the beginning of 2022. I know we got a great show lined up today. Friend of the show, Sam Bors is going to be coming on. You don't want to miss what he has to talk about. We'll give you the weekly roundup. We scoured the Internet for all the hottest tweets this week to keep you updated. We got a short clip to get into. Then we're going to talk about some of the biggest market news. A lot of hearings this week in the Senate, Congress in the US what does this mean for the crypto markets? Are we bullish, are we bearish after this things? We're going to dive into a lot of that stuff and we're going to give you some of the coins that you should be watching based off our Markets Pro platform. And speaking of of markets pro, we're going to be giving away a one month subscription this week. And for those that are leaving the comments, drop them in there. We want to hear from you today. Tell us where you are tuning in from all the millions of fans that are tuning in today. Tell us where you are watching from. We want to hear you and we want to interact with you. Let us know your questions, make sure you plug them in. Maybe Sam's going to answer a few of them. We could answer them in our expert segment today as well. And then we're going to end the show with Marcel's hot expert takes. He's going to be diving into some research about how to spot emerging projects and the tools that he uses. And you don't want to miss that because he can give you some alpha to figure out how to navigate that space and how to pick the next hot topic. If you want 20% off, go ahead and look at the description below for markets pro 20% off discount in there. And before we jump into things, make sure you like and subscribe Cointelegraph on YouTube. We are here on Thursdays at 12pm so let's go ahead and get started with our markets news video this week. Awesome stuff from one of our editors and producers, Danielle. Thanks for creating that. We saw some tweets from Elon Musk this week, Elizabeth Warren and Elon. We're getting into it so some of the Twitter news. But I want to jump into one of the biggest headlines of this week. Bitcoin rallies above 49K. Let's go ahead and pull up this article. There was some awesome stuff this week. Saw this little mini rally after the Fed came out and announced the rate hikes for 2022. So guys, I want to understand what does this mean for the overall markets? Why is this an announcement from the Fed so important this week? Why did the crypto markets react positively to this? Marcel, what is your take on what happened?

So first of all, ahead of the announcement, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were down and people were saying, well probably Fed will announce some tapering so reducing the the bonds buyback programs and that will be negative for riskier markets. So it's causing the drop on bitcoin and cryptos. And I knew at that time that that was bullshit. It was not right because if the inflation is going up and the Federal Reserve and Treasury continue to print a trillion dollar every month, every time they need, they just raised the federal budget that limit by $2.5 trillion. So if they keep doing that, we're going to have keep higher inflation which is good for bitcoin. So that's why bitcoin and cryptos rallied after the funk announcements.

Yeah, I want to note this Quote here from Jim Karen, who's cnbc, a senior portfolio manager and chief strategist for Morgan Stanley Investment Management. He said it's kind of a sigh of relief to the equities market who thought it might be much more aggressive. It's kind of what we were thinking. So it appears a lot of these institutions were kind of like, hey, this is, you know, par for the course right now. We expected this, but again, bitcoin kind of saw this rally we saw here up from 46, 5, kind of up to the, you know, touching 50. It seems like we're, we're meeting some resistance at 50. Jordan, what is your take? What's going to get Bitcoin above 50k and back to some higher highs moving forward into 2022?

I don't know, we might need to see some form of major announcement or like a bitcoin spot ETF or something. I don't know. Like, I'm waiting for the adults in the room to kind of come around and be like, hey, we'll take over the Fed and all this stuff. Like, there's a whole lot of hard truth that we need to realize as a society. And like, we're not going to be able to raise interest rates in the future, in my opinion. All these kind of things. So I don't know, it's just like everybody's just, let's just keep the game going. Let's enjoy the fun market over and over. Even like the stock market, it just keeps going up and up and up and up and it doesn't make any sense. This is getting a little ridiculous and we're all going to be in for a hard time in the next year or two. This doesn't change.

Yeah, it's, it's. When is it going to stop? You know, it's this fiat system we're seeing. The money's been printing, the printer's been going burr, but when does it stop? When does the musical chair stop? And so, Marcel, what is it? What are your thoughts on this?

We had a viewer, Renee Montenegro, saying that until bitcoin returns to the bull market, altcoins are not going to rally. That's not true in my view. In periods where bitcoin is lateralized, it fails to break 50,000, but at the same time doesn't crash below 46. It's a good time to enter out front positions. Historically speaking.

You heard it first here on the market report and I see folks are tuning in from around the globe. We got folks from India, Nigeria, Netherlands, Istanbul, a few Folks looking from Germany, the States, we appreciate you all jumping in today. Feel free to pop in your questions, your takes. Let us know what you think about some of these headlines this week. And we are, what do you got to say?

We are watching closely. Like, if you guys want this free subscription to Markets Pro for month, like, let us know in the comments. If people need that, that extra alpha, let us us know, like, tell us, like specifically we want that and we'll keep an eye on it.

Let us know exactly those folks that are chiming in today. Your likelihood of winning that Markets Pro subscription is very, very high. All right, so let's jump to the next headline this week. We, we saw it in the, the video leading into this segment. The Crypto House Crypto in the House of Representatives. Execs came in. You saw Sam Bankman Freed, you saw Brian Brooks. A lot of the big names in the crypto space were in front of Congress this week. What, what was your takeaway from this, Jordan? Was this a good thing? Is it good? Was, was Congress positive to having these folks in and answering these questions? What do you think?

I had a positive experience with it. It seemed like compared to past, like, grillings in front of the House, I've seen they were a lot, it was a lot more positive and they said some good things. And it seems like they're actually starting to open the door to maybe accepting cryptocurrency because they're starting to realize, like, America's falling behind the whole world as far as, like being up on the crypto game. So I don't know. I took it as a positive. It seems like we're moving in a positive or a beneficial direction for the industry as a whole. We'll see. Regulations can always kind of muck things up, but we'll see how it turns out. Yeah.

Marcel. So looking at this from a broader context, does this mean anything for, for the broader markets when you see like countries like the US talking about this in their governments? Like, what is your take since, since you're there in Brazil?

Well, Benton, I'm more of the opinion that once the defi really gets more of a news, like more people involved using defi doesn't matter if it's on Avalanche, Ethereum or on Bitcoin, second layer, it doesn't matter. But once more people get on board, defy, there's really nothing that the government will be able to do to stop it. We've seen that with China. They banned bitcoin, they banned OTC, they banned P2P and still, there's a lot of activity going on from China. They just moved to stable coins. They can use. Dai, they can use. They don't even need stable coins that have each dollar on US bank accounts like Tether for example. It moved out of the us it doesn't have money in US bank accounts and it still works. So governments are starting to realize little by little that instead of just saying no, you're not allowed to do that, which is only going to make the companies move abroad. They should do something maybe better or alternative. The CBDC or whatever, they should offer some alternative instead of just trying to block and say that's not good because it didn't work for China.

Looks like we have some Elizabeth Warren fans in the crowd today. Since speaking of that, I wanted to pull up, I mean, I'm not sure if you all saw this video. She was kind of sitting there interviewing some experts and talking about stable coins to Marcel's point. And then she brought up D5 in this, this six, six minute clip of hers and she essentially just on defi and said it was like the most dangerous thing to, to crypto. Jordan, what is your take? Because I, I know you're a D5 fanatic. What are your thoughts about what Elizabeth Warren had to say this week about crypto and then defy in general?

I don't know if that was projection. Well, it's not, it's not the most dangerous thing to crypto. It's the most dangerous thing to the old system. That's what she's trying to convey. She's like, oh, this is bad for us. And she's trying again. As I said in the last show, they can't ban bitcoin and cryptos. They can only use the propaganda machine to make people not use it. And that's another example of this. It's like, he's bad. It's bad. I'm like, no, it's not bad that I can get 100 APR and something that I deposit on a stable coin on some platforms. Like no, your old system is bad. You just print. They printed 40 of the entire paper, like supply of US dollars in the last two years. That sounds like the worst coin that any of us ever like thought about getting involved in.

Exactly, exactly. It's just like it was mind boggling to see like someone who maybe or may have not been involved with crypto sit there and kind of take this stance like, hey, here's what this is. I've talked to a couple now, I know everything and you're Right. It is. It is definitely, I think, an attack on the traditional system by having these decentralized facets of crypto that governments can't control. And that's the greatest part about this. You get access, you cut out a lot of the middlemen from the traditional finance system. And I think that's what governments are starting to realize. Like, holy shit. We can't.

We can't.

Not only that, like, some of these platforms, like the dao, is decentralized, autonomous organizations. They actually institute or implement voting, which gives people actual power for the platform. They don't want people all around the world learning that they can have a say in what they're using, especially when it comes to financial matters. Like, this is going to open up the world to a whole new thing. And they don't want people to, like, realize that they have that power.

It's going to be even worse than that because the dao, the decentralized autonomous organization, you can theoretically, theoretically create an Uber or our own A, B and B, completely decentralized, and the token holders will get a part of the revenue. So it's gonna act like a stock, but it doesn't involve real cash on cryptocurrencies, which is not the financial assets. So SEC doesn't have a saying on that. It's gonna be interesting.

Yes. Well, moving to other headlines here, let's see. It looks like we got a question. Hi. Any idea what? Drone Prowl seems to be the only central banker who is not afraid of crypto. I don't know if I understand the question. Are they. Are they saying that Jerome Powell is, is or is not afraid of crypto? He's not afraid.

It looks like they're saying he's not afraid, but I think he. I think every central banker is afraid of crypto. That's why you got that, like, okay, that. That big dude from the bis. I can't think of another, like, perfect visual representation of central bankers, first of all. But like, all those guys have been doing for the last two years is being like, bitcoin's bad Bitcoin. That's because your system is worse. And you don't want people to migrate to something that's better.

Exactly, exactly. I do want to pivot to one last headline this week. Elon Musk was the talk of the town. You saw him getting into the spat with Elizabeth Warren on Twitter. But he also made a nice little Tweet, Dogecoin. That gained 25 after Elon confirms Tesla will accept Dogecoin for merchandise. Here we Are Dogecoin is back in the headlines. Are you guys going to be buying merchandise from Tesla with Dogecoin or are you all going to be buying any kind of merchandise in general with Dogecoin? Marcel, I'm curious to hear your take on this one.

So, first of all, no one is gonna buy Dodge Coin only to buy Dallas Maverick stuff or Tesla stuff and T shirts or whatever. If you can use credit cards or the regular banking system, that works fine for that. For example, Brazil has the most advanced financial system in the world. The transactions are instant, 24 hours free. And yet our currency devalues from 10 to 20% every year because the government keeps printing it. So it's not about the technology. Even if Dodge had the best technology, which it done, which it doesn't have, it's not about that. It's about security, it's about scarcity, it's about knowing that it's decentralized and Dodge Coin has none of that.

Yeah, when I think about a lot of these, when I think about using cryptos for payments, I'm like, I'll use a stable coin for a payment, but if my crypto is going to go up, I don't know if I want to use it for a payment. And that's why I'm running into that problem with a lot of these things that want to be payments. I'm like, you better have a stable coin as your payment coin because people don't want to spend something that's going to go up in value.

Exactly. Dogecoin. I don't see the value. It's just another fiat currency. In my opinion, it's a meme coin. Elon tends to love it. And when he talks about Dogecoin, this thing starts the moon. So here we are yet again, Elon tweeting, dogecoin rise. But that's going to do it for our Our Markets news this week, huge announcements from the feds. We saw that bitcoin reacted well. Overall, stock markets reacted well to the news. Are we going to see a huge surge before the end of the year? Let us know, let us know what you think in the comments. Is bitcoin gonna be get back above 60k before we head into 2022. Don't forget, keep chiming in. In the chat today we're giving away our one month subscription of Markets Pro. If you're just looking to get a 20 discount, check the description out and make sure you are subscribing to Cointelegraph on YouTube. We're here 12pm on Thursdays. Let's go ahead and bring on friend of the show Mr. Sam Borgi for our guest interview today. You don't want to miss what he has to say about the markets. Let's jump right in. All right, friend of the show, Sam Borgi is here. He is the business editor at Cointelegraph where he brings a decade of experience in economic analysis and financial market writing. Past roles included think tanks, boutique research firms, in the wild world of freelance crypto. How are we doing today, Sam?

Lovely. Doing well, guys, always a pleasure to be on.

We are super excited to have you here today because we know that you bring the macro expertise and the economic background. And so I just, I'm curious to know what is your current take on the bitcoin market and how the news may have impacted that recent move that we saw in the last kind of 24 hours.

Well, in general, I think that we know that when in doubt, zoom out. When it comes to Bitcoin, this 40% decline that we've seen from the recent peak, it was what I was probably expecting back, back in, back in the spring to happen. Although at that time the fall was a lot more severe and that kind of caused question marks about the bull market. Overall, I think the correction, I'm not too concerned about it from a, from a weekly standpoint, looking at it from a long term perspective. As for the news, you know, it seemed to be one of those things where investors were nervous up until the FOMC meeting. After they got the confirmation they needed, markets seemed to rally. So if you look at the FOMC material, you'll see that the Fed is projecting three rate hikes next year. I personally don't believe they'll succeed in that because what the Fed this is going to happen versus what actually happens are two completely different things. So overall I think it was a healthy bounce. Nothing to be overly excited about. But right now in the short term, I think bitcoin and crypto as a whole will probably be more correlated with stocks. So if we head into the end of the year and there's a Santa Claus rally in equities, risk sentiment increases, you can probably see that trickle into crypto for a nice end of the year rally. Nothing too exorbitant in my opinion, but I think we're going to be range bound probably for the next month or two in crypto.

So Sam, I've got a question for you about Ethereum. We've all heard over the years many Ethereum killers coming and going. So do you think Ethereum right now has a secure second place position as the leading defi and smart contract platform. How confident are you on Ethereum?

Yes, I think that it's really carved out its position. It, you know, there's a lot of people who say this is going to happen, it's going to happen. Ethereum killer is coming. It's coming. It hasn't come yet. You know, I've been covering ethereum killer since 2016. We haven't seen anything remotely close to an Ethereum killer. And I know that Ethereum has, has its problems. I know that the end game road map that Vitalik put out a little while ago got some, some negative feedback for the centralization of block production. For example, I know that Ethereum isn't perfect, I know it has a lot of issues, but a lot of people much smarter than me, developers, business people, they're all building on Ethereum. So that tells you something. Even though we're seeing uptake of a lot of other smart contract platforms, I don't think we're going to see a one size fits all. I think there's enough space here for, for many to, to coexist. But right now I don't see anyone toppling Ethereum from a perspective of activity building, adoption, et.

If everything back to the like news out of the Fed. We saw them recently retire the whole transitory narrative which is all of us have been like that's not transitory. But do you think that what do you think of the current rate of inflation is going to make, is it going to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more attractive to people over time? What do you think?

Well, on the topic of transitory, I mean I informed our audience a long time ago on Cointelegraph that the, they've changed the definition of transitory inflation. Right before it used to mean well prices will rise right now in the short term, then they'll decline later on. And then Powell changed the definition to mean that no, we're still going to expect inflation, just future inflation will be lower than the current rate. But the current prices have been re baselined. So the 10, 20% surge you're getting, that's kind of been the new baseline. So they've changed the definition of transitory inflation several times now. Now they've admitted that you know what we, we completely messed up. It was probably one of the worst calls ever by the Fed their expectation for, for transitory inflation. So I think that inflation is, is here to stay for a long time. Even the base case Scenario right now has inflation raging on up until the second half of next year. You take a look at the producer price index, which was released, I think Yesterday showed a near 10 spike in wholesale prices. Those prices are going to be reflected in the consumer prices as well. So I think overall this is going to be very good for Bitcoin because in an inflationary environment, more money is going to come into crypto, it's going to come into Bitcoin. And the narrative around Bitcoin is that if you want to protect against your future, future inflation, you buy Bitcoin because Bitcoin compounds much faster than the rate of inflation. So as Marcel would say, you know, the USD is the ultimate coin right now. I, I can't disagree with that.

Love that. Cash is trash, man. So I guess like walking, walking through exactly what, what happens and what this means when the Fed says, hey, we're going to hike up these interest rates and taper back bond buying. So for those that are like watching at home and just don't have like the extensive knowledge, can you kind of like unpackage this in a very like, elementary way the mechanics of how that works and then why this is actually impacting the overall markets?

Well, the monthly bond buying program is another form of stimulus. More cash goes into the system. The Fed uses that to keep interest rates low because they believe low interest rates are going to be good for the economy because it stimulates consumption, spending and lending. You know, in Western economies, money is created through debt. You have interest rates low, more money is created, more money's in the system, everything goes up. And that's what we've been seeing. So when the Fed comes and says, well, we're going to raise interest rates, investors get nervous that some of that liquidity, that juice, the steroids that are pumping through their veins is going to be taken out. And that causes some short term consternation because less liquidity usually means a negative impact on the stock market. But as we saw post financial crisis, the Fed has been talking about raising interest rates for a long time. They started that process under Yellen a while back. They raised rates for a while and then they realized that we can't keep doing this or else we're going to crash the stock market. The Fed has put itself in a very, very difficult position because it has really two choices. Either you keep inflating your currency to destroy purchasing power and destroy the dollar, or you completely cut off the life support and you crash all the asset bubbles. Either way, the Fed's decision is going to be very difficult. And right now I see no indication they're going to let the asset bubbles pop. So I guess inflation continues. You know, Jerome Powell has his, has his hands busy. You know, he's, he's printing money like crazy. I don't think he has time to think about crypto. He's too busy printing money down in the basement. Right. So that's not going to change anytime soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's going. I don't, I don't see them. They'll raise rates. They'll realize it's going to be a catastrophe and they'll cut rates again. And we saw that, we saw that before the, the COVID crisis. We saw all the issues in the repo market. That was before COVID started. Right. So keep your eye on the Fed.

Yeah. How do you raise rates when your debt's almost $30 trillion? I don't. You can't. Like, you can't.

You inflate your currency and you use that inflated currency to pay off your debt? I guess that's, that's the only rationale. But for the rest of us, if you're a saver, you get creamed. You know, if you have any kind of saving account, there's really no incentive here in Western societies to really save money. You know, that, that natural instinct that we have as humans to kind of hoard and save and plan for the future, that's kind of erased. That's why Bitcoin is so, so powerful. Because bitcoin.

We're doing the NFT.

On Twitter. The guy was asking, what are the advantages of buying a house in the United States or real estate, paying cash. It doesn't make sense, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Interest rates are so low, it's incredible. So let's shift a little bit back to crypto markets right now. Let's assume for a moment, you know the banking sector as well as I do. So let's assume that J.P. morgan or Goldman Sachs, they start using the defi applications, but closed end pools. So we regular people cannot access just the bank and institutional clients. So closed and pools and offer those services to their clients. Do you think that this is good or bad for the broader crypto market if that happens?

I think it would be bad. I think any, any involvement among, among JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and these, these guys essentially centralizing defy, in a sense. Right. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of it. I mean, at a, at a elementary level, at a, at a very, you know, it kind of, it seems like it's a good thing because, oh well, the big banks are adopting D5, but what they're really doing is they're repurposing it for their own ends. And I think at this point you're gonna, you're gonna probably start seeing more of that moving forward because these banks will realize that if we don't get into crypto, we're creamed, we're done. So kind of like a cbdc. A CBDC isn't really the, you know, the philosophically, it's not the crypto that we imagine. It's going to make all transaction, you know, much more centralized, much more. The ability to, to monitor your population becomes much easier with the cbdc. So cbdc, we're using blockchain, but it's not really in the same spirit as bitcoin or in crypto more generally.

My only caveat to that whole thing would be that just from the people point of view, I promise you there's at least 30 to 50 of the population that don't want that much control of their fine. They don't want to be in charge of D5 application. They're gonna, they want to go to JP Morgan and say, I want D5 access, give it to me and you control it. Like so I, I think it's a bad thing for us crypto folks. Like it's bad for the, the certain percentage of population that don't like being that much in control. It's a good thing. I don't know.

Well, at least we'll be able to dunk on Jamie Dynam a lot more. Right. Because, you know, this guy starts off trashing bitcoin, then he starts offering the services, now he's in defi. So.

Right.

I could think of a lot of really nice headlines to, you know, because, you know, trashing Jamie Dimon is a rite of passage. It's one of the things that, that we should all enjoy doing. So that gives me a lot more ideas for, for, for, for conveying that message.

Yeah, exactly. So I, I want to get in one last question here regarding kind of the NFT space we saw Coinbase recently added support for NFTs to its wallet. What does this tell you about the, the future of NFTs and the evolution that that could be impending?

Yeah, well, I think many of us realize that NFTs are in a bubble. I mean we saw defi in a bubble back in middle 2020, but that doesn't negate the long term value of defi. Same thing with NFTs. A lot of the initial NFT create, I didn't really understand from the perspective of, you know, collecting digital JPEGs, digital collectibles. But as Coin Telegraph Consulting showed, you know, we're expecting a 20 billion dollar in sales just in 2021 for NFTs. I think this is a very powerful market, especially as most of us now start migrating to the metaverse. Working in the metaverse, interacting in the metaverse, we're going to start seeing more of a trend toward NFTs. So with Coinbase Wallet accepting or, or supporting NFTs, I think that's really a nudge in that direction. They're doing it from a business perspective. They realize this is a new trend. I wouldn't sleep on it. I may not get it, I may not participate in it, but I see the value that NFTs bring and I think that that's not going to change in the future. I think it's going to only intensify and grow like other crypto and blockchain niches.

Excellent. Yeah Sam, we always appreciate you jumping on and just dropping knowledge on our dome, man. This has been an awesome interview and we'd love to have you back. Friend of the show, Sam Borgi, always thank you for jumping on today man.

Thanks a lot guys. Appreciate it. Have a good one.

Thanks Sam.

Excellent. Sam the man, always bringing some of the macro level information that we love to just digest. Love having Sam on the show, but if you haven't liked and subscribed, go ahead and do so now. Coin telegraph on YouTube we are looking at the comments. Make sure you are chiming in. We're going to give away a one month subscription to Markets Pro which brings us to our next segment. Today these are the coins that you should have watched because if you would have had Markets Pro you would have been able to spot these, make the moves and get the gains jump on the gains train. So let's jump into our Markets Pro Coin watch of the week. And. All right folks, the one of the coins we watched this week was Flux L Flux and we saw the News quake happen and you saw the price just jump 22%. And if you're not familiar with the News quake, it's an automatic automated alert that instantly notifies the user when market moving news happens. This week, the future Newsquake is a testament to the power of the alert traders to a new Binance listing. So when coins get listed on these exchanges like Binance, we typically see price action immediately after you see what happened. That price, that white line price indicator shows you that flux moved 145% in just six hours from 1.28 cents all the way up to $3 and 14 cents. That's the power of the Newsquake service from Markets Pro. The next toe watch this week was Helium. For those who aren't familiar with Helium hnt, this was, this was a Vortex score indicator that we were watching. And for those aren't familiar with the Vortex where it's comparison between its current market conditions and social metrics of those in the past. And so Helium emerged as one of the few winners amid this week's market fluctuations. And its price hike was driven by favorable trading and social conditions. And we see that Vortex score of 83. Anything above 80 is typically kind of indicating that things are looking bullish. You see that first red circle on the screen and then the price action of that white line? Absolutely got on the Elon Musk SpaceX rocket and just shot up from 26.92 all the way up to 32 cents, almost $33. So respectively it was a 22 increase. I don't know who wouldn't take a 22 gainer? I know I would and I know I'm hawking the Vortex score indicators on Markets Pro all the time looking for those high 80 scores, trying to make the moves. And that's what you could be doing with Markets Pro. So make sure you are chime in because one month free subscription today, folks, we're giving it away. We want those winners. We want to give away. We want Markets Pro. It's there. It's there for the taking. Go ahead, leave us. The best count of the day is going to win that. So let's go ahead. Marcel's got some important stuff for us to learn about today. He's going to show us how he likes to research projects and show you what he goes through in the process. That looks like. So let's get into Marcel's expert take and segments for this week.

So today, guys, I'm gonna explain you step by step how I analyze smart contract platforms. I'm not only a Bitcoin and Ethereum trader, I do a lot of stuff for Cointelegraph, including Altcoins, so despite being a coder dev in the 90s, I'm not versed enough to analyze which is which technology is better. Ethereum, Solana, US or which is more secure or better to develop. That's not what I do. My background is traditional finance and that gives me an edge at spotting companies, for example, that are inflating their Numbers to please investors or some huge IPO that it's a big promise. But after listing the stock crashes because it was a bunch of marketing stuff.

So can you give some examples?

Yeah, give us, give us the examples. What, what projects have you spotted in the past, man?

Okay, I'm gonna show you some examples in crypto that used to be really hot top 20 coins and mostly vanished in smart contract platforms. For example, Z Liquid on the top, it had nearly $3 billion mark. Yeah. Ontology at the top, over $2 billion market cap. Ardor at the top, 2 1/2 billion dollars market cap. Where are those smart contracts platform now? They had the best technology, they have investors from all over the world and they're simply gone. Their market cap is down 80%. There's no really defi activity going on in those. So they had their moments in the past, they might add the technology, but they failed to grab investors attention and build an ecosystem. So today, currently, for example, I'm not saying that those are shit coins or those are scams, nothing like that, But Cardano has 43 billion dollar market cap and Polkadot's 26 billion dollars and none of those have active smart contracts defi and stuff and complex smart contracts going on. So they're still under development. So I don't have the tools, I don't have the skills to tell you if those are expensive or not, if those technologies are promising or not. So yeah, there's GitHub activity, there's on chain analysis, but that's not going to tell you how the ecosystem is going to grow or how the DAPPS are going to perform. You get it?

Yes, I guess. So what are some of the tools that you're using when you like to look at these, these projects and like how were you able to spot some of these like from the jump?

Okay, Ben, so the first thing I want on a smart contract platform is having a lot of deep pockets, preferably VC money. For example, Solana Labs raised $314 million back in June. So they have deep pockets to hire developers marketed team to fund the ecosystem growth, the dapps. So without cash you don't go anywhere in crypto Today, maybe in 2007 you could do an ICO for $20 million and get things going. But not right now. $20 million will get you nowhere. For example, Avalanche foundation raised just in September, $230 million. So it gives me some confidence to start looking at those projects. But I will show some metrics and indicators that I use. Danilo, can you share My screen please. Okay guys, so here you have Dappraider, which monitors a bunch of blockchain networks and their Defi applications and dapps. So what I like to DO is either 7 day or 30 day metrics and filter by the number of active users instead of focusing strictly on tvl, the total valid locket, which is the amount of ETH and stablecoins and Solana deposits on those smart contracts. I'm more interested if there are active users on the platform. So for example, if you have a VC, a venture capitalist that deposits $1 billion on a DeFi application, but there are only like 200 users trading on it, it's not interesting. For me, I rather have $100 million but 10,000 users active. So that's why I use the users metric. And we have here for example Raydium, which is a Defi and a Dex, which nearly 100,000 addresses active on over the past seven days. So it gives me some insight about if it's being used or not. Like for example the Solanart which is an NFT marketplace. Have you, one of you guys ever use that? Solanart?

Yes, I've heard of it. I've heard of it. I haven't used it though. Very familiar with it.

Even if you haven't used it, you can go on Twitter, on Reddit, on Telegram, on Discord and search for the Solen Art and NFT community and see if people are talking about there. If people are shielding their own NFTs on those platforms, it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 followers if there's no activity. Users are not commenting or not having questions are not cheating their projects over there. So yes, I use those metrics from the operator, for example. Thank you Danilo. But that's not the only thing that I want to see. I want to see good activity on.

Social networks and you bring up a great point. Go ahead Jordan.

I was gonna. Do you take into account the utility of a project or the disruptive nature that it can have or do you just look at more like is it only the tangible metrics that you focus on?

No, Jordan, I don't have this, how can I say, the expertise to know. Yeah, this project is going to be really revolutionary. Yeah, this game is out of the. I'm not at first this. So I rather wait for it to be launched even if it's an alpha version and see what the general public are commenting or are if there are you active users or not, remember that if you have a hundred million, $200 million from a VC. They're gonna buy marketing, they're gonna buy PR on the websites, they're gonna buy some influen influencers doing videos on YouTube and etc. So don't fall for that. You're gonna have to look for bigger groups or for general edit or the general Twitter community and search for yourself. Don't blindly follow influencers or PR material. Don't fall for that. So that's my recommendation. That's how I analyze. I don't give so, so much importance to tvl. I like to search for active users on the DAPS applications.

Yeah, I would, I would expand your recommendation out even further to like all these metrics, whether it's tvl, active users or anything because so much can be faked on the online now whether it's bots on Twitter, bots on exchanges, trading back and forth, all these different things like or tvl, you have them watching billion dollar liquidity program. So yeah, the TVL and the platform went up a billion dollars. Wow. That's not. No, they like a VC company put a billion dollars in there and it went up. Yeah. So like within all these metrics. Yeah. None of them should be used in isolation. They're all like part of a bigger picture that we should all like. You're explaining to yours, Marcel, how the well rounded Dyor approach do your own research approach includes more in depth analysis of all these different things to actually show what's actually being done behind the scenes.

I mean Marcel, you bring up a great point today and I think one of the biggest takeaways from what I heard you say is to check the platform, go check out the Twitter page and if some account has a hundred thousand followers and you see their tweets are only getting 10 retweets like that, that's a huge disparity. That should tell you something like what happened. Why do they have so many followers but their engagement rates aren't there? And I know kind of working within the Cointelegraph ecosystem, you know, we've, we've been able to work with a lot of projects over on a division CT studio and you kind of see the space and you see some, some companies projects out there and something's not adding up. And so we see it all the time in the space. So. Great point Marcel.

Yeah.

And another thing that viewers got to pay attention to is that Ethereum fees are huge, above $20. So faking numbers of active users on Ethereum, it's costly. Binance smart chain. Yeah, $0.50 per dollar per transaction. So yeah, it costs to build up fake numbers and inflate those but on Avalanche, Solana and those other networks it's really cheap. So yeah, you've got to go to the social medias, the social networks and check if there's active users talking about the project or not.

Excellent points today. Hopefully you all are able to take some of this advice and use it to dyo on some of the next upand cominging projects. There are so many projects coming up in the NFT space, defi space, you name it. So hopefully you were able to learn something from Marcel today. Thank you for providing that excellent insights. So is it time, is it time for us to Give away our 1 month subscription of Markets Pre Pro? Let's see. Hey guys, do you have any favorites in the chat today? I know we had a lot of activity for, for our Markets Pro giveaway today. Looks like I see a lot of people chiming in. Are we gonna do a, a shotgun winner here where it's, it's a, I.

Saw quite a bit of an activity from Sigun. Steven.

I like the guy. I agree.

Yes, we, we love Stephen. Stephen was chiming a lot today. But just in case we need a runner up though let's see if we have any second options. Is Stephen, if you can go ahead and pop your Twitter handle into the chat and we will have a runner up just in case Steven, for whatever reason does not this is the only.

Person that said I need, I need it. Like I know we said earlier, like say it, tell us if you want it. This is the only one I said.

That I vote for Sergio Talis, the guy who mentioned about Ellen tweeting again, Sergio Talis is my vote for the second place.

So we have Stephen and we have Sergio. If you both pop your Twitter handle into the chat, we will issue you that Markets Pro subscription to give you the power in your pocket of the Vortex score. And the news Quake alerts. Guys, closing thoughts for today's show. Jordan, I'll kick this off to you first.

Oh, I'm, I think we are seeing a little bit of an extension to this rally. I'm looking for a good like I said at the beginning, like a blow off rally in, in the next couple months and as I've broken record that man take some profits. As we all learned the crypto market could turn really quick and like having taken profits, you have a nice little pile of cash on the side to maybe buy some of these dips that come along or I don't know, buy a house, depending on how much you get. So yeah, take your profits, look for a nice big run up here in the next couple months. This is an investment advice and if it does, I'm like, take some profits and prepare for a potential bear market to like refresh your portfolio.

I'm gonna go to the opposite direction. I remember the guy Suzu from Three Arrows Capital one or two days ago, he was saying about it's time to buy the deep and whales are smart and etc. Watching he was monitoring on flow, especially on Bitfenix Exchange which is usually traded by whales and they're buying over there. So I think it's time to start building a higher, bigger position in crypto slowly every week. And don't focus on a single project. For example, you like metaverse, pick five metaverse names. If you like D5, pick five D5 tokens. Don't go all in on a single altcoin because it's too risky for that. But I think it's time to buy, start buying more aggressively because of the US inflation data.

Exactly right. If you all want a safe haven, I always recommend bitcoin. It's volatile, so get used to it. But in my opinion, it's better than having a US dollar in my pocket. I don't want that. I want to blow my nose with those and use it for whatever else other than money. Give me bitcoin. Thank you all for joining us today. This has been awesome. Another great show. Make sure you're tuning in next week like and subscribe right here. 12pm on Thursdays. This is a market report. Thank you for joining us. Until next time, over and out. Bing Bong.