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 Friday, May 9th, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. 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. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, we are back with another Friday 5 with Scott Melker.

Now, note this one was recorded on Thursday afternoon. I always like to say that in case some crazy thing happened on Thursday night and you're like, what the hell are you doing? How did you miss this important thing? In any case, this week we have a little bit of a redressing of the balance. It's a lot of crypto news, actually. It's not just everything in the shadow of

the trade wars and et cetera, et cetera, although we will cover some of that as well. We've got a

combination of policy, some big acquisitions. It's actually a pretty diverse week, so without any

further ado, let's dive in.

It's the Thursday evening five, just in case, you know, the entire world explodes by Friday.

But yeah, we're recording this.

Hard from impossible.

It happens every time we try this.

So it's almost guaranteed.

But we've got some big stories.

And once again, man, we've got to look at Washington.

I mean, this was a crazy, crazy week.

We pretty much thought that stable coin legislation was a slammed up by Protestant support,

crypto army, you know, anti-cryptal army was completely dead. It didn't exist anymore. And then

we had complete mayhem and insanity. Maybe you just break it down.

Boy, there's so much to break down. I think that what I would say, and I'll start with the

good news, it's not clear to me that this is exclusively the return of the anti-crypto army. There's a piece of that,

but then there's also this other piece, which is a very different story. So let's try to unpack

those two sides. So the first is, let's talk about the straight-up, theatrics, anti-crypto-armie side of

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