The future is, of course, by definition, shaped by innovation. And for all of these traditional

financial firms, it's catch up or get left behind. And the time is now. This, more than anything

else, is a good reason not to get overly stressed about these short-term corrections and movements

in the Bitcoin price. It's about the arc of the markets, and that arc is bending

this way. 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 produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, January 21st, and today we are talking about why the world's largest asset manager is getting into Bitcoin.

First up, however, let's do the brief.

First on the brief today,

a new SPAC-E-F. Here is an absolute jungle of acronyms and two of Wall Street or perhaps Wall Street bets favorite things coming together, SPACs and ETFs. ETSs are, of course,

exchange-traded funds that give people exposure to specific themes. So it's

sort of like an index fund but traded like a stock. An example of a theme would be ARCS Innovation Fund,

which invests in a set of companies to match their theses about how the world is changing,

including in this case Tesla, CRISPR Gene Therapeutics, Spotify, etc. Now SPAC stands for special

purpose acquisition companies, also known as

blank check companies. And effectively, these companies are an alternative way to take a private

company public. A promoter of a SPAC sells shares in their SPAC, which is a company that's publicly

listed, but doesn't do anything. The entire purpose of

that company is to go merge with a private company, again based around some specific theme,

in effect taking that private company public when the merger clears. Spacks have had a long

and not always great history in the markets, but over the last few years, they become a much

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