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 Wednesday, August 23rd, and today we are catching up with all the latest intrigue around Binance.

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. Hello friends. Welcome back to the breakdown. When we survey the landscape,

the wreckage, some might say, of this industry after the last year or year and a half,

it is pretty clear what the biggest hanging Chad or threat left is.

One might argue that there's still contentiousness around DCG and whether it will be able to

successfully get itself out of this Genesis situation. There's obviously a lot of jawboning about

that and recriminations flying back and forth between Barry and the Winklevosses. But the bigger

threat, at least that most people identify, or perhaps not threat but concern, is whether Binance is really doing as okay as they say

they are. CZ has been quick to wipe away story after story with his customary four, indicating that

everything is just fud, and it is certainly the case that there has been an extraordinary amount of leakage

from various U.S. government offices around their investigations into Binance in ways that have

led some to assume that they don't actually have the goods on Binance, and so we're just trying

to try them in the court of public opinion. This week we got even more of all of that when on

Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported

that Binance is still facilitating large amounts of Russian transactions, raising the question

of whether the exchange is flouting Western sanctions. The article claimed that, quote,

via layers of intermediaries, clients can turn funds that sanctioned banks into balances

at Binance, while Binance also enables peer-to-peer

...