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 Wednesday, April 29th, and today we are

going to be talking about Lebanon, specifically the currency crisis overlapping a political crisis,

overlapping a larger economic crisis that is engulfing Lebanon, and I think has relevance for how

we understand the dollar in the world, the dollar's role in the world, and the fallout

from COVID-19. I wanted to bring this episode to you because I noticed last week Lebanon

start to emerge in the cryptosphere, and there were two contexts. The first was Dan Tapiero

picked up on a piece by NewsBTC noticing that Bitcoin seemed to be trading at $15,000 in Lebanon

via local Bitcoins.com, which is a peer-to-peer platform for trading Bitcoin between people.

He said,

classic emerging market funding crisis made worse by deflationary dollar peg that is breaking.

Study this case as it will be modeled for other weak emerging markets,

will be a key part of the macro story behind upcoming Bitcoin price rally.

NewsBTC, they titled their article article Bitcoin trades at 15K in Lebanon

amidst economic turmoil, showing its real potential. That was part one of how this showed up on the

Bitcoin radar. And of course, you see Bitcoin trading at a seemingly 100% premium against what we were seeing it at, it's going to

cause notice. The second context that Lebanon has had to enter the Bitcoin sphere, the Bitcoin

Twitter sphere, is images and videos of riots in Lebanon where protesters are smashing banks

and setting fire to banks over the last two days.

And that is happening, but it has a specific context.

And I think it's incredibly important to dig into this because this is not just a single

...