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? Today on The Breakdown, we are talking to Cracken CEO Dave Ripley. Before we get into that, however, if you are 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.L.Y slash breakdown pod. What's going on, guys? Really excited for

this conversation today. Dave Ripley is the CEO of Cracken, which is one of at this point the longest

standing highest credibility, most deeply connected to the crypto industry exchanges that

exists. Cracken has been an innovator from back when they first formed more than a decade ago,

all the way up to getting the first bank type license for a crypto exchange.

And in this conversation, we talk a lot about how the company thinks about the changing nature of the exchange business and what they were hoping for and building towards coming off of the last cycle.

It's a great conversation, so without further ado.

All right, Dave, welcome to the breakdown. How you doing, sir? Doing well. How about

yourself? It's great. We're recording on a Friday, some of my favorite times to do these types of

conversations. And I'm really looking forward to it. You know, I was just mentioning this, but I love these

sort of times in the cycle where we've clearly been through a big change.

We're clearly at the beginning of something new, not the end of something old, but it's still really up for grabs, right?

Like what the shape and texture of this cycle is going to be going to be really interesting.

And so where I wanted to start is, you know, I guess like,

where do you see us in this cycle? Is it still early? Is retail here? If not, when do you

think they'll show up? You know, when you guys kind of sit and try to assess where we are,

you know, what do you think about? Yeah. Well, it is nice to, it is nice to see,

the market's moving, obviously the price moving, a lot of positivity as well that we see. I mean,

clearly there's the ETF event that happened. You know, it's, it's really great to see versus the

negative, you know, negative news cycle that we had

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