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, December 15th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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 in the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. We are cruising through the

end of the year into the beginning of the next and so much of what will be a big deal for the

crypto industry is going to be around the first hundred days of this Trump presidency.

Today we have two pieces, one looking backward, one looking forward, And the first of those is by Ben Schiller over

at CoinDesk, and it's called Proof of Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Let's turn it over to AI to read this,

and then we'll come back and discuss. Proof of Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Newly released documents

from the FDIC show a concerted federal effort to debank crypto companies

showing long-held theories were correct. So now we know. Operation Choke Point 2.0 was real.

There really was a coordinated federal government effort to debank crypto following the collapse

of three mid-sized crypto-friendly lenders, signature Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank, in March 23.

The crypto industry, led by VC commentator Nick Carter, has long suspected and railed against

debanking, but until today, we didn't have much documentary evidence. Friday morning, internal

communications at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp were released after a research firm,

History Associates, Inc., hired by Coinbase sued to get them uncovered.

The heavily redacted documents emerged on Friday showing the banking regulator slamming the brakes on lenders offering or considering products and services in the digital asset sector,

Coindex Jesse Hamilton wrote in his report today.

We respectfully ask that you pause all crypto-asset-related activity. The FDIC wrote in one of 23

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