The Breakdown - Why I’m Hosting The Breakdown | David Canellis | The Breakdown

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

As a new season of The Breakdown approaches, David takes a moment to introduce himself and explain how he thinks about Bitcoin, crypto culture, and the industry’s next phase. – Follow David: https://x.com/dcanellis — Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (01:04) My Crypto Origin Story (04:07) From Trading to Crypto Media (08:47) What Crypto Means Now (13:32) AI, Autonomy, and What’s Next __ Disclaimer: Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Welcome everybody to The Breakdown. I'm your host, David Canales. This episode is going to be a little bit different. We have now rounded out Season Zero, what we're calling Season Zero, of the new format of the breakdown. and we're taking a few weeks break in between seasons while we prepare content to roll out for season one.

And I hope that you're enjoying the content so far. But I wanted to take this opportunity to really introduce myself to you because I imagine if you have been a listener of the breakdown for a while now, you would have grown accustomed to hearing NLW and understanding how he thinks about crypto and macro and Bitcoin in the world. So I really wanted to give an opportunity. opportunity to understand who I am and why I am even hosting the breakdown in the first place at all, all of a sudden. So this is your going to be an audio-only episode, but we are going to continue with the video episodes throughout the break as well before we roll out the next season,

which should be at the start of April, but TBD on that. So who am I? Who is Dave Canales? So, I mean, I think maybe similarly to many of you, I think I bought my first Bitcoin in mid-2017, just before the big ERC-20 Ethereum ICO bull run towards the end of that year in the start of 2018. But, I mean, I stumbled across Bitcoin through the Bitcoin subreddit, basically. And, you know, obviously I was very attracted to Bitcoin for its, you know, cypherpunk energy and its commitment to open source money. but what really hooked me in the beginning was actually trading chip coins as unfortunate as they

may that as that might be i think my strategy in the beginning was to pull up for you know i would check twitter for four different coins that a lot of people were talking about that day and then i would pull up four different binance charts on one screen and swing trade between those four coins all day and i think this was even before binance had stop loss orders or anything like that it was really when they first launched. So that kind of hooked me in the very beginning and I kind of got absorbed into trading very quickly for pretty much the entirety of that ball run. And once one time in particular, I remember, you know, like I'm, I'm Australian so I would trade on these smaller Australian exchanges. And I think at one point when Lightcoin was first rallying from $10 to $80 or something like

that I noticed that an order book was incredibly thin on the on on on on on the sell side so you know I'll put in joke bids for you know buying a bunch of like coin for for a cent and I remember I think this was in my first few months of trading that there was a flash crash on that order book and and that order really did get filled so all of a sudden I had come into a bunch of light coin and because I was so new to trading and a new to crypto and new to these centralized exchanges I didn't really believed that light coin was actually in my wallet, so I would sell it immediately and then withdraw the funds immediately and then be amazed that I had this money in my account. And I think it was only a few thousand dollars or something like that. And I think I immediately went to

buy groceries because I was a poor university student at the time. And this is essentially what my first few years of crypto were really like. And eventually what happened from there is that I essentially stumbled into working full time in the crypto industry. since then. So, I mean, this was around the time of ICOs and everything like that. So I was spending a lot of time in telegram chats and everything like that and eventually connected with someone who had hooked me up with a freelance writing gig to work for or to write articles for, you know, these smaller crypto publications that would pay by the word. And that was my kind of road into crypto was through quote unquote journalism. I would say that I don't really characterize myself as a journalist per se.

I've done a lot of journalism and that's what I was doing at Blockworks before I jumped in to host the breakdown. I was on the editorial team. But for the longest time I was much more attracted to, you know, telling the story of crypto culture and the narrative of crypto's evolution in the context of its encroachment onto traditional finance and, and quote unquote, traditional finance rails and how it was directly impacting smaller communities and then reflecting that onto the macro side of things. So once I kind of had my foot in the door with working for these smaller crypto pubs, then I was able to move to actually the Netherlands to write full time for a tech company that's based in the Netherlands called The Next Web. They had a crypto vertical

called Hard Fork around 2018, 2019. From there, I was able to explore a lot of the world and understand what the crypto industry actually is because I think that there is crypto of what it is on a philosophical and also a technical level. And then there is what we would all want crypto to be and then there is the crypto industry that is really its own beast and its own its own living ecosystem and so since moving to the netherlands i was able to really travel around europe and the u.s and and other parts of the world to understand how these mechanisms work under the whole umbrella of crypto so that that would give me a wide range of exposure to all sorts of different things. Like I would be at, I would be in Brussels at the European Commission where

a blockchain association had signed a memorandum of understanding or something like that with the UN or the European Commission. And I would be on stage for that, having snuck up on stage behind all the actual people who were building. And, you know, so I would see how the government regulators would interact with this very suit and tie side of the crypto space. And then I would go to Spain. And then I would go to Spain to Barcelona where Siren Labs was launching their Finney phone with, you know, Lionel Messi would be there and I would see how these things would be hyped up. And that would really contrast to what Bitcoin was and what crypto is. And so I gained a lot of understanding about all the different facets of what makes, not just crypto, but a tech industry and a tech

ecosystem and a conference circuit and all that kind of stuff. And since then, and since then, and since moving over to Blockworks, I think what has actually happened since then is that I moved over to Blockworks in 2020. And I think that this was just after the big 2021 ball run and the NFT hyper cycle. And what has really happened since then is that crypto has been, I won't say entirely institutionalized, but institutions have really arrived and shaped development and the trajectory of what these projects and, and coins are actually doing and what and shaped the market response to what entrepreneurs and projects and developers are building. So I've watched really firsthand the institutionalization of crypto through our events at Blockworks and that has been a very interesting experience at the same

time as well because, you know, if you were to really press me on what my political identity would be, I would mostly have to side with the anarcho-capitalists. And of course, that, at times that doesn't really fit in with the corpore reality of what crypto has become. But I think the reality is a lot more nuanced than that, especially when you see how these technologies have really reshaped how Wall Street thinks about their role in the financial landscape, especially between generations, because it is really a case of the old world media. in the new world that I'm sure you are all aware. So, you know, what is crypto and Bitcoin to mean now in the context of all of that stuff?

And it's a very difficult thing to say. And I would expect that many of you are also wondering what crypto and Bitcoin means to you these days. Because what crypto is right now is obviously very different to what it was in 2015, 2017, 2021 and now to 2026 and and I suppose I might start with Bitcoin itself because I still hold on to the idea that Bitcoin is the most purest expression of what crypto is meant to be and I also don't want to be totally prescriptive and about the utility of different networks and and all of that sort of stuff so I don't really consider myself to be a maxi, but I do identify most with what Bitcoin represents. And the best crypto projects outside of Bitcoin are those which reflect those properties of Bitcoin as well. So, you know, and I've always thought that Ethereum was cooler when it was a proof of work network rather than a proof of state network. And

This doesn't really have anything to do with decentralization or anything like that. I just really enjoy the raw physicality of proof of work mining. And I really feel like Ethereum lost something when it switched during the merge. So that might give you an idea of my emotional response to how these coins have evolved and how the market has evolved in general. What excites me the most about crypto? And it wouldn't necessarily be stable coins or payments or. I do really identify with defy and the power to offer savings technology to a wider subset of people that aren't being serviced by the traditional finance system through banking and all of that stuff.

And I think crypto is going through a massive transitionary period in terms of where the velocity and energy and attention is in building new and exciting technologies. because for the longest time, we had to suffer through meme coin mania and then, I mean, before that was NFTs and before that was ICOs. And I think that ultimately prediction markets have replaced a lot of this very energetic speculation about what could be valuable in a future world and instead trying to figure out what the world is currently right now. And I think that's the primary utility of what prediction markets have done for the crypto space. and obviously those have found massive success. So I really do enjoy the idea of prediction markets, but I am still somewhat reluctant to wholeheartedly enjoy them because many of them are quite centralized in how they operate.

And this is a lot of my own internal struggle with what crypto is and what it could be and what it was in that for the longest time being a decentralization maxi was probably the easiest position to take. take within the crypto space and it's something that I identified with for a long time. But obviously we do already have decentralized technologies. We already do have Bitcoin. And we do have, you know, there are the Moneros of the world and there are the more

decentralized proof of state networks as well. So if we already have decentralized technologies, then do we really need to have all the other technologies be as equally decentralized? decentralized as those offerings, I'm not so sure. So I really do see the utility in having more centralized networks or centralized products running on top of decentralized networks. But in many cases, I find it hard to connect my personal ideals with those offerings. And ultimately, I tend to find those much less interesting than the more pure play decentralized protocols that do exist in the crypto space. But obviously, at some point, that makes your world incredible.

small when it comes to what you think that blockchain and crypto can offer the world. So how I feel about crypto and Bitcoin, as it is right now in 2026, it's trying to navigate a way through this that retains some sense of connection to why I fell in love with crypto and Bitcoin in the first place. And I'm assuming that many of you are going through a very similar thing. And so I really hope that the breakdown moving forward is it can be helpful in understanding how this space is positioning itself in response to the feedback that it is getting from the market. And I also really just don't want to become someone who is bitter and jaded and wishing it was how it was 10, 15 years ago because I really don't find that useful at all.

It's very important to be looking into the future to find. where there is potential innovations and potential ways in which the world that we're living in right now can be made better, not only the world that could be in 10 or 15 years. And I suppose that brings us to the relationship between AI and crypto and how much attention the world has to dedicate to all of these things equally. And I'm sure that I'm not alone in understanding that AI has really. really sucked a lot of the air out of the room for the entire world almost. And it has given crypto a little bit of cover to just coalesce is how I'm currently thinking about it.

Because if crypto really is going through this big transitionary period of understanding what it offers the world and understanding that there are established projects that do have all of the properties that I don't want to invoke Satoshi, but do have all of the properties that the cypherpunks would hope for. So if we are transitioning from that world into a world where crypto is building additional things that do look somewhat different than what came before, just know that the new wave of the industry does not cancel out the old. I mean, and that's obvious when you look at the valuations of Bitcoin and Ethereum compared to the rest. of the market, they are still far and away the most valuable networks in many aspects. But if it is a transitionary period, then it needs some grace to really nail it.

And I can clearly see a lot of parallels between AI development and what crypto was doing even in 2017 with OpenClau and AI agents. And a lot of these things are very powerful and trigger a lot of imagination. But it's clear that there aren't a lot of consumer-ready applications of AI technology outside the context of Claude co-work or software engineering and stuff like that. And even then, we're seeing some reckoning throughout the tech giants of how to actually incorporate these technologies without sacrificing engineering efficiency and so on. So it's clear that AI is going to have to progress from here in order to really convert

to major success. And it does have all of this investment momentum and capital momentum. momentum to really achieve that, but it is still going to be a few years until we see the fruits of that in the same way that it was a few years between 2017 and 2018 and then the and then the 2021 NFT mainstream moment that the world had an, that the world realized what crypto is and what it could do and and the opportunities that afforded itself because this technology was becoming available. AI is going to go through exactly the same thing, but I'm not sure crypto is really in a place that it can really invigorate that same level of amazement because it's already gone

through that arc. So right now I would say crypto is in a retooling phase before crypto 3.0 emerges where we do see real world applications that are being used in the real world. And so I don't really want to see this as the world has forgotten about crypto or or anything like that because it clearly hasn't the where the attention is coming from has definitely shifted more towards institutions paying attention to what this technology can do for them and how they can access an incredibly engaged ecosystem and its liquidity to strengthen their offerings and all that sort of thing. So I actually find it quite reassuring that despite all the hype and momentum around AI that crypto is still getting attention from a market. But it's clear that I think that

we all have to understand what our own personal power is when it comes to using AI professionally, personally, and we should not forget that crypto inherently increases our individual power. So how I'm viewing crypto and AI, and it's likely that you'll see more AI content from the breakdown moving into season one. I just want to make it clear that as much as Bitcoin and crypto are a part of our daily lives at this point, especially if you're listening to this podcast and if you're working professionally in crypto, it is, I don't want to be present. but it's almost guaranteed that we think about crypto and we talk about crypto more than perhaps we actually use crypto outside of a trading and investment context.

And I've said it before in a previous episode that that in itself is a privilege and that our backs aren't against the wall for most of us, I would hope, which means that we don't really have to use crypto for its most powerful properties, the censorship resistance, the freedom of transfer, the financial anonymity that it can provide when using the right tools. We instead can talk about it and to look at it zoomed out and how it's impacting through the finance world instead. But AI is on a different trajectory than that. we are all using AI very closely every day and if you aren't I'm sure you will be over the next seats eight 12 months so how we interact personally and professionally with these technologies is

quite different so what I am looking for is a time when these two usage patterns converge and we are using crypto every day and if if you are already using crypto every day then using it more every day or using it on the same scale as you are AI, that will be, I think, incredibly important to retaining some sense of personal autonomy and power in a world where we are just all using LLMs from the Frontier Labs and trusting these centralized AI providers with all of our own personal desires and desires and thoughts and professional endeavors and all of that. So what I do not think that the two cancel each other out and I understand that there is all this hype around AI agent payments and

there'll be billions of agents or using crypto on chain and maybe that will be true. I'm not too sure. But what will be key is that human beings can still control their identity and prove their identity through the technologies they use outside of the AI context. And personally, I find crypto to be the thing that solves that particular issue. But like everyone else, I'm experiencing this evolution of humanity and technology as it's happening. So I just hope that perhaps this has given you some context about who I am and how I think about things. I have really enjoyed putting together the first seven episodes of the breakdown. And I'd love to hear that. I'd love to from you also some feedback about what you would like to see on the breakdown what you're enjoying

what topics you would like to see covered as i said we're going to be expanding out from crypto and bitcoin into more general technology subjects as well including AI so you're going to see a lot of different things come out from the breakdown and and i hope you enjoy and and we'll see you next time