The Breakdown

A daily analysis of macroeconomics, bitcoin, geopolitics and big picture power shifts, hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore @nlw. The Breakdown is part of Blockworks.

Business
Investing
1751
Tyrone Ross On The Next Million Crypto Investors
One man. Three piping hot takes. In this special interview episode of The Breakdown, financial advisor and crypto advocate Tyrone Ross shares his thoughts on: Why Financial Advisors are the key to bringing in the next wave of crypto investors Why...
28 min
1752
Why ‘Crypto Dad’ Is Building the Digital Dollar...
As Libra continues to spur discussions among regulators around the world, and China’s digital yuan comes ever closer to fruition, the U.S. Federal Reserve seems disinclined to look seriously at a digital dollar. Ex-CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo - aka...
16 min
1753
Why DeFi Is Surging As The Market Pumps
Crypto tokens weren’t the only thing that saw a major pump yesterday. The total value locked in DeFi ascended to new heights. While part of this can be explained simply by the rise in ETH price, it also reflected traders turning to DeFi platforms as...
16 min
1754
Mati Greenspan on the Technical and Macro Roots...
Bitcoin is up more than 8% in the last 24 hours. BSV, meanwhile, is up nearly a whopping 100%. The question is, of course, why? Is it some larger macro context? A pump-and-dump? Or just the crypto markets being as crazy as they are. The Breakdown...
18 min
1755
Tokenized NBA Contracts & The Hunt For Crypto’s...
Starting today, accredited investors will be able to part of $13.5m in tokenized bonds connected to the contract of Brooklyn Nets Point Guard Spencer Dinwiddie. The first-of-its-kind offering took months of negotiation with the NBA but marks a seminal...
20 min
1756
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | Jan 11 2020
All 5 episodes of The Breakdown in one long file. By popular demand, this is an experiment to see if it's useful to have the full week's episodes compiled in a single file. I've also summed up what I think is most important about the week. Let me know...
74 min
1757
China Completes "Top-Level" Digital Currency De...
China’s digital currency project continues to move ahead aggressively, with a new paper from the People’s Bank of China suggesting that a core design is complete. Whatever stage of development the currency actually is, it’s clear that China...
16 min
1758
Why 2020 Is The Year Of DAOs feat Aragon's Luis...
The aftershock of the 2016 The DAO hack meant that DAOs weren’t nearly as hyped as ICOs and later some other aspects of the web3 movement. In 2019, however, DAOs came roaring back and start 2020 with the wind at their sails.  In this episode,...
20 min
1759
Travis Kling on the BTC Bump and Safe Haven Status
The conversation about whether bitcoin is a safe haven asset continues in the wake of Iranian missile strikes, which saw the price of BTC both surge and retrace in parallel with crude and gold. To help explain what’s going on, we feature comments...
16 min
1760
How Compliance Costs Could Kill Crypto Innovation
In their annual transparency report, Kraken reported seeing a 50% increase in regulatory inquiries as compared to 2018, which CEO Jesse Powell later revealed cost the exchange more than $1m. Between this and stories like the $2m it cost Blockstack to...
17 min
1761
What Iran and Instability Mean For Bitcoin
Last week, the US government took out a key Iranian military leader. As the world - and the markets - reacts to the news, some are asking what happens with bitcoin. With global instability on the rise, will more people turn to bitcoin as a safe haven...
17 min
1762
YouTube, Tron and the Pipedream of Decentralize...
The past few weeks have seen multiple instances of large, centralized tech giants censoring crypto related content and activity. Noticed in the context of the Coinbase Wallet, Apple is pushing back against apps that have anything to do with Dapps....
12 min
1763
Taylor Monahan on Crypto’s Divergent Possibilit...
Taylor Monahan is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto. In this interview as part of The Breakdown’s end of year coverage, she argues that the level of discourse in crypto matured in 2019, with more focus on things that actually matter. That’s...
17 min
1764
Tom Shaughnessy & Jordan Clifford on Layer 1 Wa...
Tom Shaughnessy is a co-founder at Delphi Digital as well as the host of the Chain Reaction podcast. Jordan Clifford is managing director of Scalar Capital. In this end of year interview for The Breakdown, Tom argues that the big story of 2019 was...
25 min
1765
Katherine Wu on DeFi and the Inevitability of t...
Katherine Wu was a founding team member at Messari before moving into a VC role at Notation Capital, but is perhaps best known in crypto for her epic annotations of key regulatory enforcement actions. In this end of year interview with The Breakdown,...
16 min
1766
Camila Russo and David Hoffman on the 2020 DeFi...
Sometimes things are clear, and to both Camila Russo (write of The Defiant newsletter) and David Hoffman (co-host of the Crypto POV podcast), it couldn’t be clearer that the essential narrative of 2019 was the rise of DeFi as a true market force. In...
24 min
1767
Marty Bent on the Macro Fires on the Horizon
Marty Bent is the author of one of the most popular daily Bitcoin newsletters and co-host of Tales From The Crypt. In this end of year interview with The Breakdown, he talks about the macro context - from trade wars to pressure on the fed to continue...
14 min
1768
Rob ‘Crypto Bobby’ Paone and Preethi Kasireddy ...
Rob Paone, aka Crypto Bobby, got his start as a popular crypto YouTuber and has gone on to help build a number of crypto companies before launching his own technical recruitment firm. Preethi Kasireddy is the founder of the TruStory debate platform....
22 min
1769
Meltem Demirors on Government Digital Currencie...
One of CoinDesk’s ten most influential people of 2019, Melem Demirors is a crypto renaissance woman, known best for investing, operating as CSO of CoinShares, and for explaining ‘shitcoins’ to Congress. In this end of year Breakdown, Meltem...
10 min
1770
Peter McCormack On A Defiant New Era For Bitcoin
Peter McCormack is one of the most prominent podcasters in the space. In 2019, he added a new podcast called “Defiance” and focused on the intersection of bitcoin, human rights, and political activism to complement his “What Bitcoin Did”...
17 min
1771
Art Haus Ethereum Meets Bitcoin Financialization
One of the most important (yet somehow quiet) narratives of 2019 has been the financialization of bitcoin and the emergence of a robust market for derivative products. That was reinforced today as Binance announced a significant investment in...
14 min
1772
Should the Government Have A Say In Where You I...
Accredited investor laws block most of the US out of technology and other types of early stage risk investing, but as the ICO boom showed, not being allowed to do something doesn’t mean that people don’t want to do it. The SEC announced...
21 min
1773
“Stacking Sats” vs. “ETH is Money” - The Memes ...
From “digital gold” to “stacking sats” to “ETH is money,” 2019 was a year of narrative battlegrounds and meme warfare. And when every narrative is competing for scarce resources and attention, things are sure to get contentious. This...
23 min
1774
Productizing bitcoin maximalism and the emergen...
More crypto businesses are transitioning to or choosing to focus exclusively on bitcoin only from the beginning, in some ways representing a productization of bitcoin maximalism. In China, however, the government is cracking down fiercly on resurgent...
18 min
1775
Authoritarian Airdrops, Derivative Competitions...
If 2019 saw bitcoin come together around the digital gold/digital SoV narrative, is 2020 poised for a resurgence of the idea of payments utility, thanks to Lightning powered applications? One beta test of a LN point-of-sale app suggests maybe. ...
17 min