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 Thursday, November 18th, and today we are discussing what we

learned from Congress's demystifying crypto hearing. So last week, a bunch of hay was made

about Congress and the Senate holding this hearing

called demystifying crypto. There were many who pointed out that it was actually quite a good

panel of expert witnesses and that it seemed that the tone might be different.

My critique at the time was that broadly, yes, it was a good panel, but there was no one there who represented

a builder or an investor, as much as I love Coin Center and appreciate their constant presence

at this type of thing. It's very hard, I think, for the U.S. government to get a full picture of the

crypto industry when you're only having academics and advocacy groups as part of the dialogue.

But what we're here to talk about is what actually happened.

And there was, you might say, shockingly little commentary on Twitter about this, which

either means, one, no one was paying attention, or two, that there wasn't a lot of controversy.

And either way, that tells us something about

how the regulatory conversation in the U.S. is changing. Now, this was an event held by the Joint

Economic Committee. The Joint Economic Committee actually includes both members from Congress

and the Senate. The chairman is Democrat Don Beyer, whose name you might recognize as the person

who introduced the

digital asset market structure and investor protection act over the summer. Now, at the time

that Congressman Byer introduced that legislation, it was notable because he hadn't really

...