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 produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, February 10th. And today we are doing part two of

Python politics, the U.S. government's slow squeeze on crypto via the banking system.

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 in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod.

Now, first up, I know that there are a ton of things going on right now as I'm recording

this on Thursday afternoon, actually. It appears as though Cracken has made a settlement with the SEC.

I will use the weekly recap coming out on Saturday to get into that stuff, but this is part

two of this special kind of background series on this broader set of crackdown type actions that

we're seeing, and that many have been noticing especially this week. If you haven't listened to

yesterday's Part 1 yet, I definitely suggest you go do that now. That episode lays out first the

slate of events in the last month and a half or so that show this slow squeeze of crypto

via the U.S. banking system. Second, I get into the key recent history of the main U.S. banking

regulator, the office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And specifically Brian regulator, the office of the comptroller of the currency.

And specifically Brian Brooks, who headed that office up, who had previously been the GC at Coinbase.

In our story so far, we'd seen how Brooks had used his six-ish months in office to open up

crypto custody for nationally regulated banks, to ensure that those institutions could work with

stablecoin issuers, and to try

to stop banks from being legally able to prejudice customers based on the industry they operated

...