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- [00:00]
Tom
I mean, Ford is worth. I don't think Vitalik has ever had good taste in apps. I feel like the stuff that he cites of, like, things that he's excited about are like, generally bad.
- [00:08]
Robert
Not a dividend.
- [00:09]
Tarun
It's a tale of two Kwan.
- [00:10]
Haseeb
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
- [00:13]
Tom
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
- [00:15]
Haseeb
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.
- [00:18]
Tarun
Alec Eth is the ultimate defi.
- [00:21]
Robert
Protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. Today, Haseeb as an influencer, is going to show you his preparation that he goes through every single episode prior to the show.
- [00:42]
Haseeb
Yeah, guys, I don't know if you saw, but I recently became number two on the Kaito Yapper leaderboard, which means I'm officially an influencer now, so. Ooh. Okay, so let's just. It's time for. It's game time. Oh, oh, oh. Okay. Wow, that got all over the screen. Okay, now I just need a little bit of this.
- [01:07]
Robert
Wipe it off. Yeah.
- [01:09]
Haseeb
Oh. Oh, beautiful.
- [01:10]
Tom
Okay, that's the youthful glow right there.
- [01:12]
Haseeb
Yeah. Can you guys tell? Can you guys tell? That looks refreshing.
- [01:18]
Robert
That looks really good.
- [01:19]
Haseeb
Yeah, this is. I can barely read my screen now. Okay, we're going to put this over here. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now we start the show.
- [01:30]
Tom
Steve does that every show.
- [01:31]
Haseeb
Actually, I do that. Actually, I do it every show. We just wanted it. Yeah, we wanted to show the audience because we thought it might help personalize some of us. So quick intros. First we got Tom the Defi maven and master of memes.
- [01:41]
Tom
Hello, everyone.
- [01:43]
Haseeb
Next we've got Robert, crypto connoisseur and czar of super state.
- [01:46]
Robert
Welcome to the show.
- [01:48]
Haseeb
Then we've got Tarun the giga brain and grand Poobah at Gauntlet.
- [01:51]
Tarun
Yo.
- [01:53]
Haseeb
And finally, I'm Haseeb, the head hype man and now influencer at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopping Block XYZ for more disclosures. I need to wipe my face.
- [02:06]
Tarun
Okay, so, Haseeb, first we have to. We have to ask you the hard hitting questions first now that you're an influencer, please.
- [02:12]
Haseeb
Oh, I'm ready for it.
- [02:13]
Tarun
The first one is, when are you.
- [02:15]
Haseeb
Moving part of my. Are you part of my trading group? It depends on how much elf I can actually give you.
- [02:20]
Tarun
I mean, my real question is, when are you moving to a TikTok house? Like, when are we going to see you see a TikTok house?
- [02:27]
Haseeb
You know, I don't like to give out teasers on shows like this, but let's just say I'm going to be moving to Beverly Hills very soon. So very excited.
- [02:34]
Tarun
I mean, the jacket looks like you're like, in a TikTok house video. It's like it has an aesthetic. No, keep it on.
- [02:42]
Haseeb
Keep it on.
- [02:43]
Robert
It gives the correct.
- [02:43]
Haseeb
Keep it on. All right. Keep it on. Keeping it on, Keeping it on. Okay, cool. All right, so let's talk about what's been going on in the world over the last week. For those of you who have been living under Iraq, Trump's tariff show has never ends. It's a show that keeps on giving. So, of course, Trump's crazy tariffs on the entire world. His global trade war was set to begin on April 9, and then Trump reversed course completely, said that reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days. All tariffs on other countries would go back to 10%, minus the tariffs on Canada and on Mexico and on automobiles, as well as the tariffs on China. So during that period of time, China tariffs escalated in a tit for tat trade war that ended with now 145% tariffs on China from the US so this 90 day tariff pause seemingly was instigated by Bill Ackman. It's caused a big rally in markets across the globe. We've seen massive, massive reversal in pretty much every single asset class, including in crypto. So we're now in the weird position of basically wait and see. So we don't know exactly what to infer from this. Clearly, Trump blinked in some way with respect to the effects of his economic policy on the country and on stock markets and on the treasury markets. All that being said, there's still weakness in Treasuries, there's still high inflation expectations, and the crypto market has recovered somewhat, but it certainly hasn't fully recovered. And alts are still kind of sitting in the toilet. So given where we're sitting, we have 90 days to see whether or not Trump renegotiate some of these tariffs. How are you guys feeling about how this is likely to impact the crypto market?
- [04:21]
Robert
I'll start. Well, I think the biggest thing that's been up in the air is the trade war with China has taken the front and center stage. Right. Every other country has basically been pushed to the wayside the Trump administration is negotiating, fielding calls from, discussing whatever with all the rest of the countries that we were proposing tariffs with China, it's basically like a very serious trade war. And yes, there's a lot of back and forth on, like, what's included, what's excluded. Is it semiconductors, is it electronics, is it auto parts, is it completed autos? You know, it's like every day there's a little bit of, like, different news there. I don't think any of it directly impacts crypto that much, frankly, no matter what, the cat's already out of the bag and that there's already, like, discontentment and disharmony in global markets. Right. Whether we've resolved these tariffs or not, I think, and we talked about this on the show last week when Jeff park was on, some of the damage has already been done. And even if we completely reverted back to completely tariffless trade with China, you know, I think they're going to have lingering distrust of the US Monetary order, and we're going to have some resentment and distrust towards them as well. And so for a crypto investor, you know, I think it's generally bullish, Bitcoin as a neutral asset, that we've never really seen it play out in the midst of a global economic battle, but it is neutral. It's credibly neutral. It belongs to neither the US Nor China, nor the EU nor Japan, nor any of the countries that are involved at the table right now. So I think it's still an edge case, but I think, you know, the edge case probability is increasing that bitcoin finds a role in the new economic order. And so I'm not looking at this in a next week resolution. I think we're going to see this play out over the coming weeks, months and years. I think the dominoes have started to fall.
- [06:11]
Haseeb
Tom, what's your take?
- [06:13]
Tom
Yeah, I mean, we did talk about it a bit last show, which is, hey, all else equal, weaker $QE on the horizon feels like it's good for Bitcoin. But right now there's just uncertainty. And when there's uncertainty, you want to take your chips off the table. You want to wait and see for every asset class other than, I guess, gold. So it feels very early. And I think already this has been extremely volatile in terms of the way that the tariffs were rolled out. There was even like, oh, there was an updated China tariff, and then they declared no, that was on top, the existing tariff. And so it's like uncertainty on top of uncertainty. And it reminds me A little bit of COVID There was so much uncertainty. And then when the uncertainty kind of starts to crystallize a little bit, then people kind of start to redeploy and sort of have a firmer view of the world. But right now it's like just. It's so risk off.
- [06:58]
Haseeb
Yeah. I mean, the difference with COVID obviously was that Covid was a natural phenomenon and this was a self imposed policy error.
- [07:04]
Tom
Basically, it's a human hurricane. It's unpredictable.
- [07:08]
Haseeb
Yeah. It's been, obviously, from the perspective of financial markets, it's been a fiasco with respect to just the inconsistency in communication, people contradicting each other. You hear different things from Greer, as from Trump, as from Besant. Tarun, what's your take on the macro situation?
- [07:25]
Tarun
Negotiations usually require two people to dance. Like both sides need to be playing. You don't need to keep calling and saying, hey, why are you not showing up to the negotiating table?
- [07:35]
Haseeb
You're talking about us, China.
- [07:37]
Tarun
Yeah, I mean, it's like kind of. It is a little bit comical. I saw a bunch of tweets that were like, that, you know, someone was like, there's some news headline that was like, oh, Trump to Trump to. To Chi. Like, I'm waiting for your call. And that one of the snarky headline, one of the snarky tweets was like.
- [07:53]
Robert
They need to negotiate with us. We don't have to negotiate with them. How come they're not calling?
- [07:58]
Tarun
And. And like the tweet was like breaking. Man expects his ex girlfriend to call him back after they broke up. And I was like, you know, it's kind of, it was kind of a.
- [08:07]
Haseeb
Little, it feels like diplomacy. It's, it's crazy. Like, this is exactly what kids do. It's. It's insane.
- [08:14]
Tarun
I, it did feel a little like, you know, I, I don't know. To me, that's like the number one thing that's weird. The other thing is just like, how could you roll this out and have no deals before you announced it? It's like, I kind of feel like game theory is like completely broken. If you're like, we're going to do all this and force you into bilateral negotiations and then everyone is actually, if no one else is doing it, I'm not doing it either. There's kind of this collusion that everyone can kind of do by being like, fuck you, we're all not negotiating with you. Versus if you go in and say, okay, I have some, some set of deals that are already done. These guys, because they negotiated with us before we announced it publicly, got better terms and, and you can you act fast otherwise you're going to get worse terms. It's just like the whole like bargaining strategy reminds me of maybe teenage diplomacy is not the worst description of. It is very like tit for tat and not about like long term strategy. And like what do you think the other person is going to do in response? Clearly, clearly they're like, it doesn't seem like they're doing any prediction of what the response of the other player is.
- [09:18]
Robert
I think they are. I mean I feel like it's very obvious game theory that like when you have two superpowers, the only response to almost any beef is escalation. I don't think, you know, it's that or like alliance, truce, compromise and resolution.
- [09:34]
Tarun
But I think, I think another thing though that is different here is that it would be true if you had you were two superpowers with equal leverage against one another. But the US doesn't really have any leverage against China in this whole thing. Like I just feel like that's clearly true.
- [09:52]
Haseeb
That's clearly untrue. I don't think pushing, we're pushing China to stimulate when China has really been trying as hard as they can to not stimulate their economy. Right. I mean we're, we're clearly pushing China into recession if they don't stimulate aggressively. And China is still an export driven economy. Like they don't really have the consumer.
- [10:11]
Tarun
Look, look, look, I'm not saying we have no leverage, but I'm saying like we walked into this kind of like knife fight with a butter knife. You know, it's like we, in theory we could, we had.
- [10:21]
Haseeb
Yeah, I mean I'm against his trade policy as much as you are, but I think that that's clearly just not true. China is clearly in the weaker position given that they don't have.
- [10:32]
Tarun
They're in a weaker position on their own. They're not in a weaker position when everyone else also hates us at the same time. Because now we have to negotiate all the swarm.
- [10:41]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah, you are seeing the swarm.
- [10:43]
Tarun
Thing right now, right? Europe is also like, fuck you, we're not negotiating with you, you're trading.
- [10:48]
Haseeb
No, Europe is totally negotiating with us. What are you talking about? Some portion, some portion of the reciprocal tariffs. They pulled back the reciprocal tariffs. The EU pulled back the reciprocal tariffs, said we're canceling those and coming into a negotiation.
- [11:00]
Tarun
But then the eu, the eu, EU had some weird things. Like some countries are like, we're going to negotiate on our own. And that's what I'm saying. It's like, it's like a total like mayhem thing. It doesn't seem like it's like a.
- [11:11]
Robert
Here's, here's the GTO solution to this. It's very simple. Every country is incentivized to discuss and negotiate because any country that reaches zero tariffs with the US has a competitive, competitive advantage over every other country on earth. If there's only one country in a hypothetical world, let's just say it's like Italy. Italy is the only country on earth that we have zero percent tariff with. And everyone else, it's like up here, every exporting business will move from their random ass country to Italy to be able to sell more products. And the country that basically breaks first or settles first or negotiates first with us if no one else does is the winner. And so yes, we have to negotiate with 60 different partners, but there really isn't a major incentive for those partners to reach a good set of terms with us very fast.
- [12:02]
Tom
I agree. I think the big also confusion has been the exclusions. And it feels like two weeks ago the story was, oh, we're going to reshore manufacturing, we need semiconductors, we know all these advanced products. And then it's like, okay, no, actually those are excluded. And then we're going to tax or tariff the inputs. We're going to tariff like raw aluminum. And it's like, okay, well no, that's actually what you need. So it feels all very backwards and not, not, not super productive.
- [12:27]
Haseeb
Yeah, I mean, some of the actual specifics of the policy clearly are being negotiated in real time. There's now a particular potential exemption for car parts as opposed to fully finished cars. So there's clearly a lot of this stuff that the Trump team didn't really understand. The nature of a lot of this trade in finished goods versus unfinished goods. Right now in Polymarket, there's a market on which countries will agree to do a trade deal first. And right now what you can see is that UK is leading, then Argentina, then Vietnam, then India, then Japan, then Korea, then eu, then Israel. And so there is an ordering and there's some sense that whoever comes first will probably get a better deal. Now is this true? Is this just perceived? It's hard to tell. Obviously there's going to be a lot of pandemonium in 50 trade deals being executed simultaneously within a 90 day period. Normally trade deals are incredibly complex. They involve lots and lots and lots of minutiae in actually how to implement these trade deals, if you remember things like TPP and usmca, they take many, many months and they're extremely Byzantine agreements. So the idea that we're going to have this real agreement, maybe we'll have a term sheet or something, or just a kind of spiritual. Yeah, this is roughly what we're going to do. And then we're going to go back to the way things were before this deal. As we hammer out the details, that's very likely all we're going to be able to get in 90 days at best. And right now, again, the way Trump is talking is that if at the end of this period, we don't get these deals, that tariffs actually go back to the high level that were announced during Liberation Day, which basically, of course, means, okay, we're back to Armageddon mode. And it also means that producers and exporters do not have any confidence about where tariffs are going to be in 90 days, which is another just real kind of Armageddon level error on behalf of the Trump administration is that you can see from all the recent reports that are coming out, producers are frozen right now. They're just basically sitting and waiting. They're not making any investments because they just don't know what's going to happen. So that's going to be a big drag on the economy. Now, all this being said, the real economy is clearly going to suffer because of this. Financial assets, it's less clear that we have seen capital flight taking place from the US Capital flight, meaning that it's not just that the stock market is weakening, but also Treasuries are weakening and the dollar is weakening. All three of those are happening at the same time, which generally means money is moving out of the country. That's a really bad thing. That generally doesn't happen in the U.S. usually in the U.S. what happens is that stock market weakens, but Treasuries are strong and that ends up being the flight to safety asset. So this does not portend well for financial assets generally. It may well mean that the Fed has to step in, and the Fed may have to step in sooner than later, even if inflation gets elevated because of tariffs. And to me right now this seems like the most bullish story for crypto assets is that basically this is the dynamic is that the Fed is forced to step in and to lower rates or to even do QE to basically protect the dollar and protect the bond market, regardless of what's happening with financial assets. And so financial assets may end up getting buoyed from all this additional liquidity, regardless of the state of the. Of the real economy. Lest we become a macro podcast, let's go ahead and switch gears and talk about what's going on in Cryptoland. So, first story is about this token called Mantra. The ticker for Mantra is Ohm Om. So this is not Olympus Dao, this is Ohm. So Ohm originally was another team from 2020 that had a Binance listing and a ticker. A new team took it over and rebranded it to Mantra, which is some kind of RWA chain. So it's apparently originated from the Middle East. It has a lot of Middle Eastern money associated with it, as well as some RWA deals from some Dubai families or something or other. So it's all very opaque. So this token ran up like crazy over the last year to the point where it basically became a top 25 asset. Now, despite being a top 25 asset, basically nobody, I would imagine, none of the four of us knew what Mantra was or what they were doing or what they were doing in the top 25. So it was a very kind of weird, suspicious team company project, given how few people in crypto were familiar with them, how much the token had run up. And many people believed that this was because of the fact that it had extremely low liquidity, so that the team was basically misrepresenting how much float was actually out there and how much of the token was actually trading hands. It was claimed that there were billions of dollars of this token circulating, but many people have reported that actually it's less than 1% of the total supply of this token that is, in fact circulating. So a lot of this was. I saw a lot of this promulgated by this guy Mosi on Twitter. I think Ivana Charmer is his. Is his handle who's basically going around town.
- [17:12]
Tarun
That's such a good. That's such an amazing handle name. Because it's like. It's like a finance joke to have that type of nickname.
- [17:21]
Haseeb
Is it? What's what? Vana Charmer.
- [17:22]
Tarun
Vana and Charm are two different moments of a deriv. Process. So, like, if you compute the expectation of a derivative process relative to spot, like that spread the kurtosis of an charm is. And the charm is actually a joke that's related to a physics thing. But I won't keep going down. This sounds.
- [17:42]
Haseeb
Sounds like a riveting joke.
- [17:44]
Tarun
No, no, no, no. But, but, but the person. This guy being this like, kind of like Maury of the blockchain. I don't know what's it called Mori makes dates me, I guess, but I don't know. Do you know Maury, you know the guy who like.
- [17:56]
Haseeb
I know. Yeah, he's like, he's like.
- [17:59]
Tarun
He's kind of like bringing out the conflict and he's, he's. This is not just. He's done this for a bunch of.
- [18:04]
Haseeb
Investigative journalists more than Mori, but. Okay.
- [18:07]
Tarun
I think in crypto those two are very similar though.
- [18:10]
Haseeb
Okay, all right, fine. But we'll take that anyway.
- [18:14]
Tarun
For someone who's like that to also have this kind of deep cut name, I got to give them credit.
- [18:19]
Haseeb
Okay, well, Tarun approves. Good to hear. So to finish the story, what ended up happening is this token, despite going all the way up to five bucks, it crashed 90% in 90 minutes on Sunday, going all the way down from 521 to 50 cents at the low $71 million in liquidation, wiping out billions of dollars in market cap in the span of less than an hour. This was widely perceived, so people widely thought that maybe this is some kind of team exit scam, something or other. So far it doesn't seem the evidence is actually pointing in this direction. It looks like it was some kind of forced liquidation from an investor and basically there was just no liquidity for this asset, despite the fact that nominally it looked like this asset was worth billions of dollars. There just wasn't a bid. So long story short, this token now is in the toilet. There's a widespread sense that something was very amiss with what's going on with this token. And there's a sense that this might not be the only one, that there may be a number of other projects, probably not a ton. This is not like a widespread phenomenon, but people have already started pointing fingers at several other projects that supposedly have misrepresentations about the total amount of FLO that they have outstanding on different exchanges. So there's been a few accusations floating around, again, larger than pushed by Mosi, that this thing, when tokens represent how much of the float they have, it's mostly self reported. So what happens is that I was looking into this process because I was trying to figure out what exactly is the mechanics here about how this kind of a fraud could be perpetrated. And the answer is that when CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap ask you, hey, how much of the tokens are currently circulating? They literally just ask you. Now they don't just ask you because then obviously many people the obvious incentive is to overrepresent how many tokens are circulating. And so what they do is they check first of all are you listed on reputable exchanges? Two, how much volume is there on reputable exchanges? Three, they look sometimes at the on chain addresses to make sure that they kind of make sense. But they, but they really can't do that much if you're really motivated to lie to them. And how would you lie to them? You would lie to them by taking the majority of your purported airdrop or your community distribution and basically claim it yourself as opposed to actually having your community claim it and then give that to market makers and have the market makers just make volume on exchanges just basically just generate noise that will result in the exchanges having volume. The on chain stuff looking sensible and it looking like your distribution chart but really no actual retail customers own your token. So you can have extremely, extremely low float and just a tiny amount of actual liquidity that's easy to push in any direction. So I think that's the story. And you've had other people. I think it was Cain who came on Unchained talking about a similar phenomenon earlier a couple weeks ago. So curious to get your guys thoughts on is this a thing that you think is happening broadly and if so how can we as an industry police this better or what do you think is the root cause here beyond just okay, OHM did a bad thing.
- [21:18]
Tarun
I will say one thing is you have to watch the this interview that just came out four hours ago with the OHM founder and Coffeezilla dude sounds hella guilty. Dude sounds hella guilty.
- [21:31]
Haseeb
Guilty of. Guilty of what? Guilty of what?
- [21:33]
Tarun
I'm just like he's trying to be like yes we may. He pulled a Bill Clinton. It was like I did not, I did not manipulate this, this price officer. It's like, it's like. And if you listen to the coffee's little thing he's like no, what's the definition of market manipulation? And like they both have very different definitions and it feels like definition. His definition was like you're explicitly doing the trading and you have to do it yourself. And you if a third party does it, it's out of your control.
- [22:00]
Haseeb
Okay.
- [22:01]
Tarun
When the President Shady money.
- [22:04]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [22:05]
Tarun
It's kind of, it's kind of, that's kind of his. So I highly recommend the coffee Zillow thing. I never, I kind of only knew about om because historically and maybe, maybe I would call this one, call this some of my this stuff. I would say I learned a lot of negative lessons from investing in the Cosmos ecosystem over time. And one number one Thing is, everyone in Cosmos is shilling ohm. So it's like anytime there's a Cosmos thing that like everyone. Yeah, because ohm's a Cosmos chain and Mantra is. And anyone. Anytime there's like Cosmos shilling something into like a multi billion dollar cap coin, like outside of Celestia, everything else.
- [22:40]
Haseeb
But this is not Cosmos shilling. This was not like an engine.
- [22:44]
Tarun
No, no, no. Now you, now you, you're talking about it right now. But the first time I heard about Mantra was like way before it had the big price increase that seemed extremely inorganic and it was all Cosmos people shilling it. So it was like, it was like it had, it was like an interesting.
- [22:59]
Haseeb
Thing that I. Yeah, but I think this is like an epiphenomenon, right? It's like because it was going up, Cosmos, people started shilling it. But clearly, like it's the Mantra team giving all the tokens to shady market.
- [23:10]
Tarun
Makers from an investment standpoint, not from a technology standpoint. I'm not trying to make any critique of Cosmos technologically from a market standpoint. Anytime people who are Cosmos devs are showing a chain, I'm like, you should be shorting it like historically and so.
- [23:28]
Robert
Not from a tech perspective.
- [23:32]
Haseeb
I thought you were like, no, no, no. You were part of the tribe.
- [23:36]
Tarun
All I have to say is I've learned a lot of hard lessons from an ecosystem that loves shooting itself in the foot and embracing Mantra as this like, oh, we're back thing was bad.
- [23:49]
Haseeb
So no love for your Cosmos Bros.
- [23:51]
Tarun
All I have to say is I think they've done historically and empirically a great job of technology. They've got it adopted. A lot of people use it who don't even know they're using it. It exists everywhere. But when it comes to financial products, they seem to have a lot of very bad jurisprudence historically.
- [24:11]
Haseeb
Yeah. So far Ohm and Terra is a pretty bad rap sheet.
- [24:15]
Tarun
Yeah.
- [24:16]
Haseeb
Okay. So Tom, what were you gonna say?
- [24:18]
Tom
Oh, I, I was more surprised. This is kind of.
- [24:21]
Tarun
I, I've.
- [24:22]
Tom
I've heard this own story last year about kind of taking over this, this old ticker. I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard about this from other projects. I'm also surprised it hadn't been delisted from Binance because it'd been kind of dormant for like three years and then it was like, oh, and skip this thing up. And the whole thing is very kind of bizarre to me, but I also feel like float aside. Obviously there, there are sort of difficulties with that. It's like you can also just look at the chain thing has like no volume, no TVL like no use. Like it's, it's like clearly like a ghost chain. And it's trading at like 10 bill FDV. Like use your head. I think in my mind that that's like just a clear indicator versus, you know, trying to do some, some calculation around like float.
- [25:00]
Tarun
Speaking of this ticker thing, a kind of funny thing I think about was like, do you remember when. Oh, you guys definitely remember because you're Avalanche investors. When Avalanche launched, they could. There was some like random shitty ICO called Travala which had the ticker Ava and Avalanche had to go to Avax because like Binance was like, fuck you. We're not going to let you take the Ava token. So like this, this. It's funny how like now it's like whatever, like do our. Be our garbage collector, take up our old tokens?
- [25:28]
Haseeb
Well, no, no, no, no. I think it's more like. It's like a reverse NASDAQ listing, right? Or reverse reverse merger or whatever that's called, where like you, you basically, you don't want to pay for the, for the Binance listing. It's more economically efficient to take over a ghost chain and just like basically buy. It's like buying licenses or something. That's actually very clever. That didn't occur to me that we should be seeing more of that. Of these dead chains that just have Binance listings or coinbase listings. And it's. You know what? We're, we're as an entrepreneur, instead of launching our own chain, our own ticker, we're just going to go acquire that chain, buy all the old people out, basically buy the whole market cap and then just start over. But we have the initial distribution of already being on. I mean, maybe you lose some of.
- [26:11]
Tarun
The coming out partying. Binance listings is like a domain name.
- [26:15]
Haseeb
Exactly, exactly, Exactly. I mean, that does seem like an efficient outcome, right? As opposed to these things just die on the vine slowly. And there's this long graveyard of order books that just trade nothing.
- [26:28]
Tarun
It's a cto.
- [26:29]
Haseeb
It will happen. It will happen. Yeah, exactly. Cto an old chain. Okay, taking a step back here beyond just. Okay, shitting on ohm. One thing I was thinking, Tom, as you were saying that yes, when we saw that Ohm was ripping, we were like, what's going on here? We try to monitor what's happening in RWA land. You go look at Ohm and you're just like, oh, nothing is happening. On this chain, this clearly is some kind of engineered pump. The other sign I think in general that something weird is going on with an asset is that on days when everything is down, it's one of the only asset that goes up. That is a sign that this thing is not being organically traded. Right. So you saw days when everything was nuking down 5, 10%. Everything is red. Suddenly. Oh, ohm is up. Interesting. I wonder who's buying ohm today. It might be themselves. So I think the. That's one thing just as in general to look out for. The second thing is that people talk a lot of shit about TVL as a metric, but it's actually like surprisingly difficult to get a billion dollars of TVL even if you have a $10 billion token. Right. So actually it's easier to generate a $10 billion token than it is to get a lend to.
- [27:33]
Tarun
Unless you have lending, like big enough lending facilities that you could make the tv like. I think that the thing about TVL.
- [27:39]
Haseeb
Is why didn't they do that?
- [27:41]
Tarun
TVL is a great metric when it's actually very expensive to borrow against the collateral inflate it. And in the case of it actually is really expensive. There's no lending protocol. Like maybe Mars or something has a tiny, really tiny float, but there's not. There's not like an easy way to do that with them.
- [27:57]
Haseeb
Right.
- [27:58]
Robert
Well, one of the things I saw on Twitter was that people were sharing screenshots of ohm holders prior to the crash, looking for borrowing opportunities. OTC using OHM as collateral.
- [28:10]
Haseeb
And it was being shot.
- [28:12]
Tarun
That was the Vanna charmer thing. Was the OTC sale and borrow stuff that he was posting. Yeah, or exactly.
- [28:18]
Robert
Which it was like, have lots of ohm looking to borrow Staples at 60% LTV or something like that.
- [28:23]
Haseeb
Yeah, there's something very, very weird timing for that.
- [28:26]
Tarun
But it was literally a day before the crash. It was actually hilarious how close it was.
- [28:32]
Haseeb
Okay, taking a step back from all of this, let's talk about how we can avoid things like this in the future. So one thing I want to make clear, this is not a widespread phenomenon in the sense that half the things in the top 100 are doing this. Nobody thinks that there's probably on the order of maybe 10, 5 to 10 assets at most that that have this kind of behavior in the top 200. And pretty often it's kind of obvious which ones are because you're like, what the hell is this thing doing? There's no adoption for this token. How did it go up so suddenly when I don't know anybody who owns it. I think the. I guess my question for you guys is, let's say you're a coinmarketcap or you're a coingecko and you are trying to police somebody is reporting to you. My float is this much. And of course everybody's incentive is to lie in the positive direction to inflate the total float so that the market cap looks bigger and they rank higher on the total list.
- [29:22]
Tarun
It's not lying if someone else did the inflation. No, sorry. That was like the, if you watch the Coffeezilla thing. That would be what he was saying.
- [29:30]
Haseeb
Yeah, to me, I think. And this is actually something that showed up in Hester Peirce's disclosures recommendation. So Hester Peirce, I think last week gave a list of recommended crypto relevant disclosures that included things like the source code, the multisigs, this and that, blah, blah, blah. They're all like the supply schedule. All things that totally make sense. One of the things she mentioned was the market making agreements. And I thought, yes, absolutely, this is something that we should start normalizing. Disclosure of market making agreements. Now the market makers will fucking hate this. They absolutely will not want their agreements to be public.
- [30:03]
Tarun
This is what happens on S1.
- [30:05]
Robert
Yeah, this is normal and disclosed with all traditional security.
- [30:09]
Haseeb
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.
- [30:11]
Robert
Every single issuer who wants to trade on the NASDAQ goes out and gets three market makers. It's a requirement. It's like you must have three market makers.
- [30:19]
Haseeb
But the, the actual agreement, like the market making agreement, as well as all the covenants and all the side letters, if those are all disclosed in crypto, this problem basically goes away. Now of course you can always lie and like, you know, not disclose all of them. But then, okay, now you're committing outright fraud. And okay, if someone commits fraud, there's not that much you can do to stop that. But having that I think is how you solve this problem. Curious. What do you guys think?
- [30:44]
Robert
Well, I think it's. I mean, first of all, there's a difference between like the projects that would even go into a disclosure regime voluntarily and the projects which wouldn't. An offshore project that has a crazy checkered history.
- [31:01]
Haseeb
I'm not saying if they're registering with the US I just mean there's a norm in the industry. Like you want to get listed on Binance, you want to get listed on Coinbase, you have to publicly disclose all of your market making agreements.
- [31:10]
Robert
Right. If this was like a, we'll call it Self regulatory set of requirements that.
- [31:14]
Haseeb
Coinbase and yeah, that's what I'm proposing. That's what I'm proposing.
- [31:16]
Robert
Yeah. I mean if everyone implemented that, they'd be great, right? Like the more information that's out there, the better because you'll get a better allocation of capital to the real projects and less capital allocated to the bad projects. There'll be less people complaining that they got rugged by some crazy manipulated asset and more capital be available for the projects that are building. Amazing stuff.
- [31:42]
Tarun
Maybe I'll take the other side, not more as playing devil's advocate. But yeah, I kind of. I agree with that philosophically. But I would say incentive wise, if you think about a centralized exchange, whether it's in tradfi or in crypto, the job of a centralized exchange is to maximize fees. Like just from their profit calculation is to maximize fees and volume. I can collect while offshoring the risk of market making and kind of like having to hold inventory risk. Right. Like effectively the goal is like you're subsidizing market makers via discounts and rebates and all these other things to try to get them to hold the inventory risk so that you can collect fees without you holding the risk. Right. That's sort of the trade off. And I do think there's sort of this inherent thing where like if you start enforcing these things, all these market makers will like leave. And I think to break that you probably need a real regulatory regime. I don't think like that. Then there'll be like a natural state in which you get an equilibrium where the disclosure thing will happen, the exchanges will force the disclosure.
- [32:50]
Haseeb
Why wouldn't the exchanges. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the exchanges themselves have seen that their customers are losing trust in them when they list these kinds of tokens. Right? Like if you bought home, basically at any point you got.
- [33:04]
Tarun
Have you ever looked at, have you ever looked at tokens around Upbit listings? I don't think that's always true, right. Like some of them are making much more in fees by actually having this happen.
- [33:14]
Haseeb
Yeah, but I mean you can see from Binance's behavior, right? Like, I mean they recently did this big Twitter space where they were like basically this kind of thing. Binance is the one company that never gets chastised for listing dogshit tokens. And recently their community has started basically rebelling against Binance and saying what the fuck are all these garbage listings? Everything is down only. And when you get something like ohm, which again Binance OkX Bybit, it was listed everywhere. This makes people lose trust in that. Hey, can I trust these new token listings now? At the margin is it everyone's leaving? No, but is it bad for business? Clearly. So their interest overwhelmingly is like, look, most trading volume is not in shitcoins. Most trading volume is in the majors.
- [33:57]
Tarun
I agree with you. But I also think there's like this like weird incentive thing of like you're forcing the exchanges to take more risk but in some indirect way by making them have these kind of listing procedures and that they may have to pay.
- [34:12]
Haseeb
A lot more to get more risk.
- [34:14]
Tarun
Because they may have to pay market makers a lot more in rebates to.
- [34:17]
Haseeb
Get why the exchanges pay market makers? Aren't the projects paying the market makers?
- [34:20]
Tarun
The exchanges are offering rebates. Right. Like how do I ensure there's enough liquidity on a certain side? Unless until you get to major status when you're a new listing, Just like in an IPO market, you effectively have to provide rebates. Right? Like every exchange in the world relies on rebates as this like indirect incentive mechanism for me to outsource the inventory risk that I'm supposed to be that needs to be held in the exchange rate. And my point is, I bet you that the adding these types of disclosure things actually increases the cost the exchange has to pay in terms of rebates to get the same outcome. So that, that's where I come from.
- [34:57]
Robert
The project, not the exchange.
- [34:59]
Tarun
Yeah, but forcing, forcing, forcing the market maker agreement disclosure makes a market maker make less money agree to quote at a particular rebate. My point is they will demand a higher rebate in exchange for this disclosure.
- [35:12]
Haseeb
And I'm not sure that's why doesn't that cost get. Why does the exchange absorb that cost? Why wouldn't they push it onto the projects like the projects at this point? If you're talking about if you're Binance or if you're Coinbase, this is like an extremely inelastic market.
- [35:25]
Tarun
I think one reason you don't have this is once these agreements are public, it's a one way function. You can't turn back because now everyone knows everyone's true cost and now the projects will be like, well, you charge this other project this amount.
- [35:40]
Haseeb
Oh totally, totally. So the market makers will hate it.
- [35:43]
Tarun
No, no, no, but that's my point. That's why they will demand a higher incentive in rebates from the exchange in order to, to make up for that.
- [35:50]
Haseeb
But why would they extract a higher price from the project? Why would they extract it from the exchange?
- [35:54]
Tarun
Because my point is now the projects have transparency in pricing. They can see what other projects paid and be like, fuck you, I'm not going to pay you. Or like, oh, try to find, you know what I mean? Like they're going to run.
- [36:04]
Haseeb
Price could just go up. Yeah, I mean, but I don't think, well, Amber, whoever I, you know, this project, before the disclosure regime started, only cost this much. Now the cost has gone up because you're right, the opportunity cost has increased to put, I think some of that.
- [36:20]
Tarun
Cost will go to the exchange inevitably. I don't think it's like all going to be borne by the, the kind of project because there is this sort of like aggregate thing. By like disclosing all the exact fee agreements and fee schedules and loan terms and etc. You're effectively making it much harder for the market makers to do future agreements and they will want some premium for that discount, you know, like that public.
- [36:43]
Haseeb
I agree with you. Here's what I would bet. Here's what I would bet. So I think it may be actually the other way around is that the best market makers actually have a net benefit and the crappy, the shady market makers basically lose a ton of business. And what you may end up doing is kind of pushing more and more of the demand to a smaller set of market makers such that even though, yes, if they had the same set of customers, they would be hurt, but actually the total demand increases and people at the bottom of the food chain of market makers, they basically go out of business. If you have something that's so extractive or so shady that basically no project will be willing to disclose it. You're the ones who go out of business because you had no edge. You had no edge beyond being shady.
- [37:24]
Tarun
In TradFi, that ends up being more true because you enforce things like NBBO where you force all the exchanges to have synchronized prices and if you don't use the exchanges, exchange get in trouble. But in crypto I can always just start a new exchange that is focused on only the shittiest stuff. Right? Like you look at the, there's already.
- [37:41]
Haseeb
A bunch of them. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
- [37:44]
Tarun
But, but my point is like you will just move that volume away and then you, as a big exchange, now you're competing against those small ones, right? Like I, I, I, I'm just saying.
- [37:52]
Haseeb
Binance is not afraid of that, right? Coinbase Binance up it, these guys are not afraid of that.
- [37:56]
Tarun
I, I think Binance is afraid of upbit and UPBIT would rather have more of these kind of tokens. Right. Like they, they have a different risk preference in terms of this listing stuff. I mean I think the, I think.
- [38:08]
Haseeb
Is, is more risk averse than Binance. Like Binance lists way more stuff than up.
- [38:12]
Tarun
It does, yes.
- [38:14]
Tom
Yeah, I think, I think you're thinking about like a Gate or a Mexi, which I don't think Binance is.
- [38:18]
Tarun
Yeah, probably that's true. They probably don't care about.
- [38:20]
Tom
They're playing the short term game. Is that exactly the kind of exchange you're describing?
- [38:24]
Tarun
I, I just kind of think this idea that you're going to squeeze out all the, the bad market make it's like a little bit too much of a just so story. I think the, the costs will be split between the projects and the exchange if you cause a public disclosure because of this notion of future bargaining power changing. And I think that will mean it's kind of like either very. Takes a long time to reach that naturally without a regulatory force or it kind of is an unstable thing where.
- [38:50]
Haseeb
Like who do you think gains in the story? Who loses and who gains? Because okay, you're saying the exchange loses and the market makers lose. That sounds implausible. Right? Then who gains?
- [39:00]
Tarun
Who gains is the, the user welfare for the like median or trader. Right. Like right now if I think about these like bad coin, I think that's.
- [39:12]
Haseeb
A bad mental model that like Binance is gaining from having like really shitty token because like people are going to trade whatever's on Binance. You know, like crypto traders are just addicted to crypto trading and there might.
- [39:22]
Robert
Be more trading that occurs if everyone's like, oh, all the assets are good assets. Like I know, yeah.
- [39:27]
Haseeb
If the assets go up and people are not as worried about rug pulls, there will likely be more trading. Right. Like Binance is not in sore need of. I need more random crap to list. So like tending the garden and making sure that the assets on Binance go up and are good investments is good for Binance's overall trading volume. Right. Like what's good for retail is good for Binance.
- [39:47]
Tarun
I just think that yes, that's sort of like a nice end state. But I don't think that they're like, oh, we're going to do that tomorrow. Right. Like it's the type of thing where like they are forsaking some revenue now and they will have to make this very clear decision to be like we are cutting off 20% of our revenue with this goal. Right? Like, that's what I'm saying. Like you're asking for the sharp change.
- [40:09]
Haseeb
On 20% of revenue. They don't even make 20% of the revenue from Spot.
- [40:13]
Tarun
I don't know what I'm just pick, I'm picking a number to illustrate. Like, sure, sure, depending on the type.
- [40:18]
Haseeb
Of organization you're tiny sliver is a tiny sliver.
- [40:22]
Tarun
But, but I'm saying like that, that is like a thing where I think like a lot of places will have trouble being like, oh yes, we want to cut that out. Right. Coinbase, I think would totally do it. Right. But Binance, I'm not really sure that's the thing.
- [40:35]
Haseeb
If you're a top project and you don't have a Coinbase listing, something is wrong. I think there probably would have to probably need to be at least a little bit of synchronization in order for this norm to actually spread. If both Binance and Coinbase did this, the whole industry would grow.
- [40:49]
Tarun
This is exactly the reason I think the regulatory version is the only way to do it. So in the US we had to implement regulatory NMS in 2006 to kind of force this where you force the synchronization across exchanges. That regulatory forcing kind of, kind of made this type of thing happen more efficiently. But I, I think like, I don't know how you do that on the crypto exchange world where like it is actually kind of there are, it's like more dispersed than TRADFI exchanges where it's.
- [41:14]
Haseeb
The answer is Binance. If Binance does it, the whole industry will shift because everybody wants a Binance listing. Binance+ Coinbase is like the, that's like the pincer that just closes the whole market. And at that point, anybody who wants real liquidity on their token and wants to be perceived as a serious project, they either do this or they're relegated to being like a B tier type project.
- [41:36]
Tarun
And by, by saying that, you're effectively saying Binance is a government because they're the ones enforcing this regulation and they.
- [41:42]
Haseeb
Have like everyone market share on spot.
- [41:45]
Tarun
So yeah, I'm just trying, I'm just trying to say like, you know, again, this gets back to. I don't think this is like the natural market will find this. You do have to have some hard.
- [41:54]
Haseeb
We are the natural market. We're floating ideas out there, people. Listen, if you're a Binance and you think this is an interesting idea, I would love to chat about it. Okay, let's see, let's see. I Mean, look, I think this feels like it's becoming a real problem in the industry. People are talking about a lot more to the point where I think if we can see a solve to this, I think it solves a lot of other problems simultaneously, to be clear. But I think if we can put a solve to this particular thing now, I don't know. Look, I'm not an expert in market making agreements whether or not this actually does solve the problem, but if it does, it does feel like a very elegant solution that can be implemented pretty straightforwardly by exchanges, which is one of the virtues that doesn't require a global regulatory organization because of course no such thing exists. But just having a couple exchanges decide, hey, we're going to start doing this even just on a going forward basis, just say, any new listings have to do this previous listings. Okay, your grandfather did that may allow again the market to shift. Where like, okay, the way that market makers strike these agreements, they change. Post this change because they're like, well, okay, now going forward, I have to disclose these, so I better change the way I do my pricing. So, okay, well, tbd, clearly Tarun does not agree with the concept, but we'll see.
- [43:03]
Tarun
No, no, it's not that I don't agree with the concept. I just think there's always this, like, the reason equilibrium is unstable is if one person, one exchange deviates, they're like, oh, we agree and then they deviate once. Then it becomes a race to the bottom again. And like, that's why I think, and this has happened in us equities, microstructure.
- [43:18]
Haseeb
I don't know if this is. I think a lot of these things happened before. I think a lot of these things in crypto is just that nobody seriously cared. Like, there's so many things for which you could think there's a big game theory, equilibrium. A lot of it is just like, nobody really thought about it.
- [43:32]
Tarun
It's very easy to defect. That's all I got to say.
- [43:36]
Haseeb
Yeah, okay, sure. You list one asset and you didn't check their market making agreements or you know, they didn't disclose one and you're not forcing it. Yes, that can absolutely happen. But even just, even, just this, even if 90 or 10% of the time that happens, that would be a massive improvement over where we're sitting today.
- [43:53]
Tom
If you wake up one morning and the commons are overgrazed, just note it was Tarun. Tarun did it.
- [44:01]
Tarun
Please, I, I am not. If anyone in the FBI is reading the contents of this group chat, please know that it wasn't me. Tom did it.
- [44:09]
Haseeb
Okay, good. All right, guys, let's switch gears and talk about what's happening in Ethereum land. So once again, there is a drama in Ethereum land. So obviously we've had all this recent turnover in the Ethereum foundation, the rise of Tomas as well as a Xiao Xiao Wei, I believe his name. I'm going to keep sounding like that whenever I. Her. I'm sorry, her name. I'm going to keep sounding like that when I pronounce her name. Um, so there was a particular tweet or post, was it called Cast on Farcaster? Are they called casts? I guess they're called casts, yes.
- [44:41]
Tarun
Yes.
- [44:41]
Haseeb
There was a recent cast on Farcaster by Vitalik where Vitalik was basically criticizing the call it the amorality of certain layer ones that don't have a really strong sense of a philosophical grounding about why they're building this L1 and what they think blockchains ought to be used for. He gives the analogy Imagine that C had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C is general purpose. There isn't much surface for bad social philosophy to wreck it. Ethereum L1 is not quite in that position. Someone who doesn't believe in decentralization would not add light clients or fosil or account abstraction or spend a decade moving to proof of stake. Apps are 80% special purpose, but what apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what Ethereum apps and Ethereum in the whole are there to do for the world. Having good ideas on this topic are important. He then asked for examples of okay, what are good social philosophy and bad social philosophy? He says, which is the tweet that everyone's jumping on or, sorry, the cast everyone's jumping on. Good Railgun Forecaster, Polymarket Signal, Bad Pump Fun, terraftx. So this seems to have instigated a bit of a firestorm within the Ethereum as well as the anti Ethereum crowd about, oh, okay, our dear leader is now prognosticating on what are the moral and immoral forms of application development. Tarun, why don't you respond to that?
- [46:04]
Tarun
I would say, yeah, the first thing is I would say it didn't cause a war between the Ethereum anti Ethereum cloud. It was pretty clearly Ethereum, Solana and then Base. Right. Those are the three camps I would say made the most noise about this, where Base and Solana actually both united in their disagreement of the characterization of pump function, mainly because they're like betting markets on Internet content and attention, which is how I think Jesse Pollock from Base described Pump Fun as well as things like Zora and whatever in their ecosystem. And I think the inclusion of Pump Fun, I think is kind of an interesting point of prognostication in the sense that I think in Solana there is a belief that, hey, people should do what they want and if they want to lose their money and ha. In this kind of somewhat predatory casino, they should do it. Whatever. That's their choice. And in the ETH world, I think it. There's kind of like this. You need to have, you know, if you look at the other side of the thing, the things that he praised like Railgun and stuff like that, they have very few users. Right. Like, so it does kind of get to the heart. I mean, comparatively. I saw Tom's face. No, no, no. Polymar, Polymarket. Only one of those things, I think. Like, I think. I think that's kind of. My point was like, he's always. There's always some featuring of these things.
- [47:31]
Haseeb
Poly Market, Farcaster and Signal were the other three.
- [47:34]
Tarun
No, sorry, I. I'm really focusing on Railgun because I was like, railgun, if I go look at onchain usage, it's like, why is that even the same?
- [47:41]
Tom
There are probably exogenous reasons why people are not using.
- [47:43]
Tarun
I know there are exogenous reasons. I'm just trying to point out that there's generally this thing where it's like, there is a little bit of the, like our dear kingdom. You're, you know, you know, the meme with the.
- [47:57]
Haseeb
Yeah.
- [47:59]
Tarun
And I think the fact that L2 app developers and D5 people were all dunking on it tells you kind of actually the fact that it was a very unpopular message even within Ethereum. Like, like, I actually think a lot of people, Ethereum on the application side were like, this was. This was. Doesn't make sense because like, I think people agree there is a predatory aspect of Pumped Up Fun, but there's also an aspect that like, it created a new modality of how people experience these things and like people want to use it. Right. And I, I do think that is a fundamental divide in Ethereum where they. The idea that an app can be. Can generate so much externality that could be positive or negative for the base. L1 is like not acceptable beyond some point in a way that like, I don't think.
- [48:43]
Haseeb
Do you think he would have treated Satoshi Dice the same way?
- [48:48]
Tarun
That's a good question. I. Well, the thing Is for those who.
- [48:54]
Haseeb
Don'T know, Satoshi Dice was like an early bitcoin gambling thing where you could gamble directly.
- [48:58]
Tarun
Eric Voorhees. Yeah, but like I think I, I would say, I think his views, in my opinion from just watching Vitalik for like almost a decade, I guess now, have changed over time. I don't think he was as negative to that then, whereas like, I think he would probably be more negative to it now if that makes sense. Like, I think like there is definitely a path of change. But I do think it's interesting that the eth. App developers who are very staunchly generally never would critique Vitalik publicly like that. I thought that was the inmost interesting signal of this whole thing is that that like, like it was very unpopular amongst app developers.
- [49:41]
Haseeb
Sure. Tom, what's your take?
- [49:43]
Tom
Yeah, I mean Ford is worth. I don't think Vitalik has ever had good taste in apps. I feel like the stuff that he cites of like things that he's excited about are like generally bad. I think polymarket being like the only one. But he's also very excited about Augur. So I think he just likes prediction markets independent of sort of specific product taste. I don't know, I kind of feel this is like a little bit of like a who cares kind of kind of story. Like I don't think Ethereum or Solana would be so different if it had been. This has been public a long time ago and therefore, oh, this had been part of the way they were shipping the roadmap. Like Solana was not shaped to explicitly support something like Pump and Ethereum was not designed to not support something something like Pomp. These feel like emergent properties independent of the creators. And so I, I just feel like people obviously love to cling on to Vitalik's word, but I'm like, practically speaking, the reason why these exist on different chains or why different chains have different vibes is like it's not sort of a development feature set kind of question. It's more, do like minded people sort of gravitate to this chain or not?
- [50:44]
Haseeb
So Anatoly's line in response to this was, when you don't have pmf, you get politics. That was his response to the entire drama.
- [50:52]
Tarun
But I also think the opposite of that is true. Sometimes if you have too much pmf, you get politics. Right? Look at like Bridgewater or like Facebook or like, you know, I think of like places that have so much success that they like keep bringing money in that the only thing left to do is politics. So, like that. I kind of found that quote a little bit weird because, like, I don't quite. I think it happens in both directions.
- [51:13]
Tom
I think it's a bit rich too. Like, to go from, you know, we're going to bring NASDAQ on chain to like. No, no, no. You are like the meme coin chain and that's what you're going to do. It's. It's kind of like, this is your bit and we're going to fucking make you do the bit until you die. And if you don't want to do the bit anymore, then you're going to be irrelevant. It's like those kind of. It's like carrots with that Rick and.
- [51:30]
Tarun
Morty meme with the like the little robot that's like, what?
- [51:33]
Tom
Yes. Yeah, that is what you do. Anyway.
- [51:36]
Haseeb
Robert, what's your take on all this? Yeah, I think it's as an app developer.
- [51:42]
Robert
As an app developer. I mean, I don't really care what anyone at Ethereum or Solana or Arbitrum or name the chain philosophizes about. Right. I care. What can I do on the chain? What other defi applications are there? What's the throughput? What are the costs? What's the integration throughout the rest of the ecosystem? The moralizing doesn't matter to me and I honestly don't pay that much attention to it. And I think it's a little bit irrelevant.
- [52:15]
Haseeb
So you think everybody sort of having the vapors about what Vitalik says is there? It's performative.
- [52:21]
Robert
Yeah, Well, I think for certain people, especially those who are not builders.
- [52:26]
Haseeb
Right.
- [52:27]
Robert
There's nothing else to talk about. So, like, that's going to be the conversation.
- [52:31]
Haseeb
There's a lot to talk about.
- [52:33]
Tarun
You seem to be singling out someone who. Or some people very directly with that.
- [52:40]
Robert
So all I'm going to say is I really don't think it's the most relevant thing to focus on. And I just think it's a lot to do of nothing.
- [52:49]
Haseeb
I think it's a great take. Is that, yeah. If you went all in to go build a startup in crypto, this is not. You have much bigger problems than like, oh, Vitalik said something on Foraster that maybe is mildly upsetting if you really think about it super hard. I guess from my perspective, actually I have a lot of respect for Vitalik and for his consistency. This is not new. This is not something he changed his mind about. Vitalik has been a missionary for as long as Ethereum has existed. Right. Ethereum was an ideological project for him. And he still feels that way. And I think many people look at that and they're disappointed. They're like, why didn't he become more like a business leader or more of a politician? And it's kind of like when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, and then eventually he rises up, becomes the leader of the Democratic Party, and becomes the president. You might look at him and say, oh, now he's saying things that he would never would have said as a community organizer in Chicago. And you're like, that guy lost his touch. He's no longer who he used to be. Vitalik is the opposite of that. Vitalik never really became president of Ethereum. He never really went and said, look, now this thing is super successful. I'm going to throw away all my old ideological convictions, I'm going to wipe away all the blog posts, and I'm just going to become the Ethereum booster and Ethereum number one. Rah, rah, rah. How do you make number go up? That's not Vitalik. Many other people in the Ethereum ecosystem became that after the success of Ethereum, but Vitalik did not. I respect Fatah for that. He would have said this five years ago. He would have said it today. He'll say it again in five years. I think it's totally okay to build something and have convictions about what you want it to be used for. And if it's used for things that you think are bad, that's totally fine. It's totally okay for the president of a country to say, you know what? I think casinos are bad and we should have less casinos or lotteries are bad. We should have fewer lotteries. Right? And you might look at that and say like, well, but the lottery makes so much money for the government and da, da, da, da. And he's like, yeah, well, I think it's bad anyway. Way, yeah, I know it's good for me and I think it's bad anyway. And I'm allowed to believe that. So I, I respect it.
- [54:49]
Tarun
I, I, I know we got a wrap in a sec, but speaking of lotteries, one of the greatest lottery exploits ever took place in Texas in the last year. So, So I think, I think like.
- [55:00]
Robert
Next week's shopping block.
- [55:02]
Tarun
Yeah, we can, we, we can talk. We can talk. We can talk about how crypto exploits and IRL lottery exploits ha. Are very similar.
- [55:11]
Haseeb
Okay, all right, sneak preview. So anyway, to wrap. I think I understand why people are upset, and I think a lot of that comes from people who don't really understand Vitalik. If you look at Vitalik like he's the CEO of Ethereum, then, yes, you're going to be very upset. Blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But Vitalik, to my mind, he's more like Geoffrey Hinton or something. He's an intellectual godfather for the industry. That doesn't mean you have to listen to everything he says, doesn't mean you have to agree with him, doesn't mean that he has to bless your project. And if you look at the track record of projects that Vitalik is blessed, it's really hard to tell that he has any impact in the positive direction. Vitalik is Vitalik, so he says he can say whatever the hell he wants. I'm going to respect that guy for as long as he's walking on this earth. But that doesn't mean I'm going to take product direction from him. And nor should you.
- [55:57]
Tom
I liked Bingy's tweet in response. I'm sure Tim Berners Lee wasn't a huge pornhub guy either. It's okay if Vitalik doesn't like pumped up fun.
- [56:04]
Haseeb
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a perfect encapsulation, which is that, yes, if you understand the role that Vitalik plays, he's the elder statesman in the industry. That doesn't mean he has to approve of your project. You know, it's totally fine with that.
- [56:18]
Tarun
I think we gotta. Gotta wrap.
- [56:20]
Haseeb
Cool. All right, thanks, everybody. We'll be back next week. Wait, what? Oh, shit. Next week.
- [56:24]
Robert
To talk about before.
- [56:26]
Haseeb
Hold on. Before we wrap. So we are gonna be doing a live chopping block on April 25th at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt island at the US Innovation in crypto Conference. So if you want to attend, it is. We're gonna be on stage at 1pm Eastern and we're giving out free tickets. There's a limited run. If you're in New York City that day, go to cbc25eventbrite.com, we'll put it in the description. And the ticket code is CHOP Innovate. One word, all caps, CHOP Innovate. So we'd love to see you in person. See you guys next week. It.