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- [00:00]
Taylor Monahan
Circle has to at some point realize that this decision to push all responsibility, you can't do it because again, once you, once you push all that responsibility to the courts, you can't say no to the courts. And this is like one thing that tether does very well is they, they have a lot of sort of thresholds and sort of things that have to happen depending on the facts and circumstances. But they sort of always retain that final say. And even when they do get like an order, they say like, we're just ha. We just happen to voluntarily freeze this. Like yeah, you, you served us. But like we froze it all on our own.
- [00:46]
Kane Warrick
Hey everyone, 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 this show possible.
- [00:56]
Sponsor Announcer
Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50+ billion dollars in enterprise value for 80+ clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets, build real traction today@multichainadv.com
- [01:17]
Kane Warrick
all right everyone, I'm here with my co host Taylor Monahan, weird hotel expert and Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Igloo Inc. We were trying to get a guest today, but after Ilya, everyone was too scared to come up. Good job. So you have to go and check out that show. All right, here is our first segment of the week and this is going to be fun because I love flooding my own bags and I'm a poly market investor. So um, let's get into it. The, the question is, did Polymark resolve the master market wrong incorrectly? Right. So this is a very interesting story for a bunch of reasons. One, because why the is micro strategy selling bitcoin? That's the first thing this should never have even gone close to. Yes. How did we allow this to happen? This promised us that he was never ever going to sell any bitcoin. Like it would never leave his cold dead hands. And then he's like ah, like let's just sell like 32 BTC to see what happens and it's not going well. Like why? I like that. That still why, like why?
- [02:38]
Taylor Monahan
I've been traveling so I've been like half online. Why sell 32 Bitcoin? I don't understand.
- [02:43]
Kane Warrick
Fucking crazy.
- [02:44]
Taylor Monahan
It's not that much. It's. It's like did they misdo some math and like I don't.
- [02:49]
Kane Warrick
No, no, no. It was like a, it was a bit of like a shit test of the market. I Think guy's an insane person. He's like, if there was any, if there's any question about whether the guy running the giant bitcoin Ponzi was crazy, we have answered that. Like there, there, there's a bunch of theories about why, like, you know, whatever. But basically my, my take is he was playing chicken with them all market and the market has now skull him. So congratulations, that was not a good idea. And I just think like, that, like the idea that, you know, people somehow or would be reassured that he would sell bitcoin to like cover, you know, these, these dividends if needed, is not reassuring. That's not the reassurance we were looking for. Anyway, so as usual, people were betting on whether this would happen. And I think that there were like three or four markets about like, you know, would, would they sell Bitcoin before May 31, before like August or like before the end of the year or whatever. And like my hot take looking at these markets is like they might be forced sellers, like if something goes horribly wrong, maybe sailors forced to sell bitcoin. Right. I don't think anyone who was betting on this market necessarily thought that like he would do it as a joke, as some kind of weird joke or trick or something. But anyway, here we are. So he did. And then we don't really know when because he doesn't tell us. Right. The only way that, the only way that MicroStrategy tells us when they bought the bitcoin is usually when. When he's top ticked it. And the price of bitcoin is like 85 grand. And it's like, we just bought a billion dollars of bitcoin at like 92 grand. And you're like, wait, what? Like, how did you do that? It's like 10% above. So usually you would top ticket. But here they're like, we sold some bitcoin, they sold 32 BTC 2.5 mil somewhere between the 26th and the 31st. Right. And the, the, the people who were betting. Yes. And this was like not a huge amount of money at first, if I understand it. So, so basically the, the market looked like it should resolve. Yes. And then it looked like it was not going to. Right. And as soon as there's.
- [05:38]
Taylor Monahan
Is this. Hold on. Is this the actual. This is the actual question, right? Will MicroStrategy sell any Bitcoin by May 31, 2026?
- [05:49]
Kane Warrick
Yes.
- [05:49]
Taylor Monahan
Right.
- [05:50]
Luca Netz
But it wasn't disclosed until June 2 or June 1.
- [05:54]
Taylor Monahan
Oh, dear.
- [05:55]
Kane Warrick
Because it never is. So like this is like just a The dumb qu. Like, you know, and this is like classic polymarket, right? Like classic Polymarket having a poorly worded thing that wasn't thought through.
- [06:10]
Luca Netz
Right.
- [06:11]
Kane Warrick
Because if you're saying that we would only resolve this. Yes. If it was announced, then it should say, will MicroStrategy announce that they sold Bitcoin by the 31st? But it doesn't say that. It says, will they sell it? And they did pretty clearly. But they didn't announce it. And so here we are. So, so like the theory or, or the story, right, is MicroStrategy Micro Strategy created these preferred shares and they owe 1.7 billion in dividends, right? And so they've got to pay off the debt by what, 20, 29 or whatever. So apparently he only has like five months of cash. But my hot take, honestly is like, he can raise more money, right? Like, he didn't have to sell Bitcoin to raise money. Like, that's the whole point of this Ponzi scheme, that he can raise money by like doing a bunch of other random stuff. So it doesn't really track for me that like, he was going to have to sell the bitcoin this quickly. He's not on the hook to sell bitcoin. He just has to raise money. So anyway, my, my.
- [07:25]
Taylor Monahan
All right, but if he. Oh, like 32 Bitcoin is not that much in the grand.
- [07:32]
Kane Warrick
This is the point, right? Like, this is. This is why I say it was a bit of a shit test of the market, right? Like, it's not gonna.32 Bitcoin is not the point. The point was maybe like, test how does the market react if I sell Bitcoin? And the answer is not well.
- [07:45]
Taylor Monahan
So, okay. But anyway, so because ideally he would want to sell more, theoretically, if the market would tell us currently construct.
- [07:56]
Luca Netz
Have to sell more pretty soon here.
- [07:59]
Kane Warrick
Yeah, they have to raise money. Yeah, they have to raise money. Right? And you know, historically he's been very good at raising money and finding ways to raise money without selling bitcoin. So I'm. I'm bullish on his ability to do that, although now less so because the price of Marcus strategy is cratered. So anyway, I think, I think like, we. It's hard to know exactly what he is thinking. And you know, again, he's historically said never going to sell bitcoin, whatever, but also has a way of like, you. So here we are. But. But that's not the point, right? Like, it wasn't a question of like, why would he sell Bitcoin or whatever the Question was, would he? Would Marxist micro strategy sell Bitcoin? And they did. But this market, like many poly market markets, was poorly worded. Like, just get some lawyers, bro, to write, like, the things, please. Like, we've been saying this for so long. Like, just think about how this is going to play out. It would have taken two seconds to be like, what if they sell it and don't tell anyone and then they tell them off? Like, like literally 30 seconds of thought. Also, we have AI agents. You'd write. You could get an agent that could be like, hey, are there any edge cases here in this thing? And the agent would be like, oh, yeah, there's 10.
- [09:19]
Taylor Monahan
You're like, well, I feel like this, like, you're. You're legal intern. This is what they do in their sleep, right? It's just like, think about words and meanings and find the loopholes and then close those loopholes. Like, I don't.
- [09:32]
Kane Warrick
It's crazy. It's crazy. Anyway, they have a lot of markets and whatever, but, like, historically, this has just been like a thing, right? So it. It should have resulted. Yes, then. And this is the thing, right? Like this. This always happens whenever there's like a weird dispute or whatever. The. The volume goes up like 20x, right? Because now people are like, you know, betting on how the thing will resolve. And, you know, there's UMA token holders. Like, UMA whales are getting involved. Because remember, this is solved by, like, your mate, right? And. And you know, that's. That's the oracle, right? I mean, we. We talked about this, I think last week or the week before where they had these new markets that are going to be resolved by nasdaq. And I was like, thank fucking God, because this is so much better than, um, A. And again, like, I love Heart, like, I love polymarket, but like, the days of, like, resolving this by U of A is weird on chain governance thing is just like, so, like, not it anymore. So, yeah, here we are. So now there's. There's, you know, this has gotten far worse, right? Situation's gotten far worse because now there's a lot more volume. And again, like, you know, Polymarket's not like a random defi Apple that no one cares about anymore. It's a $20 billion company and they just. They need to be more cognizant, I think, of, like, the impacts of these sorts of things. And. And yeah, so we'll see. I guess we'll see what happens, right? Like, we're still in the limbo period of, like, how will this resolve. And, and my understanding is, even as of this morning when I woke up that, like, the market was still open, which I also don't quite get because we're like, past. This hasn't resolved. Right. So, like, you can still trade it. But, like, last time I checked, it was like the third of June. So, like, this is. And again, this is, this is like, you know, how long does the market stay open? How long does it take for us to determine whether Micro Strategies hold Bitcoin? Like, all of these are things that should have been considered before this was started. So I don't know. Luca, what, what are your thoughts here? You know, trading this? No. You trading this?
- [12:01]
Luca Netz
No, I'm actually. Poly Market's not. I put some money in there. I've just been losing everything. Just not, Not a good Polymarket guy.
- [12:11]
Kane Warrick
It's not your, it's not your venue?
- [12:12]
Luca Netz
No, Hyper Liquor is definitely my venue. But I, I, you know, probably the solution here is having some sort of SEAL Team 6 that, like a department within Polymarket that simply just addresses these cases because it's definitely pretty obscure. And I don't know how you would like, automate the solution outside of having a department that specifically is built to solve these problems. Because, again, this isn't the first time. It's interesting though, because if I were to.
- [12:43]
Kane Warrick
Sorry, is that, Is that like, is that post hoc or like, is that after the fact come in and like, oh, shit, we've got a fire here, Put it out. Or is this like, before the market blows up in everyone's face?
- [12:54]
Luca Netz
Yeah, the problem is it's like, you can't really, like, with situations like this. Like, I don't know how you would code or make like a product feature within polymarket to avoid this because, like, there's always been some sort of, like, vagueness around the wording of how these markets get resolved. Like, meaning, you know, like many such cases in this. So, like, I don't know if it falls into a category where these type of specific markets in terms of, like, buy and sells by a certain time. Like, if there's some sort of grace period because there's obviously disclosures. But, like, there's so many variables because some things require disclosure disclosures earlier than not. Like, I would just probably think that the solution would be that there is a group within the Poly Market organization that can usurp, you know, Yuma stakeholders in the instance where. Right.
- [13:43]
Kane Warrick
And just overrule them. But then at that point. Right. Like, at that point you just, like, have those guys Resolve the market. You know what I mean?
- [13:53]
Taylor Monahan
Like, but I mean you can, you can limit it to like the controversial ones or like the ones that are getting a huge amount of attention. And I wouldn't even necessarily say, I don't know if the need is to like usurp the power. I think the biggest issue here is like the lack of like trust, right? Like, why is this resolving this way? Where are, you know, if. If another.
- [14:18]
Kane Warrick
I don't.
- [14:19]
Taylor Monahan
There's often markets with these dates, right? Or is polymarket gonna learn? Or are we gonna do this again in a week or two weeks or. Right. Are we doing this again right now? And I think it would be nice to have like some sort of formal, sort of transparency. Like this is why it resolved this way. Maybe that's wrong and, but that's, you know, it is what it is. Moving forward, we're going to do this or at least here, like, let's lay out the facts of the situation because they keep being these really dramatic markets and I feel like the drama overshadows and then erodes the trusted polling market. Like, I feel like that's really the biggest issue because yeah, let's not forget
- [15:05]
Kane Warrick
there's also there's the like, you know, alchi factor as well, right? Where like these guys are like the dirtiest dirt bags who will like come up with whatever they can come up with to like undermine Poly market. Like they're running oppo research and stuff. Like, let's not hand them this on a silver platter because they're just going to turn it into fud. So I think like, there's also just this element of like, don't fumble something like this that's so easy. I mean, to your point, Luca, like, you know, the, the fix. Like, of course there's always going to be edge cases for sure. This is not a edge case that no one could have possibly foreseen, right? Like, this is like if you took two seconds to think this market through, okay, will they do this thing before this period? How will we know? How will the market resolve? They will tell us. Okay, when do they tell us? After the market resolves. Seems like a problem. Maybe we should make some. Like, to your point, like, there's a one week period where, you know, they have to tell us whether they sold any. And if they don't tell us by then, even if they did sell it, which is what happened, they came in and changed the market afterwards and they're like, oops, let's just fix this up and clarify this right but at that point people were already, they'd already traded like tens of millions of dollars because again, people love to run towards fire like this and they're like, this will be fun to trade. So yeah, like I, I agree with you Luca, that like they need a team that is dedicated to this. I think they have a team. It's like the market listing team. That team just needs to be like slightly less when they're listing markets is the real solution.
- [16:55]
Luca Netz
You know the interesting part about this is this is something that I'd prob, like if I try to put myself in like coming up with polymarket and just underwriting, starting that business, this is one of those thoughts that I would have. Like you, you, you know, I'm sure Shane has thought about this a hundred times. It's actually just pretty impressive because like when you think about the business that is polymarket and starting a business like that up, there would have been so many objections I would have gave myself as to like why I should not go and build this business. And this would be like one, you know, like how actually like solve all these problems and all of these Ed.
- [17:33]
Kane Warrick
Because there's, there's tons of edge cases
- [17:35]
Luca Netz
in this, in Poly market, right? Like there's so many outcomes like this that you could think about. I just think, I just think about it. Like if I was Shane in the early days, I probably would have thought about this and I would have probably ruminated on all the edge cases and been like, this is just not possible, dude.
- [17:51]
Kane Warrick
And that's why Shane is the biggest fucking crackhead that I know. And he was just so certain of himself and so certain that this was solvable. Right? Like not just that, not just the, like from first principles. What are all the ways this could go wrong? We had empirical evidence like Augur, there were, there were a bunch of super smart team, like Joey is one of the smartest guys in crypto and Augur like tied themselves into knots trying to like handle these edge cases. And I think, you know, timing was good. Like they were able to, to you know, offload the Oracle stuff to uma. They, they popped up like that year. They were, they were getting a lot of traction, whatever, so being able to like just hand this off to an external party. But that worked for like three years where UMA was probably bigger I think than, than polymarket in terms of like exposure to the market. You know, they were doing a bunch of stuff and so it's like ah, blame them if something goes wrong, right? It's on them now. Polymarket is like 8 trillion times larger than UMA. And it's just this gigantic risk that's sitting there and like a huge, like, you know, liability for them. Right. And, and I mean, they are obviously not unaware of this. That's why they were like, let's find someone bigger than us, the nasdaq. Let's let them resolve the problem. Right. So I think that they will eventually themselves off this. But like, in the interim, there are ways you could make this less problematic and it's like just being a bit more thoughtful about the market resolution and just thinking things through. So. Yeah, anyway, and I mean, I think the. Interestingly there, there was a guy on, on Twitter, which I think is kind of. This is like the, the crux of all prediction market. Right? It's like the, the prediction market problem. Right, The Oracle problem. It always comes back to oracles. Professor Cornell was like SDC form AK filed on June 1st. So technically, Poly Market is right. The deeper read, you're never just betting on the event, you're betting on who scores it. There's also an EM dash in there, which a little concerning. Never like to see an EM- in, in a tweet, but here we are, he's a professor. Maybe it's okay, maybe it wasn't AI. Anyway, I, I think we'll see how this plays out over, over the next couple of days. But like, yeah, I mean, I can't see a world where polymarket doesn't need to just come in and like refund everyone who touch this market Bas. But it's pretty wild
- [20:29]
Taylor Monahan
rude.
- [20:31]
Kane Warrick
All right, let's go to our next topic. So Salana's soul burn fight. Luca, hopefully you got some aches on here. This is the. If I'm. If I'm not mistaken, this is like the second or third pro, the third proposal that like messes with Salana tokenomics. Right?
- [20:52]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah.
- [20:53]
Kane Warrick
So, yeah, give us, give us the download here. What's. What's going on? What's totally cooking.
- [20:58]
Luca Netz
Yeah, the download is, is that there's been now three proposals to go and cut Salana inflation. For those of you guys who don't know, you can stake your Solana on your local phantom or coinbase or wherever you custody or soul and earn a pretty good yield, about 6%, 7% some places. I think in Solana inflates about 7, 8 or 8% ish a year, something like that. So, you know, you're getting that yield from the inflation. And the elephant in the room is, you know, a token that inflates is obviously bad for price. I think Solana, yeah got some empirical
- [21:41]
Kane Warrick
evidence on that one as well.
- [21:42]
Luca Netz
But yeah, yeah, Solana, Solana. I think the, the big stories and I encourage people specifically who trading crypto, the alpha is to look at market cap, especially in things when you're like charting and understanding value. And I learned a couple years ago to start looking at coins in their market cap. If I was really bullish on something like I wouldn't underwrite it, just simply on what the price was. And you can see that a lot of coins will have know relative market caps to their all time highs, but price will be 50% less. And the reason for that is because of token inflation or token unlocks. Right. Which is also inflation in its own respect. So interesting thing to look at. I, I obviously am keen and advocate for anything that is deflationary. I think if you can create a product that continues to get better and then also create a tokenomic scheme where the token inflates very little or hopefully deflates, then you have a recipe for success. And as a big Solana holder and advocate, I hope this passes.
- [22:50]
Kane Warrick
Nice. So back in the day we had this thing. Hey, you know, you know where I'm going with this, right? Ultrasound money. Everyone was rocking like a bat and speaker emoji on their, on their Twitter. And I think this came. I'm gonna blame Bankless. Might not be, might not be Hoffman's fault directly, but I'm pretty sure this is a, it's a Bankless thing, right? They started this.
- [23:21]
Taylor Monahan
I don't, I mean I don't know if they started it, but they were definitely like leader
- [23:27]
Kane Warrick
flew it up, they blew it up if they didn't start it. So. Because I think like Eric Connor maybe was like there was the whole, there was a whole crew of people. And the reason why like to your point Luca, is like everyone was super excited because EIP 1559 Vitalik accidentally stumbled into this like deflationary thing which wasn't supposed to be the way that it went. But you know, just things have a way of, of happening that you're. That you don't. Unintended consequences. Right. And so ERP 1559 was vitalic solution to gas market price volatility. Right. And we all know Vitalicate's volatility. And so, so he came up with this scheme to basically stop the gas market from being so volatile. Right. Which was a very good idea. But it had this one small unattended consequence which was that when it was proposed it took about Two and a half years because Ethereum was even more of a basket case, if you can believe it, 2019 than it is today. And literally we couldn't get it funded. I remember like running around at like E. Berlin trying to like raise some money because it was going to cost like 200 grand or whatever to fund the build of this thing. And everyone was poor and, and so we couldn't, we couldn't afford to build this. And then eventually, like two years later, it was built. By then the whole market had changed. We're back in a bull market, whatever. And so EIP 1559 switches on and somehow ETH is deflationary. And that was the story. Not that the fee market was now suddenly non volatile because no one gave a about that in the first place. And this ultrasound money meme was born. And I would argue, like, there was a period of time where like, it definitely had an impact on ETH price and people were very excited about it.
- [25:27]
Taylor Monahan
And yeah, because when the. What was it? The activity, Whatever. But anyways, the activity would go one way, the price of ETH would go one way, and then that would impact how deflationary it was.
- [25:40]
Kane Warrick
There was this chart of like how much burn. You know, the, the burn. Right, the burn chart. So my hope is here that Hoffman, having sold all his eth, replays that for Saul Luca. So I, I hope that's in your future. You get Hoffman doing a SOL burn car and we need to come up with something other than a bat. Need like a different emoji that would be a bit, A bit on the nose, but like some, some animal that uses echolocation and, and a speaker. So I'll leave that up to you, Luca, to figure that one out. You can start. You can start the Saul Ultrasound money meme. It was, it was good. It was. The going was good for a while. While. While it was there.
- [26:27]
Taylor Monahan
It was so much. It was so much. And it was always a little bit. It took a long time to, I think, catch up, but it was always a bit of a fragile narrative. Like you were like, you don't say,
- [26:42]
Kane Warrick
yeah.
- [26:43]
Taylor Monahan
You're like, sorry, this gas fee market UX thing is actually ultrasound money. Like, and this is what's going to pump eth and this is like impacting everything about ETH that you know, and everyone's like running around with a little bat emojis.
- [26:59]
Kane Warrick
Emojis is my favorite.
- [27:02]
Taylor Monahan
I have many tweets of me just being like, hi. That's how I imagine all the people yelling about ultrasound money.
- [27:10]
Kane Warrick
Ultrasound Money.
- [27:12]
Taylor Monahan
But I don't know, maybe Solana might do it better than Ethereum in the sense that Ethereum kind of got carried away with it and kind of. It was like a fragile narrative, and then people really piled onto it.
- [27:22]
Luca Netz
Well, I don't think the proposals actually, and maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the proposal is actually to make it deflationary. I think it's to take it from 8% yield to 3 and some change, right?
- [27:34]
Kane Warrick
I'm just looking at the numbers here, and it's like 10,000, 64,000 daily burn. And then the inflation's like approximately 60,000. So I'm just saying, if it hits 60,001, some lunatic on the timeline's gonna do happen. The day when there's like, this was the thing, right? Like, no one was expecting this. And then there was, like, one day where someone, like, looked at the ETH inflation to, like, burn chart, and they're like, wait a second. It's going down. Like, this is crazy. And then it's borrowed, out of control, which was fun. So, I mean, I think to your point, though, Luca, like, anything, especially in a bear market, anything, inflation in a bear market, when, like, there's no bid for it, it's just. It's grim, right? So, yeah, like, the having some deflation during a bear market, probably not the worst thing. That. Versus the staking yield. I just, you know, there's like two. There's two things here, right? Like, there's a lot of stake stall, and you do need token sinks, right? And so there is a danger that if, you know, the yield goes to zero, that that token sink that currently exists disappears. And, you know, people are. But the thing that I think Solana has going for it, that. That ETH didn't. And where. Where the narrative kind of got poisoned is when, like, fees started becoming so insane, right? And people were, like, rallying around it, right? Like, this was the, like, pre L2 era, right? And this was like the Suzu thing. Like, my. My fight with Suzu came out of this whole thing as well, where it was like, all of you, like, jackasses, basically, this is Suzu, right? Are, like, sitting around, right, jacking yourself off over the burn. Meanwhile, no one can afford to use your chain, which was actually, like, on the money. Like, 100% on the money. It cost, like, 500 to do a synthetic staking.
- [29:37]
Luca Netz
And you took the other Posada that.
- [29:40]
Kane Warrick
Yeah, it's a long story. It's a long story. I was like. I was subtweeting him for like a week, like getting in his head. And I knew he knew. And eventually he lost his mind because I'm a very good troll if I want to be. And he, he like added me directly. And I was like, whoa, whoa, I don't know what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with me. Why are you freaking out, bro? And meanwhile, I had this like SCOP campaign for like weeks, just like prodding him, prodding him, prodding him, and he lost his mind. And, and so, but he was right. Like we were sitting around jacking ourselves off over the burn and it cost like, you know, 0.1 of an eth or something like that to do a complex transaction. And no one except for ETH whales could afford to use the chain. And he was like, this is not sustainable, guys. Like, this is not going to work. Right. So the difference here, I think in fairness, is that Solana's fee burn comes from like massive transaction volume, not massively expensive transactions. So in terms of like sustainability, it feels a little bit more sustainable to be doing like tens of millions of 2 cent transactions and 0.001 of a cent is burned, whereas we were doing like a few hundred $5,000 transactions and burning like $2,000 per transaction. Again, maybe not sustainable. So.
- [31:09]
Luca Netz
All right, let's see, let's see if
- [31:11]
Kane Warrick
this, if this passes. This will be interesting to watch. Before we continue though, let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back talking about USDC waking up and starting to freeze usdc, which is exciting.
- [31:29]
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- [32:09]
Kane Warrick
okay, so this is an interesting story. So Circle, who like historically are very bad at freezing USDC when we need them, decided that they were going to freeze USDC when we didn't need them to. So Tay, walk us through what happened here.
- [32:30]
Taylor Monahan
Okay, so these guys, you guys will have to fill in if you know anything about the whatever this overnight Overnight finance. Yeah. So basically there's a thing. Overnight finance. I guess it's been around for a bit. It kind of seems like a dead project to me, but I guess there was some amount of activity, and then these other guys came in and bought a bunch of the token. But then the person who actually controls the protocol, because the token obviously don't actually control the protocol, like, oh, yeah, come on, Tay.
- [33:05]
Kane Warrick
Of course. What are you talking about?
- [33:08]
Taylor Monahan
So the guy that actually controls the protocol. So all the guys. All these other guys come in. They're like, we're going to buy up all the tokens, and then we're going to try to take the whole treasury, because there's like a treasury that is left. And then the guy that actually controls the protocol was like, I don't like that plan. And so he took all of the treasury for himself. It's a bit unclear what exactly his plan was. Like, was he rugging them? Were they rugging him? I think my read on it is like, they're all trying to scale.
- [33:40]
Kane Warrick
They're all bad actors. They're all bad. Yeah, they're all bad actors. That's just the reality of these situations. It's like these, like, guys who come in who are like, you know, crypto raiders, they try and, like, raid treasuries. They're like, you're doing a bad job. And it's like, no, he's not doing any job. He's like, slow rugging everyone.
- [33:58]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, so that's like step one or whatever step two is. The raider guys have lawyers, apparently, and the lawyers basically, like, they followed the money. And so the treasury that the raiders were trying to grab, the treasury moved to a new address, and then from the new address, it went into this privacy protocol called Zamma. And it's not a very. At least the USDC Zamma pool is not very widely used. It's also kind of a weird one because it's not exactly tornado cache. It gives you certain privacy, but not full privacy. It's not really a mixer, I guess, which was weird. But anyway, so, yeah, so now there's like $12 million in this pool. And the raider guys call their lawyers, and the lawyers go to court, and the court, they get a. Like a. It's a temporary restraining order. They basically get. They just share their side of the story, right? Because this happens very fast. So they go to court and they're like. They make it. This big thing in the sky is
- [35:03]
Kane Warrick
getting away
- [35:06]
Taylor Monahan
and they. You can stop. You can stop the bad guy if you Freeze this money. You can stop the bad guy. Um, and the judge, like, kind of looked at it and was like, sure, that's fine. We'll figure it out. Like, that was on Friday. We'll figure it on Monday. But freeze it for now so we can't get away. So, like, Friday night, Saturday, all of a sudden, the smart contract protocol, which is like a commingled pool of assets, is frozen by Circle. And no one knows why, including the Zamba guys. The people who run the Zamba protocol
- [35:37]
Kane Warrick
are like, circle, circle, circle.
- [35:44]
Taylor Monahan
And.
- [35:45]
Kane Warrick
And this is because they.
- [35:46]
Luca Netz
This is.
- [35:47]
Kane Warrick
This is like a shielded pool, right? They're, like, uses, like, fully homomorphic encryption to shield the pool, but you can see the addresses, but not balances. So there's like some balance obfuscation thing. Um, but the pool is, like, not all of this money, right? Like, it's. It's just weird that this guy decided to use Zama as, like, the exit strategy here. Like, it's very. That. That's weird. Like, I don't. I don't get that. But then Circle just came over the top and was like, freeze all of Zamma. All of the USDC in this pool is. Is frozen.
- [36:26]
Taylor Monahan
And because he had deposited such a large amount, it was like 12 million out of, like, 13 million. And that's being quite generous. I think it was like 12.2 out of 12.9 or something was right. It's just this one guy. It was just like a completely overwhelming number. And then also the way that the. The raider guys, sort of their lawyers framed everything up, it just didn't seem like a big deal to freeze this smart contract protocol. But it is worth noting there were like, there were other people that had deposited funds there, and suddenly their funds were frozen on top of it. Zama, who is running this protocol, is, like, trying to build and trying to get, like, you know, activity and, like, do useful things. Wakes up and is like, wait, what? Like, why didn't anyone tell us about this? And then the Raider guys are obviously, like, you know, taking a Twitter and they're defending their actions, and they're saying they're just, like, kind of taking it for granted that everyone's going to accept that, one, this was, like, an okay thing to do. And two, that this. The guy that they were trying to raid is, like, definitely evil. Which I think some people accept, because he did, I guess, like, run away with money and then put in a privacy thing. But I'm not.
- [37:45]
Kane Warrick
You said earlier, just protecting the loot, bro.
- [37:48]
Taylor Monahan
It's all Very.
- [37:49]
Kane Warrick
These guys to steal it. Yeah, from the token.
- [37:53]
Taylor Monahan
And I don't believe him. I don't blame him. Why would you want the raiders to raid you? But obviously it opens up a huge conversation about like, there's a lot of pools in crypto. Like a lot of pool. Like a lot of pools and how big like or how much are your deposits?
- [38:16]
Kane Warrick
Right. This is, this is why like the circle, we only do things when we get a court order. As if courts are somehow going to be the best arbiter of the impact on a stable coin. Like, it's just so dumb. Like every aspect of this policy of circle is so dumb. Like we will only freeze pools if we have a court order and we will freeze them if there's a court order without even thinking about it. Without, like, with no scrutiny whatsoever. And it's like, you can keep doing this for a while, but this is one of those things where like there are alternatives. Guys, like, people will eventually go, eh, like, it doesn't take that many cases of things. And this one resolved fine. But like it could easily have not resolved fine. Right. Like if it were a different type of pool, it's an LP token that now the stable coins deep peg because can't get the other side out. Like, there's just so many ways that this could go wrong. Especially once people realize that you can do these like Friday afternoon attacks. Like, like this is, you know, crypto is so adversarial. Like people will take advantage of the poor judge who doesn't understand the implications of what they're doing. And they turn up and say this, there's a bad guy doing something and like, he's going to get away with it. Like a judge is going to be somewhat kind of, you know, open to that argument. Right. Like, okay, let's like courts do this all the time. They're like, ah, freeze the thing and we'll figure it out on a Monday.
- [39:46]
Luca Netz
Right?
- [39:47]
Kane Warrick
Like, but in crypto, freeze the thing and we'll figure out a Monday. Not.
- [39:52]
Taylor Monahan
It was like, it was so long. It was so long. And like, again, this specific pool was not the most used. There's a pretty new pool. Most of the money was this other guy, whatever, the overnight guy.
- [40:07]
Kane Warrick
But you can imagine overnight finance. I feel like I, I feel like I was in this for a while.
- [40:14]
Taylor Monahan
I had never, I never heard of it. It was a weird one. And I'm still not sure what they were ever doing and certainly not sure what they were doing at this point.
- [40:21]
Kane Warrick
But apparently, I mean, there's A lot of protocols that are just, like, Treasuries floating around. Right. So.
- [40:28]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the biggest issue that I have is, I mean, we've talked about this before. CIRCLE has fully dedicated this decision to a US Judge. And there's on. On the one hand, it, it absolves you of all responsibility. On the other hand, there's a lot of judges, and especially when you're doing the, the ex parte tros, which means, like, basically, I just, like, go in under emergency circumstances and tell my side of the story. And there's no one else, not the hacker. I don't have to name anyone else. I, I. You know what I mean? I can, I can. There's a, There's a lot of things that I can say that are, like, let's say, skirting the line on truth. Right. Like, they downplayed the potential impact of third parties. They sort of, like, just like, threw in a line to, to make the. I guess they've done this before, but they threw a line in saying, like, and if third parties are impacted, like, we'll. We'll cover it or whatever, to, you know, and so the judge, the judge is looking at this and it's like, okay, it's a, It's a boatload of money. You're telling me if I, if I order them to freeze it, then the money can't go anywhere? You're telling me there's, like, not really any harm? Like, okay, cool.
- [41:53]
Kane Warrick
You can, like, shop judges and find. There's so many judges. Just, like, find a judge who's like, there's probably some judges who are just like, yeah, yeah, fuck these crypto guys.
- [42:02]
Taylor Monahan
Like, you know, a hundred percent. And especially, you can imagine there are. Yeah, there's a lot of circumstances where, like, a pool of commingled assets should absolutely not be frozen. But if you frame the facts and circumstances in a certain way, you can absolutely get it frozen for at least a few days. Right. And I think, I think it's just bad on. I think Circle has to, at some point realize that this decision to push all responsibility.
- [42:34]
Kane Warrick
Yeah.
- [42:35]
Taylor Monahan
You can't do it because again, once you, once you push all that responsibility to the courts, you can't say no to the courts. And this is like, one thing that Tyler does very well is they, they have a lot of sort of thresholds and sort of things that have to happen depending on the facts and circumstances, but they sort of always retain that final say. And even when they do get, like, an order, they say, like, we're just ha. We just happen to voluntarily freeze this. Like, yeah, you, you served us, but like we froze it all on our own.
- [43:13]
Kane Warrick
It's just a coincidence, man. I don't know.
- [43:15]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, yeah, but it's, it's to maintain this, the, the control. Because if, if the court does order a bad breeze, they want to be able to say no. But if you've completely delegated responsibility and said your. Your entire policy. Circle's entire policy is if a judge orders us to do it, we will do it. Does it? If they don't, we won't. If they do, we will. And I think that can be abuse. And I think people are realizing that.
- [43:43]
Luca Netz
I mean, that's just like all it
- [43:45]
Kane Warrick
takes is a few examples. As I said, like, crypto's so adversarial. There's so much USCC floating around in weird places that people can attack. Like, you could go, this could be completely unrelated. And you're like, if we can freeze this pool, then we can go and do this other thing and exploit this protocol. So let's like, figure out some like trumped up thing of this guy is trying to like steal the money or it's at risk or whatever and just say like, hey, it's Friday afternoon. Just freeze it till Monday. It'll be totally fine. And then by Monday, there's smoking crater there. So yeah, Circle has to get this. All right, well, I just wanted to
- [44:23]
Taylor Monahan
say too, like, I don't know, I think that I just, I feel for Zama in this situation. Like, these guys are just trying to build a freaking protocol and then they wake up and they got frozen. And it's not even because they were building a privacy protocol.
- [44:40]
Kane Warrick
It wasn't.
- [44:41]
Taylor Monahan
You know what I mean? They're not even giving. So I think people who are building DeFi should probably consider this risk, I guess, and maybe think about ways to mitigate it.
- [44:52]
Kane Warrick
I mean, you know, the funniest, the funniest thing is like back in the day when I was still like drinking the decentralization Kool Aid, right? Like, we were like, we delisted Dai out of synthetics because Dai was like 58% USDC. And we're like, we can't trust these guys. This is when USDC was a lot smaller. But we're like, we can't trust these guys. Like, their, their policy is insane. They could freeze the whole protocol just because someone turns up. Griefs us, whatever. Anyway, here we are now. USDC all the way down. So congratulations. All right, let's move on to our Next segment. This is an interesting one. So the. This guy, Jeff Sprecher, who is the CEO of ICE New York Stock Exchange, and I don't know Tradify well enough to know if there's like beef between like New York Stock Exchange and nasdaq. I feel like there is. Like, I know they compete for like IPOs and stuff, but like, I don't know if this guy is, is like, is, you know, throwing shade on the nasdaq.
- [46:03]
Luca Netz
No different than finance and coinbase.
- [46:05]
Kane Warrick
Just right. Okay, great. So it definitely is right. So basically this guy, this, this tri Fi guy who's the CEO of New York Stock Exchange is like, hey, did you know there are these like 11 kids in like Bolivia or whatever that are bigger than the nasdaq? Which feels like a very good burn. I just like that to me is. Is awesome. So apparently he said this is Hyper Liquid that we're talking. If you haven't heard about it, it's bigger than the NASDAQ. Okay. It's 11 people. You look at it, you're like, wow, that's pretty something like. I love that quote. It's amazing. And then, and this has been a while because Kyle Simani was supposed to be like, not even in the area. So I don't know how this happened, but there was 100k bet. Arthur Hayes challenged Kyle Simani that I outperforms every top 10 coin from. And look at this. Okay, Arthur Hayes and Kyle Simone's prop bet that they're setting up has clear specifications than your average poly market. So maybe we should get Arthur Hayes to write the poly market markets for. So the bet is from midnight UTC June 2 to January 1, 2027. No time stamp on that one though. So I don't know, maybe we assume it's midnight priced versus USDT on byit. They like specify the venue and Saman accepted. I hope he loses. I really do. I like Arthur. And so.
- [47:43]
Taylor Monahan
So Kyle's betting. Kyle's betting basically soul. Is that right?
- [47:48]
Kane Warrick
He's basically anything. The funniest, the most entertaining outcome would be if ETH outperforms Hype and Kyle wins. That would be the best.
- [47:59]
Taylor Monahan
You know, if that happens. If that happens, I win and you guys can all go, oh, cry in the corner.
- [48:08]
Kane Warrick
But yeah, anyway, so. So yeah, son's knock. Hyper liquid is Binance 2.0 without a marketing team. Not fully open source permission validators. Token. I love Simone best. So yeah, there's a bunch. Sorry, does it matter?
- [48:25]
Luca Netz
Does it matter? Because I can literally go with my Internet connection and have the best trading experience ever. Like what are we, what are we doing here?
- [48:33]
Kane Warrick
Just nothing that Kyle says matters. It's all sc. Everything that he says is some kind of s. So yeah, I, I think like you know, the, the reality is that in a bare market we're now in this situation where we didn't have the kind of blowoff top in alt that everyone was expecting. And so you had these assets and not many of them but like there are definitely some out there, right? Like zcash even near, you know, hype that were coiled for the blowoff and it didn't come. And now we're in this weird thing where like there's always, there's always in bear markets, assets that outperform, right. Like you go back to like any, any, any bear market there'll be, there'll be some assets that like start to get some momentum and it looks like the only investable thing, everything else is going down, whatever. And it's pretty nice if you can, it's good if you can get into that position. But, but this feels like it could be even crazier because usually it's like come off the back of the blow off top, everything crashes and then it's like rebuilding from zero and so they kind of grind back up. But hyper liquid, you know, I think it went down to like $20, right? Like from 50, so it was down 60%. Usually with alts it's like they're down 98% and then you know, a few will like show signs of life and, and grind back up. Whereas hyper liquid is like grinding back up off, you know, $20 and now it's at all time high and it just, it feels like through the whole bull market it was one of the few things that was investable and now in a bare market it's like 10 times, 10 times more concentrated in terms of, you know, what's investable. So yeah, I, I think Arthur probably has the right side of this bet, but you never know. 2027 is a long way away. And again I would love to see Kyle lose prop bet.
- [50:43]
Luca Netz
Does that mean if Zcash the top 10 that it's not applicable? Because that would be the only thing that I think could give hyper.
- [50:51]
Kane Warrick
They could, they could actually blow. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was based on the top 10
- [50:55]
Luca Netz
currently he'll win that bet. That's like a very easy bet to win. I don't even know why Kyle would make that bet.
- [51:02]
Kane Warrick
I, I mean if you're a founder out there and you know, can't figure out what you should build. I'll prop bet.com. good business.
- [51:12]
Luca Netz
The thing is Hype Hype really misunderstood because on the FDV side, like the remove FDV from the equation, like where, where is the rest of that diluted value going? Potentially another air drop, which like, I feel like Jeff would do that really strategically and at the right time. And then like what the 11 insiders, like, those guys don't read to me like huge ginormous net sellers. Like once you have your millions, you know, you, you could sell into the hype twop and they wouldn't even do anything. So, you know, if you just look at hyper liquid objectively and call it rounded up at a $20 billion asset, like it is definitely worth more than 20 billion bucks. I mean, you know, I think the FDV is a big psyop for a lot of people. But like, let's understand where those tokens are being distributed. You know, 11 guys, Jeff probably the big, by far the biggest stakeholder. He's been rich, right? He's not hungry to, you know, be a ginormous net seller and then some future airdrop. But that's probably a ways away.
- [52:20]
Kane Warrick
All right, let's see, let's see. Okay, I find our final segment for today. We're actually on time weirdly quite bizarre, but maybe we can, we can blow ourselves out with this one. So apps are fleeing Mega Eth for Monad. So I. This is an interesting one to me because I'm an investor in both Mega Eth and Mon, right? So, so, you know, I like Shuyao, I like Keoni and I think that they're building different approaches to these networks, like optimizing for different things. But the thing that's been interesting to me throughout this entire thing, especially Monad, it's been four years now, is both of them very clearly understood from the beginning that it's the apps on your chain that will make or break it. You have to have the apps. You know, I mean, Luca, you've talked about this, right? Like you got to have the defi apps. Even if you don't have aave, you got to have something like aave, right? Like you got to go out there and get that. That's the spine of your network, right? If you don't have that defi activity. What's interesting though is Monad seemed to focus on like fundamentals based apps, if, if that makes any sense, right? Like they were like apps that were not controversial or like super novel. Or whatever. It was just like outtake on this thing. And in fairness, like Monad, you know, the, the selling proposition of Monad was like another EVM based L1 with like a few different trade offs. But it wasn't like, oh, we're going, you know, way out on the risk curve of like a real time blockchain in the way that Mega Eth did. Mega Etho went with this very cultivated, like small group, you know, five, 10 teams, right, this Mega Mafia approach. And they, they courted these like cracked zoomer teams that were very clearly trying to build apps that did not feel like they were crypto. That was the goal, right? They were like. And, and every single one, I remember I went to one of these Mega Mafia events and like every single one of the, the founders was like, we want the crypto to like fade into the background and, and we really want this to be an app, right? Like an app on the App Store or a web app that you would use and you just don't feel any of this stuff. And I was always a little bit concerned about this because it's felt like kind of adverse selection. Like if you're, if you're courting a bunch of teams that don't care about the blockchain aspect of the thing and, and want to, you know, make the, the blockchain disappear, what possible loyalty are they going to have to your blockchain? Like, if it turns out that your blockchain can't do the thing that they want to do, then they're not like, there's nothing really holding them there. And I think we're sort of seeing this play out, right? Like there's a bunch of teams that, that were, you know, in this Mega Mafia program that as soon as there was, you know, some incentive to go somewhere else or, you know, any issues or whatever, they were like, we'll go over to this network and you know, like Monad raised a lot of money, A lot of money. They've got a massive war chest. And yeah, that like, you know, it's a bear market. Teams are looking for funding and, and incentives from chains is one of the best places to get funding. And so this, this just doesn't feel that, I don't know, it doesn't feel that surprising to me given, given the teams that that mega, you know, was, was courting. I mean, Luca, what's, what's your take on this? Right, like from an abstract perspective, how have you thought about the teams that you have courted, incentivized, supported incubated like how. What's your strategy there?
- [56:46]
Luca Netz
Yeah, I've got an answer that's going to get me in trouble. And I, I just put amazing.
- [56:50]
Kane Warrick
Let's go.
- [56:51]
Luca Netz
No, I'm not gonna, I can't give that answer. I don't want, I don't want to start some stuff. But I mean, look, I will tell you this. I think that the blockchain business is an incredibly hard business to do.
- [57:03]
Kane Warrick
Right.
- [57:04]
Luca Netz
I think it's really easy to sell a story. I think it's really hard to actually be performant. I think what apps want above all else and if they look for anything other than this, then I think they're, they're, they're mercenaries. And so like optimizing for mercenary apps is not advantageous. So like I've been anti grant, anti money. What I am, what I am, what I think a chain's job at an ecosystem's job is to provide distribution for applications. That is the compelling reason why I think an app would go on a chain. I think if you're looking to build your, you know, look at it, look at a chain as an ecosystem and in our world like ecosystems are like cities, right? Like if I have a city with a lot of foot traffic, then my promenades and my boardwalks are going to have a lot of good stores that pay a lot of good rent. And I think that is really the business model that they are in. I have since maybe disagreed in terms of. Let's just through the lens of token value. I don't think token value is derived anymore by the apps that are built on your chain, which is unfortunate. Obviously a chain success and ability to become self sustaining is right. Like the chain business is such a bad business that unless you're making real fees. Right. A lot of chains just sell token to go and subsidize the infra and the spend that is running a blockchain. And so for that reason I think you have to have a chain that has good apps on it. But as Polygon showed us, I don't think apps on your chain accrue value to the token unless for some reason activity then ties in. But the activity you can have the most activity in the world. Salon has proven this. But what it actually does, a token supply in an efficient manner is relatively nominal. And I think, I think it's really going to be hard to compete with chains moving forward. I think it's a, it's, it's an incredibly difficult business. And, and I think if you look at the landscape today, I think if you look at the future of blockchains, I think they're going to be very purpose built around certain enterprises. I actually think near has a.1 of the few cases to actually become a top blockchain because of its privacy element and what I think it can do there because Intense is such an amazing product. But you know, I think, I think Monad built really great infrastructure. But you know, to the spirit of me not getting myself in trouble, I won't give you my true honest thoughts on what I think is transpiring across that entire landscape.
- [59:48]
Kane Warrick
Awesome. Well, I think one, one thing that's interesting, we saw this in base, right? We saw like I was really close to a bunch of teams who, who went from optimism to base, the super chain, you know, some teams I wasn't close to, like velodrome, aerodrome, you know, whatever. And my, my experience being in those groups, like the, the base defi groups and, and some of these other like base mafia groups was always that there was this sense from everyone, right, that Bates doesn't care about us. You know, they're, they have, they play favorite, they care about these guys. Now the good thing about Ethereum, right, Like if you think about it is when everyone is like Vitalik doesn't care about us. All of the Defi builders, there's no favorite. Like there was no one that you could point to be like, but he loves Stani. No, he doesn't give a about Stanley either, right? Like, so there was at least an equal playing field in the Ethereum Defi community where like no one felt like anyone cared and you just had to like survive on your own, right? And it is an interesting place where like these ecosystems where they do play favorites and there's Omega Mafia and like BAS has like their anointed teams and you know, I remember BAS being like
- [61:11]
Luca Netz
Coinbase is not Kane is the thing, right? How, how can you not? Because if you own a boardwalk, right, and there's three places on the boardwalk that are bringing everyone there, are you supposed to go to the local crevice of that boardwalk and treat that person in the crevice with the same care and attention as your main attractions. It's just metallic. Would tell you, shut the boardwalk down.
- [61:34]
Kane Warrick
We don't want boardwalks get rid of.
- [61:36]
Luca Netz
It's not, it's not ergonomic, it's not efficient. The quality of builders, like at the end of the day, you know, I can just tell. I'll just be honest. When I was delineating builders, right, there were some builders that I would talk to and spend time with. And then I got the same, I got the same response from other guys. And the unfortunate reality, to the best of my ability, I try to avoid saying this because I don't want to hurt their feelings. Today, I care less is you are just not the same talents as the other guy. I hate to break it to you and I don't think you have what it takes as the other guy that I'm spending time and attention with. And frankly.
- [62:14]
Kane Warrick
Right.
- [62:15]
Luca Netz
I, you know, if you treat it like a startup mode, you have to give somebody attention because again, you're, you're pronged on so many people, other people's success. But frankly, building abstract gave me a little more empathy for, I think or a little more understanding for how Vitalik went about it. Now Vitalik was interesting because he was put in a position where post success I think it's super important that you have, have that rapport especially with guys who have like hundreds, you know, 50, $100 billion of assets. I mean it's almost like fiscal, fiscally irresponsible not to. But when you're in the startup mindset, he was obvious first mover, kind of created the whole blockchain ecosystem and you know, a lot of power to him for kind of capturing a lot of that value and that momentum early on. But if you're treating a blockchain the day net new and you, you have to treat it like a startup. And if you know your startup is dependent on other parties finding success, you can't go and give all those other parties the success that you want. And so you have that dynamic. But the truth of the matter is, is you are picking guys who clearly have some semblance of what it takes to go and build, you know, good properties and good attractions on your boardwalk to make your, to make a successful boardwalk versus you're not going to go to every Joe Schmo wants to inquire for a lease and king make them and bring them the same value that you're giving the guy that is know developed multiple properties in the past and has multiple successes under his belt. Right. And it's just like, it's like common sense. The problem is, is crypto is not the land of common sense the way, the way I wish it would be. And so you're, you're, you're dealing with this dynamic that is really frustrating frankly. And it's even from like a user perspective, you know, it's, it's really, it's really a catch 22. And frankly it is, it is, it is almost impossible to manage if I'm being honest.
- [64:15]
Taylor Monahan
Well, I think
- [64:18]
Luca Netz
from Luca,
- [64:21]
Kane Warrick
but I get, I get it.
- [64:22]
Taylor Monahan
I get you 100%. And then I think on top of it all, okay? So regardless, every project right now, if they haven't gotten traction, they're struggling. This isn't about a chain thing, right? These are projects. These are people that are trying to build stuff.
- [64:38]
Kane Warrick
It's just rough right now and it's existential, right? Like if you raised, you know, I saw a team like a couple months ago that raised like 10 mil. They raised 15 mil or something, right? They were like defi super app, one of our competitors and they burned through enough that they were like we're down to whatever months of Runway, right, over the course of two years and they're like, we got to shut this thing down and sell off the assets, right? Like, and you know the problem, this is the funny thing, right? Like trying to build an app or like any, you know, a consumer facing app or whatever that is like somewhat chain agnostic. You got no hope. No one's, no one's going to come and save you, right? You know, because there is, you're not tied to any ecosystem, right? Whereas at least if you were in the mega mafia, you're still grinding like, you know, Meggie probably can help you like help you raise some more money, help you survive. Because it's existential for them that their apps survive, right? So yeah, it's just a hard, it's a hard time. Bare markets are hard, people, people run out of cash really quickly. They think I thought there was going to be more time etc. Etc. And there isn't.
- [65:58]
Luca Netz
So, but, but you know, there, there's a, there's a self accountability here too, right? And so at the end of the day, like if I'm building a product, right, it's nice that a chain or something can bring me value. And I, I've always, my qualms with Ethereum was never. I needed them to king makey, king make me. I think I needed them to show me some acknowledgment like a, like a stepson to their dad, right?
- [66:22]
Kane Warrick
Show me, I've said the story to
- [66:24]
Luca Netz
show me a little bit of love, right, Was I think my always my qualm because I would worked really hard for so long. But I think the my, my, my, my, my my thing is is if you're building a business and you are dependent right, on somebody else bringing you a user base, right? If it's Not a chain, a chain ecosystem. It's quite literally the, the, the business. But if I'm an app and I think, and I think I'm failing because of a chain, right. You are so misconstrued. I mean, you just, you, you may not be built to run a business, frankly, you might just be an intrapreneur, which is fine. Steve Ballmer was an entrepreneur, one of the richest mans on the planet. You can still bring value for yourself and your family. But this idea that I, you know, I needed, like, and my thing was actually really interesting because I was on the other side of it, right. I was the app builder or the consumer in my own respect. Right. But I wasn't ever an ecosystem first. And I had no money for 18 months. I didn't take a salary for 18 months. Right. I actually put millions of dollars of my own money into it. And we found success and we persevered and we did everything physically possible to go and succeed. I mean, quite literally, I try to run down what were the 20 things that would make a thing successful, and I did every single one of them. And, and you know, at, at no point in that early process that I blame Ethereum for not giving me and bringing me success. It wasn't until after we had won and done so much in, at such a, in such a bad time was I like, oh, maybe Vitalik, you want to.
- [67:57]
Kane Warrick
Or, or Ethereum, we're propping this bad boy up. Can I you buy me lunch maybe one day?
- [68:04]
Luca Netz
You know, may, maybe, maybe a nice, maybe a nice comment. Didn't even need to be in public. It was just some sort of eligible
- [68:09]
Taylor Monahan
from literally just acknowledge that you exist and that you did a thing like
- [68:15]
Luca Netz
I never expected them to save my business. Right. Or to create value.
- [68:20]
Kane Warrick
Yeah, agreed. I agree with that.
- [68:21]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah.
- [68:22]
Kane Warrick
100 agree.
- [68:22]
Taylor Monahan
I do. I think, Luca, I think you've, you have hit the nail on the head a bit where if you're building on Maggie, if you're building on Mona, frankly, if you're building on a lot of chains right now and you are not, you have not got that traction, you've not found that product market fit. I think there is a certain class of builder who's sitting there right now saying it's the chain's fault or, I
- [68:44]
Kane Warrick
mean, but in fairness, the chains are struggling. It's grim for chains, right? Imagine if you built your business.
- [68:53]
Taylor Monahan
You can't tell me that these guys that are going to move from Meggie to Monad or Monad to Mega or
- [68:59]
Kane Warrick
Base, it's Not going to do shit. It won't help. The only thing it will help is you get a $2 million grant that lets you survive for another six months.
- [69:06]
Taylor Monahan
Right?
- [69:07]
Kane Warrick
That's the only, like, it will not change your outlook as a business, as a protocol, as the team, as a project. Right. But it will give you cash and, you know, like, if you're in an existential. Like, you know, if. If Solana had turned up in. In, I don't know, Luca, like 20, 22 and been like, hey, move pudgies to Solana and we'll give you a 20 million dollar check. You probably would have to consider that, right?
- [69:36]
Taylor Monahan
Like, oh, yeah, 100. Especially during COVID Yeah, you're done.
- [69:42]
Kane Warrick
That's a missed opportunity. Totally. Anyway, you got there.
- [69:46]
Taylor Monahan
But let's see. I don't. I don't know. I think. I think like you said, everyone's struggling because it's not just.
- [69:55]
Kane Warrick
This is hard. Bear markets are hard. Running a chain's hard. Running a project's hard. There's not many on chain users right now. It's hard. So people are gonna have to do what they have to do to survive, which I think is, you know, as Luca said, like, as a founder, that's your job. You gotta survive. You gotta play the board in front of you. And. And I think, you know, that's. That's the. The reality. But, um. But yeah, it's. It's definitely tough out there. Um, so, yeah, keep grinding, I guess, is the only. The only advice. Keep grinding. Um, all right, I think that is it for us. We were on time. We're now a little bit over. We did it, basically.
- [70:43]
Taylor Monahan
We almost did it.
- [70:45]
Kane Warrick
Uh, all right, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember, what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. We will be back next week with more fun stories. Until then, do your own research. We're in. 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 it. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com. uneasy money. Sam.