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 Monday, March 31st, and today we are talking about a big settlement for Galaxy.

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. All right, friends, well, in one of the largest settlements in crypto history, Galaxy Digital has

agreed to pay a $200 million fine to the New York Attorney General over their promotion of Luna.

We all of us remember here the Luna crash as one of the defining moments of the last cycle.

And the run-up in the second half of

2021 was just as pivotal. Luna was a bit more of an obscure token up until that point, with the

Terra Protocol making relatively little impact with the tokenized stock product as their major

offering. In March of 2021, Terra introduced the Anchor Protocol, which offered 20% yield on

their algorithmic stablecoin UST.

This unsustainable yield would ultimately lead to the demise of Luna as the stablecoin violently

depegged the following May. But for six months, Luna was a dominant trade in the all-coin space.

It ran up from $5 in June 21 to reach $100 by the end of the year.

Crypto influencers were pushing the token hard, and Luna founder

Doe Kwan became a notorious presence on CT, shouting down any detractors. Galaxy Digital founder Mike Novogratz

was right in the thick of it all. In January of 2022, Novogratz posted a picture of his Luna

tattoo, declaring himself a lunatic. At the time, the token price was crashing and would be cut in half

to $50 by the end of that month. Luna ended up rallying to fresh all-time highs in March

...