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 Monday, June 8th.

And today I'm starting a week-long experiment with something I'm going to be calling

breakdown briefs, at least for this

week. And the basic idea is that there's a lot of stuff that I think you guys come to the breakdown

for. Part of it is great guests who are looking at not only the world of Bitcoin, but about

macro and geopolitics and even cultural shifts that help explain the context that Bitcoin operates in.

But then there's also the day-to-day analysis of what's actually

happening in this industry right now. So I'm going to try for the next week to have at the beginning

of each episode a brief, which is going to be three quick stories, a what and a why for each

story, why it matters, followed by that day's either featured guest or the feature topic,

if I'm just doing a deep dive on a topic myself.

So with that, let's dive into the first ever breakdown brief.

Story number one, over the weekend, it came out that Brave had been redirecting with a Binance

ref code. So basically what happened was a user on Twitter called Cryptinator saw that when you type

Binance.us into the Brave browser, it automatically added a reflink. And this obviously was not a

great look for this company, which is all about privacy, to automatically add something to a user's

feed. Brendan Ike, the CEO of that company, quickly came to Twitter and said,

hey, we made a mistake and explained their policy on using reference links as a way to

...