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, November 19th, and today we are talking about the latest in the long, strange journey of backed. 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 buy a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod.

All right, friends, well, we have a funny one to start. You might have been following along the

long-sorted tale of BACT. This was a company that was founded all the way back in 2018 by

ICE, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange. Their original idea was to offer physically

settled Bitcoin futures to institutional traders, and in the depth of that crypto-winter,

they were seen as the institutional savior, the company that was going to bring institutional

investors into the market. But it never really exactly got off the ground. The platform later pivoted to custody and other

back-end infrastructure and went public via SPAC in 2021, but never managed to achieve profitability,

and its shares were down 96% since listing. In February of this year, back disclosed they had

about 12 months of runway left. In April, they executed a 25-1 reverse stock split to

avoid being delisted from the NASDAQ due to their share price falling below a dollar.

While now, it seems like there may be a future for the company yet, as Donald Trump's media

group is reportedly in advance talks to acquire them. According to reporting from the FT,

the group, which also owns Truth

Social, is closing in on an all-share purchase of the crypto platform. Markets are excited.

Backstock has almost tripled in price since the news broke. Unsurprisingly, Trump Media Group

itself has seen their stock price soar in the wake of the election result. Despite only generating

$2.6 million in revenue last year, the company has a

$6 billion valuation. That, of course, gives them plenty of space to use their stock to make

acquisitions. Trump currently owns 53% of the group and said in September that he has no plans of

...