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, January 2nd, and today we are talking about everything that happened during the holiday break.

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.

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to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, welcome back to a new year. I am so excited to be here

with you all. And this one is kicking off a hell of a lot more fun than we were last year at this time.

And you can see that in the stories that happened over the course of the holiday break.

Now, there was a ton going on.

It was a busy time for the industry.

And so today we are going to wham slam through the big highlights, which will set us up,

I think, for the beginning of this year.

Now, obviously, and of course, we have to do an ETF check-in to kick off. The final days of 2023 saw a rush of activity surrounding the Bitcoin ETF applications.

Updated S1 prospectus filings came flooding in from most applicants. Now, in this round of

updates, the final details are getting nailed down. For example, all products are now seeking

to launch with cash-only share creation and redemption mechanisms. This means that authorized

participants won't be able

to deposit and withdraw Bitcoin directly from the funds. There was a whole question around whether

BlackRock was going to be able to do a hybrid structure, but that has been tamped down.

Now, speaking of authorized participants, we also got our first look at which market-making

firms will be servicing the new products. Each asset manager has a slightly different choice of partnerships, but the big names like

Virtue and Jane Street are heavily represented.

...