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 neared.org and produced and distributed by CoinDess.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, May 1st, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

Yesterday, I went through the seven factions that I believe make up this crypto bull market,

and honestly, across any of them, this week had something for everyone. From Bitcoin

converting some big bank holdouts to more intrigue around the CBDC wars, it was chock-full.

It also saw a big uptick in factional fighting, so I'm going to talk about a few of those

different factions, and of course, we must start with Bitcoin.

The biggest story in Bitcoin this week was not the price. It is worth noting that Bitcoin recovered nicely from last week's twin dips, coming back to spend most of the week in the

mid-50,000s. However, yesterday saw $4.2 billion worth of options expiry. We've seen this

at the end of every month this year.

Options expiry tends to compress volatility within a certain range.

54,000 was the so-called point of max pain, the point in an options expiry where the most

people would get wrecked. The price tends to huddle around that point, and that's exactly

what it did, although it broke out yesterday, as we know. No, that wasn't the big news. The big news for Bitcoin this week came from J.P. Morgan.

J.P. Morgan Chase, which is America's biggest bank with $3 trillion in assets, has historically

been one of the most hostile institutions when it comes to Bitcoin. CEO Jamie Diamond, one of if not the best-known

banker in America, has variously called Bitcoin a fraud, worse than tulips, and even when he softened his

stance, it was to calling it not my cup of tea. And yet, news broke this week that JPM was launching an

actively managed Bitcoin fund for their private

wealth clients as early as this summer. In February, we started to see cracks of the JPM facade

...