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 Sunday, February 11th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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breakdown pod. Hello, friends, back with another Long read, and today we have sort of a classic old point

counterpoint about real world assets.

Now, I am once again kids sick, and so we'll be turning to AI me thanks to 11 labs

for a reading of each of these pieces, and then we'll come back with a

little bit of discussion at the end. We're going to start with a piece by Alan Gully called

Forget ETFs. Let's work on tokenizing the whole value chain. Alan writes,

The last six months in crypto markets have been dominated by two main narratives. The prospect

of Bitcoin ETFs, which were finally approved by the SEC in January,

and so-called real-world assets, RWAs. Interestingly enough, these themes represent two sides

of the same coin. Bitcoin ETFs take digitally native assets off chain, while RWAs bring

traditional assets on chain. Both traditional and decentralized finance experts have hailed

these related innovations. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, for example, told CNBC, ETFs are step one

in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization

of every financial asset. So what about step three? I would argue that bringing the entire value chain,

not just the end product on-chain, should be the final objective for all financial assets.

That includes equities, fixed income, cash equivalents, alternative investments, and the many

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