Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, December 21st, and today we are heading fully into our

end-of-year coverage with predictions. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying

the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive

deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in

the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. Well, for content creators,

it is that time of year. We are talking, of course, about end of year philosophizing,

predictionifying. And instead of just making predictions myself, what I wanted to do is try to

sum up the predictions

of all of the other folks out there. We have gotten reports from JP Morgan, Matrixport, Bitwise,

coin shares, Michael Saylor, Samson Mao, K-33, Lynn Alden. Of course, there's Ryan Selkis and

Misari's Crypto Theses, a mainstay of this season. Arthur Hayes and Raupal are

turbo-bullish, and we have integrated all of that into this conversation. But before we get into the

future, let's talk about what has passed. It's very clear that what we are doing right now is

turning the page on crypto winter.

2023 was a brutal year. In many ways, it was a last-stand year, the most severe and then

they fight you year we've ever had. We had a raft of crypto bankruptcies from Celsius to Voyager

to Genesis to BlockFi to FTX, and not only are many of those getting

resolved, it doesn't really look like there's any more dead wood to be burnt. We had, of course,

a serious crackdown, chokepoint 2.0, a Binance settlement, SBF criminal charges, and a conviction,

even tether cozying up to law enforcement. Speaking of enforcement, we've had the SEC sue every major exchange and also ding NFT projects.

...