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 Saturday, July 22nd, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

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 on the breakers Discord. You can find a link at the show notes or go to bit.ly slash

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All right, guys, we have a fun one catching up on a number of interesting pieces of news.

Just one quick additional thing before we get into that.

I want to take a moment to tell you about the sponsor of today's episode in Wolf's clothing.

Wolf is the first startup accelerator dedicated

to Lightning and Bitcoin companies, and it's really just an awesome program for anyone who's

building in this space. It's an entirely in-person program that happens in New York City in this

incredible office. There's mentorship, there's guaranteed funding, and you also get to hang out with a group

of Bitcoin Builder peers. Wolf has just opened up applications for their third cohort, and I

highly recommend you go check it out. Go to WolfNyC.com to learn more, and I hope that you apply.

But with that, let's move to today's show, and we're going to start with our first topic, which is

that Fed Now is here. Yes, the long-awaited Fed Now instant payment system went live on Thursday.

The new system, operated by the Federal Reserve, will allow the 35 financial institutions and

16 service providers participating in the initial testing phase to now be able to transfer payments

between institutions near instantly. This eliminates the previous wait time of days for clearance of

transactions using other Fed systems. One of the key benefits for Fed now is that payments between

...