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 Sunday, August 1st, and listen, this week has been so full of

craziness from Amazon rumors to just a nonstop barrage of regulatory action and intrigue and challenge that I thought that for

Longreed Sunday this week, we do a little something different. Now, if you're paying attention

to the broader crypto space, you've probably heard people talking about Axy Infinity and play

to earn games. You also might have heard Mark Zuckerberg talking about the

metaverse and why Facebook is making such a big bet on these new digital worlds and what they'll

mean. You take these things together and you see a totally new way of interacting with the world

that's interfacing through digital experiences, digital worlds, and is creating

new types of digital economies. As you guys know, I'm interested in the economic empowerment

dimension of Bitcoin and the economic empowerment potential of other parts of the crypto space as

well. So for this week's Long Read Sunday, I'm reading a piece by Beryl Lee, who's the co-founder

of Yield Guild Games. The piece was on Coin Desk, and it was called A Play to Earn account

beats a bank account, and her central contention is that, quote, NFT games are doing more

to deliver financial inclusion than a bank account ever has or will. Now, this is an example of an op-ed

that I'm reading that is specifically talking about someone's project, so there's obviously a

grain of sand, but I still think the perspective has a lot of value, and so I hope you enjoy it.

It may be lauded as the hallmark of financial inclusion, but a bank account represents very

little for those that don't have one yet. Even for the privileged ones who have access,

an account alone does not necessarily qualify its holder to access a competitive interest-bearing

...