Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond.

This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Cipher Trace. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

And now, here's your host, NLW.

Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Friday, June 19th, and today my guest is Dr. Vikram Man Sharmani, the author of the new book, Think for Yourself. It's a really

extending and wide-ranging conversation, and I'm super excited to share it with you. But first,

the brief. First up on the brief today, FDX is listing Compounds token. So what happened?

Compound is obviously making news everywhere. I covered it briefly on the brief

yesterday. It is sort of the new Defy hotness and it is dragging a number of concepts to the

forefront in Defy, including yield farming and all these other really interesting decentralized

financial engineering concepts effectively. What happened is that FTX is going to list both

comp and CUSDT. CUSDT is compound's interest token and comp is compound's governance token. The price

of comp has rocketed up. It was over $200 per comp when I was recording this. And the total

market cap in comp is now over what Maker is. So

obviously a leading defy light. Why is this interesting? I mean, for me, the real nut of it is

that there is clearly bull market energy around defy, and even if that doesn't reflect a new

influx of users or buyers to actually kind of drive those big gains, it certainly suggests

a real excitement that if you are watching the crypto industry is worth noting.

Before I leave this, I want to quickly go over who I think should care about Defi, and right

now I think there are really two main categories. The first is, honestly, just people who have the

time to dig in deep on some really novel concepts that straddle both financial engineering as well as

technical engineering. If you are willing to take some time and learn, and you are interested in

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