Bingo, bango, bongo, to me, that is the real story.

The utter lack of liquidity, a growing amount of leverage, peak market boredom, and this is just the type of stuff that happens sometimes.

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 Friday, August 18th, and today we are talking about the massive crypto crash. 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 get deeper into the 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. Hello, friends, happy Friday. Yesterday I shared a

meme with my wife. It was a tweet that read, Hi, I have a question about toddlers, and my question is what the fuck. Now, we are doing a little end of summer trip with the four and the two-year-old before the four-year-old heads off to kindergarten, so it struck the old funny bone.

It was also, exactly how I felt, when I checked the markets yesterday after about three hours of being away from my phone, to discover that they had completely nuked.

So, friends, now you get to play ketchup alongside me

because I have a question about markets and my question is what the f***. This week's price action

began much the same as it has throughout the past month. Bitcoin was painfully rangebound with

basically zero volatility and muted volume. In fact, since the last week of July, Bitcoin has been

stuck between 29,000 and 30,000,

spending only a few hours marginally outside of that range. On Wednesday night, price began

trending down, drifting below 29,000. Bitcoin hit 28,000 just before midday on Thursday,

a move that would have been significant by itself. In fact, Bitcoin lost 4% over the course of

Thursday morning,

including a 1.6% drawdown in 1 hour at 11 a.m. This was the lowest level that Bitcoin had

traded at since the bullish catalyst of the BlackRock ETF application in early June.

Then, at around 5.40 p.m., Bitcoin flash crashed. In less than 10 minutes, the price plummeted by more than 9%.

Bitcoin hit 25,000 on Binance and plunged slightly lower on Bitfinex.

...