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.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, December 15th, and boy, is there a lot to catch up on today.

First, we are going to talk about the stable coin hearing in the Senate yesterday. It was the Senate Banking Committee.

And this was, of course, the follow-up to the

overwhelmingly and perhaps even surprisingly positive House Financial Services Committee

last week. If you missed my episode about the House Financial Services Committee hearing on

crypto, it was unexpectedly positive, proactive, bipartisan. This was the hearing that had a set of crypto

CEOs from Coinbase, FTX, Circle, and more. And really, the standout thing from that session

was the sense that these lawmakers were now treating this industry, this technology, as something that existed,

as something that had lots of potential, as something that had specific issues that they wanted to

deal with, but as something that was here, not to be banned out of existence, not to be

regulated away, but something real and potentially positive. And that was the tone

from both sides. There were still plenty of people who had specific issues or issues that they

cared more or less about than others, but it was a very encouraging moment. Heading into this one,

there was a lot more expectation of contentiousness, and that's for a few reasons.

First, Senate Banking Committee chair, Sherrod Brown, has made Stable Coins a focus.

At the end of November, he sent letters to a number of stablecoin issuers with a set of

rather pointed questions that he wanted answered. On top of that, we also have recently had the

President's Working group report on stable

coins, which advocated among other things that only depository institutions be able to issue

...