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 circle and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, June 26th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

First on the recap, let's revisit a theme from earlier in the week. I argued that if we were

headed into a bear market, it was a bear market that would be incredibly well capitalized. Well, two more monster rounds announced this week to add to the list that I

shared then. For the second time this year, Chainalysis has raised a nine-figure round. Their series

D was in March and led by Paradigm and raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation.

This series E was also $100 million, but led by Kowatu management at a more than doubled

$4.2 billion valuation.

A couple of months and your $100 million buys you half as much, right?

Well, what happened in those couple of months?

Well, the ransomware epidemic, of course, or,

more specifically, the broad public and regulatory focus on crypto's role in the ransomware

epidemic, thanks to some extremely high-profile events like the Colonial Pipeline attack.

In that context, firms that can help law enforcement track and even recover crypto used for

illicit purposes are going to have

some serious wind in their sales, so it's no surprise that chain analysis is capitalizing while

it's hot. Other firms in the space, TRM Labs and CipherTrace, raised 14 million and 27 million

respectively over the last couple of weeks. How about a monster funding announcement on the

fund side as well? Andries and Horowitz has announced

Crypto Fund 3, a $2.2 billion fund. Here's the way they kick off their announcement blog post.

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