The Breakdown - NLW's Last Breakdown

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Today’s episode is the last episode of The Breakdown with me, NLW. To mark the end of this chapter, this show looks back at the biggest story from each year of the podcast, from the strange early days of 2018 through cycles of collapse, rebuilding, mainstreaming, and normalization, tracing how Bitcoin and crypto evolved alongside the show itself. It’s a reflection on the moments that mattered, the themes that endured, and why the story of power, money, and incentives is far from over, even as my time behind this mic comes to a close. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

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 Thursday, January 29th, and today is the last episode of The Breakdown with me ever. 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. Well, friends, yes, it is the end of an era. The breakdown will continue, but my watch has ended.

I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the show, but as a way to celebrate the end of this story period, I thought it would be fun to go back and talk about the biggest story from each of the years of this show, going dangerously close to a decade all the way back to 2018. This was the first year that the proto things that would go on to become the show first started happening. In around May of 2018, I started doing a Twitter thread on Sundays called Long Read Sunday, because at that time, all of the conversation in crypto was happening on Twitter, and it was happening in the form of threads. That led to me starting to mess around with media,

and to eventually a very short-lived, around-the-horn-style interview version of the show, that quickly got temporarily put on hold after the birth of my daughter at the beginning of November. Now, meanwhile, what was going on with Bitcoin then? The end of 2017 had, of course, been the first big cycle with mainstream attention. We had the first pop culture references, the first Bloomberg articles, the first Lambo's with Bitcoin license plates, and of course the ICO boom, which had everyone's attention. That Thanksgiving of 2017, everyone went home and got their friends and family to buy Bitcoin, but by the end of December, the market had started to collapse. The first part of 2018 was super weird, with a lot of all coins and ICOs still pretending

that the party was on, even though it distinctly wasn't. CoinDesks Consensus Conference that year in New York was a super strange combination of people who absolutely knew that the bear market was here and we were pretty deeply heading into it and folks who were still trying to hold out for one more bite at the ICO Apple. Overall, Bitcoin was down nine out of the 12 months in 2018, with the largest drawdown coming at the end of the year with a 37% drop in November. At the same time, it was still a big year for building. It was one of the first moments of validation for Bitcoin where it was no longer just weird internet money and we got the first glimmers that it could be an important asset. Circle launched their stable coin.

A16Z raised their first crypto venture fund, and there was a massive push to support Bitcoin payments, with Jack Dorsey really summing up the 2018 vibe when he announced that Square would support Bitcoin payments. In March of 2018, he said, the world ultimately will have a single currency. The internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be Bitcoin, probably over 10 years, but it could go faster. Bitcoin, in other words, had a clear place in the world that if you ignore the dismal price action, the feeling of building something new could be contagious. Now, 2019 was the year that the breakdown turned into an actual daily show. First is the crypto 3 at 3, which was literally a live stream of me talking about the three most important

stories at 3 p.m. But then, which quickly morphed into the breakdown. From a news perspective, the year was dominated by Facebook's Libra project. It was pretty interesting in the context of monetary history. The idea borrowed from economist John Maynard Keen's 1940s proposal of the Bank Corps. The idea was that Libra would be pegged not just to the dollar, but to a basket of currencies. The concept, of course, is that the future of internet money should be independent from single nation states. But it quickly became clear that, A, the U.S. government would not be allowing competition on that front, and B, the U.S. government also would not be allowing Mark Zuckerberg to be the one to bring this to market. Zuckerberg, indeed, was hauled before Congress in October, and Lieber completely lost its momentum.

Now, while, of course, Zuckerberg and Libra were way ahead of their time, and the idea of Staplecoins has gone on to be a hugely important part of the scene, at the time, Lieber's collapse was a moment of validation for Bitcoin. It was clear, in other words, that internet money needed to be independent from the influence of single actors and hardened against state attack. With the government effectively strangling Lieber in the crib, we got to see why that was so important. Prices rose steadily throughout the first half of the year, but mainstream media still had a huge amount of skepticism or disdain. This was a peak moment for the blockchain-not-bickoin narrative, with most serious financial players seeing Bitcoin as mindless speculation or worse.

2020 was of course the year that changed everything. Indeed, the year that changed the world, including Bitcoin. The pandemic broke out in late February, and global markets crashed the following month. Those of you who live through the Bitcoin side of this, I'm sure have acute memories of it. There was a moment where Bitcoin seemed like it actually could hit zero. I recorded a podcast on the night of March 12th with Preston Pish, and that was the night that Bitcoin crashed in a way that seemed like it actually could have gone to zero. Arthur Hayes pulled the plug at Bitmex, and who knows what would have happened if he hadn't. Still, a string of events in the spring changed Bitcoin's trajectory forever. The halving happened on May 11th, just as the money

printers were firing up. Days before the having, Paul Tudor Jones published his now infamous great monetary inflation thesis, declaring that Bitcoin was the fastest horse in the race. The following weekend, Jerome Powell went on 60 minutes to assure the world that the Fed was in fact printing money by the trillions. There was a sense that Bitcoiners had figured out what would come next but still needed to wait for it all to play out. Now, despite all that, Bitcoin slowly drifted up over the summer and into the fall. But honestly, compared to the massive run in Nasdaq, you'd be forgiven for feeling like Bitcoin is falling behind. That changed, though, in the final months of the year, with a string of big corporate buys. Michael Saylor announced his Bitcoin strategy in July and began buying in August.

From a modest $250 million buy, we got a totally new way of talking about Bitcoin that changed the messaging around the asset class. Square then bought $50 million in October, and despite those purchases seeing incredibly quaint based on what happens now, they really helped change the narrative. In late October, PayPal announced Bitcoin support and Bitcoin took off. It went from $10,000 at the beginning of October to just shy of 30,000 by the end of the year, almost tripling in the final quarter. Now, in the final days of the year, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin tried to ban self-hosted wallets, and we saw the crypto industry start to come together in Washington for the first time. 2021, of course, was the year when crypto went crazy.

Speculation was intense in Bitcoin and insane in alts. We had crypto lending, crypto hedge funds, AirDrop, Defi, NFTs. This was the mainstreaming of crypto, at least for retail. In many ways, the year was bookended by two massive stories of adoption. Elon Musk disclosed that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in February, which sent markets screaming higher reaching its first peak in April at around $65,000, which was the same week as the Coinbase IPO. When Elon pulled back a bit, the market started to crash, but it wasn't all over. Bitcoin got a second

wind in July, as the reopening of the economy seemed permanent, and markets went fully risk on. Massive inflation then, of course, ripped through the U.S. economy and showed absolutely no signs of slowing down. In September, El Salvador announced that Bitcoin would be legal tender. Another incredible moment to think back on, when we had on Twitter spaces, the president of El Salvador talking to Bitcoiners in this incredibly unscripted and off-the-cuff way. Bitcoin hit its final cycle top in early November at around 69,000. and unlike 2024, this was a true blow-off top and sentiment was off the charts. Many were calling for 100K Bitcoin or even more. Importantly in 21, as much as the focus was on things like Bored Apes,

the year also saw the crypto lobby start to mature and professionalize. 2020 was, of course, the collapse. It was the year that the industry came apart, but at the beginning it wasn't immediately obvious how bad things would get. Although Bitcoin was down 40% from the highs by the end of January, there was a sense that it was stabilizing. There were echoes of that 2018 period, where the 2017 breeds hadn't given up the ghost, that was sort of what the beginning of 2022 was like. You'll remember no doubt that I made a Super Bowl ad with Larry David as part of that whole thing. The spring saw another insane period of all-coin speculation. NFT mince were crazy events that broke Ethereum almost every week, multiple all-coins delivered huge run-ups,

and throughout this period, Bitcoin took a back seat, with the industry starting to feel a little unseemly. That May was defined by a single phrase, steady lads deploying more capital. Yes, That was when Doe Kwan knocked over the first domino in the crypto collapse as Luna crashed to actual zero over the space of a couple of days. The Luna collapse then set off a chain reaction. In June, Three Rous Capital declared bankruptcy after failing to repay billions in loans that were called in. That default revealed that crypto lenders like Celsius and Voyager hadn't been lending on an over-collateralized basis, but instead were lending billions to unregulated crypto funds on a handshake, people started pulling money out of crypto lenders, crypto exchanges, and Bitcoin falls and falls.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried styled himself the JPMorgan of crypto and start striking deals to save various companies. Later, of course, we would find out that he was indeed trying to cover up the hole in FTX's balance sheet. At the beginning of November, an article from CoinDesk about Alameda Research's balance sheet triggered a set of withdrawals from FTX, which the exchange might have been able to weather if it weren't for CZ, coming in over the top saying that they were selling all of their FTT. That led to a massive set of withdrawals, which led to the revelation that SBF had been gambling with people's deposits, which led to variously my public resignation from the company, an eventual bankruptcy, and the true undisputable end of the cycle. And by the way, as all of this was happening in crypto, this was also

the year that we got the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation hit a peak of 9.1% in the U.S., and from a breakdown perspective, most of this year's coverage was macro-focused when we weren't discussing the slow-motion train wreck happening in the industry. 2023 was very quiet. The industry entered another crypto winter. Like 2019, it was a rebuilding year, and people bringing fresh new ideas to the table for Bitcoin. Lightning adoption hit an inflection point and people started to think about Bitcoin defy and other ways to extend what the blockchain can do. One of the most discussed of these ideas was Ordinals, with the first inscription placed on the blockchain in January. This idea of making use of Bitcoin's arbitrary data storage to create

meta-assets and NFTs was entirely novel and drove a huge wave of new enthusiasm and energy. Outside of the industry, Crypto News was all about resolving the crypto crime of 2022. Doe Kwan was arrested in March after going on the run. Shinsky of Celsius was charged in July, and in November, SBF was found guilty on seven counts of fraud. Also in November, CZ reached an agreement with the U.S. authorities, paying a $4 billion fine and getting sentenced to four months in prison. All the while, Gary Gensler's SEC was investigating the entire industry, bringing lawsuits against finance, Coinbase, and sending about a million Wells notices. We also experienced peak debanking, and many in the industry fleed to Singapore or Dubai.

There was, however, some light at the tunnel throughout the year. The undisputedly two most important moments were won, when BlackRock filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF, effectively throwing their body in front of the slide where people might have thought that the industry was irrelevant forever, and then Grayscale won their lawsuit in August, with the court ruling that the SEC had been arbitrary and capricious in denying approval to convert GBT into an ETF. It was clear, in other words, that spot Bitcoin ETFs were coming and they were going to be supported by the largest financial institutions in the world. While much of the year was focused on negative news about the bad actors that came undone in 2022, Bitcoin relentlessly climbed higher.

It went from 16,500 to 42,000 throughout the year. At 150%, it was Bitcoin's biggest gain since 2020. 2024 was, of course, dominated by two figures, Larry Fink and Donald Trump. In the first month of the year, Bitcoin ETFs went live. After a small stumble out of the gate, the momentum drove Bitcoin to new all-time highs by March. The ETF saw more than $36 billion worth of inflow in year one, making them the most successful ETF debut of all time. The latter part of the year was, of course, focused on Trump, and the quickly approaching election. The industry gathered a $260 million war chest with the Fair Shake Superpack. Private donors helped convince Trump to give a speech at the Nashville Bitcoin Conference

in July, where he declared he would help make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world. Trump won the election, and the crypto vote felt like it mattered. Now, many in the industry were uneasy with the deal that had been struck, but still there was a sense that the industry could not survive another four years of Gary Gensler. Much of 2025 then focused on reshaping government policy to become more permissive to crypto. Paul Atkins was installed as the chair of the SEC and immediately got to work, implementing a roadmap laid out by Commissioner's Hester Purse and Mark Yuada. The Genius Act saw contentious votes throughout the first half of the year,

but gathered a surprising amount of Democratic support despite protests from Elizabeth Warren. The bill was signed into law in July legalizing and regulating stable coins in the U.S., but it wasn't all-smooth sailing. President Trump began the year by launching a meme coin the weekend before inauguration. His family's involvement in the industry accelerated throughout the year and became a huge point of contention in Washington. Still, when push came to shove, the story was all about institutions coming on board and crypto adoption steadily increasing. We saw Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and university endowments by their first allocations. Banks began preparing to launch crypto products and plan their

stablecoin strategies. In short, crypto became normalized. So what comes next? So far, this year has been dominated by the debate around the market structure bill, and little seems resolved. While both sides of Congress seem to be working in good faith, there doesn't seem to be a clear compromise that will satisfy both industry and political concerns. Although we're only at the end of January, a looming shutdown threatens to chew up much of the remaining time in Congress. Some industry figures, specifically Coinbase, are now taking the stance that no bill is better than a bad bill, the logic being that the SEC and CFTC can build a framework the industry can live with without the need for legislation. At the same time, without legislation, everything is at risk with a change of political fortunes in Washington.

On top of that, we still have interesting questions about whether the four-year cycle is done forever, about whether altcoins are done forever, about why Bitcoin is down $40,000 during the period when people started talking about currency debasement outside our little corner of the world. The point is that there is still a ton of interesting news ahead of us this year and into the future, which is why I'm glad that although my time with the breakdown has come to an end, Blockworks and new host David Canellis are bringing new life to it. The biggest reason that I wanted to home the breakdown with Blockworks is that I wanted a place where the themes that we focused on this show, the protocols, the incentives, the power

structure shaping the system, to quote the trailer for the new version of the breakdown, would remain the main focus, rather than alt-coin games or speculation or any of those other parts of the industry that are completely legitimate, but not about the big-picture power shifts that I've always been most interested in. I've gotten a preview of what Blockworks wants to do with the show, and I'm really excited to see how they execute it. In the meanwhile, a huge thanks to all the people who have worked on this show over the years, editors like Rob Mitchell, Adrian Blust, Eleanor Paul and Ryan Huntington, my original producer back in the Coin Desk days, Adam Levine, the teams at Block TV, Coin Desk and Blockworks, who have supported the show variously,

partners and collaborators like Scott Melker, and of course my indefatigable researcher and writer Scott Hill. Most of all, thank you to you guys for being a part of this journey. This is an industry that can get extremely noisy and extremely distracted. And the one thing that I knew is that this audience always cared about the topics that I thought when the history books were written would really be seen to be the important ones, where this strange little corner of our world found its way to influence the rest. So for one last time, appreciate you listening as always. And until next time, be safe and take care of each other.

Peace.