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 nexus.io and circle and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, November 12th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

Before we get into that, 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, guys, so again, sorry to disappoint,

but as of recording, this is Wednesday, November 9th. I still don't know anything. I still can't

say anything. So obviously, it's quite clear what the big story of the week is. But at the moment,

I must continue to remain quiet on that particular story.

That said, there were a few other important stories, things that would be covered this week

normally as the title for an entire show.

And so I wanted to use the weekly recap to do a couple of those stories.

First, one of the most significant tipping points in the regulatory

discussion this year happened when the Office of Foreign Asset Control or OFAC sanctioned Tornado

Cash. Tornado Cash is a mixing service that adds privacy to crypto transactions by making

it difficult to see inputs and outputs. The sanctions brought up some serious questions.

In fact, I would argue that they were one of the most

galvanizing actions the government has ever taken against crypto. One of the big questions was,

did OFAC actually have the authority to sanction a smart contract? This was completely new territory

and caught a lot of people off guard. We've seen sanctions in the past, but they've always been for

...