Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Friday, February 14th.

Happy Valentine's Day lovers.

And speaking of love, those of you who have listened to me before know that one of my

greatest interests is narratives.

Narratives are the ways that we explain complex phenomenon simply. It's the way we make sense of the

world around us. In the context of markets, it's how we explain what's happening and why and what

might happen next. I think narratives have incredible power across all markets, but especially in

emerging markets where there's simply less data and simply less history to

really have stronger basis in fact, right? It's just a game of interpretation. And these

narrative battles have real implications in the context of crypto markets because there's limited

time, attention, and money to go around, and the narratives that shape what we believe

shape what we do and how we spend those resources. So narratives are an incredibly important

part of this market. What I wanted to do today then is take a look back across this week,

which is the culmination in some ways of an incredible shift in sentiment and excitement that started

at the beginning of January and has gone right through to the middle of February where we are now.

Across almost every vertical from volume to price, there is just so much more action in

crypto markets now. And this was inspired in part by Dan McArdle. He responded to my tweet about

the CNBC Fast Money show that we listened to a couple days ago, where in less than two

minutes, they hit almost every bull Bitcoin narrative that you can imagine. They talked about

...