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.

The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, February 25th, and that means it's time for the

weekly recap. One quick note before we dive in, there are two ways to listen to the breakdown.

You can hear us on the Coin Desk podcast network, which comes out every afternoon alongside

other great Coin Desk shows, or you can listen on the breakdown-only feed, which comes out a few

hours later in the evening. Wherever you're listening, if you're enjoying the show, I would so appreciate it

if you would take the time to leave a rating or a review. It makes a huge difference, and I appreciate

each and every one. All right, well, happy weekend all. And man, oh man, is there a lot to follow up on

for this recap? It seems like every story we've covered this week has some additional nugget to include,

so let's dive in and let's start with Coinbase's announcement of base.

One of the things that we discussed about this new entrance of Coinbase into the L2 space

was how it seemed like their aggressive, no-token approach was at least in part trying to position

Coinbase in the regulatory clear. At least that was many people's first reading of it.

However, some have argued subsequently that the move was still problematic from a regulatory

perspective. Gabriel Shapiro, the general counsel at Delphi Lab, said many people seeing some

kind of regulatory strategy in Coinbase's L2.

No idea if that is Coinbase's primary motivation or not, but if so, in my opinion, it

is a massive miscalculation.

Let me explain.

Base is a stage zero optimistic roll-up, aka essentially a glorified enterprise blockchain,

...