Look, there is no universe in which I am rooting for Binance to fail. I want all of these things

to be the sort of small errors their spokespeople want to make them seem like. But Binance

have got to get their shit together when it comes to all of these processes. The level of

scrutiny and the importance of the leading companies in the space doing it right has never

been higher. 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 CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, January 27th, and today we are checking in on

crypto companies behaving badly. 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

slash breakdown pod. All right, friendos, happy Friday. I hope you are doing well. And I am doing well,

because this week, I have to say, has been blissfully free of bad guy stories and crypto firms

behaving badly. At least mostly. That said, I do believe we've tipped over the point where the

accumulation of news along those lines and follow up from the fallout of 2022 has amassed enough

relevance that we needed to do an update show. So today we'll be catching up on the latest around the

FTX bankruptcy, around Celsius, BlockFi, and a few other stories.

Let's actually start, though, with Binance.

All eyes in this industry have been on Binance since the collapse of FTX.

Now, part of that is that SBF has tried to make the fall of FTX seem like a targeted hit from rival CZ rather than a byproduct of his own rampant, long, hidden, newly exposed fraud,

but even those not buying Sam's message of CZ being an assassin are still carefully watching

...