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 Tuesday, June 3rd, and today we are talking about a big month for

crypto deals. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go

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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. All right, friends, today's one of those days where we don't have one huge story.

We have a bunch of stories that all add up to something of a trend.

And basically the idea here is that May was a very good month for crypto deals.

According to Blockworks research, the industry saw almost 600 million in deal activity.

Now, dealmaking has been heavily depressed since mid-2020, as the industry caved in on itself,

venture firms closed their wallets. It took until March of this year for crypto deals to come

anywhere close to the frothy peak of 2022, which saw almost $4.5 billion in total dealmaking.

In addition to the $600 million in venture,

may also saw a ton of M&A leading to a total of $3.5 billion. Now, it is certainly the case in

crypto capital that this big volume is not representative of a large number of small venture

bets, but instead is concentrated in a few larger deals. For example, last month's

figures were almost entirely about Coinbase's $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit, while the

March numbers were dominated by Binance raising $2 billion from MGX. In fact, overall, total deal count

was actually down. May saw 61 fundraising announcements, which is the lowest number since

February 2021. In fact, to some extent, when you start to dig into this, although the total

dollar amounts are starting to get back to higher levels, it actually looks a bit more like

...