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

The breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.

Welcome back to the breakdown.

It is December 16th, Monday, and we are closing out the year fast, and what that means

is a lot of excellent end-of-year content as people try to make sense of what has happened

over the course of the last 12 months and look forward to the next year, in our case right now, the next decade, right?

And so today we're going to be looking at three little bits of news that each revolve around

what I would say an interesting narrative leading into 2020.

So the first is we're going to look at some experiments on the Lightning Network using

basically a point-of-sale Lightning app and what it means for the utility of Bitcoin narrative.

Second, we are going to look at the emergence of a couple new projects in the derivative space

and some news on that front, which has been a huge part of 2019 and seems poised for even more in 2020.

Third, we're going to look at news out of Venezuela in terms of the Petro,

one of the central bank digital currencies that actually exists sort of,

and what it suggests for and what warnings it holds maybe for the entire CBDC space as we move into

2020. First, let's talk about lightning and the Bitcoin narrative more broadly.

CoinDesk wrote a story today about a new application that's being beta tested. It's a point-of-sale

app from two partners,

iterative capital and Breeze. Now, Breeze is a lightning app that allows other apps basically

to plug into it. So Fold and Moon Pay and Bit Refel all plug in and use the infrastructure

of Breeze to allow people to pay with Lightning through their experiences. And they've actually been

doing quite a bit of volume, right? So Breeze said they did something like 4,200 transactions

...