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 Sunday, September 1st, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

Before we get into that, however, if you were 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, one quick note. Tomorrow we will be off

at Labor Day here in the U.S. We will be back on Tuesday. And for this LRS, we're talking Bitcoin,

but in a way that we'll have half of you very excited and half of you pounding your fists.

We are reading a piece from the Blockworks opinion pages called Bitcoin's Evolution into

DeFi is inevitable and it's about time. As always, I will include a link to it in the show

notes. The piece reads, We need to embrace Bitcoin as the foundation for DeFi in order to create

a more secure and resilient financial ecosystem. Otherwise, we'll miss the opportunity to leverage

the most stable

and proven blockchain for the next wave of innovation. For too long, Bitcoin has been viewed as

merely a static store of value, digital gold. But those days are over. The Defy revolution is

coming to Bitcoin, and in inheriting the security and robustness of the original blockchain,

it stands to be better for it. If we aim to build truly decentralized financial

applications without the need for middlemen, Bitcoin is a no-brainer. Until recently, the infrastructure

needed to facilitate the development of these financial applications has been limited.

While Defi flourished on Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains, the idea of building a similar

ecosystem on top of Bitcoin was seen as a contrarian bet. Bitcoin was often

criticized as being too rigid, lacking the smart contract functionality needed to support the

...