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 Wednesday, May 24th, and today we are talking about Hong Kong and how

shockingly they are open for crypto business. Before we get into that, a quick note. The breakdown, as you

know, has become the breakdown network. Yes, we have two new shows that have joined the family.

Bitcoin Builders is the story of all the

interesting, creative entrepreneurial energy going into Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community,

and the AI breakdown is, well, the breakdown for AI. Bitcoin Builders comes out two to three

times a week, and the AI breakdown is also daily. If you're enjoying either of them and you want to

dive 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, guys, well, today we are focusing on one of the most interesting and

frankly unexpected shifts of this cycle. From top to bottom, we have seen China first ban

crypto and push Hong Kong on a similar

path to now being in a position where Hong Kong and China behind the scenes seem to be

recognizing the opportunity in the U.S.'s aggressive anti-crypto turn post-FTX collapse.

So today we're going to discuss Hong Kong's new rules, which we've

gotten much more detail about in the last few days, but we're going to start with the latest

in the U.S. being inhospitable. Coinbase has responded in its case against the SEC. They have

accused the regulator of hypocrisy in their presentation of one set of facts to the court and an entirely

different set of facts to the public via the statements of Chair Gary Gensler. So the context for this

discussion is, of course, the Coinbase lawsuit that was filed in April. This was a lawsuit

...