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 Sunday, September 29th, and that means it's time for Long

Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go

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conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link of the show notes or go

to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, for much of the last two years, the

crypto industry has operated under the shadow of what many have come to call Operation

chokepoint 2.0. This, of course, refers to a campaign of quiet and sometimes not so quiet

pressure by U.S. regulators on existing U.S. financial infrastructure in the form of banks

and other institutions

to decline of their own volition to service the crypto industry. No one has been more omnipresent

in following and tracking what has been going on than venture capitalist Nick Carter. He was the

person who first popularized the term, and now he's back with a deep analysis around how it played out in the

context of Silvergate Bank. The piece that we're reading today is called Inside the Biden

Admin's plot to destroy Silvergate and debank crypto for good. It was published on the excellent

pirate wires, and as Nick puts it towards the end, sticking up for a bank that did business with FTCS

suffered a bank run was voluntarily liquidated by management then settled with three different

regulators is not an enviable task. But an injustice visited upon a flawed subject is no less

of an injustice. The piece uses new bankruptcy filings and exclusive interviews with

confidential sources that together suggests Silvergate could

have survived if not for pressure from regulators. This is a long one, so of course I turn to AI

...