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 Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, July 31st, and that means it's time for the weekly

recap. And what a week. Price action was interesting. We were going on 10 daily green

closes as I recorded this, although options expiry seem to have dragged the price

of Bitcoin down slightly, there is still definitely a lot of optimism from a price perspective.

This is perhaps unexpected given how much regulatory news has hit the wires this week

and how much markets have seemed to respond to this sort of thing over the past few months.

First of all, at the beginning of the week, we had three hearings that touched crypto.

One each about ransomware and CBDCs, but the main one from the Senate Banking Committee

on the value of cryptocurrencies generally.

That meeting showed simultaneously some clear work had been put in among certain senators

to learn more about the space. But it also

showed the entrenchment of a number of political opponents, most notably Elizabeth Warren,

who lamented the shadowy super coders, her term, who were the new exploitative superpower in this

new financial sector that in fact would do nothing to break the power of the banks.

Still, that was, for the moment, just bluster, and there was a heck of a lot of real action at the

same time. Let's talk Binance first. Last weekend, Binance dropped max leverage from 100x to 20x,

stopped crypto margin trading involving the sterling, the euro, and the Australian dollar,

and finally, they reduced withdrawals for non-KYC customers. This sucks in a broad sense of showing

you the breadth of acceptance of overarching global KYC regimes, but also, to be quite honest,

...