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It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

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Hello, friends. Well, today our theme is where we are in the cycle. I think we are in a very transitional moment, and both of the pieces today have something to do with exactly that.

The first is by John Rizzo, the senior vice president for public affairs at Clyde Group,

and was featured on CoinDesk on August 16th. The piece is titled, How PayPal Upended the Crypto

Debate in Washington, D.C. John writes, as the end of July arrived, House Financial Services

Committee Republicans achieved its goal of passing a bipartisan stable coins bill. Still, they left D.C. without the broad bipartisan vote, Chair Patrick

McHenry had labored to achieve. The session ended with new recriminations over old disputes,

namely the degree of federal versus state regulation in a new regulatory framework,

casting a dark cloud over the prospect of legislation that could garner support from

McHenry, ranking member Maxine Waters, and the Biden White House. And then PayPal and Paxos

entered the chat. The surprising unveiling of PiUSD may be the accelerant needed to forge

compromise in D.C. and bring about the legal enshrinement of a comprehensive regulatory framework

for stable coins. It may also represent a new, more aggressive strategy for how American fintech companies deal with the federal government and DC regulators.

Now, Rizzo continues to explain just why it's such a big deal.

There are a couple parts to that.

First, he says, the sheer scale of PayPal's reach is really significant.

...