The Breakdown dives into the deepest topics in crypto, blockchain, and the macro forces shaping markets and power structures. Each episode breaks down complex ideas into clear, grounded analysis — separating signal from noise across crypto, finance, and geopolitics. Hosted by David Canellis, The Breakdown features explainers, interviews, and conversations with the people building, regulating, and challenging the financial system. A Blockworks podcast. Subscribe to The Breakdown newsletter: https://the-breakdown.carrd.co/
2027 episodes transcribedDavid maps the current Bitcoin bear market against every prior one — where we are, how much longer it could run, and where the bottom could land. F...
A Google engineer allegedly profited $1.2 million on Polymarket betting that d4vd would be Google's most-searched person of 2025 — using Google's own...
Polsia (AI Slop spelled backwards) just announced a $30M raise at a $250M valuation with one human employee. David thinks it's less a company, more pe...
It's Bitcoin Pizza Day, and David runs through three Friday stories: Hyperliquid breaking all-time high (and why the buyback isn't really the driver),...
David unpacks the Ethereum Foundation exits, the Polymarket / UMA Oracle dispute mess revealed by the WSJ, and OpenAI's push to sell guaranteed comput...
Nick Almond of the Jito Foundation joins David to walk through why DAO governance is a mess, what “pragmatic decentralization” looks like in practice,...
Hyperliquid enabled early exposure to the biggest AI IPO of the year. Claude helped recover a Bitcoin wallet locked for 11 years. And CLARITY made it...
Bhutan timed the Bitcoin top almost perfectly. The CLARITY Act may only let 10–20 chains qualify as “decentralized.” And onchain Pokémon cards are pop...
David covers three Monday stories: the NFT mini-revival (Bored Apes doubled in a month), Canton raising $300M at a $2B valuation, and Saylor's AI rap...
David covers three Friday stories: Coinbase's hours-long outage on the back of an AWS cooling failure, the data on whether prediction markets are actu...
David covers three Wednesday stories: Coinbase laying off 14% of staff, a16z Crypto raising $2.2 billion, and Strategy losing $12.5 billion as CEO Pho...
David runs through three Monday morning stories: the viral Clavicular clip with Polymarket’s CMO, the CLARITY Act’s compromise on stablecoin yield, an...
DeFi just raised $302 million to cover losses from the Kelp DAO hack. David calls it what it is: a bailout. David runs through four stories from the...
North Korea has had IT workers embedded in DeFi protocols since DeFi Summer — and they’re pretty good devs. Nick Bax, blockchain investigator and SEA...
Someone guessed Anthropic’s Mythos URL, gained unauthorized access to the most hyped AI model in history, and used it to build websites. David cove...
Crypto might be the world’s best test bed for AI trading — and Virtuals Protocol is running the experiment live. Weekee Tiew, co-founder of Virtuals...
Trump's Fed pick has 30-plus crypto investments — and that's just what he could disclose. David walks through Warsh's filing, a Polymarket bot built o...
AI is reprogramming the social fabric — and nobody can agree whether that’s a good thing. Kevin O’Leary, investor and entrepreneur, joins us to share...
x402 just got a lot bigger. The Linux Foundation is now backing it — and maybe Amazon, Google, Stripe, Mastercard, and American Express along with the...
AI agents are coming online fast — and the payment rails for that world are being built right now. David breaks down the race between Coinbase’s x402...
