Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Saturday, February 22nd, and today we are, as every Saturday, doing a quick

recap of the week before posting all five episodes of the breakdown, or in this case,

four we took Monday off, but all four episodes in one long, easy to consume thread. So the story

of this week, I think, was a couple things. First, it was all about defy attacks and really the

surface area of defy that gives rise to new types of attacks. So we saw attacks on BZX that started last weekend and went into

this week that brought up a huge number of new questions. So on Monday and Tuesday, actually,

we explored both of those things. On Tuesday, we had Chain Links founder Sergei Nazaroff to

actually talk about them. But I think it's been really interesting to watch the emergence

of adversarial thinking in the defy community, as in people are now looking at every single

protocol, every single platform, and saying, how could people attack this in new ways? What can we do

to get ahead of it? Which, as we've seen from Bitcoin, can be a very good way to think.

The second story of this week has to be the radical dip that happened on Wednesday where

we had gotten very comfortable at this $10,000 price level. It had gone down, it had gone back up,

and so on and so forth. And then in five minutes, the price of Bitcoin cratered something like

5%. And it's not exactly clear what it was. It might have been Binance and Coinbase going down

at the same time. It might have been something else. But either way, I think it gave rise to a lot

of conversations about the power of exchanges in the context of the crypto industry.

So lots and lots happening this week.

We also saw more from the Central Bank Digital Currency Front as Sweden pilots,

...