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, August 5th, and today we are talking about the crypto sprint in Washington, D.C. 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 in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod.

All right, friends, a bit of a grab bag of stories today. We have Hester Purse on privacy,

Brian Quintens being grilled in Senate confirmation, the CFTC beginning their crypto sprint.

But let's actually start on the market side of the house.

Last week, Bitcoin saw its first major test in several months as investors pulled their money.

The Bitcoin ETFs had been on a 15-week-long hot streak that came to an end last week with a $400 million outflow. The streak of positive flows takes us all the way back to late April

when the Trump administration issued their tariff reprieve. Since then, there was one rough

patch during the Iran bombing, but Bitcoin rose to 80,000 to a new

all-time high at 120,000. The question is whether this is investors taking some chips off the table

or the Bitcoin cycle rolling over. James Butterfield, the head of research at coin shares,

believes that this was a very rational week to lock in some profits, writing,

while the weak payrolls data at the end of the week had dovish connotations for the Fed,

general risk-off sentiment led to further outflows with over a billion dollars on Friday.

Given that we've seen 12.2 billion net inflows over the last 30 days,

representing 50% of inflows for the year so far,

it is perhaps understandable to see what we believe to be minor profit-taking.

Now, Bitcoin is firmly now within the realm of mainstream investable assets, which means we should expect some

TradFi behavior to start to show up, especially in the ETF flows. For Bitcoiners that are

never selling, a 50% gain in Fiat terms over three months is just some numbers on a screen.

For Tradify traders with very little fundamental conviction, it's a home run that can make their entire year. They're taking profits on the trade in the same way they would a hard-running tech stock. Now, the question will be whether the Bitcoin trade is over or if these profit takers will rush back in for the next leg. To a certain extent, that's going to depend on the broader market. Despite Trump's focus on

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