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 crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, August 9th, and that means it is time for long reads Sunday.

This week, instead of one long piece, I decided to read three shorter pieces. In fact, one of them is actually

a tweet storm. The first is about private markets. The second is about the emerging crypto and

Bitcoin bull run, and the third is about marshmallow. Let's start with a piece by the goat

Matt Levine from his money stuff column from Wednesday, August 5th. This is called

Private Markets are the New Public Markets. Not that long ago, the stock market was a place where

companies raised money to invest in their businesses. If you were a company and you needed

money to build a factory, you could sell stock to investors. Investors would give you the money

in hopes that the factory would be profitable, and you'd have more money later on, which you

could give back to the shareholders in the form of dividends. Now the stock market is a place where

companies return money to shareholders. If you are a company and you have a factory, it probably

makes money and you use the money to buy back stock from your shareholders.

Investors trade your stock with each other on the stock exchange and the hope that your factory will be profitable and you'll buy back their stock. You don't sell stock to raise money,

you buy stock to do something with your money. Where did you get the factory? How do companies

raise money if not on a stock exchange? One simple answer is, you built the factory back in the

olden days when you raised money on the stock market. Now you already have the factory, so you don't

need money to build it and can buy back stock instead. More specifically, this answer might mean

that public companies are older than they used to be. In the olden days, lots of companies would go

public and raise money and spend it on investments. Now fewer companies raise money, and the ones that are still around from the olden days,

...