⚠️ *WARNING* CRYPTO IS IN DANGER! HBAR STAKING, XRP & RIPPLE TAKEOVER COMING! XRP NEWS TODAY...

What is up? I am Crypto Mason and welcome back to the Crypto Mason YouTube channel. Shout out to the Gold Squad. We look for gold in every single aspect of our lives and we always find it. Now today we have another daily market update. Today we've got Bitcoin sitting at $30,000, still, still in this sideways movement, uh, at $30,000 here. Altcoins are, are basically all red today. We're going to talk about everything happening. We've got some good, uh, Ripple clips today. We've got some good Hedera stuff happening, uh, some stuff with certain altcoins that I'm going to talk about. But before we do, make sure that you're following me on Twitter right here. There is my username, My Instagram username is the same. 100K, uh, Instagram giveaway coming soon. Stay tuned for that. Now let's get straight into the market here. We have $1.2 trillion. Every time I log on here and do these daily market updates, uh, these past couple weeks we've been at this $1.2 trillion, uh, dollar level. Today in 24 hours we have the volume sitting at $65 billion. Right? You guys know I use the $100 billion mark as an indication if it's a good or bad day for volume. So $65 billion is not that good today. $1,758, uh, on Ethereum right there. That basically has been said to be the bottom, right? $1,700 to $1,800 local bottom for ETH. We saw that yesterday with Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX guy, um, saying that he thinks that's the bottom, uh, for ETH. 38 cents on XRP right there. So right now, what should you actually be doing? Okay, so what should we actually be doing, and what am I doing? As I've said before, I'm not buying anything because I, I am more confident that altcoins will go down a little bit more, and I can get an even better deal on some of these altcoins. But two things you should be doing right now First of all, you should be hardcore researching and staying in tune with this market, making it so impossible for you to, to forget about this market. That's what you should be doing the first thing. Research the Illuminati coins, which is like XRP, Quant, HBAR, XLM, XDC, Algorand, Ethereum. I would even say is an Illuminati coin. Research those, look at these agendas, like research all of that stuff to keep you in the loop. And the second thing you should be doing, if you want to, is actually, uh, basically getting your cash flow up. That's something you should do no matter what. But if you want to, you can be starting to put some cash into these altcoins at these levels. Now I just told you I'm not doing that because I think these might go even lower. Right? So I'm just staying, you know, cash is basically king right now. I always talk crap about cash, but cash is basically king right now. Um, I even took some of my stablecoins out a while ago, like basically one week after the Luna situation. I took some of my stablecoins and I put them into actual cash. So those, those are my thoughts on the actual market and the price action today. Um, that's what— those are two things you should be doing for sure. Now let's get into some of the news today because we have some very, very good stuff, starting off with a lot of quotes from Brad Garlinghouse. We have, uh, see, look at CNBC. They have an— they have a dedicated section for Davos World Economic Forum news. So this is a thing, like, this is a thing, like, they know what they're doing here. And basically this headline says crypto firms say thousands of digital currencies will collapse, and they compare the market to the early dot-com days. Right now we have 19,000 cryptocurrencies, we're approaching 20,000, um, and basically, uh, crypto firms in general say that thousands of these will collapse. And they say that several cryptocurrency industry players told CNBC that thousands of these tokens will collapse. And the number of blockchains in existence in the coming years will also fall. And then they quote Brad Garlinghouse right there, and they also quote this one guy saying— so this is Bertrand Perez, CEO of the Web3 Foundation. He says one of the effects of what we've seen last week with the Terra issue is we're at the stage where basically there are far too many blockchains out there too many tokens, and that's confusing users, and that's also bringing some risks for the users. Uh, he says, like at the beginning of the internet, you were having lots of dot-com companies and lots of them were scams. So I do like this, right? I do like this, uh, theory that a lot of these will collapse because I think it's very true. Um, although, you know, too many blockchains equals a certain level of invincibility from the SEC and who— people who want to shut this down. So having 19,000 coins that they can't shut down all at once makes us a little bit invincible there. Now we have another little clip, uh, and an article about Brad Garlinghouse right here. And this is a 2-minute and 35 clip. We are going to play this. Um, this is a very, very good clip, uh, of Brad Garlinghouse explaining some of the inner workings of the actual Ripple business and what they're about to do.

I saw an interesting move you guys did. You bought back your round C shares at a higher valuation than what they were at the moment. What was the rationale behind that?

So we did a Series C financing. I'm trying to get my dates right here. In 2019, in Q4 of 2019, and we raised $200 million from a series of investors. When we negotiated that, we had pre-negotiated the ability to repurchase that up to a certain period of time for 1.5x the issuance. So we purchased— repurchased all of the Series C, uh, back from our investors because we thought it was a good investment, you know.

Uh, we thought that was repurchasing their own shares because they think it's a good investment. Like, they are so confident in their own business, right?

Accretive to all of our other shareholders, you know. As you just— you mentioned, or you asked, you know, we have been profitable and cash flow positive, so we're able to use that. So we've repurchased north of half a billion dollars of Ripple shares over the past couple of years, including that financing.

And you mentioned you're cash flow positive, but also, are you looking for further outside funding at this point, whether it be, you know, for an extra cash injection or at least just a strategic sort of investment as well?

You know, we aren't actively looking. We haven't needed to do that. You know, we have a very strong balance sheet, and even as we look at the future, we feel good about that. I do think there will be opportunities, and I think there'll be an uptick in M&A in the blockchain and crypto space. We haven't seen that yet, but I think that's likely in the future.

And I certainly think as that unfolds, we would consider things like that in terms of buying.

M&A is mergers and acquisitions. And look what he asked now. Are you going to be buying companies? Are you going to be selling?

Internally, but we've made— we've invested in over 30 or 40 companies around the crypto ecosystem and we'll continue to look at opportunities to grow through external acquisitions also. And of course, the market's not great right now, but over 30 or 40 companies around the crypto where we've got internally is something we've kicked off in different segments of crypto.

Hold on.

Over 30 now.

But is an IPO on the cards?

Okay, here's the IPO.

I think we want to get certainty and clarity in the United States with the US SEC. Uh, you know, I'm hopeful, uh, that the SEC will not slow that process down any more than they already have. But, you know, we certainly at a point in scale where that is a possibility, and, uh, we'll look at that once we're past this, uh, lawsuit with the SEC.

So even more confirmation that we're going to get, uh, an IPO from them as soon as possible when, when the SEC case is over. Also, look at that, there's— he thinks there's going to be an uptick in mergers and acquisitions in the crypto space. Now, two things I want to talk about with that is these two coins right here, Audius and Opulus. Okay, we've been into Opulus. I got wrecked in Opulus. Um, I did take some of my initial investment out on this when it pumped, uh, but this has basically wrecked me now, right? I'm at 17 cents on this. Horrible, right? But I still believe in music, uh, music coins and music NFTs. And Audius and Opulus are both exactly that. They are music, uh, NFT and music coin projects, right? But the point here is I feel like someone like Spotify and some of these Web2 companies are gonna start buying out and merging and acquisition, like acquiring some of these, these coins. Like, I can, I can, uh, envision Spotify kind of acquiring something like this so that they have this like decentralized arm of Spotify. Um, so let me know what you guys think of, of that and what's going to happen with mergers and acquisitions. And are, are certain cryptocurrencies going to merge as well? Like, that could be extremely interesting, uh, to see happen in this industry. We also have Hedera staking news right here. Basically, uh, this is, this is about native HBAR staking. So, you know, this is an HIP, Hedera Improvement Proposal, um, HIP 406. It is now final and has officially been closed. This is the most discussed HIP ever. It has consequently taken longer than expected. That is true, uh, because the roadmap for, for this staking was Q1 of 2022. We would like to thank all the contributors, blah blah blah. This is the HIP right here. I did read through some of this. You guys can read the abstract, the motivation, the rationale, um, and the user stories. But then it does get a little bit, a little bit complicated down here. I didn't read this part because this is some coding nerd stuff that I don't know, and I'll let the smart people do that. Um, but this has now been agreed on. So native HBAR staking, basically all that means is like not through a third party. Right now everybody is staking through basically Stader Labs, right? So Stader Labs, you can go click stake your HBAR right here, um, and boom, I have— this is how much I have right now staked. Uh, that is obviously not all my HBAR, of course, but then it shows your HBARx value, 44% APY. So right now, but this will be native staking. So very cool right there. Now we do also have a clip of Gary Gensler that I want to show right here, 30 seconds, basically explaining why Bitcoin is not the future of payments. Oops.

A modern payment system, you need to be able to move about 100,000 payments a second. A modern securities clearing, the Depository Trust Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission says you do about 30,000 transactions a second, but we need you to scale and your computers and everything have to be resilient to 100,000 transactions a second. Bitcoin, you can do about 7 transactions a second.

Look how he says that right after he says we need you to be able to scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS. Bitcoin does 7 TPS. 7. Trash. Garbage, right? This is why we need things like the Ripple Private Ledger that's scalable up to hundreds of thousands of TPS. Moving on, we have, um, New York just passed a bill cracking down on Bitcoin mining. This is an absolutely horrible bill, apparently. And basically just trying to ban like fossil fuels if, if they're used for mining. It's a very peculiar bill here, but people are tweeting out like, we need to vote against this. Call your New York senator here, right? They're leading to this. They link to this website, which is the Blockchain Association, which I mean, there's no link to like vote against it or anything on here. I think it's just a resource that they left. there. But we're making progress, uh, basically killing off this bill because they're trying to ban the blockchain infrastructure in New York, which makes zero sense, uh, for, you know, the New York— because I've always viewed the New York mayor to be kind of in competition with the Miami mayor to make New York a hub for crypto, like But this, this doesn't do that, right? And they're trying to pass this bill. Actually, they did pass the bill. They did pass the bill. Um, and if Hochul signs the bill, it would make New York the first state in the country to ban blockchain technology infrastructure. Excuse me. That is the dumbest thing you could ever do. Like, that is— this should just say, uh, this should just say it would make New York the first state in the country to ban Innovation. That's what that should say. That's so stupid that they're doing that. So definitely, if you're in New York, go and call them or do whatever, right? We have Nick Carter reacting to this as well. And then we also have a second, uh, bill, a bipartisan crypto regulation bill. Uh, this is two U.S. senators. This is Wyoming Republican senator and longtime or big-time Bitcoin holder Cynthia Loomis. I am a fan of Cynthia Loomis and her thoughts on crypto specifically. I don't know any of her other thoughts, but she likes crypto, so I like her a little bit at least. And then she's joined by New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, uh, Satoshi stash size unknown. So we don't know if she's a holder, um, but their bill focuses on several aspects of cryptocurrency regulation. And look at this, In particular, the bill would amend the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. The reason I pronounced 1934 like that is because 1934, dude, how are you trying to apply something from 1934 to a new, a brand new technology, right? So we need a change there, um, and this is going to amend that to include precise definitions of terms that are foundational to blockchain technology, including digital asset, virtual currency, stablecoin, and smart contract. Significantly, the draft does not label cryptos as securities, as has been feared by many. The senators said they plan to incorporate language that would classify digital assets as commodities or an entirely new category. This is actually what we need. We need new things. Let's stop using old things to try to envelop new things, right? Don't deem them commodities. Make an entirely new category. Make an entirely new agency that only handles crypto. And that's what we need. We need new things, new people in power, new things, right? That's the only way change is going to happen. So that is all we've got for today's daily market update. Obviously, the price action in the market is fairly boring right now, and that is why we're focusing in so much on news and different things that are happening. Make sure you're following on Twitter, Instagram, join the Telegram group. I love every single one of you, and goodbye.