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 sponsored by crypto.com, nexo.io, an elliptic, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, October 10th, which means it's time for the weekly recap.

And when I look back over the last week, really the last couple weeks, it's very clear to me that there is one major theme, and that is the

rise of the regulatory dogs of war. Are we facing a regulatory reckoning coming for the

crypto industry? So what do I mean? For the past year or so, most of the regulatory action has felt like

simply catching up with ICO-era-Crypto. Since many in the space feel they've moved on from that,

no one has been all that concerned when X or Y ICO is forced to settle and pay back its earnings

because whatever, that was from 2017, that's a million

years ago. The last 10 days or so, however, have felt markedly different, so let's walk through

them. First was the action against Bitmex. On the one hand, this wasn't a complete shocker. We've known

since early summer 2019 that the CFTC was looking into Bitmex and weren't

particularly pleased with them. They had also announced this as Bitmex had announced

that after a six-month grace period everyone was going to need to be KYC'd.

Well, whatever was going on behind the scenes with Bitmex trying to make nice, it didn't seem to work.

Last Thursday, the CFTC announced just an absolute slew of accusations against the company, but that wasn't all.

The Department of Justice actually filed criminal complaints as well around violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. The CTO of Bitmex was even arrested.

I had Stephen Paley and Preston Byrne both lawyers on my show last week, and they both thought that

this marked a pretty significant escalation. Fines and fees are one thing, but jail time is absolutely another. Subsequently,

we just got news in the end of this week that Arthur Hayes and the other leadership had stepped

down as this all plays out. Next up, we jump across the pond to the UK, where earlier this week,

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