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 Thursday, June 15th, and today we are talking about the Fed's rate pause, or is it a pivot? We will discuss it all in a little bit. Before we do, however, a quick note, you really should be checking out the Breakers Discord. It is a place to discuss the latest episodes, the goings-on in the industry, stuff that's

happening in the broader economy, random hobbies, fun memes. It's all there, and you can find it

at bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, so as I mentioned, we are back on the macro side of

things digging into yesterday's FOMC announcement and all the

implications thereof. But one quick thing I wanted to flag, coming either tomorrow or Saturday,

we're doing a show about this massively strange Prometheum affair. If you've been on Twitter the

last couple days, you've probably seen something about it, but here's the teaser.

Prometheum co-CEO Aaron Kaplan was one of the witnesses at a hearing before Congress on Tuesday.

Now, he was really a star witness for the Democrat position, given that he said that they had been able to register with FINRA as an alternative trading system just last month.

Now, of course, if you've listened to this show, you know that Crypto's position has been

that the SEC's notion of just coming in and registering is total BS.

But if Prometheum could, does that validate everything that Gensler has said?

Indeed, Kaplan's views seem to be closely aligned with establishment Democrats.

And frankly, at times in the hearing, he almost

appeared to be reading prepared answers to highly specific questions. Now, towards the end of the

hearing, Republican Mike Flood forced Kaplan to make it clear that under the terms of his registration,

his exchange was not allowed to offer Bitcoin or Ethereum. That, of course, questions how functional

that kind of registration is in the first place. Now, that generated a whole new set of

questions on crypto Twitter, where everyone put on their Sherlock Holmes hats and basically

started digging into just what the hell is going on with this company. There have now been

a seemingly endless string of interesting tidbits and innuendo, and I think

...