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 Friday, September 1st, and today we are catching up on crypto, on macro, on all the things.

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breakdown pod. Well, friends, the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall is here. We are kicking

off the best season of the year with tons of catch up across both macro and crypto. And we're going

to start with a follow-up on what is obviously the biggest story and theme of the week, which was

grayscale's defeat

of the SEC in their lawsuit and the implications for spot Bitcoin ETF approval.

Now, somehow, apparently some people thought that just because they lost in court, the SEC

was likely to turn right around and approve an ETF. That, of course, was not the case,

and the SEC have in fact deferred their

decisions on approving spot Bitcoin ETFs until at least October. On Thursday, the agency filed to

defer decision-making across all seven ETF applications that were filed in June, including

applications from BlackRock, Vanek, and Bitwise. Now, even though they didn't make the decision now,

that Tuesday publication of the court order delivering victory to grayscale was widely viewed as moving the needle

on the likelihood of an ETF approval. In the wake of the decision, Bloomberg analysts

had bumped up their odds of an ETF approval by the end of this year to 75%. Still, they cautioned

that their expectation was, of course, that the SEC would defer decision-making

this week. Markets reacted pretty dramatically to the grayscale order on Tuesday, with Bitcoin

pumping more than 7.5% on the news. That move has now been completely retraced on the delays,

...