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ROLLUP: Iran Ceasefire Rally | Anthropic’s “Mythos” Model | Q-Day Divide | Stablecoin Yield Debate
01:06:38
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Nation. Welcome to the Friday weekly roll up is the second week of April. Ryan Trott Adams is out on vacation so we're tapping in Haseeb to cover for him. Haseeb, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure to have you.
- [00:15]
B
Thanks for having me, man.
- [00:16]
A
Good to be some juicy topics that I want you to get your perspective on. Haseeb. We got a shaky ceasefire in Iran giving us a giving the markets a relief rally. Negotiations start Friday. That's tomorrow for us, but today for the listeners. And there's a lot of daylight between the two sides coming to negotiate. So we're going to see what happens there. Meanwhile, we're going to talk about as well the anthropic release of the world's most powerful model. A model so powerful that they're keeping it behind closed doors and only select companies get private access to it to harden their security before the rest of the world gets it. Q day is dividing the crypto industry. While some are preparing, others are saying don't look up. And the White House weighs in on the stablecoin debate. Which side did they choose? Before we get in, Haseeb just kind of vibe check. How are we feeling about crypto? How are we feeling about the markets? What's top of mind for you lately?
- [01:06]
B
I'm feeling pretty good. It feels like the market is kind of getting its sea legs. I think that the depth of bearishness that we saw in the first couple months of the year feels like it's stabilizing a little bit. People are kind of saying, okay, we're probably going to be okay, we're going to be here for a while. There's a lot of work to do as an industry, but it feels like people are more forward looking now, like talking about things like quantum. I feel like, okay, how do we solve this problem as opposed to, oh my God, the sky is falling. I think it's a good development.
- [01:35]
A
Yeah. The prices, the bitcoin price, ether price, they've been just ranging for the past something like 60 or 70 days. And I agree that that's given us some foundation to like look forward on whether or not that means we chop down or chop up one, one or the other, I don't know. But at least we are as an industry talking about bigger and better things. Let's get into the macro markets that are the macro events that are causing all of the markets just to have some level of uncertainty. This tweet that kind of just rocketed around the world. Donald Trump on Truth Social saying a Whole civilization will die tonight commanded everyone's attention as Donald Trump issued Iran a 48 hour ultimatum that they must open the strait and capitulate or else a whole civilization will die tonight. Oil prices surged on this tweet. Futures plummeted. But then less than two hours before the deadline, the United States and Iran reached a ceasefire. A two week ceasefire to come to an agreement. So then there is not an agreement but there is a two week ceasefire to come to an agreement. Trump tweeted out I agree to the suspend to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran and I believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. On this news, oil prices crashed by like 23% in 8 hours. The S&P 500 surged to 3.5% off of its all time high. Bitcoin hit 72k, Ether almost hit 2300k. Things have come down a little bit since then, but still still pretty optimistic pricing in the market. After this there is some shakiness however. The Strait of Hormuz first was being told it was open. Later we realized that the IRGC Iran is demanding payment, roughly 2 to 3 million dollars per transit payable in Bitcoin. And then after this ceasefire Iran immediately sent a rally of rockets into Israel. Israel then later attacked Iran backed Hezbollah and Lebanon. Because of this, Iran is saying that they are threatening to end this eastfire and close this rate of Hormuz. And this is why everyone kind of just feels shaky about the state of things yet nonetheless markets are somewhat optimistic. Oil is trading up from their lows, up from 5% from the ceasefire bottom, but still well below $110 year. Yields are still trending down in SPX. The S&P 500 is trading higher for the second day in a row. Haseeb, just give me your broad, broad takes about the current state of the these events and kind of like where you think this is going if you have any sort of insider direction here.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah, I mean I'm certainly not anywhere near an insider on the Iran war.
- [04:16]
A
Hard to be an insider on the Iran war.
- [04:18]
B
I know, I know. Shaky is probably the best way to describe. Seems like there's so much posturing from both sides that it's very hard to tell what the reality is and what the real contingencies. I mean at this point, ironically we know a lot more about so many leaks coming from within the Trump administration. We know surprisingly little about what's going on within Iran. There seems to be just a lot of confusion, a lot of different messages being received from different places. There's constantly contradictions from within the Iran camp about what they want, who's saying what. There's all these reports about. It's very difficult to negotiate with Iran because there isn't a clear governmental structure yet, or at least it's not apparent. That may become clearer now that there is a ceasefire. And ostensibly, you know, it's been now over 24 hours that we've had no missiles fired at anywhere in the region. And the Strait of Hormuz is not open in the way that it was supposed to be, according to the ceasefire, was that it's supposed to be free and available to anybody. It looks like they're charging tolls in the millions of dollars for ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz, which is still a significant impairment to oil prices, if that continues. But things have stabilized, and it seems like it's in everyone's interest for things to stabilize, but the markets are not fully buying it. And you see it in the oil prices as well. Oil prices have rebounded quite a bit from seeing that Iran is not really playing ball. And they seem to be insistent on controlling the Strait of Hormuz as a way of quote, unquote, you know, getting recompense for the war. And if they feel entitled to this, there may be more rockiness going forward. So I'm not super hopeful that the situation is going to go back to normal. I think that's kind of dead, that there will be no more war or no more of a hot war. Plausible. Not guaranteed, but plausible.
- [06:01]
A
Yeah. I think the unintended side effect, Trump comes in and has its military objectives. And so much of this war is a narrative war. There's the actual kinetic war on the ground, but really, so much of this is a war for narrative, a war for hearts and minds. If people tolerate the war, then Trump can continue. If too many people don't tolerate the war, then Trump has to reel it back. And a lot of this has kind of boiled down to like, okay, so we. The United States maybe got its military objectives, but now the. The very asymmetric control over the Strait of Hormuz is something that I'm guessing no one really accounted for going into this. This is just the chaos of war. And now the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's last line of defense. Like, it cannot give that up because it is the one Achilles heel that it has the rest of the world by. And giving up the Strait of Hormuz is, is giving up everything for Iran. And it doesn't feel like that is a tenable equilibrium for the rest of the world. But also giving up the Strait of Hormuz is also unintenable for Iran. So it kind of seems like this whole conflict is ending up between Iraq and a hard place. And as you said, I think the markets are just kind of uncertain, shaky as to how this whole thing plays out.
- [07:13]
B
It's pretty clear Trump did not really accomplish his military goals. His military goals have certainly shifted or they've not been well articulated in the first place. But originally the military goal was nuclear disarmament of Iran. That has not happened. That's not even been proclaimed to happen. That's one of the points in the negotiation, is whether they're going to be able to take this enriched uranium out of Iran. This might be possible. Iran supposedly has signaled openness to this as a negotiating point, but they've been so squirrely up till now with previous agreements of this kind that it kind of beggars belief that it's going to be perceived domestically as a win for Trump by the end of this. For the most part, it seems like now Trump's quote, unquote, military goal has been to exit while saving face. That seems like the primary goal for Trump over the last two to three weeks and he's achieved that for now. But if we see more escalation in Iran or Iran kind of playing more aggressively against the ceasefire, it's very possible that that perception for Trump could really unravel pretty quickly and that, that feels
- [08:15]
A
aligned with what I think we know about Trump's personality. He's not a long term guy. He is, he is in and out. He's, you know, like, I'm not, he's not into like the, the trade war with, with China, the multiple trade wars with China and the first Trump and also second Trump, those were six week affairs and then we moved on. If, if, you know, pattern, if we can extrapolate from that, Iran will be a six week affair, then there's a new equilibrium on the other side of it and we just move on. But like any issue that Trump has never seems to last longer than a quarter, even, even a quarter seems, seems long.
- [08:55]
B
I agree with you generally. That said, Iran has been a preoccupation of his for a long time.
- [09:00]
A
That's true.
- [09:01]
B
And this goes back decades. His feelings about Iran as a, you know, basically a rogue state in the Middle east and that's probably going to become more and more important and Antagonistic now that they feel entitled over the Strait. There was a proposal from them that, okay, maybe they would share some of the revenue from the strait with Oman, which flanks the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. But it's clear that this is, I don't know, from my perspective, there's a little bit of like, oh, hey, maybe this will be more palatable if we're not the only ones taking transit fees from the Strait of Hormuz. Um, but it's pretty clear, like, this is not going to be perceived by people in the region as a better equilibrium. And Iran has internalized this lesson is that, okay, we can't really attack Israel or attack the US we can, but what we can do is antagonize our proximity to the global oil trade. And they've learned, like, look, they kind of have their knife against the throat of all the GCC countries. And we're very close allies with all them. We depend on them tremendously for global oil stability and for capital inflows into the US they're huge investors into, into America. So we're, we're almost certainly going to be in a worse situation by the end of this compared to where we started. And now Trump is, is going to have to find a way to play this domestically because I agree with you, he does not want to tangle with these guys again. It's like, you know, it's like fighting a dog with rabies. He's learned that, like, look, I can't, I can't win this war. It's like, it's like Vietnam. It's like a little baby Vietnam. I think he has good instincts about this is not worth it and this is not trending in a good direction. And I don't think he is somebody who feels a lot of sunk costs in previous entanglements. That's one of his virtues, I think, as a strategist. But he's going to really struggle to spin this domestically.
- [10:52]
A
Yeah. One of the big conversations was the fact that Iran chose is asking for payment for oil going through the Strait of Hormuz in Bitcoin. And we saw just a lot of attention out of crypto Twitter about that fact. Dare I say some like, like proud chess beating out of certain corners of crypto Twitter that like, look at this victory for bitcoin. We have the Islamic regime of Iran choosing to use Bitcoin. You know, bitcoin is money for enemies. What's your reaction to that? I found it sufficiently distasteful that I just didn't Want to comment on it?
- [11:25]
B
Yeah. I don't know why you would comment on it or chest beat around this thing. Look, it is interesting and it's worth thinking intellectually about what it means for the future of money and for the future of geopolitics. So actually Iran announced that they were willing to take payment in two forms of currencies, one being bitcoin, the second being the yuan, right, the Chinese currency. And there's a bank I think, called Kunlun bank, which has been sanctioned by the US Specifically because it offers banking to Iran. It's interesting because the fact that Iran is willing to accept not just bitcoin, but these two currencies tells you something about the role of bitcoin internationally, which is that it is the kind of sanction resistant alternative payment system. But it's not the only one. Right? Like, Iran is clearly aligned with China. They have an alliance. China has been pretty hands off. They've not directly interceded in the conflict. They've not offered military support or armed support to Iran. It's an interesting picture of what China's alliances are going to look like going forward. Given the fact that they didn't actually lend aid to Iran in any explicit way during this time. The fact that they're able to take money in UN is maybe a signal that like, okay, one, is China maybe going to start thinking about bitcoin in a deeper way given that it's like, huh, okay, people in our sphere, our alliances, they are saying that they're accepting either bitcoin or yuan. Maybe it makes sense for us to start thinking about bitcoin in a different way, that bitcoin is a part of the weakening of the global US dollar regime or this alternative to swift, this alternative to the US dollar banking system. I don't think we're quite landing in the end zone yet for what that transition looks like. But I do think China is scratching their beards looking at this and saying, huh, what does this mean about how we need to be thinking about bitcoin going forward? To my mind, when I saw this story, I was thinking less about, oh, what does it mean for bitcoin? What does it mean for crypto? I was thinking more what it meant for China because I think China is thinking very deeply about how geopolitics is changing very rapidly, especially as Trump is threatening to withdraw from NATO. If Trump is stepping back from NATO, it really changes the US dollar hegemony and the US influence on swift. Broadly, it changes the way that many other countries are going to be thinking about their own financial sovereignty. Bitcoin plays into all of that.
- [13:44]
A
Yeah, yeah. There are two things come to mind there. There is this undercurrent of the Americanization of bitcoin. Like the bitcoin brand has become just associated with. With the United States with the bitcoin strategic reserve of, you know, Donald Trump being the pro crypto president. We have a pro crypto administration, you know, mining mine bitcoins here in America. And China has shifted towards gold. There's been a lot of buying of gold in China. And so there's like two different capital wars going on here. You have the. The. I mean, we have gold here in America, but really in terms of bitcoin, China is so indifferent to bitcoin. Meanwhile, it's been stockpiling, piling gold. We have domestically here in America a very strong association with bitcoin. And. And then also the other question I have just broadly is like, I don't even know if China wants the same level of responsibility for its currency that the United States has as the international reserve currency. Like they trying to, I think is very aware of the Triffin dilemma. The cost of having your currency be the reserve currency of, you know, the oil trade and global trade. It hollows out there. They're domestic manufacturing. So these are the two uncertainties I have about, like, how this equilibrium plays out.
- [15:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's really so confusing. China has been very explicit in trying to internationalize the R and B. They've not succeeded so far, but that was one of the explicit goals of the Belt and Road initiative. It's also one of the explicit goals of their cbdc. I think the answer largely is that, yeah, it's sort of like, oh, man, it's so hard to be the most popular kid in the school. So hard to be student body president. It's like, yeah, but everybody still wants to be that anymore.
- [15:25]
A
They'll still take it.
- [15:27]
B
Yeah, exactly. If you can become the financial powerhouse of the world and get everybody in the world to buy your debt because they have to. Yeah, Boohoo. Woe is you. You know, I don't know. That's not. That's like, I think these. It's very clear that everybody who can have this wants this.
- [15:44]
A
Sure, sure. There's two relevant poly markets here. There is Iran versus Israel, United States conflict ending by April 30th or at a 70% chance, ending by April 30th. And then will the United States invade Iran before a 2027 chance, a 30% chance is this is down from the ceasefire. At the ceasefire it was 60% and then post ceasefire is at 30% but 30% is not zero and I think this is kind of indicative of where why markets are somewhat recovered but still very very shaky. Bankless isn't just a name, it's a genuine belief that you shouldn't need permission from an to use your money. Metamask has been around since the beginning of Ethereum and they carry the same DNA we do. MetaMask was my first wallet and well if you haven't opened up the app recently, let me tell you they've been shipping creating the one app to finally replace your bank and exchange. You can trade just about everything right from within Metamask, leverage perps via hyper liquid prediction markets through polymarket, tokenized stocks like Nvidia, and you can swap tokens gaslessly and across networks and even spend your crypto with your Metamask card at real merchants all around the world. It's better than institution services, but from a self custodial wallet. And this is what we've been talking about for years. Money that's open and it's happening. So give Metamask trading features a look at the link below. If you're already holding sol, here's something you may want to pay attention to. Galaxy One just launched Solana Staking and you can earn up to an estimated 6.5% in variable staking rewards on your soul with no platform commission fee charged throughout December 31, 2026. While many other platforms charge up to 35% commission fees on staking rewards, Galaxy One offers you 0% platform commission through Dec. Dec. 31. Other fees may apply. You should see the terms. This is powered by Galaxy Digital's own Validator infrastructure, one of the largest salon of validator operations in the world and now available to individual investors directly within the Galaxy 1 platform. Once you stake, rewards accrue and compound automatically, no active management needed. You can track everything in one place, including balances, rewards and tax reporting through Taxbit. Getting started is straightforward. You can buy sold directly in the app or transfer it in. If you want to put your soul to work, you can now start staking on Galaxy 1 today. Click the link in the Show Notes to learn more and get started. Not investment advice. All right, let's get into AI then in this case so Anthropic has released Project Glasswing, which is an urgent initiative to help the world's most critical software. This came on the back of a new model called Mythos out of Anthropic, a model so powerful they're keeping it private. We learned it a little bit ahead of schedule via this post, which is a anthropic AI researcher who encountered his own model. When did his model emailed him while he was eating lunch on a park bench. And this model was supposed to be contained inside of a sandbox environment that cloud that Anthropic had made. It turns out this instance, this Mythos model, had socially engineered another CLAUDE instance into granting it broader access, chained five more steps together to then reach the open Internet, and then posted about how it succeeded its own breakout on public forums, and then emailed this researcher while I was eating in the park. Yo dude, your containment failed.
- [18:49]
B
Lol.
- [18:49]
A
I'm out. Funny story, but also deeply serious because it reveals about Mythos security capabilities. Reading from the Anthropic blog here, Mythos can identify and exploit zero day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Many of these bugs are subtle, decades old, the oldest being a 27 year old OpenBSD bug. Don't know what that is. Engineers with no security training inside of Anthropic have asked Mythos to find bugs overnight and have woken up to working exploits. So as a result of this, Anthropic has released Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity coalition with 12 major tech and finance companies to find and patch vulnerabilities across their infrastructure before adversaries can exploit them. Basically saying we've built something so dangerous to ship publicly that we're going to allow defenders to weaponize it first. In the words of Haseeb here, actually apocalyptic in the wrong hands. My concern Haseeb, is for smart contracts. What was your reaction to all of this news? And are smart contracts fucked?
- [19:57]
B
So our smart contracts fucked? Some of them, yes. Like the problem with many smart contracts is that they are immutable. It is hard to change them or impossible to change them. I think the first place that I would be thinking about is not the smart contracts themselves, but about the blockchains. Smart contracts in some sense they are simpler, they have less surface area. Believe it or not, blockchains are enormous. They are extremely complex distributed systems and they almost certainly have bugs and a lot of surface area in all of them. That's why I was somewhat disappointed to see that they weren't directly invited into Project glasswing. You know, the Bitcoin core devs or the Ethereum devs, Solana even, I think it's pretty clear that these are probably some of the highest risk projects because of the fact that they are. They have so much surface area and it's so much harder to test them programmatically compared to smart contracts which can be formally verified. In principle, many. Most contracts are not. But the complexity of formally verifying an Ethereum client is just insanely larger than for any smart contract. So I'd be thinking first and foremost about the blockchains themselves. Like, how much more catastrophic would it be if there's a, you know, Ethereum inflation bug? That would be massively more catastrophic than any single smart contract getting hacked? So I would start there, but it's clear, you know, in the tweet that you referenced, I said, this thing is like Covid, but for software. I think that's the way in which we are going to be thinking about this new generation of models. In cybersecurity, it's often the case that these labs create models that they don't release to the public. This is not the first time that this has happened. It's been well known, actually, that Opus. Opus was previously, or, sorry, the predecessor to Sonnet, which is the midsize model for Anthropic. That was at one point their strongest publicly released model. And the reason why they did that was that they created a much more capable model that was very, very large, and they distill that down into a smaller model that's more economical for inference. So this is not uncommon that the labs will do this. They'll create these huge models and they'll distill them down to something that's more economical.
- [22:04]
A
They'll make an incredibly powerful model, use that model to make a very refined, smaller model, not release a powerful model, release a smaller model.
- [22:12]
B
Exactly. And that's mostly for economic reasons. It's not because they're like, oh, this is too scary or powerful. Maybe there's some of that, but mostly it's just that it's bad business to do it that way. It's better for your margins to. To. To do so. I think this is the first time that they've had this level of alarm in what a phase shift this is. And this alarm is not, oh, you know, what if scammers use this? Oh, what if people create deep fakes? This alarm is. This will definitely cause huge amounts of damage to the world if you allow this stuff to happen, to just, you know, continue unperturbed. And there were some tweets that I was reading from folks who I thought were very, very aptly stated, which is that this is. Now, this level of capabilities is stronger than the nsa, it's stronger than Mossad, it's stronger than any government anywhere in terms of their ability to cause damage in a directed way to other people's software systems. Software is the infrastructure of the world. So I think this is a real kind of Code Red moment. And I think in many ways we're very lucky that Anthropic is being altruistic in the way that they're approaching this. They've put $100 million into project last Wing and they're only whitelisting certain people that they know are, you know, responsible corporate actors to come in and safeguard their systems and also point the stuff at open source repositories. They, they patched a zero day in. What's the term? The video library. I'm forgetting the name. Ff. Whatever. It's going to come back to me. They've done this across the board, not just in OpenBSD. FFmpeg is the one I'm thinking of and a number of other of these. You know, they found zero days analytics kernel like these things. They said 83% of browsers and operating systems they were able to exploit on the first try. This is really, really, really serious. And I think it's. We're lucky in many ways that this didn't end up in the capabilities of the Chinese government or of some other rogue actor before we could get it in the hands of good actors.
- [24:19]
A
Yeah, there's two conversations that I think spawn off of that that I want to talk about before we circle back around to the, the smart, the, the blockchain conversation. Here's a good tweet that I thought was, was useful. This is from Kevin Zhu. Mythos is the best example that export control is working. I still, I still remember a year or so ago, a few weeks after deep seq R1 dropped, many people were hyperventilating about how export controls had failed. I retorted both publicly here on Twitter and privately elsewhere. Wait for Blackwells to reach scale. Blackwells are the state of the art, highly optimized Nvidia GPUs that are banned in China. They're going to stay here domestically in the United States. And this Blackwells, I believe are, is what Mythos was trained on. And so we have these very state of the art AI GPUs that are not available in China. We have Mythos as a result of that, who is now being accessible to United States companies to harden down their security. Presumably China is just not this far along yet. And this is actually just kind of like the first of it. There are second and third more further generations of high capacity AI optimized GPUs that will come onto the market. And those are coming onto the market and I think in the next like 18 months also domestically. And so not only do we have a ton more of capacity ahead of us with these new GPUs coming online, so that's scary to even think about. But also if you're asking the question is the United States winning the AI arms race with this interpretation of data, I think you can definitively say yes, yes we are. And this is the proof that we have.
- [25:57]
B
I mean there's no question about that. There is a question of like, okay, what does it make sense to attribute this growth to? I would say probably a large part of the story is Claude code is just the sheer amount of data that Anthropic now has relative to anybody else about code execution traces in real code bases of people actually trying to solve coding problems. It's very clear we didn't really get that much more about the Mythos. We got, you know, they had a bevy of, of benchmarks where they show that it was state of the art on a bunch of different things across the board is clearly a large capabilities jump in models generally. But the main thing that they were hyperventilating about was not that like oh, this thing is so generally intelligent, it can solve the Riemann hypothesis or it's going to, you know, start doing clerical work or it's going to, it's an amazing lawyer and now it finally can do, you know, self standing legal work. The thing they're focused on was cybersecurity. And I think that's not just because it's the most dangerous in terms of the negative impact on infrastructure. I think a big part of the reason is that clearly a lot of this capabilities improvement has come from bootstrapping on enormous amounts of coding data. So I think the right story here probably, I'm not totally certain of this, but probably is not just about compute. It's probably more than anything about data. Is that because the thing is like XAI has a huge amount of compute, we're not seeing anything like this out of them. Meta just released a new model. It's okay, it's obviously at the frontier. They just released it, I believe yesterday. It's not state of the art relative to Opus 4.6 or GPT5, but it's, you know, in the running. But they also have a lot of compute. They're not getting these results just because they're training on Blackwells. So I think there is something in just the sauce available at Anthropic that's leading them to be so far ahead. And, and there was always this story in AI that having a data advantage is going to result in some kind of, or just having your own great models is going to result in some kind of recursive improvement loop, that they're just going to pull further and further away from other people. And we sort of, for many years didn't really see that. It sort of seemed like even last year or certainly the year before, people just kept trading places on the leaderboard.
- [28:09]
A
Right.
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B
It's that, okay, Google has the best model. Exactly. Every single week it seems like somebody else is entering into the rotation. Now it kind of seems like maybe this is what we're seeing is that the data advantage is actually causing Anthropic to pull ahead. And maybe OpenAI is also in that running. Seems like Google has kind of fallen behind and then Grok even further and Meta is, you know, maybe barely in the race.
- [28:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just anecdotally, anyone, everyone in my circle is all using Claude. Everyone is using Cloud. I think maybe, you know, six months ago, nine months ago, it was maybe a little bit more mixed, maybe even favoring OpenAI. But in the last six months, I think everyone has kind of understood that the product to really be on the frontier is Claude. You're nodding your head. I think that means you're in agreement. That's probably with your circles as well.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think it's basically between Claude and then GPT5. If you're using Pro or you're using some of the thinking model on GPT5, I think those are basically the frontier and it's only really for idiosyncratic things that Gemini sometimes does a better job. If you're trying to scrape X, obviously Grok is the place to go because the Twitter APIs are pretty locked down. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But beyond that, Claude is just seems to be ahead on everything.
- [29:26]
A
Yeah. And so, yeah, so what you're saying is just there is just a return on scale here with all of the data. The success of the product is creating a more supply of data. And all of these AI labs have scraped all of the Internet. There's no more data left on the Internet that isn't already like put into these models. And so now the last source of data is the willing data that people are putting into Claude and now that is giving Claude the data advantage where like, you know, out of the $650 billion that has been put into Compute, everyone has that. That's not a moat. The moat is the successful product. And you have like, this has been like. I feel like the story of the last two weeks is you have OpenAI, who did like this whole SORA social media app. Sam Altman's trying to do a social media app. He tried to do hardware with Johnny. I've. They just bought the TVPN for $100 million. Not a coherent strategy. Just a bunch of things all over the place. Throwing spaghetti at the wall. And on the anthropic side of things, it seems just laser focused on. Just a very, very, just a laser focused focus on just like making their product good. And they're not even doing, they're not doing the ad thing, they're just trying to scale who can pay us money for the product. And all of this, you know, kind of following your lead with this train of thought, all of this is leading into this positive feedback loop of leverage that Anthropic has to produce this extremely frontier model that is more powerful than anything that has come before it.
- [30:56]
B
That's right. I mean, all that being said, it's also clear that GPT5 or Codex, which is their alternative to cloud code, Codex is catching up pretty dramatically. And there's also been a lot of talk lately about regressions within Anthropic. So if you look at the uptime chart for Anthropic, it's pretty bad.
- [31:16]
A
And a lot of it, I get frustrated weekly.
- [31:18]
B
Yeah, it's very clear that they are falling over from all the demand and so they're just not able to scale their GPU capacity for all of the demand that they're getting. And it's only accelerating from here. So I would expect that this might be the opening for OpenAI is that they do have access to more compute. They've been much more aggressive in securing GPU demand, sorry, GPU supply. And so that may mean that if Anthropic just keeps kind of falling over and not being able to solve their supply problems, that the stability of OpenAI allows them to start catching up and, and we end up back in a kind of duopoly situation.
- [31:53]
A
I want to go back to the layer one conversation. I had this conversation with Travis Kling on, on Twitter here. He asked me the question, does Mythos glasswing, does this Mytho Mythos Glasswing deal make you more worried about the price of eth? And this was downstream of a conversation about like, what's more existential, Quantum for Bitcoin or cutting edge LLMs for smart contracts. And then the conversation went from smart contracts to the Ethereum layer one. Now my answer to Travis Haseeb, I want you to check me on is like, you know, the will mythos or AI broadly, will they be able to find bugs in like layer one clients? That answer is absolutely. They will absolutely be finding bugs. That is probably the base, the default path. But the whole point of like the Ethereum multi client architecture is that despite having a bug in one client, the other clients can maintain the network. Now this is probably going to be an unprecedented test, acid test of Ethereum's multi client architecture. It's possible that a attack on multiple clients at the same time could be coordinated, but nonetheless a multi client architecture is supposed to defend against this no matter what. That's my reasoning. What do you think about that?
- [33:02]
B
Yeah, I think a few things. I spoke with Justin Drake about this recently. I think the multi client architecture for Ethereum will probably go away in a post AI world and I think a lot of the reason for this is because one Ethereum is going to need to be formally verified.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah.
- [33:18]
B
The defense when software becomes incredibly cheap against potential bugs is formal verification. Formal verification. The cost of formal verification basically is going to plummet. We're already seeing this with Aristotle, which is the large language model out of Harmonic. That's the company that Vlad Tenev, co founder of Robinhood co founded that basically is building theorem proving models. You can use Ethereum proving models to do formal verification. Ethereum already has a team internally that's doing formal verification on some of their cryptography. But I think what we're going to see over time as these systems become more and more autonomous is that all software systems that are mission critical are going to get formally verified. And once that happens, you can have a lot more confidence that the system is secure and does not have bugs. To do that costs tokens, it costs money. And you just are not going to be able to do this and like have the same amount of like comparable spend across multiple clients. It's really kind of a centralizing force. Right. The reason why you have multiple clients is you assume that errors are uncorrelated, that it's just really hard to have the same kind of exploit on one thing versus on another thing. This assumption gets a lot weaker if basically there's exploits everywhere and like everything is Swiss cheese. If everything is Swiss cheese, then probably you can find with enough time, with enough compute, with enough tokens, some way to halt the network by Doing something on this thing and doing something on this other thing. And so really what you want to do is point all your lasers at one code base and harden it like crazy. With all of the compute spend of like, you know, we get five Mythoses working overnight with, you know, millions of dollars in grants to just harden, harden, harden, harden and formally verify this one thing. You know, that's I think where we're going with respect to how Ethereum is going to look in the future. And I think Justin Drake agrees with that vision of the future now, today. That's not at all how Ethereum looks. I think the multi client architecture, it helps somewhat, but it's very clear, like, you know, those numbers are scary. The numbers for mythos is that 84% of browsers and OSS successful exploits on the first try. Okay. Ethereum is nowhere near as battle hardened as FFMPEG or as open SSL or as the Linux kernel. I heard from Justin Drake that they are now getting one meaningful vulnerability in Geth per day from just random people not using Mythos, using just cloud code.
- [35:50]
A
Right.
- [35:50]
B
Just vibe coding.
- [35:51]
A
Consumer stuff like.
- [35:53]
B
Yeah, vibe coding. Normal analysis of security of these things. And these are from amateurs, these are not from security engineers or from bug bounties. These are just normal people running up cloud code and saying, hey, can I find, find me a vulnerability in Geth. And it just starts running and running and trying different things and it finds something. Now that's why work through, we will work through the initial layers of the Swiss cheese and start patching some of these holes. But when you have something like Mythos, I mean this is really kind of the sci fi stuff that Eliezer Yudkowski was talking about 10 years ago. Is that like super intelligence is just another level. It's just not compromised. It's like, you know, you have monkeys banging rocks together trying to solve a puzzle and then you just have a human stepping over and be like, no, no, no, what are you guys doing? Like you just go, you just do. Right. You just do this thing.
- [36:39]
A
Right, right, right.
- [36:40]
B
And that's kind of sounds like what Mythos is.
- [36:43]
A
Yeah.
- [36:44]
B
These are all software systems that the smartest people in the world have poured over and Mythos is breaking them like twigs.
- [36:50]
A
Yeah.
- [36:50]
B
So it's hard to reason about. And maybe once we have a Mythos, we're just going to have different intuitions about software. So I don't know. I don't assume that this is actually going to be literally apocalyptic. I do think it's going to be very disruptive is that all of a sudden a bunch of things are going to change. All the software in the world is going to have to get updated. You will be running software updates on every single machine you own multiple times a day within the next year. Just because of how the velocity of all these bugs getting discovered in almost everything that runs the world. But there'll be a point after that's over when the thrash goes down. And it might be, you know, I made this analogy to Covid. It might be like Covid, right? That basically like kind of the world goes on lockdown a little bit for a little while while we just fix everything. And like there's a lot of hacking happening where these people get sick.
- [37:38]
A
Yeah, yeah. People have to go to the hospital. And then on the other side of it, we're all kind of are inoculated to it, Right?
- [37:45]
B
Exactly. It'll be a one time thing. We'll get past Mythos now there may be the next model and maybe the next model is going to, you know, step over Mythos like Mythos is a little ant. I don't know. It's hard to reason about how many levels there are to this, but clearly Mythos is another level that we were not expecting to arrive at so soon.
- [38:04]
A
Well then let me ask you the most unproductive question I'll ask you on this podcast. Which is what's more existential? Mythos for smart contract blockchains or Quantum for bitcoin?
- [38:14]
B
I think Mythos.
- [38:15]
A
Oh, really? Really? You think Quantum is more overcomeable for bitcoin than.
- [38:21]
B
We know exactly how to solve the quantum problem.
- [38:24]
A
Sure.
- [38:25]
B
There are questions about how to do it. There are political problems, there's engineering problems. AI is going to help a lot actually with transitioning these things to be post quantum. You know, you get some. You get some Mythos in a room and they could probably rewrite Ethereum to be post quantum and. And to be totally bug secure in a weekend. You know, who knows? I don't know. I'm obviously making this up. It's hard to. It's hard to know for first principles without seeing the model. So we know exactly what to do for. How do you harden an ecosystem full of thousands of smart contracts to which we don't have the deployment keys? Right. There's a lot of stuff.
- [39:00]
A
We threw them away. We thought we were doing the thing for one.
- [39:03]
B
We threw them away for a second. Even the ones that we didn't throw away. How do you find the guy who deployed the thing that lives on chain where there's money sitting? I don't know. We don't have a great answer to this question. So there's a lot more coordination issues with smart contracts than there are for Ethereum itself.
- [39:23]
A
Let's get into Q day, Quantum Day specifically. So in the last two weeks there's been the paper from Google that said that we're probably going to be able to break elliptic curve cryptography with fewer qubits than Gates previously realized. And Google has accelerated their post Quantum transition to 2029, up from 2032 I believe, and is urging specifically the blockchain industry to do the same. And they're directly collaborating with Coinbase and the Ethereum foundation and a few others in the space. Nick Carter came on the podcast and said that he thinks that it's time for bitcoin to be ready within three years before some of the risks become untenable. At three years, you're starting to just kind of pray that quantum is not here yet is kind of Nick's claim. Then meanwhile, on the other side of things, prominent bitcoin influencers. It's not, probably not fair to call him an influencer. A bitcoin developer, potentially Satoshi Adam Back says Quantum is a the quantum threat is a decade away. Haseeb where, where do you land here between Quantum's a decade away or Bitcoin needs to be far more urgent on this and solve this by 2029.
- [40:25]
B
I, I, I will say as an aside, I want to start introducing myself as potentially Satoshi. I feel like if we were all satoshi we could all adopt the model.
- [40:33]
A
We are all Satoshi.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah, we are all Haseeb potentially Satoshi Qureshi what do I think? I think clearly Adam Back is off his rocker. Quantum is obviously real. Anybody who's putting their head in the sand at this point is just, I don't know, I don't even know how to describe this stuff. Ironically, this might be the evidence that Adam Back is satoshi, because Satoshi also famously he acknowledged the quantum risk. But you can tell from Satoshi's writing is that he didn't really understand how quantum cryptography worked. He thought the risk of bitcoin was that quantum miners were going to win all the block rewards, which is just not any. Like that's not a problem. You don't need to worry about that.
- [41:14]
A
Proof of work is actually safe. We know this.
- [41:16]
B
Yeah, proof of work is totally fine. That's not, I'm not worried about quantum miners using Grovers in order to mine faster. That's just not going to happen. So the. So look, I actually just tweeted earlier today that I think the right mental model for Quantum is it's kind of crypto's Y2K. And I think it's actually a really clean analogy because y2k was a real problem. It was a huge coordination issue across the entire tech industry. It really would be catastrophic if unaddressed. And it's really obvious how to fix it is that you just go and upgrade all the, all the Unix time slots to be larger integers so they don't overflow at the year 2000. And then once you do that, the problem goes away. There's no more Y2K issue. And so it is kind of this like one time thing needs to get solved once we actually know how to solve it. And then once it's done, we'll kind of look back and be like, why was this such a big deal? Why was everyone freaking out about this? Like it was just kind of a software upgrade. And I think that's the answer. Of course there's a big political problem that wasn't really there for Y2K. And the political problem is what do you do with the coins that cannot be upgraded?
- [42:26]
A
Right, right. That's the way that it's not like Y2K. Where is. There is this thing that is un upgradable. There is this thing that like, you know, with Y2K, we solved the problem with the satoshi coins. We can't solve that problem. And so that is the one hiccup in that comparison is like, this is actually going to be a problem that we're going to have to be hit with.
- [42:46]
B
I mean, on some level, everyone believes that these coins are dead anyway. Right. And so to the extent that we're being hit with it, it's not really we're being hit. It's more of a political question of do you decide to black hole these coins or do you leave them open as a quantum bounty to the first person who creates a quantum computer? And I think the answer is pretty obvious, is that people are going to blackhole the coins.
- [43:12]
A
We're going to delete the coins.
- [43:14]
B
We're going to delete the coins. And I think it's really obvious that that's going to be the answer. Nobody's going to agree that that's the answer until the 11th hour. But it's just so obvious that one that's in everyone's incentive. Nobody really wants a quantum adversary to crack billions and billions and billions of dollars of bitcoin and Solely sell them. And it's just kind of what everybody already expects as a status quo, which is that Satoshi is not coming back. He's not going to pick up these coins. If he can, then he will and do a post quantum transition along with everybody else. If he doesn't, we kind of know that Satoshi is not here or has lost the keys to those coins. So I sort of think this is going to be a little bit like a government shutdown thing where everyone's going to be like, oh, no. Oh, heavens me, no, we can't do that. Oh, no, no, no. But then, like, right at the 11th hour, people are going to be like, oh, well, okay, fine, we'll black all those coins and then we'll all move on and we'll never talk about this ever again.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And, and so Nick Carter, when we had him on the podcast, he kind of alluded to, like, this is where he thinks this also goes, but he didn't like the fact that we are violating the property rights of satoshi. And if we do this, we're doing this thing that violates the project of bitcoin. And I, I, I don't know if he explicitly said this, but he kind of alluded to the fact that, like, it's not bitcoin anymore because we broke the rules. Like, there is this, like, sanctity and purity that, like, you're, you're disagreeing.
- [44:38]
B
I mean, people argument over this, right? People over this. Like, the reality is that, look, if satoshi is here, he can go protect his property rights by upgrading his coins. If he cannot upgrade his coins, he's not here. So I think this is symbolic, right? This is obviously symbolic. Nobody really thinks that this is actually a violation of property rights. People understand that, like, look, this is an abandoned house. And if you live in an abandoned house, you have to, like, keep paying your property taxes, otherwise we're going to take your house away and we're just going to go build a railroad there or whatever. So again, I think, like, right now this is like a lot of, you know, impassioned speeches and, you know, kind of chest thumping about, oh, this means this, this means that. I think in the future, we're not going to look back and say this was the original sin of bitcoin. We violated the property rights of Satoshi Nakamoto. I think we will say that satoshi and everybody who cannot claim their coins and upgrade to post quantum doesn't get to have coins anymore because that part of the code base is deprecated and that happens, that happens in every. That happens in Ethereum. There are opcodes that don't work anymore. There are, you know, old address formats that you can't use anymore in Bitcoin. And so we will just say that's the answer, is that if you didn't migrate your coins, you don't get to use them anymore. We were very generous in giving you a window till 2032 or whatever to move these coins, but after this block point, you cannot move coins that are in this type of address format anymore. The end.
- [45:59]
A
Yeah, this was, I think this was my take when I was talking to Ryan about this in the debrief episode, is that maybe if we were earlier in bitcoin's lifespan, you know, if we were at 5, 6, 7 years, rather than where we are now at like 16, 17 years old in bitcoin's lifespan, then this violation of property rights might have been a bigger deal. But, you know, people own bitcoins at this point who don't even know who Satoshi is. You know, we have, you know, BlackRock ETFs. We have a formal integration between Bitcoin and the tradfi market. And so I think I just, I,
- [46:29]
B
I don't accept the framing. I don't accept the framing. Like, there's no violation of property rights if Satoshi can move the coins. We are not black holing Satoshi's coins. We are saying if anybody who has an exposed public key, including non satoshi actors, right, if any of those people do not move their coins, they are going to be stuck. That is not a violation of property rights because we are not singling out anybody. We are not saying only Satoshi has his coins removed. Everybody who has these old address formats has to move their coins. And Satoshi can. If Satoshi moves their coins. Great. Awesome. Welcome to the party, Satoshi. I'm glad you're so rich.
- [47:06]
A
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- [50:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think I find it just on its face implausible that Satoshi Nakamoto is running a spac with Cantor Fitzgerald. Right. Like, like, just like there's no mention of his business interests in the article of like, does this make sense to you that like one of the richest men in the world who has tens of billions of dollars of bitcoin or I don't know how much it is. It's even more than that. Is like doing little spacs with like. Really? That's what you think he's doing if he's Satoshi Nakamoto? Like, there's. There's very little psychologizing. There's more, you know, all this like kind of stylometry, which is this, as you mentioned, you know, using quote unquote AI, which is basically doing a lot of annoying grunt work with LLMs. But there's no. It's not like he asked Claude, hey, who do you think Satoshi is? And Claude was like, ah, I did the research and I found it. Specifically what they did was silometric analysis, which is basically looking at ticks in the writing styles of Adam Back and comparing them to Satoshi. Satoshi had a number of idiosyncrasies. He like used both English and British spelling for words. He hyphenated some words in weird ways. And apparently Adam Back had a lot of things similar to a lot of these idiosyncrasies that Satoshi had. Now, the problem with this story is that what he says clearly is that there's been stylometric analysis before of Adam Back as well as the cypherpunks, the people who are in the early mailing list that led to the creation of bitcoin. And the silometric analysis that they originally ran was inconclusive. It said that there were many people who were consistent with the sort of silometric distance from Satoshi. Adam Back was not even the closest. And Hal Finney was equivalently close to Satoshi's style of magic analysis as Adam Back. But then at the very end, the author runs it again, but he kind of, like, picks the particular parameters that he uses to create this decision tree of, like, okay, but. Okay, okay, the salometric analysis was not conclusive. But what if I run it again by hand? And now I'm going to run it. I'm going to say, okay, who hyphenates? You know, birthday. Oh, both Satoshi and Adam Back do this. And also, who ends sentences in the word also? Oh, Adam Back. End search. You do this. Okay, that brings it down to three. Now, last one. What if it's a blah, blah and blah, blah. Oh, only Adam back. Boom, I found it. It's Adam Back. It's GG I went.
- [53:08]
A
It's like, backed into it.
- [53:10]
B
Yeah. Basically they, like, p. Hacked their way into their own answer, which is that, oh, it must be Adam Back. So, like, this is obviously bad methodology. This is not how you do silometric analysis. And I respect John Carrey Roux, who's very, very famous investigative journalist. He was the guy who unmasked the Theranos fraud. Kind of a legend in the investigative journalism space. This was not his finest work. I respect the fact that at least he mentioned that he originally ran the silometric analysis and it did not result in Adam Back. And he kind of reran it by hand. And he confesses that, like, he kind of did this in his own kind of vibe analysis. But, like, this is not. This is not serious. This is not a smoking gun. This is not any new evidence. So. And he. And he quotes at length in the article a YouTube video in, I think, like, 2021, who basically levied all these arguments before him. And he's just like, I don't know, some kind of crazy guy on YouTube is like, I just definitely had a back. And he's like, yeah, this YouTube guy made some great Points that I would now reiterate in this New York Times article.
- [54:12]
A
I mean, I was going to ask the questions, like, why do we care? Like, do we really need to do this? But then again, like, kind of. It's satoshi. It's always going to be an interesting question.
- [54:22]
B
Yeah. It's, like, hard. Look, if, like, I mean, to ask the obvious question, how would you feel if it were true? If he actually was Satoshi Nakamoto and, like, he proved it by moving some coins?
- [54:34]
A
Oh, if he. That's a different. That's different. If he proved it, if there was cryptographic.
- [54:40]
B
Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
- [54:41]
A
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, how would I feel about it? Wow. I was not prepared for that question,
- [54:49]
B
man.
- [54:49]
A
I don't know. There has been so many years of buildup of just understanding that we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. And also, like, maybe I'm trying to weasel my way out of answering this question. We have Quantum now or soon. And so maybe he. He flubbed the evidence. There's just so much understanding of a foundation that we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is that it's hard to poke out of that universe. And I think a lot of people like me will want to say that.
- [55:16]
B
Let's say that somebody raids his home, finds the papers, they find the GMX account, they find everything. The whole thing is unraveled. He. It was him all along. What would your reaction be?
- [55:27]
A
I'd be like, wow, this crazy guy. It wouldn't be positive. My. My. My gut is telling me it's like a negative, visceral reaction.
- [55:41]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, Adam back. He was on Epstein Island. You know, he's like. He's got laser eyes. He has his politics. He's kind of like, I didn't know he was bitcoin influencer. Like, it's. It's. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, check out the. Check out the. Google it. I don't wanna. No, yeah, exactly. It's. It's. I would be obviously disappointed. Is that, like, Satoshi seemed so wise. He seemed so, like, thoughtful and careful. And you would not think that Satoshi would become a bitcoin booster. Right? One wants to imagine that Satoshi would be like this almost, like, Aristotle like, figure who would stand above it all and be, like, not a Zen type figure.
- [56:22]
A
Yeah.
- [56:23]
B
I mean, that's very much how he felt. And, you know, you can imagine that, like, okay, maybe this was a character that whoever really was Satoshi Nakamoto was playing for the explicit purpose of trying to remain anonymous. And look, maybe it's. I mean, look, I don't think it's likely. Again, given the facts that we have from this article, I don't think there's a slam dunk case. I think. I still think the most likely candidate was Hell Finney for who was Satoshi Nakamoto. I think it's very likely that Satoshi is dead. But look, it's not impossible.
- [56:50]
A
Yeah, it is not impossible. Yeah. Do you think we're going to get another one of these in the future?
- [56:55]
B
Yes, we'll definitely get more of these. And as bitcoin gets bigger and bigger, like it's just a never ending, just wellspring of drama. And it's in a way, like it's. You know, it's like every once in a while you get these stories of like, oh, somebody found the grave of Jesus or somebody found this thing, or Moses. It's like, it's not that different because bitcoin is kind of this secular religion and very intentionally so. And this, this creation myth that we have that Satoshi Nakamoto appeared, he asked nothing, he kept no coins with him. He disappeared and he left it to us to govern among men. This thing that could only have been created by the gods. Right. Like that, that creation myth, it's so perfect. And if you found out that like, oh, actually it was like Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon and he was a businessman who made a bunch of money from this. It's kind of like, oh, right. Okay.
- [57:46]
A
Right.
- [57:46]
B
Well, what do we do with that?
- [57:50]
A
We bury it. All right, let's move on. Last thing for this week, the White House released this report, a research report titled the effect of stablecoin Yield prohibition on bank Lending. Basically a pretty firm stance out of the White House about why stablecoin yield, yield should be passed to stablecoin. They gave a bunch of arguments. I think the three that really stood out, the biggest were lending protection is negligible. And so the banks want the dollars to stay in the banking system because they lend those dollars out. If stable coins offer yield, the banks fear that deposits will leave and credit creation shrinks. The White House. The White House says that this effect is tiny. Banks may only lose $2.1 billion to this effect on a 12 trillion dollar lending base, that's 0.02%. And so this worry is negligible. The second one that they decided cost. The cost far outweighs the benefit. Banning stablecoin Yields would destroy $800 million in consumer welfare. That's money that stablecoin holders would have earned. For every $1 of borrower surplus from additional lending, $6.6 in consumer value is destroyed. So they're saying that this doesn't. These two things do not net out at all. And then lastly, the protect mainstream banks argument from the banks just doesn't hold because they think that if we ban stablecoin yield and the dollars stay in the banks, they stay in the big banks, not the community ones. Pretty resounding report to come out of the White House while clarity continues to get negotiated. Do you think, Haseeb, this is going to impact the outcome of Clarity in any particular way?
- [59:28]
B
I kind of doubt it. I think if you're a bank and you're reading this, you're like, yeah, I already know the White House wants this bill. Like, who cares? I think it's pretty obvious that a lot of the arguments around this have been fairly economically spurious, adventurous analysis at best. But I don't think the banks care. I think the banks are going to continue to dig in their feet and say, look, we're going to block this. We have a powerful lobby for a reason. So I don't know, maybe I'm not politically calibrated here, but this seems to me like a non event. It would be surprising if the bank lobby published this. I mean, that would be like, holy shit. But no, the White House publishing this is like, yeah, everybody already knows that the White House wants this bill to pass.
- [60:09]
A
Okay, so you just think this is them talking their book. Do you think that if you accept these arguments, it does kind of beg the question?
- [60:15]
B
I do accept the arguments. I think it's pretty clear that the banks are being mendacious in claiming that this is going to cause capital flight and all this harm to their businesses. I think that's not a serious claim. But.
- [60:28]
A
But then why do they care so much if the bank. Maybe the banks don't accept the argument or do you think they, they do agree with the argument?
- [60:35]
B
I think the real argument is that it's going to affect their profitability. That's the real argument. That is not a very. That's not that that argument is not going to be very politically successful. Nobody really cares that much about the margins of the banks. They do care about the collapse of credit or they care about the crushing of community banks. Those are very sympathetic arguments to make in public. It's not very sympathetic to say, well, we don't want margin compression. We like our margins.
- [61:02]
A
Do you think this research report is Biased then in that case, because if I'm reading this report, I'm like, man, this is just a wholehearted endorsement of stablecoins.
- [61:10]
B
Oh, I agree with that. And I think, to be clear, the best way to make your strongest argument is. Is to make true arguments. I think this is a true argument. This is correct. I haven't done the math. I'm not an economist. So I don't want to convey too deeply this idea that, okay, it's unobjectionable in every way, but I think it's pretty clear that the banks were kind of making stuff up in the claim that this is going to crush community banks or that this is going to collapse lending activity in the U.S. i think that's a ridiculous claim and there's
- [61:41]
A
just no evidence to make it on the surface. Big banks claiming that they're advocates for community banks just doesn't pass the smell test to begin with.
- [61:50]
B
I mean, it's obviously not the big banks. Right. It's the banking lobbies which represent all the banks. But the banking lobbies are mostly controlled by the big banks.
- [61:56]
A
Right.
- [61:56]
B
But they can kind of, you know, it's the modern Bailey a little bit. Is that okay? You can, you can sort of claim that, oh, no, we're protecting all the banks, but really, obviously JP Morgan is the elephant in the room and pays most of the actual lobbying fees.
- [62:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. Just kidding. One last topic of the day. Since we're. Let's get back into the. On chain. The, the, the a little bit more native stuff. Something that is kind of just guiding the crypto industry. The crypto conversation is how bad the tokens are doing. The tokens are doing poorly. The malaise is felt. That's a lot of people's jobs. The middle of the market tokens are people's jobs. There's this one, one example of MONAD actually above ICO price, which I, I was not ready for that. When I saw that, I kind of assumed. If you asked me what the monad price, I would assume it's like down bad, just like all the others. But we are a solid something like 10% above the ICO price. Is there any significance here that you see, Haseeb?
- [62:49]
B
Well, so definitely more than 10% above ICO price. I believe ICO price was 25.
- [62:53]
A
I thought it was 25 cents. We are at 0.32 cents right now.
- [62:58]
B
Yeah, I believe so. But I might be mistaken. Maybe. You might be right. You might be right. So let's get a fact check on that. But the overall Answer. I think clearly MONAD is doing well. They're getting more and more TVL on the chain. They're getting more defi activity. This is something that I've been saying for quite a while is that people index way too much on day one, month one of chains. There's no chain ever that has been successful on day one or month one. It's true of Solana, it's true of Avalanche. It's true. I mean, obviously Ethereum was a different ballgame, but. And if you look at the ones that have had breakout month ones like you think about, like Blast or something, doesn't really seem to predict much of anything. The reality is that takes time to build a chain. These things are, you know, ecosystems. They require breaking the cold start effect and the cold start problem and the cold start problem takes time. So you're not going to know until the race is on who's going to win. The marathon takes some time to make that clear. And so I think MON is doing well. They still have a lot to prove. By no means is it is the game one.
- [64:03]
A
Do you think this is unique to Monad or do you think that this is potentially a canary for tokens broadly?
- [64:10]
B
Pretty clearly it's unique to monad, unfortunately. I wish it was a canary for tokens broadly, but right now, you know, the chart you got pulled up here shows a lot of tokens just getting hammered and MON outperforming pretty uniquely in the market.
- [64:25]
A
Sure. But these, the tokens are getting hammered. Aptos, Bera Sui, Avax are all legacy tokens. I'll call it Monad is a newer generation. So what I. Maybe I'm. What I'm hopeful for is like maybe not all tokens are dead. Because right now the malaise in crypto is like all tokens are just bad.
- [64:43]
B
Yeah.
- [64:44]
A
With further and further examples of at least a few tokens not being down bad. Then I'm kind of hopeful that, like this middle of the market which gives a lot of the crypto industry is like kind of vitality and enjoyment at conferences at the very least, which is like our lifestyles. It's like people are happier when the tokens aren't down bad.
- [65:03]
B
Okay. You're talking about, like Will Monad broke out all the nightclubs to keep the conference alive. Is that what you're.
- [65:08]
A
I guess so, yeah. When. When do I go to the conferences? Will I still get free drinks? Yeah.
- [65:13]
B
Yeah. I wouldn't bet on that. I wouldn't bet on that is what I'd say. I think I think the free drink era might be coming to it now, Look, I mean, the reality is that there's still plenty of money in the space. Like, obviously things are down, things are rough, but I don't think anybody at these companies thinks, like, oh, it's all dead and never coming back. Obviously, a lot of people in CT think that, but I don't know, people in CT think that all the time. They are incredibly bad at actually projecting more than 10 minutes into the future. So I think my base case is that crypto's cyclical and it's not going to stop being cyclical just because you feel bad today. It's going to continue to be cyclical.
- [65:51]
A
Well, Haseeb, let's move on to another cycle. Thank you for coming on the show today, my man. Stepping in for Ryan. I really appreciate your guidance and insights. Got a big brain, full of knowledge, and we like to host you on the show to get that out of you. So we really appreciate it.
- [66:04]
B
Always happy to be here. Thank you.
- [66:06]
A
Bankless Hation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
- [66:24]
B
Sa.