The Breakdown - Can NFTs & Crypto Create Cultural Revolutions?

Episode Date: March 28, 2021

On this edition of “Long Reads Sunday,” NLW reads David Hoffman’s essay “The Digital Cultural Revolution” from Bankless. The essay argues that culture, more than economics, will be the most important long-term beneficiary of the rise of crypto.  -- Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io -- Enjoying this content?   SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=   Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW   The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.com

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. The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, Casper, and Exodus, and produced and distributed by CoinDes. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, March 28th, and that means it's time for Long Reads Sunday. Now, the question we're exploring today is, can crypto-create cultural revolutions? I've said, frequently on this show that the way I think about what I cover is fundamentally about shifts in power. Why I cover Bitcoin so much is that I think it is a significant, meaningful part of shifting power at a global macroeconomic level. Why I cover other things less in the crypto industry is that it

feels to me like many of them have potential, but certainly aren't macro forces yet. In other words, yes, one can see how defy might leave traditional financial processes in the dust, but it hasn't really started to chip away at them as yet, despite massive growth over the last year. NFTs, when I've covered them, have been primarily in the context of power, such as the power to break the record label business models in the music industries. So, when I saw someone write a piece about why some of these areas can and will inspire cultural revolutions fundamentally about shifts in power, I thought it was worth giving it a read. The piece is The Digital Culture Revolution by David Hoffman, and it appeared first in the bankless newsletter. If you are interested in

defy or anything in this space, bankless is an absolute startup media juggernaut. They're putting out an insane amount of content, so go check it out. With that, let's read the digital culture revolution. The cryptocurrency revolution is typically viewed as a revolution in money and technology. Crypto-economic systems promise to usher in a new age of unbridled value transfer and value expression via the improvements in both scarce financial assets and technological mediums for leveraging these assets. Together, technology and money compose so much of what makes society's society. When we change these things, we change everything. Much of what defines a society is mediated by the technological tools we have available to create

cultural expression. The cryptocurrency revolution is a revolution in money and technology, but the legacy of crypto will instead be a renaissance in human culture. Crypto Culture The world of cryptocurrency has cultivated its own unique culture, values, and communication styles. There are esoteric terminology, slangs, and memes, and people are versed in their ability to express these things through purely digital means. The crypto-economic

foundations that make up this industry, Bitcoin and Ethereum, are responsible for creating the environment from which crypto-culture has been established. The specific flavor of cultural expression found in crypto-culture is directly downstream of the code that produces Bitcoin and Ethereum. The values that are baked into these crypto-economic systems extend outwards from the code itself and into the community, and the art that we share in value. There is a relationship between the nature of cryptography that underpins these systems and the resultant communities that come to surround them. Value, a collective agreement. If something has value, it's because humans collectively agree that it does. Value is true because humans make it so. It's a myth maintained by the social

layer shared by the collective. Value is intangible, yet it is a powerful, unifying force of everyone that shares the myth. Because all humans know all others believe in the same story, value becomes self-fulfilling. A definition. Value? The monetary worth of something. The importance or usefulness of something, a fair return or equivalent in goods and services. Values. A person's principles or standards of behavior. One's judgment of what is important in life. The assets that humans value are determined by our values. The market value of our financial assets is derived from our values created by the ethic that we live by. The true power behind the cryptocurrency revolution is in its ability to eliminate the is-ought gap between what humans value and human values. With crypto,

humans have the tools to become more closely aligned with how we desire to be. The net result of crypto is the production of new cultural expression vehicles that enable humans to express their values with fidelity. This is critically important and is perhaps the prime reason to why this industry is so massively revolutionary. Humanity is perpetually on a mission to discover ways to express what it sees as good and crypto offers a platform that makes this process more effective, efficient, and accurate. Most humans are good and want to do good things for the world. Most humans wake up with the intention of helping improve society in whatever ways they can while still making ends meet and living a comfortable life. Our ability to achieve good results depends on the system that humans

use to organize and coordinate. Not all organization systems are equally capable of enabling humans to successfully achieve the desired result of being good. Certain environments and human organizational schemes enable the expression of more good than others. Environments flushed with resources make it easier to reduce suffering and to spread wealth, which is good, but there's variability in how humans manage to organize inside the environment they find themselves in. It's one thing if there are ample resources, but being able to distribute these resources in good ways requires organizational scaffolding to enable it. Organizational schemes. As discussed in a bankless nation, humans have organized and then reorganized themselves under different schema across time, and these organizational

schema tend to be more and more socially scalable. Steve Jobs said technology is a bicycle for the mind, implying that innovations in technology enable the human brain to achieve more with less effort. Extrapolating from that single human brain to the collective human hive mind, new and improved human organizational schemes, feudalism, religion, the state, democracy, the internet, crypto, are enabled by innovations in social coordination technology. Our ability to organize and focus our energies is mediated by the technology we have at our disposal. Crypto offers new social scaffolding that allows us to better distribute our valuable resources in a way that is better aligned with our human values. Learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a term coined by Martin Seligman,

a pioneer of the positive psychology movement. Learned helplessness is a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression. Learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy, the individual's belief in their ability to achieve goals. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. Learned helplessness in society. Societal institutions are entrenched.

Wealth isn't circulating. Attempts to climb the social ladder and achieve the American dream are thwarted. Millennials are the first generation in history to believe that they are going to be worse off than their parents. Home ownership in young people is down. Inflation adjusted income is down. Debt is up, both in student loans and credit cards. A young person's positive beliefs about the future are at all time. Lowes. Millennials and Zumers are the two current generations in which positive beliefs about the

future are critically important. These two generations need to be positive about the future, as it's the primary source of motivation to get out of bed in the morning and work towards achieving goals. Young adults need to believe that they have the power to positively impact their own lives and the lives of people around them via their own agency and self-actualization. If they don't learn that these things are possible now, then the generations may become stuck in a state of learned helplessness. If you believe that the future is going to be worse, building motivation to expend the energy to try and build the better future will be difficult. If you don't believe that you have the ability to direct your own personal future for positive

outcomes, then why bother even try? Keep your head down, go to your 9 to 5, come home, watch Netflix. At least Netflix is only $12 a month. If you meal prep and don't eat so much avocado toast, you may even be able to pay off your credit card. Meanwhile, millennial and zoomer memes about depression, suicide, and loneliness are relentless on Instagram and Reddit. If a meme catches traction, it's because many people can relate to it. Internet memes are a way for young people to express their emotions and offer a way to funnel their depression and pessimism into a creative outlet. We should take notice that a common way to establish commonality and express oneself with internet strangers is via memes about depression, suicide, and loneliness. While these are

intended to be a lighthearted jest, they are also the product of an environment that millennials and zoomers find themselves in. Society is in a state of learned helplessness, and it's because our institutions are rigid, fixed, and designed to protect entrenched players and to protect the status quo. Unhelpful institutions. The institutions that were erected after the Great Depression in World War II produced one of the most progressive periods in human history. The 1950s to 2008 was one of the greatest periods of economic prosperity and technological advancement humanity had ever had. But just like everything else in this universe, institutions age. What was originally built to benefit all of society now only works for a small part of society. Older-generated,

were able to enjoy the best years of these newly established institutions, and they latched onto them and never let them go. Rather than passing the torch to younger generations and allowing the institutions of the 21st century to adapt, evolve, and be inclusive of further generations, older generations instead captured these 21st century institutions and sucked them dry. The older generations are also steering the ship of wealth and declining to pass control down the line. The last five presidents of the United States have been baby boomers. the United States has been led by a baby boomer since 1992. That's my entire lifespan.

Research leadership, or the direction we focus our energies into society R&D, is a baby boomer-led movement. At the same time that student debt is reaching critical levels, university administration is inflated and leadership decisions are made by baby boomers. It takes roughly the lifespan of one long human life for a social institution to be birthed, mature, then age, and become decrepit and senile, the generation that happens to be in their prime working years, during the era in which institutions are at their best, latch on to these institutions and capture all the value they create. By happenstance, the generation that was positioned to take advantage of the primers of these new institutions uses this era of prosperity

and wealth to further expand these institutions to their maximal degree, as these generations believe that these institutions are good. Obviously, they believe these institutions are good, because how much value in wealth they've created from the relevant generations. These new institutions are wealth-generating machines, and the generations that benefit from this wealth generation latch onto the institutions and proliferate them, into monolithic gargantuanes that grow to commandeer the lives of everyone. The generations that helped create these institutions never pass up the helm of the ship. They continue dictating the direction of everyone under the umbrella of these institutions, even though they were erected under completely different

leadership, under completely different paradigms. Society and generations move on, but the institutions stay the same. Eventually, there is such a large discrepancy between the needs of society and what the institutions in power are capable of offering. As a result, the generations that come after these lucky generations receive less and less of the wealth that is created by them, as the prior generations find more and more way to capture all the value that is produced. The wealth does not trickle down. Because these institutions never find new leadership, new brains, new innovators, or new entrepreneurs, they begin to age, just like the people that compose them. Eventually, they turn old and senile, too. and the social leadership these institutions offer is fundamentally misaligned with the desired goals of subsequent

generations that came after them. As a result, the social institutions reject the young folk. The young folk reject the institutions and a societal crisis occurs. In 2020, both the left and the right in America took to the streets and rioted. Younger people are increasingly pessimistic that we will be able to vote our way out of our issues because the older generations never seem to acknowledge their perspective. Instead of playing the society game, younger people seem to just rather opt out and make memes about depression and helplessness. They have learned that they cannot succeed in this environment because the institutions are not on their side. New institutions, new culture. Younger generations are in dire need of new institutions. We can see this in the ways they

attempt to express themselves in their culture. Younger generations are in a state of learned helplessness as they struggle to discover where they fit in today's society. Many are discovering that they actually can't find themselves a niche to build and excel in, and instead find ways to compromise on their expectations about the future and learn to be satisfied with minimum wage jobs and living with their parents. For younger generations, crypto culture is product, market fit. Our memes are hilarious. Our conversations are efficient, and our lifestyle is digital. Cryptoculture offers a new landscape of both economic output and cultural expression, and it is specifically tailored to digital nomads, forum surfers, laptop jockeys, counter-culturalist,

content producers, swipers, meme artists, bloggers, internet squads, cypherpunks. The cypherpunks created crypto culture. The history of crypto doesn't begin with Bitcoin in 2009. It begins with Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkel, Whitfield Diffy, Horst Feistel, Peter Elias, David Chom, and many others who were critical to the rise of cryptography in the cryptographic systems that our industry relies on. What started out as a counterculture fight against the establishment for the freedom of cryptographic information has blossomed into crypto-economic systems that create the foundational substrate on which infinite crypto cultures have been established. Cypherpunks know that

cryptographic protocols make social structures. Cypherpunks don't care if you don't like the software they write. Cypherpunks know that software can't be destroyed. Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. Cypherpunks will make the network safe for privacy. Cypherpunks write code. The story of the cypherpunks is a story of permissionless creation, a group of people banded together under a commonly shared set of beliefs and values, each with unique capabilities to contribute towards something they believed in and stood for. The desire to create. A counterculture of permissionless problem solving, a disregard for nonsensical, outdated establishment norms, a readiness to escape from tyranny and oppression and the willingness to venture into new lands.

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nothing stands between you and your assets. Take control of your crypto and download Exodus today. Visit the App Store or Google Play to download, or visit exodus.com for more information. Infinite cultures. Thanks to the efforts of the cypherpunks, we have an alternative universe for money and finance. The realm is uninhabited and fertile. There are just two things missing in this new landscape, people and structures. The migration of people and their capital into this new realm has perpetually grown ever since the first Bitcoin block was mined in 2009. Slowly but surely, people have been migrating into this new digital realm and setting up camp. These initial pioneers of crypto are most culturally similar to the cypherpunks that establish the foundation of this land in

the first place, independent adventuring creators who have a vision for the future outside of the status quo. Ever since Bitcoin was introduced in 2009, and especially since Ethereum was formed in 2015, the migrants into this digital realm have taken on different flavors than the purely cypherpunk cryptographers. Each new community that arrives in the Cryptoverse is a new spin on the OG cypherpunk culture, and each community brings something new to the table that expands the fold. One of the first communities that settled into the Cryptoverse were the libertarian goldbugs who saw the dormant potential that lay in Bitcoin. Each different application of the Cryptoverse entices its own varieties of users to migrate over.

After the ultra-libertarian gold bugs and early cypherpunks came more casual cohorts, all interested in a specific flavor of what crypto has to offer. Dogecoin brought in a cohort of internet memesters, Nick Carter came in via Doge. Bitshares brought in economic tinkers. Brune Christensen came in via BTS. Monaro and privacy coins brought in the privacy-minded. But with the introduction of Ethereum, an entirely new dimension opened up, Ethereum enables applications that don't want or care to be concerned with the fundamentals of what makes a crypto-economic system operate. App developers on Ethereum don't have to worry about the hard problems of crypto-economics,

monetary policies, security, consensus, etc. The Ethereum protocol takes on the hard problems of cryptoeconomic systems design, and lets the application developers focus on what they want to focus on, producing their application. This is a massive boon to cultural creation. By eliminating the labor and energy that needs to be dedicated to blockchain design and sustainability, app developers can focus on creating value in their apps and incentivizing a community to band together and circle around the campfire that app creates. Sadly, Dogecoin is just another L1 blockchain masquerading as a meme, and much of its vibrant community from 2013 to 2016 has moved on. Dogecoin was not place of final settlement for migrants looking to live inside the cryptoviverse. BitShare similarly was

economically flawed and constraining to developers. While Monaro and other privacy coins maintain a strong community, their growth hasn't kept up with the rest of the cryptovers. These systems have not proven to be sufficiently sticky for migrants to be convinced of settling there. This is the power of Ethereum's application layer, a foundational substrate that creates economic viability for all possible forms of culture to be expressed. The 2018-2019-Bair market saw a mass exodus from the crypto space. As capital leaves, so do the people. Yet a few communities managed to hold on and kept their fires going. The Link Marines, the Synthetic Spartans, the Ave Avengers. These communities suffered through significant drawdowns and asset values, then they suffered through two more years of flat

crypto prices before things began to pick up again. This was two years of poverty, two years of communities contracting into their truest and most convicted believers. The Discord channels for these communities were the campfires that kept that energy alive through a long cold winter. Community members turned into community leaders and tended to the fire to make sure it kept everyone warm. Culture was created in these shared experiences of unexciting low asset prices, yet relentless optimism and conviction about a successful future. Each different bear market community generated its own style of memes, jokes, and coping mechanisms as they awaited out the winter together. And then spring came. Ave, synthetics, Link, all violently ended their bare market

by completely rejecting the pessimism expressed by all other assets in crypto and led the charge into DeFi Summer 2020 and where we are today in the markets. DeFi Summer happened and out of it came the communities of yearn, sushi, yams, harvest, and many more. Each with massive treasuries to help fund the development of both the product and the community. Each ecosystem has its own contributors, investors, developers, leaders, organizers, meammers, and just believers. Some don't do much other than sitting at the campfire and be present, and that is enough. Each ecosystem has its own culture and that culture is alive due to shared conviction and sufficient funding via a collectively owned asset. The asset makes the community and the community makes the asset. These communities and

their shared cultures are amplified via the financial and economic tool that lies in their respective token. The token is the thing that funds these communities and allows them to tap into resources that help the community grow and proliferate. When these tokens go up in value, it brings in the community members who find resonance in the value of the token and the values of the community. NFTs are vehicles for cultural creation. The power that lies dormant under the innovation that is NFTs is about to erupt into the world of artistic creation. Justin Blow, more commonly known as Three Lao raised $12 million in 24 hours by selling a combination of digital collectibles, exclusive music, and the rights to musical direction. In return, Justin was able to create a

direct connection between his artistic creations and a list of 60 people that put $12 million into his pockets for the rights to those items. While Spotify is great for distribution, it sucks for data. That's because Spotify keeps all the data for itself. It provides the artists with no insights into who their fans are or the ability to communicate with them. Blow's top 60 fans were willing to collectively pay him $12 million, yet a platform like Spotify treats them like every other Blow fan, or worse, people listening via radio mix. As a result of the NFT tokens Justin Blow issued on Ethereum, his fans were more capable of communicating their value of the music he produces. Intermediaries broker the emotional relationship between artistic

creators and artistic consumers. With intermediaries replaced by financial and economic software on Ethereum, the expression of culture through the digital arts will be able to flourish. Art is simply the ability for an artist to strike the senses of the experiencer. What happens when we generate incentivization vehicles, tokens, for the funding and development of the digital arts, the emotional response humanity will be able to access from its art will be revolutionary. Lowering the barriers. Ethereum democratizes finance, and what is happening with NFTs is just the beginning of democratization of the value derived from art. Suddenly, the sharpest and most precise financial tool ever created is in the hands of the content creators and artists of the world. Through the power of tokens

and at the scale of the internet, Ethereum disintermediates the distribution of art between art creator and art consumer. We've already seen the immense amount of energy that ICOs sparked in 2016 to 2018, and ICOs made no sense at all. Yet the takeaway was Ethereum's innovation and capital formation. NFTs are taking the power of capital formation and directing it into the arts. Tokens are the tool for artistic creators of all scales to tap into the power of their creative energies and produce something of cultural expression. If the market values cultural expression, it will have the ability to communicate this to the creator through the token. How many jobs will Ethereum create by reducing the barriers for capital to flow into new lands

of artistic creation? How many labor hours can be redirected from meaningless tasks and gargantuan companies into the land of free market cultural generation? And if T's offer a way for the younger digitally native creators of the world to not rely on established and entrenched permissioned infrastructure to help fund their personal well-being. While the issue of large, misaligned social and political institutions are not simply fixed by NFTs, NFTs offer a cypherpunk alternative to allow the younger generations to bypass these gatekeeping institutions and empower them slash us to secure a livelihood outside the status quo. Not only did the legacy institutions of the world have to compete with the permissionless

labor monetization tools offered by Ethereum, they also have to compete with the lifestyle those tools offer, the freedom to work for oneself. No 9 to 5, no boss, just a creator, in their computer. The crypto-wealthy will subsidize digital art. It makes logical sense that NFT Spring is occurring after Defy's summer. It's simply the correct order of operations. ETH runs from 200 to 2000, along with insane amounts of new issuance from defy tokens, and hundreds of billions of dollars gets injected into the ecosystem. Meanwhile, this high-powered growth also drives in funding and investments into companies and supporting infrastructure as well, adding in jobs and salaries

in crypto. And now, this newly created wealth is rotating out of digital finance and into digital arts. This is only like the millionth historical example of this. Here's an excerpt from tracing Renaissance art to the birth of modern banking. When it comes to the Renaissance, few of us would immediately equate the rich cultural fruits of the period and the birth of the modern banking system. Entitled money and beauty, bankers Bottice and the vanities, the exhibition in Florence's Palazzo Strazi looks at how Florence's famous families got rich and how they then used their wealth to commission works from some of the world's most celebrated artists. Quote, you could say that some of these gestures were simply penitential, but then the banker begins to realize that in giving

them money, he can also begin to define the image that is produced by his money. And of course, one of the things he instinctively does, whether it's conscious or not, is to use the image to change the attitude to money, that is, begin to use the image to undermine the resistance to money, says Parks. Money was feared, he said, not only because Christianity espoused poverty, but crucially because it allowed for social mobility, and therefore undermine the set medieval hierarchies. Still, for a few years, the Medici's were in charge of papal finances. The artists were often happy to oblige in order to ensure their own economic prosperity. It's simple. Society advances and learns how to create wealth and prosperity. Wealth naturally concentrates and generates a wealthy

cohort of people who have nothing better to do than to fund and finance the art they wish to see created. Artists want to capture this wealth generated from innovations and finance and banking, and then they start making art that suits the tates of the wealthy. Entire revolutions in art have come and gone due in this cycle. Ethereum is the new frontier. We have completed the exploration of the Earth, and now the frontier of money, finance, and art has moved into the digital realm. The next cultural renaissance is digital, and it will be financed on Ethereum. Conclusion. The culture that is being created in this space is a result of the awakening of younger people

who are turning away from the notion of being simple cogs in the machine, and are instead focused on becoming self-actualized contributors to the world. Andrew Yang warns of a world in which much of the world's labor has been automated by machines and robots. We stand at a fork in the road where our future can turn into either a utopia or a dystopia, Without a place to redirect the energies of our younger generations into productive outputs, we will lose these generations forever to the basements of our parents, and the spirits of these generations could wither into nothingness. That's a dystopia.

But with a place in which creative energies can be expressed and valued, we have the opportunity of automating a way of low-value work and replacing it with time spent creatively. If robots are doing the labor and humans are creating art, that's a utopia. Let's choose the later. Let the robots flip burgers and let the people create art. Let's choose the future in which people are free from limitations on their past it's producing a livelihood for themselves and others. Let's choose Ethereum. Let's choose

crypto culture. All right, back to Nathaniel for just a minute. I just wanted to come with a couple of quick follow-up thoughts. One is, obviously, David is mostly focused on and most invested in the Ethereum community. I spend more time in the Bitcoin space, and one of the things that I see is commensurate and sort of his argument, and something that I think has been so important for the Bitcoin community is the power of community mythology at the beginning of an asset with world-changing ambitions. I've talked frequently about how significant, I think, the mythology of Satoshi, the mythology of the early cypherpunks, which David talks about as well are. I think that in the long run, most of the people who interact with Bitcoin won't have to care about them, but I think that the only

reason we'll get to the place where people don't have to care about them is the strength of these mythologies in the persistent bad periods that we had to get through on the way. Second, David is talking a lot about NFTs, and in some ways that's the part that attracted me to this piece as a mechanism by which culture can better express value and better integrate markets into its expression of value. And I think that's the way that I think about it. I think that he's dead on when he talks about this example of Blau finding the 60 people who were willing to give him $12 million. Well, it turns out that in the history of the music industry, we've never had a situation where you could identify out of your X,000 fans, which 12 of them were the most passionate,

and actually then put a value on it. Even something like Patreon, which is a very cool tool, is constrained by the design of the traditional internet, where what you do is you set up tiers and maybe you can add some special high tiers, but there's nothing comparable to the total free market dynamics that these sort of unique digital assets enable. I really think that a huge part of the disruption of the future is layering true markets into things and allowing value to flow where it really wants to flow rather than just where it's constrained to flow.

I think lastly, the piece that stands out the strongest to me when it comes to the disruptive cultural potential of crypto is not any of these details, but instead the belief in the possible that it opens up. These entire worlds were dreamed up and created out of nothing, and that is an immense thing to see and to experience and to be a part of and to have a hand in. Travis Kling tweeted on Thursday, Bitcoin is worth a trillion bucks and it's never spent a dollar on marketing, never had a CEO or a board meeting, never had a budget, never lobbied, never done a partnership, never hired a lawyer or an auditor, never existed in physical form. We've never had

anything like it. When you see that, when you dig into what that means, for David, it's different examples that he articulated, but when you go rub your nose in that sort of disruption, it fundamentally changes how you see the rest of the world. And more importantly, what you believe you can do in it. That, to me, is the real disruption of technology in general, but certainly on a much higher level Bitcoin and crypto. I think that these things aren't just organizing economies of scale efficiency and giving us powerful new tools in our pockets. These are fundamentally reorganizing the most important parts about how humans interact, markets, money, value exchange. And that is going to create entire waves that ripple out across

the eons. Anyways, guys, I hope you had fun with this one. This is very much. much in the spirit of long reads exploration, and I hope you're having a great Sunday. Until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. Hey, folks, Anna B Levine here. I'm CoinDesk's managing editor of podcasts. Would you like to turn your passion for crypto and news into a career? CoinDesk editorial is growing. We're looking for full-time reporters and market analysts who can move quickly and help unpack and explain the nuances of this crazy world we're living in. If that sounds interesting, send us an email at Recruiting at coin desk.com. That's recruiting at coindesk.com and telling me you heard about it on the breakdown.

Thanks for listening.