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, July 11th, and today we are talking about the latest in the Prometheum saga, as well as a very, very weird event from yesterday on crypto Twitter.

Before we get into that, 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. We're going to bit.

ly slash breakdown pod. Today, my friends, is weird. Honestly, these are the types of stories

that get people to just disengage with this industry a little bit. But if you are listening

at this point, you are the

definition of enfranchised, so here we go. We're going to start with Prometheum, and the hyper-TLDR

on Prometheum is that it is nominally a trading platform that was trotted out as an example by the

SEC of how a crypto firm could register. In fact, their CEO even testified before Congress recently.

However, when pushed, it didn't actually seem like Prometheum could sell crypto at all, because

the platform couldn't sell commodities and securities at the same time, all of which sort of

dramatized the need for a different regulatory regime. Now, the range of opinions in the crypto community

had on the one hand that they were a convenient tool for the SEC to use versus being a straight-up

SEC or CCP plant, as you will see. Now, we released an entire podcast covering that scandal on

June 17th if you want to get the full details. But by way of background,

before we get to the update in the story, and putting a little bit more meat on this bone,

Prometheum is a company that was among the first to obtain FINRA registration as a special

purpose broker dealer with crypto assets. Prometheum CEO, Aaron Kaplan, did a round of media

appearances holding up Prometheum as an example of how crypto exchanges could be

compliant with existing securities regulations. Their pitch was that the existing large players

in the industry simply didn't want to come into compliance with the existing rules, a line that

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