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 nexo.io and produced and distributed by coin desk. What's going on, guys? It is Saturday,

January 30th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap. And this week, as you would imagine,

it's all about Robin Hood, Wall Street bets, GameStop, and the failure of unfree markets. Where we left off on Thursday was that

Robin Hood had shut down trading on the set of equities that were associated with the Wall

Street bets community. More specifically, they had shut down the ability to buy those assets.

You could still sell things like GameStop.

Quick review now of this recent Wall Street Bet strategy, there are two sides of the play.

First, find some over-leverage short-seller focused on an underpriced stock and then buy the

ever-loving crap out of that asset. Second, hold. Do not sell to the

short sellers as they desperately try to cover their shorts as the price of the asset rises.

Going back to Robin Hood then, they didn't just halt trading entirely. That would have been one thing.

Still a pretty serious thing, but different than what actually

happened. What they did was that they only allowed selling of these assets, the whole point of which

was this community was trying to keep holding. It was nearly impossible for anyone watching,

frankly, quite reasonably, to see this as something other than an attempt

to tank the market for these specific assets.

Unsurprisingly, then, people asked what was the logic behind this, or more specifically,

who was behind it.

Justin Khan, the founder of Twitch, sent out a very incendiary tweet that said,

Just got a tip that Citadel reloaded

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