Dear Reader,
Yesterday evening, I held my “Washington D.C.’s Mandated Money” event. Thank you to the thousands of people who tuned in.
There, I shared exactly how we can invest in a specialized investment vehicle that can grant us up to $2,300 up-front – plus additional returns down the line.
And these deals contractually protect us with a “money-back guarantee.” Having a way to protect our original capital in these crazy markets is more important than ever right now. We won’t find that anywhere else.
That’s why these investments are so important in today’s volatile market. Any kind of protection for our hard-earned capital should not be ignored. The “mandated” gains simply sweeten the deal.
If anyone wasn’t able to attend last night to learn exactly how this all works, a replay will be available for a short time.
You can watch that right here.
Just a few days ago, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted a launch license to SpaceX for the Starship. This gives SpaceX clearance to launch the Starship’s first orbital mission from its Boca Chica facility in Texas.
As a reminder, the Starship is the world’s first reusable all-purpose spacecraft. It’s made of stainless steel and shaped like a giant corn silo.
And the Starship is an incredible 394 feet tall and 30 feet wide. It can carry over 100 metric tons into space.
Here it is on a launch pad at the Boca Chica facility:
The Starship
Source: SpaceX
What we are looking at here is the only spacecraft capable of supporting both manned missions to the Moon and to Mars. In fact, this craft will power NASA’s manned mission to the Moon in 2024/2025.
So the Starship’s first orbital mission is a huge deal. This is something that was supposed to happen earlier this year, but the FAA delayed the mission to do a deep environmental analysis.
As a result, the FAA is requiring SpaceX to perform 75 actions to reduce the Starship’s environmental impact as a prerequisite to its launch licensing. This sounds onerous, but the tasks are relatively minor.
In fact, the FAA’s determination represents what’s called a “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact.” That means SpaceX won’t have to perform a more in-depth environmental analysis from here.
So the road is paved for the Starship’s first orbital mission. That’s a huge milestone for SpaceX and the burgeoning space exploration industry at large.
Simply put, this is the first step toward a manned mission to the Moon. From there, Mars won’t be far behind.
Turning to the blockchain space, a major crypto hater just announced a bold new project.
Economist Nouriel Roubini has been railing against the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies for years. I remember when he delivered an absolutely scathing speech against crypto at a U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing back in 2018.
Now it seems Roubini has completely flipped. He just announced that he is spearheading the United Sovereign Gold Optimized Dollar project.
We don’t have a lot of details on the specifics yet. What we do know is that Roubini wants to create an asset-backed U.S. dollar stablecoin.
And from his announcement, it’s clear that Roubini is swinging for the fences here. He wants this to become a global store of value that could compete with U.S. Treasury bonds.
Talk about ambitious… and dangerous.
For context, Roubini has also been very critical of U.S. monetary policy. He’s been an outspoken voice saying that the U.S. government prints way too much money. And he’s pointed out the risk that this will drive countries away from using the U.S. dollar in foreign trade.
After all, why would countries want to hold dollars in reserve if the U.S. government is creating trillions of them out of nothing every year?
We take for granted how fortunate we have been to have the dollar as the de facto world reserve currency for nearly a century now. This created a dynamic where all countries have held U.S. dollars and U.S. Treasury bonds on their balance sheets. This huge demand for dollars has historically helped keep our inflation low domestically.
The ongoing conflict with Russia has really hammered this point home.
In response to onerous U.S. and global sanctions, Russia has stopped conducting foreign trade in dollars. Instead, Russia is pricing its oil, gas, and fertilizer exports in rubles.
This effectively means the ruble is backed by commodities. And the result is that the ruble is now stronger in relation to other fiat currencies than it has ever been before. It’s no coincidence that we are now seeing consumer price inflation at 40-year highs. Some refer to this as de-dollarization, or a move away from the U.S. dollar.
So Roubini’s solution is to create an asset-backed digital dollar. And his firm Atlas Capital is teaming up with a Web 3.0 developer backed by prominent venture capital (VC) firm Andreessen Horowitz to make it happen.
That makes this a project we absolutely want to keep on our radar.
Historically, U.S. regulators have been hostile toward anyone trying to create a global reserve asset. We saw that with their response to Facebook’s Diem a few years ago.
But I have to wonder… Given the economic and geopolitical uncertainty, will the regulators allow Roubini to give it a go?
We’ll find out.
Speaking of stablecoins, we’ll wrap up today with a fun development.
A group of blockchain developers just launched a stablecoin backed by one of the most stable assets in history… Arizona Iced Tea. No kidding.
The digital asset is called USDTea. And it just launched with 1,000 tokens. Cans of Arizona Iced Tea stored in secure locations back each of them.
What’s more, USDTea is fully redeemable. Token holders can exchange their USDTea for cans of Arizona Iced Tea at any time. All they have to do is pay for shipping. How neat is that?
And here’s why it works – cans of Arizona Iced Tea have been priced at $0.99 for over 30 years now. This has truly been the most stable consumer product in history. Each year, the company has found ways to reduce manufacturing costs by just a few percentage points to keep the price steady.
So there’s certainly some logic to this project.
That said, it’s mostly poking fun at what’s happened in the stablecoin industry lately.
The recent collapse of Terra Luna brought to light the fact that some stablecoins just aren’t stable. And the name “USDTea” is pronounced the same as Tether’s USDT – the largest stablecoin.
USDT has been known to not be backed 100% by the assets that it is supposed to be representing. USDTea, in a fun way, demonstrates that it shouldn’t be that hard to maintain a consistent peg for a stablecoin.
Still, this project shows what’s possible using blockchain technology. The reality is that we’ll need stablecoins with insignificant transaction costs in order for cryptocurrency to be used in our daily lives. I expect we’ll see many more asset-backed tokens created in the coming years.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
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The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
