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 Sunday February 9th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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 of the show notes or go to bit.ly slash

breakdown pod. All right, friends, we are limping over the finish line here this week.

But since we had these very consequential hearings on debanking in Operation chokepoint 2.0 on the

hill this week, I thought it only fitting that Longreed Sunday focuses on that as well.

The piece today is by Nathan McCauley, the CEO of Anchorage Digital. It's called it's

time to end the bureaucrat's secret weapon, debanking. The hearing

that he testified at was called investigating the real impacts of debanking in America. I'm going to turn

it over to the AI version of myself, much better than the regular version of myself today, and then I'll

be back with a few thoughts at the end. It's time to end the bureaucrat's secret weapon, debanking.

Debanking has become a buzzword in Washington lately.

The term refers to a controversial practice where crypto companies and other businesses have

been cut off from banking services, allegedly due to pressure from federal regulators.

Many in our industry have dubbed this Operation Choke Point 2.0, comparing it to a previous

Obama-era initiative that

discouraged banks from serving certain legal but high-risk industries. The issue has sparked

heated debate, with multiple congressional investigations examining whether regulators

improperly pressured banks to deny services to crypto firms and other businesses.

...