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 Saturday, June 17th, and today we are talking about what is genuinely in a world, an industry full of absolutely bat-should crazy stories. The most baddest shittiest crazy story of the year. Before we get into that, if you're enjoying the breakdown, please subscribe

to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

and I think you might after this one, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in

the notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, so on Thursday, June 15th,

Jake Trevinsky of the Blockchain Association tweeted,

Today, Blockchain Association sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the SEC, seeking

documents related to its dealings with Prometheum. This whole story, Prometheum's ATS, its CEO's

testimony in Congress, makes no sense. Something fishy is going on here. Maria Toshman-Koppel and I will get to the bottom of it.

So today we are talking about how we went from an organization no one had heard of at the beginning of the

week to the blockchain association filing an FOIA request by the end of it. Two weeks before the SEC

began their latest barrage of lawsuits, some interesting news circulated.

A crypto firm had been granted registration. For months, Gary Gensler's talking points have been focused on how easy registration is. Just fill in a form on a website, he said, and you're good

to go. His claim, of course, was that crypto firms simply didn't want to do it. Now, Coinbase and other

major firms in the industry had called

this rhetoric preposterous, stating that they had been taking meetings and trying for years,

but failed to get anywhere. It was therefore a bit of a surprise when reporting surfaced that Finra,

the industry-funded oversight arm of the SEC, had approved its first crypto broker dealer.

That firm was Prometheum, which again, and I can't

stress this enough, basically no one had ever heard of. The firm said that they had received

approval as a special purpose broker dealer, as well as an alternative trading system,

...