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, August 19th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

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Now, today we are catching up on a ton of legal updates that have happened this week.

This continues to be the big theme of this bear market is legal cleanup, legal proceedings,

legal, blah, blah, blah, which unfortunately is just sort of part of the phase that we have to get through before we get to the exciting stuff like, you know, usage and excitement and whatever, anything that isn't just legal stuff, but here we are.

However, I want to start with something that is a little bit more on the market structure side,

given the dump that we had on Thursday. So in the middle of the week, the block started reporting

that yet another crypto market maker was pulling back. Apparently long-time crypto marketmaker was pulling back. Apparently, longtime crypto market maker, GSR, has been scaling

down operations during the bare market. Now, this is a firm that has been active in crypto order

book since 2013. They had already conducted two rounds of layoffs and appeared to have also lost

multiple executives and department heads. The firm's chief financial officer, Jonathan Hugh,

has been the highest profile departure. He joined the firm in 2021 and helped

build out the company's finance department. Anonymous sources speaking with the block criticized the

firm for expanding too rapidly during the height of the bull market. GSR brought on scores of

traditional financial professionals to help expand the firm. In 2020, the firm had just 25 employees,

but the number went up to more than 300 at its peak. One source said,

quote, the executive team is mostly friends, and I think it threw off a lot of the momentum

...