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.


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1876
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
1877
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
1878
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
1879
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
1880
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
1881
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
1882
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
1883
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
1884
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
1885
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
1886
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
1887
“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
1888
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
1889
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
1890
The ECB Gets In On Stablecoins, 2017 Token Proj...
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde’s comments on stable coins flew around crypto Twitter yesterday, as she said projects in the space indicated clear demand (even while slighting bitcoin in the same statement). Meanwhile, two once...
20 min
1891
Regulatory smackdown, DeFi on Bitcoin, and Jack...
The last few days have seen significant regulatory action, from SEC charging Shopin’s CEO with fraud over a $42m ICO to a major coordinated federal action against a $722m crypto Ponzi scheme. Over in the world of decentralized finance, meanwhile, a...
22 min
1892
Narrative Watch: The Tokenization Saga Continues
Three stories about tokenization today: ShapeShift launching FOX (an exchange token); BlockTV launching a token for media contributions; Satoshi's Treasure helping Tezos distribute tokens through games. That's enough to get me curious and thinking...
26 min
1893
Multi-Collateral DAI goes live / Not so privacy...
After a huge amount of work, MakerDAO's multi-collateral DAI is live. Only one new token (Brave's BAT) is in the ecosystem, but it heralds the beginning of a new era. In the world of privacy coins, the MimbleWimble protocol is pushing back against a...
16 min
1894
Why did Satoshi choose Halloween to publish the...
11 years ago today, on Halloween 2008, Satoshi shared the bitcoin whitepaper for the first time. The question is: why choose that date? Satoshi was extremely intentional, so it seems unlikely to be random. In this, we explore multiple explanations,...
11 min
1895
Bitmain power struggle / Russian crypto intrigu...
Today was a quick news briefing: Bitmain power struggles as Jihan Wu pulls a coup to return China bans anti-blockchain sentiment  Russian crypto intrigue that could confirm the US' worst fears Coinlist raises $10m from Jack Dorsey (among others)...
15 min
1896
Mass Adoption - But Of What? And At What Cost?
Times, how they've changed. The surge in bitcoin price and the explosion of China into blockchain has heads spinning. Some argue that we should be celebrating mass adoption of any type. In this audio op-ed, however, I argue that there are two key...
15 min
1897
Narrative Watch: The New China Narrative, 2019 ...
China has had an ongoing role in the crypto narrative. For much of the history of the industry, it was about control of mining. Now, something new is happening. As the crypto industry gets caught up in the larger battles to shape the future of the...
17 min
1898
Bitcoin Soars on China President Xi's Blockchai...
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg responded to the largely hostile US Congress by reminding them that, if the US didn't proactively assert leadership around digital currencies, then China would be more than willing to fill the gap. As if they coordinated it,...
16 min
1899
Repo Market Madness & Bitcoin Macro / CT Reacts...
Most of the world outside crypto twitter that saw a clip of Mark Zuckerberg's testimony would have no idea that it was, theoretically about Libra. On CT, basically everyone bemoaned the clear lack of giving-a-crap that pretty much any Congressperson...
20 min
1900
SPECIAL EDITION: An Opinionated Recap Of Zucker...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress today, nominally about Libra but actually about a lot of things. In this (opinionated) recap of the testimony, we look at: What was different vs. the same in FB's narrative What was different vs....
27 min