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 Tuesday, September 12th, and today we are talking about all of this dust-up with Fortress and the ripple acquisition and what it means and who you should be mad at.

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. All right, friends, well, today we are talking about one of the biggest

discussion points for the last week or so on Twitter, which has been the issues surrounding

Fortress Trust. Let's begin our particular slice of the story on Friday when

Ripple announced that they had acquired Fortress Trust. Now, the deal was pitched as an expansion

of Ripple's regulated crypto offering as they built out a vertically integrated blockchain

services product suite, and Monica Long, the president of Ripple said in a statement,

licenses are a powerful

enabler to build and deliver best-in-class customer experiences for enterprises using Ripple's

crypto infrastructure across our payments and liquidity solutions. What she was referring to is the

fact that Fortress Trust holds a Nevada State Trust license, which allows it to custody crypto

and act as a financial intermediary with the traditional

financial system. This would add then to Ripple's existing strategy of accumulating licenses.

Between Ripple and its subsidiaries, the corporate group now holds 30 state money transmitter

licenses, a New York State Bit license, and a major payment institution license from the

monetary authority of Singapore. So commentary over the weekend on this

fell into two camps. On the one hand, this could have simply been Ripple buying a company to add a

custody service to its one-stop shop approach to crypto. On the other hand, many viewed this as a

quiet bailout of Fortress. And indeed, the Friday acquisition announcement was slightly strange in tone.

...