The 5 Most Important Stories in Crypto Last Week

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 Friday, December 5, and that means it's time for the Friday '5. Before we get into that, however, if you're enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna 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/breakdownpod. Alright, friends. Well, it is Friday five time, but a slightly different Friday five. I'm traveling this morning, so I had to do this on my own in the wee wee hours of the morning, but let's rip through these five events to make sure that you have your summary of the week. First up, we kick off with Larry Fink's new narrative or at least his extended narrative. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made two big media appearances throughout the week that really moved the conversation. First, he wrote a thesis on tokenization in The Economist that was published on Monday. Then he appeared alongside Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in a joint interview at the DealBook Summit. Now this was probably the most important week in the TradFi crypto narrative since late twenty twenty three when Larry did another big press tour to talk about why BlackRock was launching a Bitcoin ETF. You'll recall that back then, most of the interviewers tried to get Fink to repeat the traditional TradFi line of blockchain not Bitcoin. He completely refused to play ball then instead saying why not both. That whole press tour was about two big ideas, tokenization changing the financial system and Bitcoin becoming a legitimate asset. Two years later, the message hasn't changed. The Economist article was all about why tokenization makes sense and should be embraced rather than feared. The deal book interview, meanwhile, was all about where Bitcoin fits into the investment ecosystem. Now although the message hasn't changed, the target audience is different. The twenty twenty three press tour took place across venues like CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg TV. It was aimed very narrowly at the financial professionals, with Fink delivering the message that Bitcoin is a legitimate asset, tokenization is a legitimate technology, and it's time for Wall Street to get on board. This time around, Fink published in The Economist, a newspaper that's widely read by policymakers and economists as well as the Wall Street crowd, and it seemed pretty clear that the intention was to deliver the message that BlackRock is gearing up to scale tokenization in The United States. Fink seemed to be giving policymakers and institutions one last opportunity to get on board or get left behind. The deal book interview was even more interesting from a messaging point of view. In deal book, Andrew Ross Sorkin has built one of the biggest platforms to …