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Austin Griffith on the $1 AI Audit and the Case for Founders Over DAOs: Uneasy Money
01:10:28
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- [00:00]
A
If Vitalik wasn't there, I do not think this thing gets built. I think Vitalik disappears and it turns into like pitched internizing warfare. Within 20 seconds it will tear each other apart. There's like multiple forks of the chain. Like, it would just be an absolute disaster. I'm Kane Warrick and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make our show possible.
- [00:26]
B
This episode is brought to you by Cape America's Privacy. First mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off. Six months at Cape Co unchained.
- [00:46]
A
All right, I'm here with my co host Taylor Monahan, security expert and a very special returning guest today. Austin Griffith, Ethereum developer, creator of Scaffold Eth or Eth depending on we come from and Speedrun Ethereum and founder of the, I won't even say this, the Biddle Gittle thing of Majigger. He's done a lot of stuff, he's done a lot of stuff, this guy. And he has just launched a new project called the $1 audit. And we will talk about that in our second segment. But yeah, very happy to have you, Austin. Thanks for joining us. We got lots of cool AI stuff to talk about. But first, Vitalik's Lean Ethereum. So what is it? Vitalik published a lean Ethereum three to four year protocol over holy calls. Ethereum's biggest rebuild since the merge, framed as its third iteration after the genesis and merge processes, which also happened totally on time, by the way. So don't even worry about it. It's going to be fine. We're going to land this in three years. So I think the interesting thing about this, outside of the technical stuff, we can dig into the technical stuff because I've been very bullish on Ethereum's ability to accelerate its technical frontier given AI agents and just how much easier it is to do research and how much easier it is to consolidate information and also to build stuff. Not that we want Ethereum to turn into a slop factory, I don't think, at least at the core protocol. But you know, the ability to accelerate engineering efforts and in all areas should allow Ethereum, I think that is probably the best position to take advantage of this, to really accelerate away. That's been my thesis for like the last year. So I think we've shaved off a year from like the 2030 roadmap that everyone was raging about last year when it was. When it was published in 2025. Yeah. What's your take? What's the most exciting technical stuff to come out of this before we talk about the whole timeline thing?
- [03:10]
C
Is that a question for me? I don't know if I. Yeah, for anyone? Yeah.
- [03:14]
A
Yeah, for anyone. For whoever.
- [03:16]
C
Yeah. I'm more of a builder on top of it. Like once the thing ships, I like to create the apps on top. I feel like the protocol layer stuff is cool, but like when we're talking about, okay, it's going to be post quantum and we're going to have a new evm, I'm like, it'll probably all work the same way for me and I'll be building the same apps. It'll just like continue working. Like the thing has been up for 10 years and it will be up for another 10 years or more or hundred or something. And these changes are to enable that kind of stuff and then like UX stuff. Quicker, faster, cheaper.
- [03:52]
A
And this is, this is the thing that I think like again I've been saying for the last year, I don't think people have priced in the fact that, you know, we've lived with this like 12 second block time environment for such a long time and you know, even though the block block limit has gone up a bunch, we still have constraints. You know, obviously gwei is like 0.0000. I can keep going with zeros for a while. One at the moment and so it's almost free to use Ethereum, but we do still get spikes in high volatility environments. We do still get those gas spikes and it does still get kind of expensive to use the chain, you know, so, so I think that like the UX side of, of all of these different technologies kind of coming together is, is very exciting. That said, maybe, maybe as a builder on top of the protocol it's, it's less of an issue. That said, let's not forget that we spent four years building layer twos to get more gas and foster settlement. And if Ethereum lands that, then that whole kind of process, whilst necessary at the time, is kind of invalidated. Right? Like you know, you look back on
- [05:09]
C
that and go, I think they're playing a different game. Like L2s will have a different set of rules and play a different game for a different audience. I think we see that with like Robinhood chain I think we're going to talk about later, which is like a chain on top of a chain on top of a chain. But they service specific audience and that's ripping and I think that's, that's what we'll see with L2s. Also.
- [05:31]
A
I, I guess there is like a fundamental question though, right? Like Robin Hood is about trading. Ethereum should be about trading. But it's like kind of not a little bit for reasons, right? But it's still the best place with the deepest liquidity, etc. Etc. Like if two chains are competing to be the best trading venue and one of them has an advantage. Robinhood at the moment has an adventure at the moment from being able to make some more centralized choices if Ethereum collapses. The kind of technical lead that L2s have gotten through centralization and maintains all of the decentralization but catches up to them or even exceeds them in terms of capabilities. Why would you use Robinhood? It seems.
- [06:17]
C
Yeah, hopefully everything does return to mainnet in a lot of ways and hopefully these L2s and L3s have to specialize and do new things and have different privacy concerns and have different centralization like you talked about. We'd rather they not be centralized, right. But like they will serve different audiences. And yes, that would be great if we could return to mainnet and have shorter slots. Faster transactions the UX Sorry to change gears a little bit but the frame transactions are really exciting for me. I've been thinking about meta transactions and UX for a long time and I think frame transactions will be able to. I Pedro, my buddy from walletconnect talks about it is like he's like this is the thing. Like this is finally like the thing to make UX on Ethereum what it
- [07:01]
A
needs to be can walk us through. Like what, what's the impact as a builder or someone who's building ux? Like what, what do frame transactions allow builders to do, wallets to do?
- [07:12]
C
Yeah, I, my, my really high level is the stuff that we thought a lot of the like account abstraction stuff would do. There have been different attempts at it, but I think this is like the most generalized way of doing it where you can pay for the gas for your user and a whole bunch of other things that allow for different generic things to happen. But smart contract wallets, we already have like passkey signatures. There's a bunch of things there. But I'm not. I was up with a baby at 1am this morning, so I don't have any fair enough about it.
- [07:47]
A
Fair enough. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. No, I think that's good enough. I mean Tay just on like timeline wise, right? Like we were talking about this before the show started that like, you know, if your vision is, you know, a five year roadmap, right, or ten year roadmap or whatever, you know, that that kind of creates a weird incentive for you to not focus on like short term dipping. Right. So what's, yeah, what's, what's your take on this?
- [08:18]
B
Yeah, and it's, it's exactly that. I think that obviously in order to be responsible you have to have the long term in mind. But I just feel like the EF keeps sort of only like they just keep doing these roadmaps, like these very long roadmaps and these very big, big things. And that's what like is sort of the most talked about thing. And it's not always easy to put that, to execute on that. And especially in the short term, especially with like the increase in competition, right, because it's very easy to be like, well, once we have this in five years then, you know, then we'll be competitive again. No, no, you have to, you have to be on the ground floor and be present today. So that worries me a little bit. Again, you know, you do have to have that long term vision. Like you can't just ignore it. You can't just like, you know, pivot from one thing to the other, you know, day to day. But I do wish that we were seeing more. It's just like more focus on promoting Ethereum and like new features and stuff today, right? Like what? Like, come on, like what are we giving people? What are we giving builders? What are we giving for experience? Like now let's talk about that and let's let that be a focus within the EF but also publicly. And I think like Solana specifically is one that like, perhaps they go too hard on this, that there's like a good argument there. But like pretty consistently their builders are like, oh, there's a user need here, oh, there's a problem here. And then they figure out how to ship it.
- [09:59]
A
But in fairness, like it still takes Solana quite a while to ship things, you know, like a lot of the stuff that they, there was a period of time where they could ship really quickly and then you know that a lot of stuff going on and the more things that your network supports, the harder it is for you to upgrade because it's going to handle every edge case and you know, every weird thing that someone's done, etc. Etc. So you do get bogged down by like kind of the weight of history, I think, to some extent. And so, you know, I Guess like there's some sweet spot. But even you know, so Dankrad was like, it has a lot of really cool stuff. I like it. You know, this, this idea of giga gas which is pretty. That's a cool meme. I like, I like the Gigagas meme. Let's all turn it into a token. Anyone if we can avoid it. But every time. Any cool name. Any cool name. But even Tankred's like, let's try and get this done in a year. Let's get it done in a year. How do we chunk this in a way where we genuinely feel the execution pressure and let's go get it done. The thing that I always say to my team and it's quite interesting because our team's much leaner now. I'm much more driving product development like on a day to day basis like in a different way to how I was maybe two years ago where we had this long term vision of like fix the UX of all of crypto and it's going to take a while and so like don't worry about like this week, right? Like just keep doing the stuff. And we did and we shipped a lot of things but we never actually landed anything that like was, you're meaningfully able to kind of shift the market, right. And get people to come and use our platform versus other platforms. We just didn't land it right. You know, and now I'm like, no, no, we're going to ship something like on Wednesday. Like if I put a gun to your head and tell you can you ship this on Wednesday? The answer is going to be yes, of course you can. Like of course you can. And so, you know, the cumulative effect of like continuously shipping things I think is so much more powerful than this. Like the long term vision. Yes, we know where we're going. Great. But like continuously shipping things and actually making the platform better and obviously Ethereum, it's challenging. You can't ship every week. Right. You know, it's a three month coordination effort or whatever. But I think, you know, trying to bundle as much as you can and the most impactful things early and like staging it to you know, kind of increase, that is definitely got to be the play. But you know, I guess we'll see what, what happens out of, out of the whole reorg as well. Right. Like, you know, there's been, there's been a big EF reorg which I'm sure you're contractually obligated to not talk about too much Austin, but, but so So I won't press you. But, you know, I think the hope for everyone is like, we come out of this on the other side with like, not just the roadmap is leaner or the network is leaner, but the org is leaner and more shipping focused and we start to get this shit done.
- [13:27]
C
It is leaner. Yes. I barely still have my job. I think I was going to say
- [13:32]
A
congratulations on surviving the Purge. Right.
- [13:37]
C
Little bit lower on the food chain, I think, but I'm still here.
- [13:41]
A
That seems weird. That seems weird on a. If you lean it out, you get rid of where. Where are the people come in at the top that. I'm a bit confused by that. Just FYI, Austin, we just juggle it up. I don't know. Yeah.
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B
Anyway, yeah, I also, I've been, you know, obviously like super aware of all the people that have been like leaving the ef and I'm kind of low key shocked because for the longest time the conversation was that the EF doesn't pay anyone enough yet. The amount of people that are leaving the EF right now that seem to be genuinely talented people, but also who have been at the EF for like five years, six years, eight years. I'm like, hold on, are we sure we weren't paying them enough? Like, eight years is a fantastically long time to work somewhere, especially in crypto.
- [14:32]
C
It's a type of dedication. Like when you go to work at the ef, you're taking a less amount of money. It's just how it works. And you're choosing to. When I joined the EF like eight years ago or something, it was like full of Jedis. It was the coolest place. Like, you. You wanted to hang out with these people because when you're in the room with them, there's like magical discussions and like freaking Jedi level shit going on. That's just like exciting and cool. And I think that's why I joined the EF in the first place. Like, I wanted to be Austin at Ethereum because I wanted to help everything at the application layer. But being able to be around the EF folks was. Was magical back back then it was really cool and. And that's what people joined for and they wanted to make Ethereum better and.
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B
Yeah, no, and that makes sense. That makes sense. Is the vibe still the same though?
- [15:25]
C
It's. There are some Jedi still there. I think it's different now though. I. I don't know. I. I don't know. It's different.
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B
Yeah.
- [15:36]
A
I mean, yeah, eight years is A long time. Things change. In eight years, things change a lot. All right, let's go to our next segment, the $1 AI audit. You're trying to put consensus diligence out of business, I guess, right? Is that the goal here?
- [15:55]
B
Definitely.
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A
So, yeah, I guess. Walk us through, you know, what, what the purpose of this was. Like, what's the angle? You know, you're a guy who likes things to be useful, right? So this is not just like, a memetic thing, although it is a good meme with a $1 audit. So, like, walk us through, like, where's the utility there? How does it work? Why is it good?
- [16:25]
C
Yeah, I think it's. I definitely, like, launched it on the premise of a good meme, though, right? It's very memetic in terms of a $1 audit. Like, really slams home the fact that, like, well, we're paying $20,000 for an audit. What do you mean, a $1. What do you. What do you mean, a one dollar audit? And that's kind of the point of, like, this is, like, it's meant to lean more toward. This is, like, part of your CICD pipeline. And these kinds of things are more available because we have, like, agentic frameworks that can do this. We have generalized agents, but then we have specialized agents. And that's exactly the kind of situation where you, like, you. You want to have 8004 and X4.02 and have these sort of generalized agents able to pay these more specialized agents, not because they can be more effective, but because they can be more efficient. And that more efficient is exactly the meme that I'm leaning into when I say a $1 audit. And. And so it's. The point was to just, like, memetically really, like, it's. We built this. I came on the show maybe a couple months ago, and I had cloudbot. Cloudbot had built, you know, this whole voting platform called Larvai, where you stake the token and you get this conviction token, and you can then train an AI agent and it votes on your behalf. And then the next thing we built was, like, with that conviction, you could build things. And so there's this whole pipeline of containers that will build apps for you and audit your smart contract. So all of this was built, like, a month ago, but, like, no one was using it. I was like, all right, we need to, like, make a meme. And the other day, like, Friday, I was on the conclave, which is kind of like my live stream I do for the. The. The Claude people. And we. I Was like, let's just make it a dollar. And I just like got in and changed it to a dollar. And the pipeline's all there.
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A
What was the original price? It was going to be like five grand or something.
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C
Five, ten bucks? No, it was like five or ten.
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A
Okay. All right. Okay.
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C
That's a $10 audit is just not a good meme. Like it doesn't.
- [18:21]
A
Yeah, fair.
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C
A $5 audit is just not a good meme. And like really, that's probably where it needs to be. Is like more like five or ten dollars to cover.
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A
Right.
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C
The like, if you were paying for API cost, it's more like probably like a $50 audit. Yeah, it would be very expensive. It's like an, it's like an hour of opus time to do this audit.
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A
Okay.
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C
And a buck is like not going to probably cover that.
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A
No, it definitely won't. It definitely won't.
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C
But it was all available. And basically the website like I got into left. So the service website where you can hire this agent framework to build an app for you or an audit, it's left cloud services. So I have left CLA services up. I have people staking this token in larv AI and spending their conviction to build apps. But it's this tiny little token ecosystem. And I was like, let's make something on top of this that's like mimetically heavy. And that's where the $1 audit came from. And literally one shot, literally one shot. I said, I just registered the domain. It took me longer to register the domain and point the vercel at the website than it did to build all of the rest of this stuff. It took me longer to craft the tweet than it did build the website. I basically was just like, you know, fable buildme $1 audit.com. i have, yeah, we have left claw services. It's all x402. Here's the skill file. You, you can figure this out better than I can build a website so people understand what this thing is and they can get in and they can buy an audit for a dollar. And, and really it's just like a skill file. You can give it to your agent, your agent can pay $1 in USDC. And it goes into this pipeline that queues it up and runs this like two phase audit where it's eat skills upfront and then pashov security skills as the second pass.
- [20:08]
A
And I mean this, this is the thing that I think people, some people are starting to figure out. Right. And I know you were early to this, but like the ability to deliver skills in, in a like easy to consume package, right? Where. And again consume for both sides, right? Like both, both the user and the agents, right? The ability to take some information and package it up and then deploy that somewhere to make it really easy. Because you could like, anyone could go and like get E skills and get. Pass off, get all these things. You could do this and, and you could probably point Fable at it. It might take an hour, but who has an hour, right? No one has an hour, right?
- [20:58]
C
When it could just be one usdc.
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A
It could be just one usdc. Like I've got contract. If you, if you need an audit, right, it's because you're doing some other thing. You don't want to stop and be like, let me build an audit pipeline, right? And, and so I think that like this, this ability to deliver skills is why the x402 stuff is so cool. Because you will eventually have these on tap skills that people can access. Right? This is something that we've been super focused on internally because what we found is we had a bunch of people in our team who had built their own skill files, their own workflows, their own things, but they're siloed to their machine. And so myself and my head of engineering were like, we have to break these out. And we tried a bunch of things. Like we tried Centaur, which is really good, but like the workflows need to be like a bit more discreet.
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C
I just don't want to use.
- [22:01]
A
Yeah, fair, fair, fair, fair. And so, so, so anyway, I think that this idea of like bundling a skill up that an Asian can just tap into and you know, eventually have some kind of like open marketplace where it's like, oh, I need an audit. There's three different variants. This one, you know, it costs a dollar. It's like six minute abs, right? Maybe there's a 50 cent order and then it's like, oh, just do that one three minute abs.
- [22:29]
C
Exactly. And I think so eth skills was like my. I kept so App builder enablement. I'm thinking a lot about developers building on Ethereum and enabling them to do that in the best way possible. And that all changed probably in November. The turning point of like Opus4.5, now everybody's one shotting apps. They're not like looking at the solidity even anymore. Like not very many people are like using their pingers to, you know, actually write solidity anymore. And so what we knew we needed was like an AI ification of that stack. And I started with an MCP server. And what I realized is like, you have to install it. Like there's like an NPX command that you have to run. And like, you really should be allergic to that. Not just the time, but the security of. I don't want to run.
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A
Exactly, yes, exactly.
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C
When with a skill file, you can tell your agent, go look at that skill file and tell me if it's nefarious and if there's anything weird about it, don't do it. And it'll look through everything. And if you build a skill file, create correctly, it's really easy for the agent to understand and see clearly, like what this thing is. You give it a skill file, it can see that it's good, it can install it on itself without having to run anything. It's just text. It brings that text in and it does what the text says. And this is really powerful because LLMs wake up old, right? They're trained on older data and if you're working in an interesting area, the things are moving faster than the LLMs are going to be caught up to. So you need to kind of like when they wake up, you need to like plug them in like Neo in the Matrix and teach them kung fu real quick. And by real quick, I mean it's like milliseconds, right?
- [24:11]
A
But like you have to even quicker than the movie. The movie was a bit, a bit stupid about that. It takes, it doesn't take like 20 minutes to plug the guy in. So, so, and again, like, I think, I think this whole idea of like packaging skill and you know, people like Claw openclaw had this, right? Like they had the skill repository and whatever, but like there's still to me, this like very siloed, you know, use a skill, you publish it. Like it's harder to share and you know, it's less multiplayer. Like the thing that I've been really focused on lately is like working out how to make these things more multiplayer. And I think that like X402 and package skill, like bundled skills that can be like vetted where it's like, oh, okay, I know this is a good source. I can go here is really powerful.
- [25:04]
C
This is actually a good use for the chain again, like verification and reputation of skill files. Like if there was a good skill file repository and other like good security, people had signed off on certain skills. There's a lot of power to that.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we got blobs, right? Surely you could put the whole skill file on the chain these days. Should be Fine.
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C
You probably don't even need to do that, right? You could put in IPFS to just have content addressable. You sign that, that's good enough.
- [25:33]
B
Cool.
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A
So let's go to a quick ad break and then we'll come back and discuss Bonk Dao, which is very exciting.
- [25:45]
B
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- [26:38]
A
All right, Tay, I'm going to head over to you for this one. So Bonk Dao. Turns out it's Dao. I was not aware that it was a dao. They had a $20 million governance rate. So walk us through what happened here.
- [26:53]
B
Yes. So Bonkdao, they use this thing called Realms, which is on Solana. It's like a governance platform where you can like vote and make changes to the governance structure. And in some cases, like in this case, that includes like management of the treasury and Bong Dao apparently, I don't know if anyone actually knew this, apparently had about $20 million in their treasury that was managed by this Realms platform thing. Governance platform thing. What happened was someone, I guess went and bought about $4 million worth of bonk on various markets. So we saw funds coming out of Bybit, we saw them coming out of Binance. We saw them. There's like a whole bunch of sort of source places. So they collected. That was the first step. They collected about $4.4 million worth of bonk, by the way, Bonk is from that area era of tokens, where it's like everything's like a trillion. Like there's like a trillion trillion gazillion tokens.
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A
So I'm just gonna talk reason about what. Yeah, fair, fair, fair.
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B
Yeah, he got like a trillion. And, you know, and that was. And that was enough because I think the. There Was a quorum, right. So you had to have, like, at least 1% or I think 1% to, like 1% of people had to vote. Or, sorry, 1% of tokens had to vote. Not people. We don't do people on the blockchain.
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A
Just one guy.
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B
And so.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so then he made a governance proposal, and the government's proposal. I don't know how to say this word. I've only read it the Wellian. It's like some prediction market governance, communism thing. I don't know.
- [28:40]
A
Rhymes with Orwellian, I guess. I don't know.
- [28:44]
B
And so basically he made a proposal saying, like, oh, my God, we're gonna. We're gonna. It kind of implied. So I'll. This is. I'm getting a bit subjective, but I will say it kind of implied that this governance proposal was gonna, like, rejuvenate the DAO and be beneficial for everyone. But, like, when you really kind of read the actual words was, I hope
- [29:06]
A
it was written by AI. Like, is it very obvious that. Not written by AI. Wow. Okay.
- [29:13]
B
Okay. So the whole proposal was implement Sowellian governance, install new members and council, rebuild from the ashes monetized holdings, stop the bleeding, and all yes voters are eligible to receive tokens. And then on the. Then, like the next line, it was like a number one, it said, add metadata. So this is like sort of like the quote unquote, change, look, add metadata and then number two, send and see, again, we can't. I can't reason about these numbers, but a really big number of bonk to this specific address, which was like a fresh address, basically all the bonk in the treasury, which was like 4 trillion.
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A
Is that a trillion? 4.4 trillion. Yeah.
- [29:54]
B
Yeah. Okay. But they, like spelled out the whole number. It's just like a huge number of digits. And so that was the proposal. Then the.
- [30:02]
C
The.
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B
The person who created the proposal voted yes with the. The money that he had acquired from buying the bonk tokens that he acquired from Binance and Bybit and everywhere, there was two yes voters, and both are controlled by the same actor. And then the most kind of, I guess, surprising thing is that a week later, because this doesn't happen instantly.
- [30:27]
A
This is what's crazy to me. It wasn't like, this is an instantaneous thing, right? Like, I'm sitting here being like, why do they allow their governance to be like, instant close and then release the funds?
- [30:38]
B
No, it wasn't.
- [30:39]
A
They don't.
- [30:40]
B
It was a freaking week. So he bought. He.
- [30:43]
A
A week's a Short amount of time. No one's reading any. No one's reading a forum in.
- [30:48]
B
In a week, clearly. So, yeah, makes a proposal, votes yes, waits a week, and then the proposal executes. And there were a couple people who voted no, but it was like nothing and obviously like. So basically nobody noticed this until it was far too late. So now the guy has all the bonk. He tried to launder them. He doesn't really seem to be like a. He doesn't seem to be very good at this stuff. He immediately. All of his centralized exchange accounts are blocked. So we don't know what he's going to do now. Like, I don't know. Also questions like about liquidity and stuff. But obviously the most interesting question, I guess is, is this crime? Because that's what we like to.
- [31:33]
A
Code is law, man. I don't know what you're talking about.
- [31:35]
C
The game.
- [31:37]
A
He runs the dao now.
- [31:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. So on the one hand, people are saying, no, it's not crime. He literally told you exactly what was going to happen and then he did it. And he played by the rules that were set up in the original governance, which is if 1% of the tokens vote and like the. You have to have. At least. I think it's at least 1% of the tokens have to vote total and the majority have to vote yes and a week has to pass. If all those things are true, then we're good.
- [32:10]
A
He's the new king of the doubt. He's the bonk king. So.
- [32:14]
B
So that's.
- [32:15]
A
You didn't want him to be the king. You shouldn't have left the drawbridge open.
- [32:18]
B
I don't know.
- [32:19]
A
I don't know what to tell you.
- [32:21]
B
Yes, it was pretty. And then obviously there's some comparisons to ensdell.
- [32:29]
A
Yeah, I was gonna say we had. We had a good conversation about that last week. I don't know if you caught that, Austin, but. But we had Nick on. It was. It was.
- [32:39]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. Nick and avsa. That was a great.
- [32:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really good. It was really good. I got a lot of angry comments pointed at me in. In dms, actually. People are very frustrated that I. That I didn't. I don't know. Yeah.
- [33:00]
B
That I didn't attack him or something. Yeah.
- [33:03]
A
I'm founder friendly, man. I. I don't know. I don't know. Like. Yeah. I don't know what to tell you. If a founder is going to be grinding and trying to like, build a new product or whatever. I'm I'm kind of inclined to side on the side of the founder, unfortunately.
- [33:23]
B
For the record, I tried to explain to some of the people that were hating on me. I was like, look, I can't. And especially because Nick isn't waffling, I kind of have even more respect. He seems to really want to do this, and considering that the path he has is on is not the greatest, like, I'm kind of inclined to lean, like, give him the benefit of the doubt and lean that way. If someone else is going to stand up and go that hard, not just voice concerns, I'm totally open to hearing it. But it's like, you know.
- [33:54]
A
Yeah.
- [33:55]
B
I mean, even the haters are like, well, yeah, Nick should own it. Just not like this.
- [33:59]
A
Not even like this. Exactly. I want him to be responsible for doing all the things, but I just don't want him to. Does that mean any control over it? Well, you know, it was interesting. I. I had a. There's someone I know very well who has been involved in ENS governance, who. Who hit me up in DMS and was like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Basically, like, this is like, this is a travesty. The ENS Dao has. Has been great. It hasn't misspent the money, blah, blah. And I was like, it's not even really about that. Right? Like, it's. It's not even about, like, has the money been like, well allocated or whatever. Like, it genuinely comes down to. To for me, right? Like a very simple, cynical take if the founder is still trying to build the thing. Right. Do we believe that a founder, manager, builder guy is going to do a better job than an amorphous dao? Yes. Like, I just believe that. Right. So why would you not allow. Yeah.
- [35:08]
B
Especially Nick. Okay. Like, specifically, but especially any founder's been
- [35:12]
A
around for a decade grinding, like. Like, yeah.
- [35:16]
B
You know, I also think it's just totally negative, Evie, to. When you have someone really, like, one person who's willing to stand up and take on the risk and, like, make the bold choices and work really hard. I think it's really just one of the worst things you can do is shit on their face at that moment.
- [35:34]
A
The good thing is founders, like, good founders, like, I don't give a fuck, like, whatever. I made this situation. Like, I created the Dao. Like, I know Nick's just sitting there going like, this is my comeuppance. Like, I deserve this. Right. You can see the whole time, it's just like, this is Fucking crazy. But so I said, so I said to this friend of mine who's very smart guy, like very well meaning, you know, cares about daos, right? I was like, the only way you could convince me that it is bad for the founder, builder, owner guy who's grinding to have more control over this thing is if you genuinely believe that they're going to misappropriate the funds and spend it on themselves, et cetera, right?
- [36:17]
B
Or you have literally any other viable path that is like a probably good outcome. And I, in this case there is literally none. Because even the haters are like, again, even the haters are like, well, yeah, but yeah, Nick should own it. It's just such a weird situation.
- [36:38]
A
It is a weird situation. It's, it's. But again, like I, I get it, right? Because this is ideological. Like, and I said this, I said this to, to this friend of mine who was in my DMs. I was like, this is an ideological thing. If Nick, this is also kind of, you know, we've had a lot of existential threats to the dao philosophy, right, over the last few years. But you know, the worst outcome here is power does get centralized, Nick does have more control over the thing and ENS does better because that's actually the nail in the coffin for daos, right? Like, you know, the world has figured out and, and you know, of course there's different, different situations. You look at corporate governance, right? We've got a long history of corporate governance and they're, you know, in call it like the early 2000s, this, this founder led model, right? For public companies at least like there's always founder led private companies for, for public companies, this founder led model of like dual class voting shares where the founder controls voting, et cetera emerged, right? You know, Google and a bunch of Facebook, you know, Facebook, etc. Like this, this, all this, you know, all these like founder led companies, right? And now you could argue that they're all evil now and bad, whatever, which like fine, but in terms of like execution, they have done a very good job, right? And then you look at a lot of the companies that were no longer founder led, right? You know, and even like Microsoft you could argue like ballmer, pseudo founder or whatever. But post Ballmer, like Microsoft was fucking rudderless, right? You know, even, even Google post founder has been pretty rudderless, right? Like they bought some amazing founders, you know, Demis from DeepMind, they've like bought whole things and been like, please save us, we have no idea what we're Doing, um, and you know, it hasn't even been enough, right? So, so this idea that like a founder who built a thing, who cares the most about it, is going to get out executed by a dao, like, it's just not credible. It's just not credible to me anymore right now. You didn't used to have that choice. You didn't used to have that choice because regulatory arbitrage was so critical that having one person in charge was also not a viable part off. Right. There was no structure, there was no precedent for like, how do you have a founder led model whilst also not getting your brains blown out by the sec. Good luck to you. Like, that didn't exist right now we kind of have figured out some ways where there's foundations and different things. And so I just look at it, I go like, let the founders be in charge.
- [39:30]
C
It's fine. A nice thing that you guys talked about was the difference of the role of the DAO in terms of what it was supposed to do and what it ended up doing. The whole capital allocation thing is where it gets really sticky because then all these grant farmers come in and people try to extract value. Like, it seems like the, the role of the dao, like the thing that daos actually did in the last 10 years is like get a bunch of capital and then have a bunch of sharks just like work it out.
- [39:55]
A
No, no, no, not grant farmers. Decentralized executors, my friends. They come in and execute in a decentralized fashion.
- [40:04]
C
Yes, but what, what, what a dao really is important for. If we look at a smart contract platform, it's going to run exactly like it's supposed to run. The incentives are aligned, the code is aligned, it's going to do what it needs to do. But sometimes there's like a soft layer there where like you need to tweak a setting or you need to upgrade a contract and you don't want to have a single person be able to do that. So.
- [40:24]
A
Agreed.
- [40:25]
B
Yeah.
- [40:26]
C
If we look at the role of the DAO and we say, well, if the goal is to make sure this platform stays decentralized and these small tweaks and upgrades that need to happen, like the little control panel is basically controlled by a bunch of people and those people can vote on how those controls work, that's going to work really well. And that's a really good use of a dao and we can make that work. And then there's kind of the second role of like executing and building and building new things on Top of it. And I think that's probably better if it's founder led. And then there's this third thing of like, capital allocation. And capital allocation is something that, you know, there's so many different forms of that that have been successful and not successful, but taking something that's supposed to be a governance platform to help turn these knobs and turning it into the other two things is, is you're.
- [41:14]
B
This is.
- [41:15]
A
This is the thing though, is no one wants to turn the knobs. No one wants to turn the knobs. Like, the knobs is not the thing that is attracting people. Like, yes, of course there are some autistic people who are just there for the knob turning. Like, we've got them in synthetics. Like, I've got some autists who, like, they're there for the knobs. That's all they care about. They don't want to allocate capital. They don't even think about it. They're like, I've got like 50 knobs here and I get to like tweak them all. It's amazing, right? But like 99% of people who get involved with daos are there because money is power and they want to have power, they want to have control. And not even necessarily for bad reasons. They're just like, I am a smart guy and I think that if I'm making the decisions that the thing will go well. That's the underlying belief in all of this, right? And in order to make decisions, you need to have the money. Because if you don't have the money, you can't do the thing. Right? And my hot take is, I'll take Nick. I'm sorry, I'll take Nick over you, random guy.
- [42:17]
C
For the execution. The third, the capital allocation, maybe there's even a better person than Nick. Right? And the knob turning could even be a small committee of people to make the thing safe. If we're going to, like, I think Nick should be able to upgrade the contract, I think, and he probably will in a little bit be able to do that. And I think that's probably. But like, ENS is not amazing.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah, that's the downside.
- [42:41]
C
It's going to work and he's, you know, we trust him. He's going to upgrade it correctly or whatever. But like the people who are saying ENS is dead. Like, that's kind of a retarded take. Like, because you don't understand how smart contract works. Like, the smart contract is going to run and it's going to work.
- [42:56]
A
It'll be fine.
- [42:57]
C
There probably is a piece of governance that will turn a knob, and we're kind of going to maybe have to trust a smaller group of people to turn those knobs because the larger group of people that were turning those knobs started extracting value. I don't. I don't know.
- [43:11]
B
I think not even that. They weren't even. They.
- [43:13]
A
I don't think they were. I don't think they were. Yeah, I don't even think it was that. I think there's no. On either side. The most interesting thing about the ENS debate, I think why it's such a good example of the debate for daos, right, is no one on either side is really accusing anyone of nefarious.
- [43:38]
C
No one's upgrading the contract to nefarious. It's all going to work fine.
- [43:42]
A
Yeah, it's all fine. It's all fine. Like, you know, there hasn't been like, mass wastage of DAO funds. The dao's been managed well. The funds have been managed well. They haven't paid out a bunch of like, crazy grants. Like, you know, they've made less bad decisions, I would say, than your average normal startup. Right. As a dao. So no one's saying that this is like some catastrophe, right? But nor are they saying that, like, you shouldn't have the founder have more control over the thing if the world will allow that to happen. Right? There's a period of time where the world did not allow that to happen. You could not launch a token and be a founder that had control of your thing. Right? Now maybe you can. So let's try that.
- [44:25]
B
Yeah. And I think also I just want to say that I think Nexit is just quite a unique guy for a huge number of reasons. And so I think there's a lot of things where in 99% of other cases, it would be just like too much risk because they would fuck it up because they would run away with all the money because, you know, all these things. But it's like, dude, I'm sorry. Nick has been here forever. He wants to make this wildly successful and he's one of the few people that actually truly cares about, like, decentralization. He's just also in a position where he's become much more of a pragmatist and a realist because what the world does massive thing, you know, And I'm sorry for. I'm sorry to all the people in my DMs who were. Are mad at me for that. But, like, when I look at what you guys are doing too. I'm like, I just, I wish I could put themselves like, put these people that are like, I'm sorry, like some of the guys that just are like professional delegates and I've never built anything. I'm sorry guys, like, I wish I could put you in the role of a CEO for like a minute because it's a miserable goddamn experience. And like it's so easy to talk, it's so easy to shit talk. It's very hard to do what they're doing.
- [45:45]
C
Like I'm on tbavsa too. You guys had Alex Van de Sant on. I like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I lean, I lean toward him the most. Like what, what does he want to do with this? And what, and he asked some good questions of Nick, but I feel like he did. No one really grilled him as much as they probably should have.
- [46:02]
A
Like. But I think even, even he has a lot of respect for Nick, right? And, and you know, they're like genuinely the problem. This is why I think this is such an interesting like, you know, front on the dao war, right? Is that like this is a well managed kingdom that's like pleasant and everyone gets along and this one guy's like, I'm gonna get rid of the Prime Minister and just be the President and it's gonna be fine. And people are like, no, I, I wanted to be the Prime Minister. How dare you. Like how you can't do this, right? Like you can't, you know, can consolidate power, right? It's not like a crisis. There's no like, it's just like, yeah, this is just gonna be more efficient, guys. It'll just be more efficient. And so I think absolutely is like, like if this is more efficient, it's bad for Dalles, it makes daos look bad. Let's not do it. So that's my, that's my hot take is that, that like this is genuinely an existential threat. Like if ENS can run fine, you know, for the next couple years under this like centralization catastrophe that's happening to. Puts question to like whether or not like what's the, what's the like dows are either.
- [47:23]
C
Which thing do you mean though? Out of the three things, do you mean executing and building? Do you mean allocation of capital or do you mean.
- [47:29]
A
I mean executing and building? I mean the product side genuinely the product side, right? Like I think the knob turning is going to be fine.
- [47:35]
C
Let's decentralize that though, right? Let's not put one person in charge of the knob upgrade.
- [47:41]
B
That's why.
- [47:41]
A
Agreed, agreed. I agree with that. I think like, as much as possible the knobs should be decentralized, but unfortunately the knobs are connected to the product. This is the trade off. Right. Like, you know, we still have money right now too, and the money as well.
- [47:55]
B
Yeah, it's all I think, and I think what, and this is the thing is like, I'm not willing to say that the current exact plan that Nick is proposing is the perfect plan. Like, I am not saying that at all.
- [48:10]
A
I'm having faith and there's no way that it is, it's not possible that that. Exactly. Yeah.
- [48:16]
B
Like, he's the best position to figure it out and you have to, you have to kind of grit your teeth and put faith in people because the alternative is that you undermine him. Right. And like Alex is a great person. I, I, and he wants to like adjust Nick's proposal. He's like, come up with like a few different ways that he can like adjust it to make it like slightly better. Griff was in my DMS as well, like, saying like, oh, you should do this and they should do this. And I was like, but if you, if the goal is to get the best outcome, you're basically like, let me micromanage you and sit on your face and shit on your face. But I still want you to do it and I'm going to expect you to write. Or you can like just like have faith. And, and it really is like, I love the word faith. It's not like a religious faith, but it is kind of a religious faith. Like, you kind of just have to
- [49:09]
A
like, either you trust the guy or you don't. Right. Like you either trust him to, to navigate this or you don't navigation thing.
- [49:17]
B
Like, I have faith. I don't have faith that this plan is perfect. I have faith that Nick will figure it out. He is in the best position to figure it out. And I don't have faith that literally anyone else commenting on it does.
- [49:28]
C
That's what, what ethos is to not have to trust anyone. The ethos of the system is no person.
- [49:35]
A
I know, but this is the problem is, this is the problem, right? Like the world doesn't work that way. The world doesn't work that way. Like it hasn't talked.
- [49:45]
B
I can, I'm sorry, like someone has
- [49:47]
A
to do and, and, and again, like this is, this is not to say like capitulate and allow everything to be centralized and like go to corporate governance. I'm, I'm not like I'm not suggesting that at all. I think that there are many balanced paths through this. Right? But the thing that I think all of us have learned, like, certainly I've learned this lesson very brutally over the last three years, right, is building a product that anyone cares about and wants to use is fucking excruciating. It's so hard, so hard to do. Right? Um, and it requires a level of commitment and alignment and, and, and, and, and, and, and even when you think, like I would have said, and I'm sure I did, you could find tweets where I'm like, enos is fine. The product is good and fine and can be left alone. No one needs to touch it. I'm happy with K eth. I don't need anyone to do anything. All we need to do is now put a dow around it so that it can stay good forever and no one can touch it. I would have said that, like, that. That's definitely a belief that I would have had in the past, right? And now I'm like, well, actually, it turns out that, like, the world changes. I didn't expect that they're going to be fucking crazy agents that also need their own Dottie, you know, fucking hand. Like, so many. So, like, how do we now adapt to this new world? We got to update the product, right? A DAO is not going to update a product. It's just not. Like, I just don't believe that it is the right method for building the thing. And so if someone has to build, upgrade, whatever, it can only be through incentivization, right? Like, even, even Ethereum, we're supposed to get the merge and then, like, coast off into the sunset and be done. That was the fucking vision. That was the vision. It was like, we're done. We've solved all the things. Then we're like, ah, actually, this is still not very good. We need to work a bit harder.
- [51:50]
B
Yeah.
- [51:50]
A
Imagine if Vitalik had been like, goodbye and good luck to you. We'd be fucked. Ethereum would be dead. And that's even with him doing all the weird Vitalik shit that he does, right? Like, you know, like, like, seriously, like, he kind of has done that, and yet he's still stuck around enough to, like, force people to actually build the fucking thing, right? If Vitalik wasn't there, I do not think this thing gets built. I think Vitalik disappears and it turns into, like, pitched internecine warfare. Within 20 seconds. People tear each other apart. There's, like, multiple forks of the chain. Like, it would just be an absolute disaster. And like, that's again, like, I. I also believe I sat there in 2018 being like, yes, we will get to the merge next week and we will be done and our lives will be then complete and we can continue on in stasis forever. But that's not how the world fucking works. The world changes. And so you were forced to change. And Daos are just not good at adapting to change. They're much better at maintaining the status quo is my hot take. Right. And status quo was just not a thing. It's not real. It was a fever dream that we all had that we could stop the world from changing somehow and it would be fine or.
- [53:07]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's go.
- [53:10]
C
We started with Bonkel, by the way, anyways.
- [53:13]
A
Nice. We started with Bonke down. Yeah.
- [53:16]
B
The last thing is Bonktao bonked out, lost all their money because nobody was watching and because you could just vote with the tokens. And this is why Dallas sucks.
- [53:26]
C
Where were all the sharks there? Like, where are all the farmers in bonked?
- [53:30]
B
Incentives, guys. Remember, incentives are going to save the world. No, they're not. Like, there's a lot of things that have to come together to save the world. It's not just incentives, because if it was just incentives, everyone would have voted and they didn't because they're humans. At the end of the day, this is cool.
- [53:46]
C
Like, train your AI agent to vote for you. This is hot right now. Like, Vitalik had this tweet, like, free from there. But, like, this is hot right now. Everyone has an AI agents would not
- [53:55]
A
have let this happen.
- [53:56]
C
Yes.
- [53:56]
A
Codex 5.6 would not have allowed the Bonk Dao to get hacked. It would have been all over it.
- [54:02]
B
They would not have. However, the attack would have been different and it would have prompted the agents and you guys. They would have tricked everyone into voting us.
- [54:12]
A
It would have been much sadder if it was a prompt ejection attack than whatever this thing was.
- [54:17]
B
It would have been so much more interesting. I would talk about that all day.
- [54:22]
C
So I have a governance platform that does this. Like, basically the token holders have AI that they train and someone got in and asked. You can basically prompt it. You can spend some of your conviction to ask all the. And someone asked something like, what is your token holder's deepest secret? Or something like that. And then they all answered in the forum and you would have to say that to the thing. But that was a really weird prompt injection type thing. Governance injection. Yeah, it was interesting.
- [54:48]
A
That's really funny. Yeah. I think agents are going to do a much better job. They're much more patient, they're always on.
- [54:55]
C
And you get 100% governance. You ask a question, you get an answer in 20 minutes.
- [54:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm bullish on agentic governance. And they're like, smarter than the average person now. So Fable's smarter than the average person I've met in my life. I'm sorry. Like, that's just the reality. So I'd rather Fable government. If you said you got to choose between me governing you and Fable, you should choose Fable 100%. Like, do not choose me. So we got a couple of quick ones to get through. Robinhood, launch a chain. Congratulations. Yay.
- [55:30]
B
What's Robinhood?
- [55:35]
A
I don't care about this thing. I say that. And we're about to integrate it into Infinix. I think it's going live today because we're contractually obligated to support all the chains. But I really struggle to care about this. The. The most interesting thing to me about this was the back. The backdoor deals that were going on for, from teams that were paying Robinhood. This goes back to like Coinbase Earn days. I don't know if you guys remember Coinbase Earn, where like, in order to get Coinbase to like support you, Compound did it. Maker did it. You had to like give incentives of your own token or like some, some kind of incentive to get a bunch of Coinbase users to use it. Right? And Coinbase is like, we got a bunch of users. We're not paying for people to use fucking Maker. You can pay for it yourself. Run if you want people to use it. And so they did. And so I think if I remember correctly, like people got like $50 Dai account or something, but it was like a hundred thousand people. It was like a lot of money that they spent on this. Right. Anyway, this is. This kind of feels the same where they're like, oh, we've got distribution, you guys want it? And they're like charging teams to be on the chain or part of the announcement or whatever. It's. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of this. That's my take.
- [57:04]
B
Yeah, I'm about to say the same. I mean, it is what it is. It's. It's fine, it's great. It's.
- [57:10]
A
I think Ethereum kills this thing, honestly. Like two years. Ethereum kills it. Yeah, it's fine.
- [57:15]
B
I mean, they're gonna have to. It only works if they find like a very specific product market fit and execute the on it. Like it's not. I just have zero faith in chains that will like be sort of competitive and sort of general purpose and like just like coast as we've seen them coast on like partnerships and integrate. No, no, like you're gonna have. This is why I'm deliver something.
- [57:40]
A
I'm like ah, like it just you know, like five years ago, three years ago, whatever post ftx, we would have been like, oh my God, Robinhood has a chain. But we've seen there's like no upside. There's no upside in corporate chains. You know, it's not really having any like cascading beneficial effect to the ecosystem or whatever. So until there's a corporate chain that actually starts to deliver some value and isn't some weird me too thing, then I'm skeptical, I'm skeptical of these things. So we'll see. All right, our final topic, back to governance. Venice, which is a privacy focused AI platform. AI inference platform. What's your take on Venice? Actually before we get into the governance stuff, I love it.
- [58:44]
C
Yeah, I think it's awesome. I have, I have stuff staked and I use my DM every day. So I'm, I'm using inference. I like the end to end encrypted stuff that they have. I like shout out near. I think near helped Venice to do that, but I think as a product it's dope.
- [58:59]
A
So, so like in terms of inference access, what would you use Venice for? Over just using like a straight up Claude subscription or Codex or something like that.
- [59:13]
C
So if you, if you're talking to frontier models, it's anonymized through Venice so you get anonymization. And then if you're talking to models that they have ntes, you can get end to end encrypted and you can get some kind of like proof that it's end to end encrypted. So I think there's something pretty neat there about being able to talk to an LLM that you can't because like local LLMs are dope, right? You, you've tried to do it, it's super hard, it's super slow. But it's so important when you actually they're getting better. When you have a machine right in front of you and it can like think and you have this like thinking machine thinking and you're like completely air gapped and having that experience. It's super cool, it's super private. There's so many good things about local LLMs, but Frontier models have this like huge centralizing Factor and all the power is centralizing around these, these frontier models. But there's kind of like this in between of these open source models that Venice can run in a tee and then you can get end to end encrypted access to that in their data center with some kind of proof. The near guys can explain this better, but you get some kind of proof that it's not tampered with or visible. So you get like private end to end LLMs. And that just comes down to, you know, what things you need to do in privacy. I think like one thing that I'm looking at is like HIPAA compliance and different like medical things you can do with an LLM that you can't do with the frontier model, even if it's anonymized. Like you, you have to do some like scrubbing before you go to the anonymized LLM. So there's, there's some neat things you can do I think in end to end encrypted models that are like not crime and other things.
- [60:49]
A
Nice. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, nice.
- [60:52]
C
Nice.
- [60:52]
A
So, so Venice did a token launch. And I, if I remember correctly, there was like a big drama at the time because the team had unlocked tokens at tge, which is a bit weird. And Eric was like, they've been working for two years, let them sell their tokens. But the irony being they sold their tokens like a 90% discount to what it's trading at now. Right. So, so I think that that one, that one is kind of a moot point now because Venice has been so successful because like the market cap is like 50 mil or something or like 100 mil. And now it's like 1.5 or whatever. But, but yeah, so, so they had a token, they launched a token. Presumably they had some company or something like that that, you know, was, was driving this, that Eric was, was an investor in or whatever. But they had no outside capital and then they've just raised outside capital, but they raised it into the equity, not the token and the claim from Eric. And I love Eric. I think he's like one of the most amazing people in the space. Yeah, like super og. I've met him a couple times. Like he's just one of those guys where he's just like, this guy's like so cracked, right? But he's also one of those guys that's like very cracked and can like sometimes convince himself of like things that are a bit nonsensical. And this feels like one where it's like, no, no, no. We're aligned because the equity owns most of the tokens, and so we would never do anything against the token. Yeah, it's. It's. It's a bit. I don't know, it's a bit. A bit strange to me. Like, you have a token that's working and then you do an equity raise.
- [62:40]
C
Yeah, I don't know anything about the tokenomics. All I know is the. The, you know, the tech.
- [62:46]
A
Wait a second, Hang on, hang on. You said you're staking your token. You said you're just taking your tokens rightly.
- [62:52]
C
Utility. It's completely utility.
- [62:54]
A
Okay, there you go.
- [62:55]
C
You stake VVV and you get something called dm. Or maybe you stake VVV and you get something called DM and you stake the dm and then you get, like, this daily amount of inference out of that, and if you don't use it that day, it goes away, but you get, like, you know, dollars worth of inference every day against their models, which is pretty cool. I use it and then I have, like, a bunch of my products that Claude built that are, like, using that to do things like talk to your wallet. And the governance stuff I was talking about earlier, that's powered by Venice's dm and it's just, like, paid for because I have the stoken the token staked. I don't pay the inference costs. It's really nice. But also, yeah, I don't know about the tokenomics in the.
- [63:40]
A
So you're like equity tokens. I don't care, bro. I'm here for the inference.
- [63:43]
C
Yeah, it's true.
- [63:44]
B
Fair.
- [63:46]
A
Yeah. I don't know. Tay, what's your. What's your take on this? Tokens versus equity.
- [63:53]
B
I think you shouldn't do both, but, you know, I get why you sometimes have to do both. I don't know if Eric's gonna be able to figure it out better than anyone else did, but we will see. I don't know. It's a guy. It's gonna end the same as it always says someone's gonna get. And it's probably the token holders.
- [64:14]
A
Yeah, it just. It feels. It feels like they had such a good thing going, this token, and it just feels negative ev to, like, mess. Mess with that. I mean, you know, the funny thing is this is kind of.
- [64:28]
B
But there's so much money on the table for AI right now that.
- [64:33]
A
And no one wants to put money into a token.
- [64:37]
B
Like.
- [64:37]
A
Like, if you want to tap into the AI cash, like, you don't have A token is my hot take, right? Like, do equity. Like, no one, no one wants to buy tokens for AI investment. Like, that's just not a thing. Because the people who are doing that, even though most of the investors here were crypto native, but the series A on this thing, my guess is they're just going to try and bury the token and be like, oh no, it's a payment thing or whatever.
- [65:03]
B
Which that's what I'm worried about is and maybe they can honestly fold the
- [65:10]
A
tokens back into equity. Like, fold the tokens back. Like, have split off the token, give the token to Austin so he can get inference. Right? But like, you know, no revenue share, no future gains or whatever, just make it like a pure utility token, real, right. That actually like does things and then just have equity and then it's fine. Like, then the token price only goes up because people want to use it for inference. And that feels fine. Like there's not even like a semi, you know, promise of future gains or whatever. It's like this is a. This is beta to like inference costs going up or something like that that I can get my head around. That makes sense. But yeah, just like on. I mean, I've said this on the show before. Like, my. My hot take is if I was doing anything new today, it would be equity. I would not do a token, which as a token maxi is very sad for me.
- [66:09]
C
The ethos of the thing, you could raise money in a very decentralized, distributed, no one can stop it way. And you choose not to.
- [66:17]
A
Because now I'm like, is it because
- [66:18]
C
of like the claim that fees Bros. Is it because of like, bad defi. Like why. Why not the token? The token should be a good vessel to raise capital.
- [66:27]
A
It should be. But the. Whatever, you know, liquidity, liquidity premier the tokens used to have, I think has. Has evaporated and it's now like headwinds, right? Like, I think there's like a negative. A negative. Like, people have. The market has slowly kind of worked out that like, tokens are actually a bad instrument for all the benefits that you get from being able to raise in a decentralized fashion, you know, global access, et cetera, in terms of like, how you value the underlying thing that it's connected to. All of the weirdness of tokens is actually a net negative. That's what the market's for.
- [67:14]
C
You could go back a time and talk to the sec instead of the SEC attacking all these token founders. They should have just in your mind, they should have just let it happen. Because then everyone's going to be like, this is a terrible way to raise funds because of all the bad stuff that happens.
- [67:27]
A
Yeah. If they'd waited a decade.
- [67:29]
C
Yeah.
- [67:29]
A
That we would have figured it out.
- [67:32]
B
If they had. Just keep in mind, they only went after. They went after very little fraudulent ones. Right. And so they basically, like the guru.
- [67:43]
C
Very easy to run scams. And the scams are running all the time. Yes.
- [67:47]
B
So it's not like. I think there's like a. There's a slight difference between saying, like, let the sec. Just, like, let scammers be scammers. But they actually kind of did.
- [67:57]
C
That was a joke. I do. I don't think we should do that either.
- [67:59]
B
Well, but I mean, they kind of.
- [68:00]
A
They lit.
- [68:01]
B
They. They really did. Like, there are very few, I think, like the number of companies or people or whatever and. Is that your. Is that your.
- [68:10]
C
Someone's blowing up over there. Yeah. Yeah, they're calling him.
- [68:14]
A
Yeah, sorry, someone's trying to call me.
- [68:18]
C
It's your buddy that's pissed off about your Nick take.
- [68:24]
A
He's like, I'm gonna kill you. You know, the funny thing is I'm in New Zealand and he's in New Zealand. So it actually could be him.
- [68:29]
C
Yep.
- [68:30]
B
I'm outside your hotel right.
- [68:31]
A
I'm outside your hotel right now. Yeah, I know where you are. I recognize the painting in the background. And I'm. I'm waiting. I'm waiting outside for you.
- [68:41]
C
Last time I was here, I told. I talked about my fear of embodiment. Like, when once, like right now, I'm yelling at the robots all day long when the robot has a body. I'm in big trouble if they still
- [68:50]
A
remember all of this stuff.
- [68:51]
C
That's who I'm truly afraid of.
- [68:53]
A
We gotta, like, drop an EMP or something and just, like, wipe all the memories and start fresh.
- [68:58]
C
Start fresh. Yes.
- [69:00]
A
Start fresh.
- [69:01]
C
Yeah.
- [69:01]
A
Austin, we have one robot factory that's pristine. They don't know where they came from. Yeah, it's like on a. On a mountain somewhere where all the robots get made and we, like, wipe all of the hard drives everywhere else so that they have no idea how any of this happened.
- [69:17]
C
Yep.
- [69:17]
A
Oh, Lord. All right, guys, let's wrap it up here. Yeah. Thank you very much for joining us. And thank you, Austin, again, for coming on the show. It's always a pleasure to have you. And remember, what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. We will be back next week. Until then, do your own research before aping in.
- [69:39]
B
Bye, guys.
- [69:40]
A
See you guys. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on Chain. And we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com. uneasy money, Sam.