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Welcome back to the breakdown.

What's going on, guys?

It is Friday, January 10th.

And today we're going to be talking about what I think is probably the most significant

shaping factor in our entire industry, which is the role of governments in the crypto industry, and in particular,

China and the rest of the world responding to China getting into the digital currency game.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the latest news from China around its digital

currency project. Then we're going to look at some new regulations going into effect in

Europe and what they might mean

and what they're actually doing vis-a-vis crypto companies. And then third and finally, we're

going to look at a couple different examples of U.S. regulatory arbitrage within different states

and how state-level regulation is impacting crypto companies as well. But first, let's start

with China. In my estimation, the most significant

narrative or story of last year of 2019 was the combination of Libra and China's response to Libra.

I think that if Libra had just happened as it is, it would have gotten a lot of governments

to pay attention

more to this industry. Certainly the U.S. government, for example, perked up in a huge way,

in a way that Bitcoin or ICOs even hadn't been able to make them do. Because of, I think,

two things. One, Zuckerberg's clear track record of not particularly caring what U.S. regulators thought,

...