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.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, April 2nd, and today we are catching up on all the big

news from crypto over the past week. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying

the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to

dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link at

the show notes or go to bit.L.L.Y

slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, I am finally back from traveling, although as you can

probably hear in my voice, not necessarily all the better for it, but we are going to power

through and do some catch up today and get back to our normal show starting tomorrow.

So we're going to go through some of the biggest news from the past week or so, and we'll take it from there. Let's start off with a decision in the

Coinbase lawsuit last week. Last Wednesday, a federal judge denied most of Coinbase's motion to

dismiss, ruling that the SEC's case can proceed to trial. The judge found that the SEC had

presented a plausible case that Coinbase is operating as an

unregistered securities broker, exchange, and clearinghouse. In addition, the argument that staking

services are an unregistered securities offering was strong enough to move forward. Coinbase did

achieve a minor win by removing the claim that its wallet service acted as an unregistered brokerage.

The judge found that although some of the tokens available through the wallet may be securities, the wallet itself does not act as a brokerage. An SEC spokesperson said,

We're pleased that yet another court has confirmed that while the term crypto may be relatively

new, the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly 80 years still applies.

It's the economic realities of a transaction, not the labels, that determine whether a

particular offering constitutes security. Regarding whether crypto tokens are securities, the judge

...