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, May 17th, and today we are talking about one of the biggest

weeks in crypto legal history. 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 dive deeper into

the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go

to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends. Well, usually on Friday we have the Friday 5, but for a

couple of scheduling reasons, we did not do that today. And honestly, it works out because we have a big

follow-up from yesterday's show. Of course, we're talking about the SEC's Staff Accounting Bulletin

121 and the vote to repeal it.

This has become a huge line-in-the-sand type of issue in D.C. when it comes to crypto, and yesterday

something pretty dramatic happened. The Senate passed the bill to repeal SB 121 by a vote of 60 to 32.

12 Democrats broke ranks to vote for the bill.

The bill will now go to the president's desk to be signed into law,

and we'll have to wait and see if the Biden administration carries through with their threat to veto it.

Now, once again, the bulletin suggests that crypto custodians should place customer assets on their own balance sheet.

This removes the ability to provide

bankruptcy remote custody and functionally prevents commercial banks from providing custody services.

The guidance was criticized by the GAO, aka the government accountability office, for being

effectively a rule that was passed without going through the standard rulemaking procedure.

This GAO finding allowed SAB-121 to be subjected to congressional oversight, which is how this bill

came about.

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