Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

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Welcome back to the breakdown.

It is Friday, December 20th.

And before everyone heads off to their holidays and family celebrations, we're just

going to be wrapping up with a conversation about the kind of the two ends of the

spectrum of the current crypto market.

So on the one hand, we're going to be talking about the financialization

of Bitcoin and the just robustness of the financial infrastructure evolving around Bitcoin,

in particular, I mean, crypto in general, but particularly in Bitcoin. And then on the other end of

the spectrum, we're going to be looking at some really interesting experiments on Ethereum that

show just how wide an array of

use cases and applications these technologies can have in the world. So first, let's talk about

the financialization of Bitcoin. So one of the themes of this year has been the emergence of traditional financial instruments

like derivatives in the crypto space, and particularly around Bitcoin. In fact, in a lot of ways,

the institutionalization narrative of Bitcoin this year, to the extent that it came to fruition,

was driven by these institutions offering new types of derivative products.

And every metric in terms of how much people and investors are engaging with these instruments,

as well as how many more offerings there are, is increasing, right? So by way of example,

you have backed, which comes from the Intercontinental Exchange, the same people behind the New York Stock

Exchange, tweeting yesterday, yesterday we set a new volume record, 6,226 physically delivered

backed Bitcoin futures contracts, traded at ICE Futures US.

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