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 Tuesday, February 18th. And today we are talking about one of the more

ridiculous stories of this cycle, a botched token launch that threatens to bring down a presidency

as meme coins cause a major geopolitical incident. 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,

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breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, we got one for you today. Boy, oh boy. There are some

days that the quest for objectivity and giving everything a reasonable shake

gets particularly difficult in this industry, and boy, oh boy, is this one of them.

I'm sure many of you will have heard of this for those of you haven't. Let me tell you

about the saga of Libra, which at this point you've got to think is just about the most

cursed name in crypto. Anyway, on Friday night, Argentinian president Javier Milay launched a Solana

meme coin called Libra. Mila tweeted, liberal Argentina grows. This private project will be dedicated

to encouraging growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups.

The world wants to invest in Argentina. I was not really around and only vaguely paying attention,

but the presumption I

saw from the first set of people who were looking at this was that he had to have been hacked or

something. In addition to that statement, Miele included the ticker and the contract address. Hacked or not,

though, the token reached over $4.5 billion in market cap in the first half hour before crashing by

90% over the next two hours. You could have, as I did,

literally gone out for dinner on Valentine's Day and missed the president of a country

...