2021 to 2022 is going to become known as the age of a couple different things: the beginning of a recession, the birth of the apes and the birth of the rugged pole. Now you guys know how i feel about cryptocurrency and nfts i've kind of gone on. No, no! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No about this for a long time uh. I think that a lot of it is going to be a lot like the dot-com bubble right there there's going to be quite a few of these different cryptocurrencies and nfts that uh don't have any intrinsic value and end up going to zero.

I think that's pretty! That's you know fair to say and that, because of that, since there is no intrinsic value uh, if it does get rubbed, there's not a lot of opportunity to sort of pull yourself out of this hole. Well, today, i wanted to make a little video about uh sort of the state of cryptocurrency and the risk of rug pulls and and these sorts of things, because i don't think it just happens on on a retail side right. There aren't influencer coins that are made uh on a day-to-day week-to-week month to month basis or whatever and same with nfts, but it also happens on the institutional side. You know institutions are able to leverage 100 to 1 money into uh cryptocurrencies.

That can inherently leave you in a much worse shoe than you would have been before uh. You know. I think that blockchain's a great thing. I like that, the transparency is there.

If you can get a hold of wallets but uh. There are also inherent risks that i think are important to highlight. You know, and i i i get asked this all the time, so i figured it's. You know good to finally make a video on why i i pretty vehemently sort of avoid uh cryptocurrency.

So with that being said, i'm not a financial advisor, it's not financial advice, please they would say grand salt, i'm part of the hotel room. I am in minnesota right now for my sister's graduation, i've just got a little makeshift setup, sort of rocking uh. So with that being said, let's get right into the video, not waste too much time in case you're new to the market in case you're new to all this stuff, uh rug pull is uh very simple. I'm going to read you off the definition that comes from binance a rug pull in the crypto industry is when a development team suddenly abandons a project and sells or removes all its liquidity.

The name comes from the phrase: to pull a rug out from under someone means, withdraw support. Unexpectedly, now there are lots of technicalities that kind of go into a rug pole uh, but the easiest way that i can probably put it is is there is something called a liquidity pool. Now this is not taking a piss in a sink or something like that. Uh liquidity in this instance represents dollar signs.

It represents money and the pool is representing uh a collection of all these different dollar signs and that liquidity pool is supposed to back whatever sort of cryptocurrency or nft you're. Investing in well in a rug poll that liquidity pool uh can get pulled from uh by whoever created the coin. Whoever created the nft whoever's got access to the code. They can access that money and pull the project from underneath your feet.

There's obviously more details of this if you'd, like rug pools, are most associated with decentralized finance projects which provide liquidity to decentralize exchanges. Dexes defy tokens of new projects usually aren't listed on centralized exchanges, meaning that a dex is the only source of liquidity. Uh you get rid of that liquidity. You get rid of the inherent value of the project and this sort of thing happens all the time.

I think the the most well noted and remembered uh rug. Pull that has happened in recent times is uh squid coin now, squid coin was uh quite funny because uh, it's sort of like a knockoff version of uh. Obviously, squid games the the the idea that there's really only one winner in the end and uh people unfortunately fell for that uh, which makes sense, if you think of of the the sort of uh you know risk of taking. If you, if you're buying into a coin, that you know, has no intrinsic value, you are just kind of taking a chance right, you're hoping to catch the momentum, take it as a technical trade and there's money to be made by trading cryptocurrencies.

We all uh, we've seen it. You know people make great money trading that that stuff. I know there was a shiba inu guy who uh made billions of dollars off of uh what 10 15 000 that they put into uh into shiba inu. So it can be done right, but the the the great takeaway is those are sort of diamonds of the rough they're wanting a billion chances, uh and they're hard to find now.

Is this me saying that all cryptocurrencies can be bad? No, not inherently. I think there are going to be some that are good right, but the question is always: does this provide intrinsic value? Is this something that can provide me value down the road uh? That's really the takeaway, and this is sort of led into a lot of different things. You can see this here, uh we've. I've talked about this before on my channel, but there was something called the image token, which was specifically targeted towards uh retail investors, known as apes.

Now apes are people who who like to buy and hold stocks they like to gravitate towards a specific few names in the market, specifically amc gamestop, maybe uh, bpi g, prague, ben beth and beyond whatever it may be, uh, and i think what is most attractive about Apes to cryptocurrency scammers such as you can see here with the amc token that adam aaron is so uh. You know kindly highlighting and thankfully legally pursuing uh is the buy and hold idea right. You can get someone to buy into a cryptocurrency uh. They hold it forever, no matter what happens and they rug you and they take your money uh, and this is something that has popped up over and over and over and over and over again, the the the surefire thing about a rug poll.

Uh is quite simple: you can guarantee two things, it's that they will always happen and that uh that people will fall for them repeatedly and the more we can. We can sort of be aware of these things, sort of the better off that we can be. But with that being said, uh it is very difficult to uh rug, pull something that has intrinsic value, which brings me into this all right now. You guys know my opinion on cryptocurrency and nfts.

I think a lot of them are inherently going to go to zero and some of them are decent, but we've all seen those rug pulls on cryptocurrency and nfts. So how about? Instead, you know buying an nft or a cryptocurrency and having that risk on the table, what if you could actually buy a real piece of art that you can't rug, you can't rug, a painting. Can you well with masterworks you can by buying into a commodity art you can actually combat inflation, which obviously the stock market struggles to do as well as avoid getting rug pulled as commodity art doesn't typically face either of those challenges? Furthermore, contemporary art has actually outperformed the s p 500 by 164 from 1995 to present day, which is obviously phenomenal returns. This is uh much better than a lot of cryptocurrencies and nfts that obviously get wronged, obviously not all of them, but i mean you know: blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then you know even further beyond that uh, with the current market being very whiplashy And having sort of a bearish trend to it, contemporary art is much more stable, there's much more safe returns that are uh possible by buying into something such as contemporary art.

In the first place. Now you might be asking yourself trey, i can't really afford to buy into van gogh. I can't buy starry nights, i i don't have that kind of money, but with masterworks you can actually buy any of these things see with masterworks, which is by the way, the only platform in which you were able to do this. You can actually buy into these paintings that were previously only available to billionaires and people who had tons and tons of money who could afford to drop hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a painting you see, but masterworks takes care of that problem.

For you, you see how masterworks does it is they go and they buy these paintings. They they buy these paintings by from picasso, andy warhol, etc, and they make these pieces investible to the general public people such as you, so that you can actually buy a piece of that painting and have obvious returns. I mean you're able to get essentially a a fraction of that painting's worth. Typically, the art is held until masterworks thinks it is a good time to sell so far.

They have sold three paintings to date and they have returned 30 percent to investors, which is drastically better what the spy has done, uh so far in 2022, which is down uh, roughly eight percent on the year. That's not much of a contest kind of proving how masterworks and you know, obviously, paintings hold their value much better compared to inflation compared to typical economic conditions, as i sort of alluded to before. You can also live trade shares of different paintings from masterworks. If you are not particularly interested in waiting for masterworks to sell a piece of art, you can actually trade this market the same as you would uh the typical market, such as the spy or, if you want to go play, puts on robin hood.

You can do that too. These are options that are available to you now. I won't take up too much more of your time, but if you'd like to learn more about this, if you're interested in investing with masterworks, who i'm very happy sponsored this video, you can actually go to the link down in the description box down below or go To masterworks dot art trace trades to get a piece of your own picasso or your own starry night today, uh, if you are interested in doing so, as i mentioned before, link is in the description box, masterworks, dot, art, slash, trace trades back to the video. So now we kind of talked about you know that uh and how you can avoid getting rug pulled by purchasing things with intrinsic value, not limited to that, obviously not limited to masterworks uh.

Obviously, there's stocks and there's uh real estate there's this there's that let's talk really about the risks involved with uh with getting rugged, because this is a form of scamming that is uh, pretty rampant. Really in in today's sort of uh markets, the rug pool crypto investors lose four billion dollars, a new scam. This is coming from financial review. If you look at this, you can see.

Cryptocurrency investors lost almost uh us three billion dollars last year in an emerging scam, known as the rug pull where fraudsters lure investors into dodging digital coins and runoff with the proceeds. It's part of an 82 percent surge and scamming losses that triggered usd eight billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency stolen globally in 2021, and if i was to show you a different chart, what you're gon na see is uh that this is actually new right. If you look at cryptocurrency scams, you can think of the ones that you see on twitter right. You see people uh, you know having these fake profiles and it's it's usually like very attractive asian women.

They message you and they're in your dms and they say hi sexy and then you message them back and you say what do you want? You know they come back with. How is your trading going and then you message back like uh? I i'm not really interested in that. Thank you. I've got a girlfriend, you know whatever, and then they message back with a whole bunch of well, if you, if you give me a hundred dollars i'll turn it into 1 million billion and people fall for that stuff.

That's the typical sort of crypto scam. Well, now uh it has gotten more advanced and this this green category right here, which is rug, pulls, is new to 2021.. Now, i don't think rug pools are something they're going to only you know happen forever and ever and ever i think. Eventually, this sort of thing will come to an end.

Uh, the feds are going to make examples of people there's something that jordan belfort like him or hate. Him said in uh a fulson podcast, he said uh. You know the gears of justice grind slowly, but the feds are going to make examples out of people who rug pull uh the retail investor right. I think there are going to be people who are held accountable for this and are going to be made an example, but we're not there yet, which means we can protect ourselves from these sorts of things, and i don't think most of you guys, you know, are Too worried about it, but it is good to talk about, nonetheless, because i am passionate about it right.

This is there's a reason that i avoid crypto. You know, despite being asked all the time, and i avoid nfts despite being asked all the time, and it's because i'm nervous about these sort of things right. This is, this is obviously a metric, that's increasing uh year over year i mean this is this is really new honestly, two, a couple billion dollars, four billion dollars to rug polls in 2021. Who knows how bit of how bad it's going to be in 2022? This isn't necessarily including nfts, which have a lot of the same characteristics.

Does it provide intrinsic value and if not, you have a risk of getting rug pulled. So if you read on new york based chain analysis, which is advising commonwealth blah blah blah said, cryptocurrency based crime hit a new high in 2021, rising 79 to u.s 14 billion dollars, which is a lot of money right uh. It's it's frustrating to watch, there's actually uh. You know more articles you can read on and on rug pull scams ranked in over uh 2.8 billion crypto in 2021.

uh. What i find actually the coolest is web3 now this is a website that i can actually link in the description box down below, but what three does for? You is actually keep you up to date, uh with messages that are kind of going over. Some of the cryptocurrency scams that happen on a day-to-day basis. You can see here may 4 2022 juno accidentally transfers 36 million in seized funds to inaccessible wallet, address attacker compromises mm.finance to redirect 2 million of crypto assets to their own wallet.

Uh ape holders can use multi-slurp juices on a single ape. It goes down the list and the the runoff here the joke is web3 is going just great, and i laugh at this there's. Definitely not an enormous grip uh that word. That's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.

Now i don't. I really don't think that all cryptocurrency is a scam. I think that uh, if it doesn't provide intrinsic value, you should be very nervous and you should be asking a question uh and i do think that the buy and hold mentality can be targeted by uh people within the cryptocurrency community. And that's why i find this to be important to talk about specifically uh.

What really made me think about this was that adam aaron came up publicly and said: hey uh this this coin's a sham. You know uh the amc, token blah blah blah. It goes on and on and on i thought about this, and i thought you know uh if retail is taking advantage of of uh retail here. What are the institutions doing, they're, probably taking advantage of the retailers taking advantage of retail they're taking it they're us both ways? You know uh, don't be fooled by this stuff.

You know it's it's! It's really important to keep your eye on, because these things are going to continue to happen until the feds make an example of people and regulation comes out, watch out for the rock pool, crypto scam, that's tricking investors out of millions. I've got this pulled up uh. This goes over, you know what a rug pull is, how it can happen, looking at the liquidity, which is a liquidity pool, what i'd mentioned before uh, and i suppose, if i was to give you any grand sort of takeaway uh for the entirety of this video. Let me switch over to my full screen, quick.

What i would tell you is this. I would much rather be late to the party. I would much rather be late to the party on cryptocurrency and on nfts, because if you're early and you're wrong, you lose everything. I i don't like the risk of that.

I really don't i think uh it is. It is worth um making a little less money to make sure that you're not getting scammed. What i've always said about crypto is uh. It's either gon na be the greatest innovation of our lifetime.

It's gon na change, the way that finance is looked at forever across the world, or it's going to be the greatest scam that we've known in our entire lifetime, and i don't know which one it is yet. What i do know is that i've seen probably more scams than good coins, but it doesn't represent all coins. Let that be known. There are good projects out there.

There are good coins out there. There are good nfts out there uh, but it's it's important to to watch your back on this stuff. I really hope that nobody falls for this. This amc scam token, that's very obviously, just ripping off amc and trying to take advantage of uh.

You know retail psychology, but you never know man and that's why i made this video um specifically, and i hope that uh that helps some people out there. So that's what i got sorry for talking quieter than usual uh, like i mentioned before, i'm not gon na, say it twice: uh, just in a different environment, so um there we go yeah. It is uh. There's now 5 20.

In the morning i haven't slept in in quite a while and i'm gon na get some z's and then uh and go watch my sister's stuff tomorrow. So i'll catch y'all later appreciate you watching much lovely taps, peace.