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

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Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Wednesday, February 5th, and today we are going to look at the market through the

lens of some fundraising and M&A activity.

In traditional tech circles, most of the news that you see day in and day out is about

one of these two things, right?

Look, if you go on tech crunch on any given day, it's here's a financing or here's someone acquiring some other company.

That's the way that the tech market, which is, of course, a private market, not subject to public market forces in the same way as many companies, gauges progress and gauges where it's at, right?

How evaluations changed. Who is funding who?

Crypto markets are a little bit different because they have aspects of both private and

public markets at the same time, which can make them quite chaotic.

But I still think that it can be useful to occasionally step back, look at funding activity and

mergers and acquisitions in the space as a way to just take a barometer reading of where we are.

Now, there were a lot of different takes about this story. Consensus is a controversial company

in the space inso far as it is the most

associated with Ethereum and takes a lot of the flack for accusations of Ethereum centralization

and so on and so forth. So in any given outlet and any given tweet, you might see this news

as very different depending on who was sharing it. So let's first talk about just what was actually announced.

And then we can talk about what it means and whatever slant we think is correct.

So first, what was announced?

Basically, consensus is effectively shifting into two different parts of the company.

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