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 sponsored by crypto.com, nexo.io, and elliptic, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, October 25th, and that means it's time for long

reads Sunday. And today, as I sometimes do, I'm actually going to read two shorter pieces

that I think go together and frame an important conversation that's on the rise

right now.

The discussion of central bank digital currencies heats up it feels by the week.

We keep seeing international organizations talking more about them, but I think even in the

last week, the biggest thing that I saw was that PayPal was so clearly thinking about

CBDCs when they were

releasing their new cryptocurrency features. They clearly want to be a layer that interoperates

between those digital currencies and every other type of digital currency. But with that background,

it's worth exploring what some others are discussing in the space. So today we're going to have two pieces,

and the first comes from Benoit-Cure. Ben-Wa is the head of the innovation hub at the Bank for

International Settlements and a member of the bank's executive committee. He was previously a member

of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank. From 2013 to 2019, he chaired the BIS's committee

on payments and market infrastructures, so what I'm saying is that this first piece is from

The Insider's Insider, and it's titled, CBDCs mean evolution, not revolution, and it was on

CoinDesk this week. Who wants a central bank digital currency?

Plenty of people, apparently. Industry groups are advocating digital cash.

Millions of people have reportedly signed up to a lottery to receive digital renminbi in Shenzhen

...