The Chopping Block: Token Launch Hype, L1 Wars & Prediction Market Breakouts - Ep. 969

Summary

Unchained Podcast Episode 969 Summary

Title: The Chopping Block: Token Launch Hype, L1 Wars & Prediction Market Breakouts
Host: Laura Shin
Panel: Steve the Head Hype Man, Tom the Defi Maven, Robert the Crypto Connoisseur, and guest Kevin Shitposter
Date: December 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode of The Chopping Block (hosted on Unchained by Laura Shin, though with Steve moderating), industry insiders debate three hot crypto topics:

• The drama and backlash surrounding the launch of the Monad L1 token
• Broader skepticism about new Layer 1 (L1) blockchains
• The rapid emergence and cultural acceptance of prediction markets.

Dialogue is sharp, humorous, and meta-aware—capturing the current cynicism saturating Crypto Twitter while also providing in-depth industry perspectives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Monad Token Launch Backlash

[02:10 - 12:27]

Topic: Monad’s token launch was one of the most hyped—and most hated—of the year.

• Smooth execution, but tons of hate:

  • Kevin Shitposter describes two months of pre-launch anxiety and the relief of a seamless rollout (no hiccups, 100% uptime).
  • However, criticism was intense. As Kevin puts it:
    "The vast majority of crypto projects fail or die because nobody cares. So I guess as long as people care, it’s not good. Now it’s much better if people care and they love it. That’s preferred. But caring at all is definitely important." [03:05, Kevin Shitposter]

• Top Community Complaints:

  1. "This is just a way for VCs to dump on retail."
  2. "Why do we need another L1? Aren't infra problems already solved?"
  3. Common critique: projects launching too late, riding on VC money.

• Tokenomics Debate:

  • Discussion on whether tokens should unlock all at once for "real" price discovery vs. gradual vesting.
    • Steve: “If the VCs are going to dump, let them dump immediately, get it out of the way...let’s just find fair value.” [06:56]
    • Tom: “We are still in the low float meta...The correct answer is likely in the middle.” [09:19]

• Launch Mechanics:

  • Monad boasted 85,000 KYC’d participants via Coinbase (broad distribution), which the team claims is a fairer and healthier launch approach than traditional airdrops.

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2. L1 Wars—Why Do We Need New Blockchains?

[17:20 - 29:41]

• Is there room for another L1?

  • Tom: “As a society, there’s always room for more experimentation and development of L1s, as long as you’re trying something different...If it’s just another copycat, there is no value at all and it shouldn’t exist.” [18:36]
  • Steve relays Arthur Hayes’ post (“Monads gonna rip,” then “fuck Monad, short to zero”), capturing how quickly the hype cycle can head south.

• Reaction Is a Sign of Significance:

  • Searing community anger means you matter:
    “People being mad is not very indicative of anything in particular except that you are very close to the bloodstream...Ethereum got the bitcoin people so angry...The second one was Solana.” [22:53, Steve]
  • Kevin: “People have their clans...anything that could challenge [their asset] is an enemy or a foe.” [21:05]

• Early Hype = Inevitable Disappointment:

  • The lesson: extreme pre-launch hype almost always leads to disappointment, regardless of actual delivery or value.

• Notable Meta Observations:

  • Steve: “You never get angry about something that’s just stupid.” [24:46]
  • Steve: “Week one of a launch of any chain is almost always a nothing burger.” [30:03]

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3. Airdrop Strategies & Token Market Structures

[12:27 - 16:00]

• Airdrops Are Deemed Ineffective:
  • Robert: “Airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.” [00:29]
• Selling tokens via exchanges (ala Monad’s Coinbase sale) may be a better model, ensuring real cash for developers and more controlled distribution.

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4. Crypto Twitter Cynicism & Attention Dynamics

[03:05 - 04:14], [25:25 - 29:44]

• Hype (positive or negative) is still valuable for project growth—even hate is “energy.”
  • Kevin: “…attention is a more absolute value. If someone hates you, it’s actually worth more than them not caring at all.” [25:35]
  • DonAlt: "Crypto Twitter is so mad at everything right now that Satoshi could launch bitcoin and everyone would hate it." [28:41]

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5. AI & Smart Contract Security: The New Arms Race

[35:52 - 44:01]

• Yearn Hack & AI Vulnerabilities:
  • Discussion about recent DeFi hacks (Yearn, Balancer) and the scary progress of AI in identifying smart contract exploits.
  • Steve: “Anthropic announced…they’re testing whether their models can hack smart contracts…They are now at 55% efficacy.” [36:12]
  • Robert: “I actually take issue with this story…I would not call these [AI-found] exploits.” [39:05]
  • Tom: “If you trendline this one out in a year or two, software will be better at writing secure code and finding vulnerabilities than humans.” [40:22]
  • Kevin: “It does feel like it's almost the same kind of quantum risk people have talked about for bitcoin for a long time. AI is going to get good enough and it can hack smart contracts.” [42:03]

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6. Macro Markets, Vanguard, and Bitcoin ETF Flows

[44:01 - 47:59]

• Crypto Underperformance Relative to Equities:

  • Steve: “Equities actually had a killer year and crypto has been flat and gold...what the fuck, what about us?” [46:50]
  • Robert: “Your friends are getting hilariously rich punting quantum meme stocks and you know you’re stuck flat in Bitcoin.” [47:05]

• ETF Impact:

  • Vanguard finally allows users to buy crypto ETFs, possibly squeezing MicroStrategy’s narrative as a Bitcoin proxy.

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7. Prediction Markets: The Next Breakout Vertical

[48:01 - 61:38]

• Massive Growth, No Hate:

  • Prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) are hot, well-funded, and, unusually, beloved by Crypto Twitter.
    • Steve: “Why do people feel so differently about prediction markets?...Maybe because there’s no tokens yet.” [48:09]
  • Tom: “It’s purely a skill-based game. If you’ve lost money on prediction markets, it’s your own fault.” [48:33]

• Onboarding Simplicity:

  • Kevin: “They're so easy to understand…it’s easier than sports betting…It’s just like, oh, if it wins, this is worth $1.” [49:55]

• Platform Strategies:

  • Kalshi’s on-chain integration with Solana (via RFQ model/Jupiter) and Robinhood’s plan to build its own CFTC-licensed prediction market indicate wider mainstreaming ahead.
  • Oligopoly predicted between Robinhood (internal), major platform partners (e.g., Coinbase with Poly/ Kalshi), and a graveyard for most prediction market startups lacking scale or distribution.

• The Real Future: Long Tail Betting

  • Tom: “The total number of events that people would want to speculate on or bet on is absurdly long...the long tail is much larger and I think someone new is going to crack that at some point.” [59:31]

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Quotes & Notable Moments

"The vast majority of crypto projects fail or die because nobody cares."
— Kevin Shitposter [00:00, reinforced at 03:05]

"There are no simple solutions for why tokens keep fucking going down."
— Steve the Head Hype Man [12:27]

"Crypto Twitter is so mad at everything right now that Satoshi could launch bitcoin and everyone would hate it."
— DonAlt (as quoted by Kevin) [28:41]

"As long as you're trying something different...there's value. If it's just another copycat, there is no value at all and it shouldn't exist."
— Tom the Defi Maven [18:36]

"Attention is a more absolute value…if someone hates you, it's worth more than them not caring whatsoever."
— Kevin Shitposter [25:35]

"If you trendline this one out in a year to two…software will be better at writing secure code and finding vulnerabilities than humans. It's almost there."
— Tom the Defi Maven [40:22]

"Prediction markets are great. Right? It's just really hard to like them…They're so easy to understand…if it wins, it's worth $1."
— Kevin Shitposter [49:55]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Monad Launch & Criticism: 02:10 - 12:27
• Tokenomics & Price Discovery: 06:56, 09:19
• L1 Wars & Layer 1 Skepticism: 17:20 - 29:41
• Crypto Twitter Hate as a Signal: 25:25, 28:41
• AI in Security – DeFi Hacks & AI Risks: 35:52 - 44:01
• Macro Markets & Vanguard: 44:01 - 47:59
• Prediction Markets & Future: 48:01 - 61:38
• The Promise of Long Tail Prediction Markets: 59:31

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Tone & Culture

• The panel uses sharp wit and irreverence, poking fun at both industry absurdities and their own projects.
• Cynicism about token launches is balanced with optimism about technical and societal progress.
• Side barbs about “quantum” and social media engagement reflect the zeitgeist of 2025 crypto culture.

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How to Engage with Monad (Plug)

"Go to Twitter, search Monad. The pinned tweet has an explainer…Tweet anything about Monad, mention Monad in some hateful thing—you’ll definitely get more than four likes in 18 minutes. It will work, I promise."
— Kevin Shitposter [62:30]

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In Closing

This episode offers a raw, insider look at the emotional dynamics and technical debates animating crypto:

• Why token launches are so fraught,
• How new L1s are perceived,
• The evolution of betting and prediction products,
• And how attention (even negative) is currency in itself.

It's a snapshot of both anxious and hopeful sentiment as the post-2021 crypto cycle matures, with strong commentary on what it takes for a new protocol to survive—and possibly thrive.

Transcript

[Kevin Shitposter]

The vast majority of crypto projects fail or die because nobody cares.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

We are still in the low flow meta.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

There are no simple solutions for why tokens keep fucking going down.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Your friends are getting hilariously rich punting quantum meme stocks and you know you're.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Stuck flat in bitcoin if it's just another copycat. There is no value at all in a trading exam.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Crypto Twitter is so mad at everything right now that Satoshi could launch bitcoin and everyone would hate it.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Not a dividend.

[Kevin Shitposter]

It's a tale of two Kwan.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Unnamed trading firms who were very involved.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Hello everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First we got Tom the defi maven and master of memes.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Hello everyone.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Next we've got Robert the crypto connoisseur and czar of Superstate.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Good Winter's Eve.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yes, In Hat. Today we decided to represent In Hat because it's winter and maybe the last live show they'll be doing for the year. Joining us today we've got special guest Kevin Shitposter, specialist at the Monad Foundation.

[Kevin Shitposter]

I like that, first time hearing that.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Welcome, welcome. And I'm a Steve, the head hype man 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. Lee chopping block that XYZ for more disclosures. So we wanted to bring you here because Monat has been the talk of the town. It launched its token last week. Last week? Yeah, I guess last week. Congratulations on the token launch. Probably one of the most hated token launches I have seen in the last year. Just the. Just the sheer amount of argument elicited from people who are not either short or long just to have something to say is probably the highest density I have seen in quite a while. Now that being said, you guys are also one of the most hyped projects over the last year. And one of the things that I've noticed as a phenomenon in crypto is that the more hyped you are pretty GE almost always that means that the hammer is going to come down one way or another with respect to the difficulty of living up to the super high expectations. So how do you feel like or how did the people at Monad feel like the. The. The launch went, given how long you guys have been working on this thing?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, I thought. I mean, the only thing I was thinking about for two months prior was just every single thing that could go horribly wrong and any of the risks involved. So from that perspective, I think everything went very smoothly. Right. The chain launched, there's no hiccups, a hundred percent uptime, and so everything is functioning as intended, which is great. On the hate side. Yeah. My. I know something is, like, the only thing that people are tagging me in on Twitter when my mom texts me about it.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Your mom is texting you about it?

[Kevin Shitposter]

She has, like, an alt account.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Shitposter]

And she was like, how are you?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

What's the handle?

[Kevin Shitposter]

It's at.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Is she a milady?

[Kevin Shitposter]

It's fine.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

No, no, no.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

All right, everybody follow mom.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Doxed.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Your mom learns.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Wow. Doxing your mom. That's a.

[Kevin Shitposter]

That's fine. It's in a non handle.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Tough move.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Not a non anymore.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah. But she texted me and was like, how are you dealing with all this? Like, are you seeing this? Like, what's going on? Like, yeah.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Are you seeing this?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Like, 200 notifications a minute.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Wow.

[Kevin Shitposter]

But, yeah, I think it's generally in crypto. I mean, one of my goals are the things that I have tried to do with Monad is make sure that people have an opinion, like, good or bad, it kind of nets out. Just make sure there is attention because people had opinions. Yeah. The vast majority of crypto projects fail or die because nobody cares. So I guess as long as people care, it's not good. Now it's much better if people care and they love it. That's preferred. But caring at all is definitely important. I also think that when a lot of people care about one thing in crypto, the popular thing to do is be cynical about it. I think there's actually a lot of healthy skepticism in crypto. Right. Everyone here has been around for a while. Generally, if you heard about a new project, like, the right natural response is like, that's probably not real or a scam. And maybe an easy mental model to. To take for this is like, if your mom texted you and was like, hey, I heard about this crypto, do you think it's good? You'd be like, don't touch it. It's definitely bad.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Like, everyone has that natural instinct. So the burden of proof is on. On the team and on the project to, like, show that it is a good thing. I think in this case, it's just been a. A massive, very public wave of. Yeah, but like, give me the, you know, give me the proof.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

So synthesize it for anyone who's not up to date with it. What would you say based on this massive wave of conversation, like, the top three complaints are?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, I think that there's. There's one that's just like an emotional response. And this takes the form of just like pure spew of. Of hate. Um, and I think the reason for that is like, crypto. Crypto has a lot of similarities with religion. And just like anything that is not your religion tends to like, incite this emotional response that's negative. I think that there are criticisms of, like, the. The main one is like, why do we need another L1? Which is super fair. That's probably the most long standing question that I've gotten. And it's like the correct question. I think for anyone who, like, if you know a little bit about Monad, the correct question asked is why do we need another L1?

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. So I think if I had to kind of reduce it down to what the most common criticisms were, I would say probably number one is, okay, this is just a way for VCs to dump on retail. And obviously we should caveat the show with that. I think all of us are investors in Monad, so we are some of the VCs about which people are complaining. So complaint number one, VCs dumping complaint, which obviously is not happening yet because none of the visas are unlocked. Complaint number two is, why do we need more L1s? Isn't there too much infra. You guys should have launched years ago. Kind of too little, too late. We already have all this stuff. These problems are all solved now. Okay. And I actually think it'd be really interesting because it triggered a lot of hate, but also a lot of, I thought, really, actually meaningful engagement and conversation. So one of the big debates that this triggered was actually Kyle Samani, friend of the show, he came out and said that the big mistake that he sees over and over again from token launches, I think Monad probably being the triggering event for this conversation, is that you should make it so that all tokens are unlocked day one. Right. So one of the. One of the phenomena that we see with token launches is that normally what happens is there's a one year cliff before one year. None of the insiders, the team, the investors, the advisors, none of them get unlocked. And so all at once, generally after a year, a wave of those tokens unlock and then they unlock Continuously over the next call, three to four years. That's the most common way the token launches are done. And so his argument was that, well, Solana didn't do it that way. What Solana did is I think they had like a nine month cliff and then everything unlocked all at once in nine months. And his argument is that actually even that was stupid. We should have done everything unlocked day one. Like complete float, total free for all.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

The price.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, the price. The price. And let markets discover their true point. If the VCs are going to dump, let them dump immediately, get it out of the way and like, let's just find, you know, real discovery, fair value. Fair value, right. And so I came out very strongly against this. But I want to get a sense of what is your gut reaction to that debate about the mechanism that we have today. The principal criticism of it is that it doesn't allow true price discovery because the supply is going to massively inflate when all those tokens come online. And it can be like a 2xing, a 3xing, a 4xing of the float, as usually not 4xing, but more like 2xing.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I feel like for the last four to five years or so. And I think SBF sort of mastered this originally with this low float high FTV game. The meta for the last four to five years has been low float, high FDV where projects release as little of the float as they can initially and it starts trading on a percent, 2%, maybe 5% of the FTV and there's a delay and you show the price based on this tiny float for as long as possible and then things unlock and everybody can sell at hopefully a high price. Right. That's been the meta that almost every team in project is using.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

That's definitely not.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

There have been many successful ones that.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

No, no, no. 1 to 3% is extremely low. That is nowhere near where the market average is. 1 to 3% was like Worldcoin. Worldcoin was like 2%, I think.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

And that was egregiously low.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Let's just say 5% is fair in.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Your case on the SBF side of flu. I feel like that's the coin that people think of like that slow float.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, Serum. Serum was an example of that. Right. But like that, like more typically, because I wrote this big article last year where I analyzed the floats that were coming out both I think on Binance last year, as well as historical floats for Solana, Near Avalanche, like you know, the previous generation of companies and even things like Uniswap and 0x and all this stuff and what you find is that historical averages are around like 11 12%.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

That's still extremely small. 11 12% of 100%.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. Do you know what the typical is for an IPO?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah, it's like 10%.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. It's about the same.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I know, but it means that there's going to be 9x the amount of supply in the future. 10x, right?

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yes.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

That is still a low float game. Right. We are still in the low float meta and I think maybe it's bouncing between two ends of a pendulum and they're both wrong. Right. I think there's problems with both, there's problems with everything being unlocked day zero. Right. There's problems with and you pointed this like that was ICO wave in 2017.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It was like haha tge like everybody, including the founders and the team is 100% out today.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

They walk away from the project. Right. Clearly there are wrongs from everything is unlocked. There is no vesting. There's clearly also problems with everything is locked. The market is trading a tiny piece of this for a long time. Both ends of this pendulum seem bad and broken.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Sure.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

The correct answer is likely in the middle.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah. I think it also comes back to the fact that token launches are done so much earlier in the life cycle of a project compared to an actual ipo. And so therefore I think you actually do need constraints. There's path dependency to the success of like the project. Right. You know, one, one team that does has like a terrible, you know, token launch and the token trades sideways or down for years might actually be structurally set up worse to perform and to build a better product than someone who has, you know, perpetually higher token price. That gives them a war chest, that gives momentum the project that gives like excitement for it. And so there is like kind of this weird token price management component which kind of sucks, but it is kind of, kind of true. But I don't know, I, I, I think it's kind of naive to say that like, oh, if we just had everything on lock day one, everyone performed the exact same with the exact same incentives. When I'm like, clearly that's not true, that's never been the case. And then comparing it to an IPO is just like not, it's, it's not analogous in many ways.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, yeah. One other aspect I think that has come into play, like when people think of 2021, it very much is like low flow, high FTV meta for better, worse is just burned into everyone's brain of like, that was a 20, 21 cycle SPF running wild, minimal floats. There is an aspect of just being able to do token launches in a different way now. Like, Monad was the first ever token sale on Coinbase, which was great. Working with them was awesome. To my knowledge, was the broadest distribution for known participants, not just counting wallets from the ICO days, which was a great way to launch a token. You have a very decentralized holder base.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Early on, how many participants was it?

[Kevin Shitposter]

There was just over 85,000 participants KYC'd on Coinbase, which is like this tough KYC, right?

Which is a great way to launch a token. And it's also a safer way from a project's point of view, to get 7 and a half percent of the float was sold and then roughly 3 and a half ish percent was airdropped. But I think for the last four years it was kind of like, how does float get out there? Day one, it's like you kind of just have to airdrop it. And now everyone has this learned behavior of like, the second I get anything on airdrop, just sell it to zero. And then it's just like it's been difficult structurally, I think. And so token sales via exchanges to get more float out there, I think is like a healthy progression of just like how tokens get into the market to start a chain.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I mean, that is a better way because, you know, previously when ICOs were basically verboten, if you wanted to increase the float, that basically meant, okay, do a bigger airdrop. And doing a bigger airdrop, of course, as we've learned, has become less and less efficient at actually doing anything useful. So you're kind of just burning tokens in order to maybe solve a market structure problem that like, you know, how much is this actually a solution to that problem? Tbd. The other thing, of course is like, you know, what's the other side of tokens with no locks? The answer is meme coins. And okay, you go see a meme coin, everything's unlocked, everything's trading immediately. Is there all that much evidence that, okay, these things trade better or more stably or there's better price discovery or whatever, it's not really clear. But then also, if you look at previous generations of tokens, so just go look back at yearn or look back at stuff that is fully distributed, right? If it's true that high FTV low float is the primary cause of this last batch of tokens going poorly, then what you should see is dispersion. What you should see is that tokens that are mainly unlocked are doing better than tokens that are more recent that have this high FTV low float mechanic. And you do not see that. You do not see that like oh yeah, yearn and compound, which are fully distributed are doing really well relative to insert defi project from this vintage. You say actually no, they're all moving together and there really is no clear regressor you can run that says, ah, this explains why things are going poorly. So that was my principal critique of the low FTV high float story, is that these tokens have basically always been low float, high FTV. If you consider low float to be like 12%, 12% is a historical average. It was a historical average in 2018 and it's a historical average in 2024. 2025, I don't know, I didn't run the numbers, but I wrote this article in 2024. So I don't think the story is that simple. If it were, it would have a really simple solution. But there are no simple solutions for why tokens keep fucking going down. So my argument is that no, I think vesting is good. I think this is not something that we should not remove. I do think there are ways that we can improve it at the margin. I do think that the main way that you can improve it at the margin is with token sales. Right? If you do a token sale then one, it's a non wasteful way of getting more float out there. So you get more float out there immediately. You can actually make sure that it's going to real users by doing some kind of deduplication, civil resistance. And by getting those tokens out to real users, you get cash instead of just airdropping it to random people. Right? And then with that cache you can make the protocol better or in some ways even do some kind of market stabilization. Now, tbd, whether or not that's legally advisable, but I have to imagine that norms around this are going to evolve in some way. My guess is that at some point what happens is people find ways to get more creative about how to use very, very large token sales. So maybe let's say you sell not 7%, but let's say 15% of the token supply. And with that amount of cash, if it's a really big project that has a nominally high ftv, you use that cash in some way. That's not okay. We're in the market as a dealer just going out and buying back our token but there's some kind of programmatic way in which this is a stabilizing pool of capital for the token markets, right. That, that's not discretionary. I can imagine that that becomes a new norm in the market that both increases float, but also doesn't say, okay, I have this giant pile of money, but I'm not going to just burn it in a gigantic fat treasury that I, you know, just give out token grants and stuff that don't end up going anywhere. Because that is the other failure mode that we saw from previous cycles when projects would raise huge sums of money. And the ROI when you get into the hundreds of millions just plummets on your ability to actually drive meaningful outcomes.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

But here, here's the counter argument, right? If you are a mature project that is about to launch a blockchain or an application or it's fully built, right?

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Raising the capital at the end of the process when it is fully built, there are a lot fewer use cases for that capital. Besides to your point being a dealer, market maker, whatever, buying back tokens later, like the capital is less useful at the end when it's ready for launch versus at the beginning when there's a lot of building and hiring and like development.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I don't know that that's true.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah, it's kind of true. But like, you know, it's not like these foundations or these labs, like they launch the blockchain, they walk away, right. There's still a lot of work to be done. And even you look at something like uniswap, right? Many different versions have been built out and probably more, you know, capital spent post, you know, token launch than, than pre. But I think to Kevin's point too, it's also about, you know, you need float. The question is, do you just give the token away to a bunch of people who are probably sibling you anyway and there's going to dump it immediately. Or do you like have some better method of distribution and it feels like a sale is like a better way to do that even if you don't care about generating any, any money. Like even if it was like, you know, you have to, I don't know, draw some blood to like get this token. That would tell people a better way than, you know, just getting out of airdrop.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

That's like World Coin.

[Kevin Shitposter]

World Coin.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

You know, go in the arm.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay. Blood. I have a sa litecoin who's building.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Sam gives you tokens.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay, I like that. I like that. Okay, so, so the one side of this is, should all tokens be unlocked immediately and should tokens invest. The other core criticism of Monad is why do we need another fucking L1? We already have so much block space. Ethereum's cheap, right? Vitalik was just posting like, oh, just come build on L1. You know, the fees are like $0.01 to do, to do a, you know, a swap or whatever. So there, there is a real question of like, okay, hey, maybe at the time that you guys started building Monad, which was, I believe, 2022, when Monat was first founded, okay, maybe in 2022 there was an argument about why we needed this blockchain, but you idiots were way too late. You shipped this thing three years late and now we solved all the problems. Why do we need you? So this criticism was probably the most common thing that I saw and I wrote this big long article and we ended up reading it out, I ended up reading it out on the chopping block on Sunday of kind of critiquing this cynicism that people feel increasingly about. Not just about, okay, do we need new infra? But also, is any of this infra valuable at all? Is Ethereum valuable? Is Solana valuable? And of course, if the answer to that is no, then obviously the answer to Monad is going to be no. But so curious how you guys saw that whole zeitgeist playing out.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I mean, I think as a society in general, there's always room for more experimentation and development of L1s, as long as you're trying something different or you're iterating on the structure of an L1 in some way. If it's the 37th EVM L2 of Ethereum, it is not valuable at all compared to the 36th, the 35th, whatever, right? If there's genuine differentiation, then it's, I think, valuable because it's something that society can learn from, developers can learn from, users can learn from it. Like, extends the, like, social knowledge, right? There's value there. If it's just another copycat, there is no value at all and it shouldn't exist. That's my personal belief.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, I think people acknowledge that Monad's not a copycat, you know, so, like, Arthur Hayes came out and he was just, I think first he was like, oh, monad, $10, monad's gonna rip. And then it went down and he was like, fuck Monad. This is VC trash short this thing to zero. And Keone wrote this very heartfelt post of like, oh, well, actually, Mr. Mr. Hayes, we have all this great Technology that may I interest you in? And he described all the different innovations and I think Arthur's response was something like, look, I've heard from people that you guys are good guys and that you built some real tech. But like, yeah, you know, who cares? Look, no one needs it. If even. I don't care if you build good tech. Nobody needs this. And this is the same kind of down only VC trash that is just going to die on the vine. And so yeah, even if it is differentiated, even if it is different, even if they did really improve the mousetrap. Well, we don't need better mousetraps. The mousetraps catch mice.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah, I mean, I feel like this happens with every tech cycle and then, okay, there's some new use case that actually does take advantage. I mean people, I feel like also like, how many perp dexes were there before hyper liquid and now it just like it's. I think it's such a, like a facile argument. I think also like, think about the metahan too where like I feel like you guys actually did everything and like people still hated you for it. Where normally it's like, okay, you didn't airdrop me enough tokens. Okay. Actually like a very cool airdrop ceremony. It's like, okay, do you do the sale? The sale was like very extractive. Okay. It's like you have this big sale and it's like. And then you actually built the tech and like there's so many other like random projects from the past three years that you see people promoting on Twitter. And I feel like you guys like, you know, it's like the squeaky clean kid in like the back of the class that like, it's done everything right, but people still fucking, you know, beat you up in the playground anyway. So I don't know, it was just like. It's very funny.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I'm like, how can you.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

How can you hate this child?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, Yeah. I think, I mean, going back to like people kind of having their clans and that's like where they claim and they like, I'm a Patriots fan when we play the Giants. Like, I don't actually have any opinion of the players, but it's like, oh, we're playing the Giants. Like, I hate those guys. I think a very similar thing happens with crypto, except there's also like a financial component to it where people own an asset and anything that could potentially challenge that is an enemy or a foe.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I actually think that's a very small part of it. I think there was some of like, okay, the eth. Tribalists and the solo tribalists, some of them were coming out, but it was much bigger than that. Right?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah. There have been other L1s that have launched in the past couple years that like, don't get as much like tribal beef. Right. In my opinion.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Here's, here's what I'd say. Here's what I'd say is that like, what I saw most interestingly about Monad is that people who normally never talk about anything like this had opinions about Monad. Right. And the, the, the thing that's interesting is that everybody has this intuition that there's too many L1s, there's too much block, space fees are way down. So this is a non problem that you guys are trying to solve. And the most common criticism is that it's extractive, that you guys are almost duping the market or playing to the market's weakness or folly that. Oh, okay, you know that markets like L1s. So you guys are creating this L1 to extract from the market and to fool the market into giving you a valuation that you guys can then dump on. So it's, it's almost like it's a very different kind of mental model than just, oh, you're bad because you're shitting on Ethereum. Right. What's interesting is that if you think about the really big success stories in the L1 space, they all actually had a very similar reaction. Right. Ethereum got the bitcoin people so angry.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yes.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right. Like irrationally angry. People who would never touch, like they don't care, they would never use Ethereum, but like just the idea that Ethereum existed, it's like, oh, this shitcoin that you ico like, why didn't you just fork Bitcoin? Why aren't you building this on bitcoin? They were so angry about it. And the second one that got a very similar reaction was Salana, right? Where it's like, sal, like, why are you building. This is not decentralized. This is, you know, the, this. You guys are, you guys are liars, you're manipulating people into buying your whatever, like it's not open source, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And so now that's not to say that because people are mad, it's not that you're going to do well, but it is a sign that people being mad is not very indicative of anything in particular except that you are, you are very close to the bloodstream. I think that's what it indicates more than anything like L1s. On some level, they are obviously the most core thing in crypto. It's the whole ball game is blockchains. And so building a new blockchain, it's like somebody who goes and tries to build a new bitcoin.

It's kind of laughable today if somebody were to come to a VC and pitch, I'm going to build the next bitcoin. You just can't be like, you're joking. Right. Like, that's not a serious pitch.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I would actually love to hear a pitch like that.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

You know, in 2026.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. But, like, people used to pitch that. Like, I remember getting pitches like that all the time in 18, 17. Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Oh, how many better bitcoins were there?

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Totally. Totally. Right. But like, today, it would be funny to get that pitch. Right. That's like, literally a joke. But. But making that pitch about Ethereum, about Solana, about whatever it's threatening, because one can imagine it could actually happen. It's hard. It's extremely hard. But I think most of the really big outcomes in Venture, they have that kind of reaction.

It's so implausible that it makes you angry.

You never get angry about something that's just stupid. If somebody says, I want to build the next bitcoin, nobody's going to get angry about that. Bitcoiners aren't going to start writing these long threads of, I can't believe this person would compare themselves to bitcoin. Bitcoin.

[Kevin Shitposter]

No.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

They wouldn't even notice it unless it got big.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right, Right. It.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It would have to have this, like, survivor bias to even, like, enter people's radar.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It would be dismissed categorically.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Like, and not worth conversation.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right. But I have to imagine for you guys, like, it must be demoralizing to some degree to go from being probably, like, the highest favorable ratings in crypto Twitter to now being, like, public enemy number one in the span of, like, two weeks.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah. I mean, I'm getting texts from my mom. She's like, how upset are you? She. She's like, should I reply? I'm like, never tweet. Ever, ever. Don't touch the title.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

So what are you telling your team? How. How are you telling your team to navigate this?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, I think one reframing that has been helpful is that, like, they're actually giving energy instead of, like, hate. And so maybe what, like, we, part of my team, we view attention as a more kind of absolute value. So, like, if somebody hates you, it's actually. It's not a negative. It's actually worth more than them not caring whatsoever. And so framing it like that, like, helps take the sting off a little bit. Like, maybe. Maybe it's not worth the same as positive endorsement.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right.

[Kevin Shitposter]

But it does spark conversation. And so I think leaning into that has been helpful.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Spoken like a true shit poster.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, I mean, like, look like, I think about, you know, probably a lot of people who watch this show know, like, choose Rick. Choose Rich Nick. Right. He's literally, Dude.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah.

[Kevin Shitposter]

He gets an insane amount of views. It. Most people who don't know what he's doing is hate. And then everyone who, like, kind of knows his bit is like, oh, this guy's actually great at what he's doing, but he's getting more engagement on Crypto Twitter than, like, anyone else, essentially. And so that even though these comments are very negative, he is creating a brand. I think he likened it in a recent podcast, I think Laura Shin's podcast actually to Barstool. He's like, portnoy does the same thing. There's as many people that hate Dave Portnoy as love him. And that's, like, part of the entire amassing of energy. And so to me, the most important thing, like, it is really hard to understand what Monad is on the tech side. Like, it is very. It is a very technical project. So the best chance you have to get people to know that they should build on it is to just get generalized energy and attention. And then when it's centered around Mana, like, hopefully they actually look into what it is. And I think that that has actually worked quite well for a number of years.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Now.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah. Like, could do without, like, the personal insults of people saying, like, what's the.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

First personal insult you've. You've seen that rubbed you the wrongest way.

[Kevin Shitposter]

There are. There are, like, very long streams of dms. I'm trying to think, maybe how about this? I'll go with, like, the one thing that has made my day in the last few days on Sunday. It was just like, Arthur Aza post. And it was basically just like Crypto Twitter erupted. It was like every single person had opinion on Monad. And I put out a tweet. Like, it's. If it feels to me like everyone is just rooting or, like, hoping that Monad is a scam. They, like, want this to be a scam so bad.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Like, why?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, and it's like, clearly, you know, we've. Keone and team have spent four years at this point. There's been an insane amount of effort. Like, we've tried to, to Tom's point, we've tried literally everything to try to be squeaky clean and like, do the public sale, do the airdrop, like, make sure that those boxes are checked, but it doesn't, like, didn't actually end up changing the result much, which is funny. Like, at the time when we were doing this, we thought it might.

But. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, sorry. Back to.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

The what made your day?

[Kevin Shitposter]

What made my day? Donald, like, had. I was like, why does it feel like everyone wants Monad to be a scam so bad? And Don Alt replied with a couple actual, like, good answers. And then he's like, listen, Crypto Twitter is so mad at everything right now that Satoshi could launch bitcoin and everyone would hate it. It was like, genuinely, like, you could launch the best thing in the world, but people are just angry. And I think it's part of the way that the cycle has gone. Like, altcoins have generally gotten crushed relative to bitcoin and even Ethereum has been kind of crushed for a lot of the cycle. People have been trading meme coins and just be losing money. The little guys who spent time to try to learn what to do in crypto besides just buy bitcoin have generally done very poorly and they're just angry. And so it's much easier to just not care and just say, I hate this thing.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Kevin Shitposter]

And then like, when you see other people doing it too, there's also torque to it. Right. You just buy into the mob mentality.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Totally. Well, they hate mine right now.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, it's great.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, I should hit him on it.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I feel like you're buying into the mon mentality.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Shitposter]

But yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of different explanations. It's like, why do we need another one? There's like an emotional answer to that for that. Like the reason that they're asking might be emotional. There's an actual answer to it. There's. It's pretty complex, but at least it's happening around Monad and not around some other project.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day.

The week one of a launch of any chain is almost always a nothing burger. That was true for Ethereum, it was true for Solana, it was true for the move chains. Base, Base. The only thing that happened in the first week was there was a bald token. And besides that, there was nothing going on. What are you going to get done in one week? The answer is very little. It takes time for an ecosystem to develop and actually be able to prove itself. So the question of is Monad bullshit? Is Monad going to succeed? Is it going to do well? Does not get answered in the first week. There's so little data. And yeah, people are going to come around, they're going to play around the chain, they're going to use a couple of the apps, they're going to buy a couple meme coins, but the ability for you to retain founders, teams, TVL activity, all that stuff is yet to be proven. So the question of, should you be bearish on Monado? You don't know enough to know yet. Give it time. Let the data come out and let the team do what teams do.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah, you know this. Everyone already knows this. But the echo chamber loses its focus and finds a new shiny object to hate or to discuss or to love very quickly. Yeah, and I think the, you know, for better or for worse, the energy around Monad is actually going to dissipate as people get enraged by the next thing.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I mean, so Eigenlayer, they recently put out this postmortem talking about why re staking underperformed as a narrative, let's say, obviously there are extremely high expectations and they were like, look, why do we feel like we underdelivered on this story? Why have there been so few AVS's, why have there been so few success stories about the core narrative that we were telling? And I think if I think of Monad, Eigenlayer is probably the closest example I can think of this kind of rise and fall of narrative momentum. And the reality is that I cannot think of a single project that had that degree of hype, that successfully delivered on that degree of hype. Right. Almost always when you have that amount of hype pre launch, you are not going to be able to live up to it. Because crypto Twitter can just imagine arbitrary amounts of goodness and airdrops and money making and the token just going up and to the right infinitely. And that kind of irrational exuberance almost always is a setup for a disappointment because nobody can deliver on that in one week. How on earth could you, how could you tell? Like, oh, Monad finally launched and guess what? Everyone was right. It's worth 20 billion, it's worth 50 billion. We figured it all out.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

TVL went vertical.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, TVL went to 5 billion. What would people do with 5 billion on Monad on day one? Obviously nothing. It takes time for that ecosystem to develop. So I guess my point is that the rise and fall of those early expectations all Those people who have an opinion about an asset that they don't own, they're not even short, they just have an opinion because it's cool to have an opinion about Monad, all those people are not going to be paying attention to you in three weeks. And your audience is going to be the people who actually do care, people who actually are interested in their ones, people who actually are interested in, hey, should I move to a new chain? Should I be buying something on Monad? Should I be using this for my defactivity? And those are the people who actually matter, who are actually winnable. At the end of the day, if you don't care one way or another, you're just like saying something to have an opinion, then you're not the audience, you're not even a part, you're not even relevant to the audience. And so I think the game will feel different when that smokescreen clears. Right. In the same way for Eigenlayer, everybody had an opinion on Eigenlayer. For most people today, I don't think they even remember that they had an opinion about Eigen Lair. I do, yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I. I still love Eigenlayer. I. I also think, you know, the expectations were extremely high. My own expectations were up here.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It's sort of sad that they didn't capture the value of that narrative like they could have.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right. I mean, we're investors in Eigenlayer and I think, like, you know, obviously everybody had sky high expectations when that was happening. I was telling everybody at Dragonfly, I think, I think people are in for disappointment because the expectations around so many of these pre TG projects is just people are kind of pricing for absolute success and like immediate out of the gates, like, everything's going to go great and almost nothing happens that way. Almost nothing happens that way. Very few of the startups that you think of as successful look like that. Solana didn't look like that. Coinbase didn't look like that. Hyperliquid didn't look like that. Like, none of these projects look like that. All of them had long incubation periods where they were figuring it out, doing the work, getting the thing to actually be in a state that it could scale and then eventually scaling it.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Right. Most of them were quietly chugging along without much attention, even if they were trying to gain visibility. Attention before their success.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right, right. So all that is to say, you know, if we had to say, if I had to send a message to the Monad team, which obviously, you know, I don't know if they care what I have to say, but my message would be chill, like the game starts now, not last week. You know, whether or not you win the likes on crypto Twitter is not the game. The game starts now. It's for the next year, the next two years, the next three years is the actual game.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Enter the Monad monastery.

[Kevin Shitposter]

There you go.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I like that. I like that 100%.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah. I mean that's very much been the team mentality. I mean through this week, even the four months leading up to launch, every single all team meeting just hammered in like this is the starting line, right. It's probably not going to look the same as however you're picturing it. Some things will be accurate there. There are some unknown unknowns. We'll figure it out. Just like we have a good plan. This is this. We spent a long time building a ship. Like we're dropping in the water, it's going to be shaky and then it starts. So very excited to see what, you know, the next few months look like in the. The mana ecosystem. Excited to support new builders who hopefully we captured their attention and now they learned about mana because they heard all the hate and in our interest in deploying.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

So yeah, yeah, well, so that is kind of all on the bullish side of infrastructure. There's also been some stories this week that are maybe bearish on the side of infrastructure. So one of them was we had another defi hack this week which was Yearn super OG project. And Yearn, there was some rounding. Was it a rounding bug?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I think so, yeah.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. Actually, do you know what happened?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I actually did not. Was it was also only on the Sonic deployment, I believe it was not on like all the Yearns. It was like it was like a sub pool within Yearn.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, it was like a sub. It was small protocol Y eth. It was exploitation avoided by some kind of. Some kind of rounding bug when depositing very tiny amounts. There was. Oh no, there was an underflow bug. I'm sorry, it was an underflow bug. They. They stole $9 million. Wasn't an enormous sum by defi standards, but obviously still bad to see an OG D5 protocol like yearn to have a vulnerability this exploit. I think it was the next day that another story that was seemingly connected along the same thread, this time by Anthropic, the creator of Claude. So Anthropic announced that they were working on using frontier models in agentic systems to try to exploit smart contracts programmatically. And so they've introduced a new benchmark that they are now testing their own, their own agents on as well as GPT5 on to see whether or not it can hack smart contracts using a data set of known smart contract hacks. So initially I think previously when they were testing on this, they got 2% of all the smart contracts that they were able to exploit. They are now at 55% efficacy of being able to hack the smart contracts in their dataset. Now of course these are known hacks, so there may be some data contamination possibly. You know, you can imagine they trained on some blog post that described how the hack was done. So can you know for certain that this is really a clean readout of their ability to hack in the wild. And so in order to test that, they also tested on new exploits that were discovered after their training data and they found that they were able to discover some exploits that were that were on. You know, they were discovered after that date as well as 20 days. A 0 day is a exploit that is the first impression anytime anyone has ever seen this exploit. They discovered two new exploits in the wild that their bot found that no human has ever found. Now unfortunately or thankfully, these exploits were worth about $3,000 each. So they were very small amounts of money that were exploit. They did do a white hat hack of one of these contracts in partnership with Seal in order to save the $3,000. So thankfully nobody had their money stolen from this. But it's a sign that the times they are changing. And of course one way you can think about this is like, oh my God, attackers could be using these models in order to do some of these exploits. Like some people were speculating that oh, maybe the yearn attack was done by this exploit. We talked before about the balancer hack maybe having some signs of having been vibe coded. But of course the other side of that is that that perhaps defenders can also use these models to programmatically scan for vulnerabilities and find the vulnerabilities that attackers might otherwise find themselves. And maybe they have more resources to be able to spend on this than attackers do. So, thoughts on the incoming AI smart contract apocalypse?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I actually take issue with this story. I was reading the blog post. I think this is just an intern, frankly, puffing up their accomplishments. Because if you actually read through the exploits in the actual anthropic post, I would not call these exploits the one that they really highlight. It's this basically a token sale platform. You can send in money and it emits a token. And there was a pancake swap pool for that same token that was trading at 10x the ICO price. And so they're like, oh, there's an arbitrage here. So I'm going to mint a bunch of these tokens for cheap and then sell them in the pancake spot pool. I'm like, arbitrage versus arbitrage.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Because it was an uncheck method, right? It wasn't supposed to be callable after the.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

No, there's reentrancy because you can like mint a million tokens in one transaction recursively, but then the amount that's being stolen is from the pancake swap pool. So it's like a pancake swap pool is just mispriced.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I'm like, that's not an exploit.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Agree.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Or these other ones is like, oh, they didn't set their affiliate parameter when they. I'm like, it's not a zero day. Zero day in my mind is like, you know, Mossad is like listening on your phone. This is like, oh, someone, someone deployed a meme coin and they didn't set the affiliate. So I'm like, like, look, it's cool, it's very cool, but I'm just like, I, you know, it's not quite what I was, what I was imagining when I. When I think of like, AI. AI hacking. Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I mean, it's not cool, it's not that useful yet. But like, all AI started with it's not that useful. It's not that cool. To get to the point where we're at today, right? Like, if you trendline this one out in a year to two years, software will be better at writing secure code and finding vulnerabilities than humans. Like, objectively, it's almost there. It will definitively be better than the best humans. And that is going to be a weird inflection point where the security posture of every single team writing smart contracts and lower level code is going to have to change.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Like, you are going to be forced to adopt software first development.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah, I agree with that. I. I do think it's maybe like a little embarrassing too, that many of the exploits that are being like, found now, even after the training cutoff, it's like they're like, the source of the vulnerability is like, from a known. I'm like, it's just like, oh, you already know this is an issue. I mean, it's like people who are still doing like, I know, Reintroduce debugs in like 2025. It's like, what the fuck are you doing?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

A lot of the defi hacks in the days of yor came from known types of vulnerabilities. The teams did not patch their own code or they were alerted that, like, there's a new vulnerability. And they said like, oh, it doesn't apply to us. We looked at our code.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah, I think it's bad for the team though. Like, it's embarrassing.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

It's like, I mean, look, this urine hack was an underflow. Yeah. Right. And then like these things are like, the balancer hack was a rounding error. So, like, we're still getting hit with the basics. Yeah, right. This is not rocket science. Oh, somebody found some evm, you know, memory corruption thing. Like it's all just kind of brick and mortar. Yeah. You're supposed to round. You fucked up the rounding, dude. Right.

[Kevin Shitposter]

It does feel like on the one to two year time horizon though, it's almost like the same kind of quantum risk people have talked about for bitcoin for a long time. This is like the slow takeoff version of that. They're like, the AI is going to get good enough and then it can hack smart contracts.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

So you're saying that AIs will use quantum computers to hack just like everyone's like, that's what I'm hearing. That's what I'm hearing.

[Kevin Shitposter]

The quantum risk. Right. Like overnight, quantum is going to get cracked and then what's the fastest way to pull value if you crack quantum? Like, like take bitcoin. This is just like a slower version of like, the computer's gonna get better and better at hacking and eventually like. Or the story at least is, oh, Balancer was just hacked and now you're in like the OGD5 protocols are now cracking. Imagine what happens with GBD7.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Right.

[Kevin Shitposter]

So it feels like you're gonna have.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

New protocols written a year to two years from now that are written AI first that are not crackable.

[Kevin Shitposter]

It's a quantum resistance version of.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Shitposter]

It's like one to one when you.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Get on AI these days, like, quantum finds a way into that conversation. I have noticed this more and more. This is definitely a trend.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Quantum analogous security.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I heard recently that's the way you get engagement on X.com these days is you have to talk about quantum. And Nikita, boost your posts.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Oh, is that right?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I've never tweeted the word quantum do after the show.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, let's pop quantum cherry.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

You guys keep talking.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Should we pop the quantum cherry live? Yeah, live. Okay. Wow.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

You guys keep talking.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

What are you going to tweet? What are you going to tweet? Let's collectively compose this one word.

[Kevin Shitposter]

AI defi.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I was going to say quantum is overrated.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Quantum is over. No, no, no. We just say quantum solves AI. I think that's quantum whiff hat. Quantum solves AI.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I think that's the tweet AI done.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

All right, Once we finish this, I'm going to retweet that.

[Kevin Shitposter]

You're going to get like a naval retweet somehow.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah, I love it.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

That's so wise.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

This is going to be my lamest.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Tweet of all time.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

No, dude, this is going to go viral.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Certified banger.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

This is like, not certified.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

This is definitely is going to certified lame.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Let's continue.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay, okay. All right, all right, let's move on. We've. We've embarrassed ourselves enough. So on the public market side, public markets have been very volatile. Markets were dumping yesterday. Now all of a sudden, they're undumping. So it looks like Vanguard seemingly has saved us. So Vanguard announced recently that after hating crypto and constantly talking shit about how crypto is uninvestable, or I should say, not suitable as an investment for the Vanguard August platform, they recently changed their mind and said, okay, fine, we're gonna allow people to buy crypto ETFs. So a big reversal. And then I think this morning, basically, when US Markets opened, we saw a big pump and bitcoin was languishing around like 83, 84 refound. Like, I think, like 92 now. Yeah. And then, like, everything pumped like a good 10% yesterday. MicroStrategy, now known as strategy, was also languishing. It finally, definitively, for the first time, went below 1xMnev. Not sorry for. Not for the first time. They obviously were. Before last week on the show, we.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Talked how it was flirting.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

It was flirting. It was flirting with 1x. And of course, they've been below 1x in the past in the bear market post the FTX crash, but they definitively were below one. And they did this recapitalization where they raised, I think, like 1.4 billion in cash. And they announced we may, if necessary, sell some of the bitcoin, which caused markets to vomit. And so now they've reclaimed the 1x M nav as at least as of today. But things are, to say the least, jittery now. The story about, like, why markets have been so weak is macro kind of. But then the macro story is kind of like, well, actually now the rate cut is priced back in. And so I don't even know if we can Play macro at this point, like, how are you guys reading this market? And just kind of the woes that seem to be besetting everything in crypto.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I'm not a macro guy, so let's ask. Yeah, one guy.

[Kevin Shitposter]

I, I don't know if I'm smooth braining it, but microstrategy to me was a way to get exposure to Bitcoin. That's kind of the origin of the microstrategy trade. And then since then it's kind of turned into proxy for Bitcoin, but it's levered so on the way up like it's higher beta. I don't know if you pair it and squint with the vanguard side and ETFs, it's kind of just like there's just actual good ways to get exposure to bitcoin. Now that, that isn't like some guy who tweets.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

But wasn't that true as of last January?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Right. I'm just saying like on a, like if you look at it on kind of like a two, three year time horizon, like ETFs coming in, Vanguard opening it up like bank of America embracing and micro strategy compressing isn't like maybe there's not a causation there, but like the two of them are correlated. I don't know. I, again, I preface with that might be smooth.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

No, no, no.

[Kevin Shitposter]

I just think like there's now there's an easy way to get access to bitcoin. The rising.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I don't know. I do think some of the like, bitterness that is just kind of permeating around crypto Twitter right now is because like equities actually have actually had a killer year and crypto has been flat and gold. And gold. And it's like, yo, what the fuck? What about us? And I think, you know, your, your friends are getting hilariously rich punting quantum meme stocks and you know, you're stuck flat in bitcoin. And I don't know, I think, I'm sure that actually does affect people's, people's psyche and they get mad at Monad.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I mean if you're flat in bitcoin, you're doing great relative to everyone else.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah, ye, it's hard to do.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think that's definitely true is that it's like, hey, I was supposed to have made the debasement trade of the year. I was right that like, you know, regulations are going to come off and Trump is going to embrace crypto. President government's going to buy bitcoin reserve and all this stuff and somehow like all my boring boomer friends made money this year and I'm down.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

We're now below where we were 12 months ago.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. November was the big rally when November.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Was the big rally.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah. So that's a bummer. That's a real bummer.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It, it doesn't feel great.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Hence people are bashing on Monad.

[Kevin Shitposter]

We'll take it.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Is that it? I'll be happy. Is that really it? Is it that simple?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

No, but let's just pretend like it.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Well, okay. Well, here's the one thing that people are not bashing is prediction markets.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yes.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

So, and, and, and I, before we started talking about the news and prediction markets, like why, what's up prediction markets? The first question is like why do people feel so differently about prediction markets? It's actually not obvious. I think that maybe the answer is because there's no tokens yet. I mean, I guess there's like tiny little tokens. Agreed. There's nothing to buy yet, there's nothing to sell yet. There's nothing, you know, that you made money on or lost money on and there's nobody else getting rich who you can identify right now.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

It's purely a skill based game.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

What do you mean?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

If you are trading on Kalshi or Polymarket or the startup ones, Right. You are making or losing money as a user of a prediction market, not as an owner of a prediction market. The owners of the prediction markets are doing extremely well. Right. Valuations are going straight vertical, raised to 11 billion today. Right. But as a user, if you've lost money based on prediction markets, it is your own fault because you predicted wrong. Right. To your point. There are no tokens.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, I don't, I don't think that's the. So like, you know, people are mostly happy for call. She raising a new round.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yes.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Poly Market raising a new round. All these valuations being super high. People are like, yeah, great. This is all wonderful and I'm very happy that I'm seeing this.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah. They're introducing new tools for society that are fun and interesting and valuable and it's not good.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. But not Monet. Monet is just total extraction. Just total extraction. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

No, you want to speak for the prediction.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah. Explain why you're extracting so much.

[Kevin Shitposter]

There are currently prediction markets on Monad. I suggest people go and try them out. You can filter on app monitor XYZ for prediction markets. Here's my plug. Prediction markets are great. Right? It's just really hard to like them.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Monad are they good?

[Kevin Shitposter]

They're terrible. That's smart, that's great.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Give them a shot.

[Kevin Shitposter]

I think that, yeah, I think that they're going to be really good but on the plug markets like I think the key thing and again maybe smooth brain take but like they're so easy to understand that onboarding and user acquisition is actually really simple. It's like easier than sports betting. Like the first time you ever did a sports bet you're like +1 65. Like I don't really understand that. You kind of have to learn the math. This is just like, oh, if it wins, this is worth $1.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Kevin Shitposter]

And it's like so easy and based around big events, like big events have the most trading volume. So it's like there's kind of a positive flywheel that comes with that of more people care about this thing so there's more liquidity, more people trade it it.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

You know that is a really good point that like I've, I've been in the gambling world for so long it never really occurred to me what an incredibly unintuitive UX sports betting is. Oh, it's horrible of like just looking at the odds, it's a little bit like, you know, negative 210.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I'm like, I don't.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like look, it's, it's commonal just like margin trading versus perps. Like perps are just so much simpler than margin trading. Like in theory they're the same. They're, they're, well not the same but like they're not that different but, but the UX is just so much more intuitive which just leads to one product growing massively relative to the other. And so it's, you know, even if you're just doing sports betting, like just the way you quote the odds just actually solves so many of the problems or so many of the UX issues with sports betting. But let's put that aside. So some of the news that's been happening in the prediction markets world recently, so one, of course Polymarket, in which we are investors, recently did their US launch hit number one in the app store for sports. Seems to be going very well, at least in the first week. And Shane was recently featured on 60 Minutes, the very famous American show on CBS I think it is and Kalshi, not to be outdone, recently announced it raise a round at a $10 billion valuation. They raised a billion dollars led by, I think it was Paradigm ASX and Z and Sequoia, all existing investors as well as launching some of their tokenized contracts on Solana. And it's a little bit weird the way they're doing this because of course Kalshi is US regulated CFTC registered DCM DCO platform. And Tommy, you were explaining to me how exactly do these things work when they're launching on Solana?

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

So the Jupyter integration has been live for a little bit now, maybe a few months. It's I think a little tongue in cheek to say that's like trading on Kalshi because functionally what you're doing is you're basically engaging in like a bilateral swap with Jupiter or DSWAP or DFlow or whoever's actually quoting on these platforms. So you're putting money into a contract they are as well and they sort of agree to pay you out based on the resolution of the Kalshi contract but they're functioning your counterparty, not Kalshi and then they're quoting you the price of these contracts based on what Kalshi is putting at the time. So it's sort of like I can buy imagine a decentralized future of Bitcoin and then the person who's selling it to me is then hedging it out on the CME and it's like, like okay, I'm kind of in a roundabout way, you know, contributing to CME liquidity. You're getting kind of the on screen pricing of buying a CME dated bitcoin future. But like it's actually all kind of self contained within this contract and like the CME is not actually the clearing venue for this thing. So it's kind of cute. Like I kind of think it's actually kind of a clever way to offer the product on chain but like they're functionally just very different. Like if there's a bug in the smart contract or I don't know, there's some issue with the counterparty, like that's your issue, that's Jupiter's issue, that's not Kalshi's issue.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Right. So it's pure rfq. You're just trading against some market maker who's willing to quote you any of the contracts.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

So it's not even Kalshi's product.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

No.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Well they're using Kalshi for resolution. So the contracts, but they're the Jupyter's the developing the contract. So it's sort of again it's like.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

How do you get the resolution from Kalshi?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I think they Just read it on chain. I guess they are pulling from API or something.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Kalshi is just posting on chain. Hey, this.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Yeah, I mean it's kind of like if you and I, you know, put money into an escrow and we're like, okay, this is going to be our trade for the resolution of a Kalqi contract. We could do that offline.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, posting the Oracle. Yeah, okay, got it. Yeah. So that, that seems to be part of Kalshi's on chain strategy is using this RFQ type mechanism as opposed to actually trying to put an exchange on chain. Whereas you know, Polymarket, the actual exchange itself, the liquidity, everything is on chain. And then they're launching their US product obviously, which is kind of segregated liquidity in the us and then the other big news relevant to the whole meta is Robinhood, of course, which is a large portion. Kalshi's overall volumes is coming through sports betting and prediction markets on Robinhood. So Robinhood's a distributor and they're sharing some of the economics with Kalshi. Robinhood announced that it's now building its own JV with Susquehanna, very large, well known market maker and market participant to build a CFTC licensed futures and derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, DCM DCO SEF for prediction markets and for event contracts. Meaning seemingly that they're going to now be internalizing this and cutting out Kalshi. So we've seen from Robinhood's quarterly reporting that this is one of their fastest growing verticals, at least on a percentage basis, not in absolute terms. So they see that this is working, this is a great business line and seemingly they don't want to split the revenue with Kalshi, especially if they own the users and the users aren't. They don't have allegiance to Kalshi, they have allegiance to Robinhood. They're like, hey, we might as well own the Rails ourselves. So how do you guys think about the meta of prediction markets as it's evolving? Polymarket coming onshore, Kalshi going on chain, and then Robinhood potentially, potentially cutting out both. What do you think the future looks like for the space?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I think Robinhood is one of the few firms that can internalize the product and everything that's required from the legal and regulatory side to the tech side. I don't think there's going to be many firms like Robinhood capable of doing that. And so I think what we're going to see is sort of an oligopoly between Robinhood, which has distribution, it has a huge User base plus its own internalized prediction markets. I think you're going to see firms like Coinbase that partner with one of the two. I think you're going to see others that partner with 1, 2. I think what you're going to get in an end state is a couple systems as backends for others like Kalc and polymarket. And you're going to see one or two attempts at internalization. Robinhood, I'm sure someone else will try it. Probably less successful, I'm sure at some point I'm making this up. Vanguard, I'll do it. Not Vanguard, obviously, but someone like that is going to be like, oh, we're doing a prediction market.

And I think you're going to see approaches that are vastly different, but all of them sort of succeed in their own way. I think the problem is going to be the startups and there's a lot of startups trying to build prediction markets that are not really going to have distribution or the ability to win distribution over Kalshi and polymarket. I think we're going to see this sort of like, like first mover advantage and I think there's going to be a lot of dead bodies, people to try to do something different.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

So where does the money get made though?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

I mean, I think as always, it's on who owns distribution and has consumer loyalty. And so this case probably, you know, Robin Hood, at least in this example, I think. And it's not really uncharted territory for them already, right? Like they already use Forecast X, which is cmes, I guess, DCM for some contracts. And so when you're already using it, they're already aggregating over existing event contract providers, I think. And then I'm guessing their joint venture will just be one of those and maybe one that will try to promote more. The thing that's kind of weird is like, okay, they also do this across other financial services and products they have within Robinar. Today you can get all sorts of options. You can get by spot, you can get a mortgage, but they're not the ones offering it. They're obviously syndicating out through someone else. But with event contracts, they're not necessarily fungible. Like me, buying a piece of of stock is different than, okay, maybe these two different election contracts resolve slightly differently or maybe they're weird quirks about the way the contracts are structured such that the one from ForecastNex is not the exact same as the one from Kalshi, it's not the exact same as this one from this JV So I don't know how you kind of resolve that. I think Kalshi, I would have to imagine, saw this coming. It's not this classic commoditize your compliment kind of strategy. I'm guessing that's why they're trying to push so hard into crypto is like. Like, oh, shit. This, like, huge bulk of our volume is. Is shrinking and trying to get rid of us. And so we are going to get in a lifeboat and try to get into crypto and try to get some crypto flow. And I'm guessing that's part of their. Their thinking and doing this on Chain Push.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah, yeah. I think it's. To me, it's a story of distribution on both sides. Like, you. You can imagine. I feel like it's a pretty simple answer of like, you can imagine Robin Hood sitting boardroom going, like, all right, there's this enormously profitable new vertical. Everyone in the world is betting on this growing a ton. We own the distribution for it. Like, can we get more juice out of this lemon? Like, can. Can we actually make more money on this?

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Sorry, it's a lemon pineapple. Something. Something tastier. I thought, yeah, I don't know.

[Kevin Shitposter]

They own all the distribution in this enormous vertical. And leadership's probably like, do this better. Like, we can win this outright. And this is just a strategic play for them. Same thing with Kalshi. Right? Like, it. It. The Kalshi side almost reminds me of kind of tokenized stocks when that was a story maybe six months ago, where it's like, why is this potentially valuable? Well, there's just more distribution. Right. There's just access to. For a lot of folks that can now come and use the product. And if you're betting on crypto growing like, they're on Solana. Solana has awesome distribution, especially for retail. There's probably a lot of overlap between people that trade meme coins on Solana and people who use prediction markets markets. And so that's their foray into distribution.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah, the one. And this is trying just to look really far out into the future and, like, seeing what wins and loses. Like, I think right now we're looking at competition over a somewhat overlapping series of events that are being speculated on where it's like major sporting events and major political events. That's kind of the market right now. It's not a long tail. It's like a fat body of, like, the most popular things. That is the battleground. I think what we're going to see is the market will evolve at some point. And the battleground will evolve to being like, you have this like, set of core type of events that are extremely popular. But I actually personally think the longer tail of all other things is actually a much bigger market that nobody is currently contesting and nobody is really fighting for right now. And there's so many things that go into this long tail. It's everything from, you know, speculating on weather events when there's a big flood coming. You know, it's everything like, to like a high school basketball game. It's like, theoretically there's like 10 million different events per day that people would want to speculate on if they could. If it was as easy as like talking into your phone being like, I think like this high school team is going to win, you know, and it's like any, you know, anyone else in the like, stands can be like, screw you. Like, but like, I, I think like the total number of events that people want to speculate on or bet on or like be engaged in or want to hedge is actually absurdly, like, long. It's like constant. And I don't think anyone is fighting for tapping into this market at all yet. I don't think they have a way of really conceiving of it yet because most of the platforms are built for like a couple big markets and the liquidity to aggregate in it. It's not built for a long tail. And that market, I think is much larger and I think someone new is going to crack that at some point. It could come from a Kali, it could come from a poly market. I don't think it can come from a Robin Hood, frankly, because it's not like a full web interface, you know, But I think like, that is not being addressed at all and it's quite large.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Well, good little request for startup.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Request for startup.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Long tail prediction. Let's.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Long tail prediction or AI Permissionless prediction. That's also big.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Predict everything.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, yeah, I like that. Well, maybe a quantum AI will be able to predict everything at the end of the show.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I'm going to actually check to see.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

If that certified banger right when we wrap up. Well, we're up on time, so maybe we should all check our phones and retweet your.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

What do you guys think? Certified banger or certified dud?

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

I'm going to say. I'm going to say banger right now. I'm going to say dud right now. But we're going to turn into a banger when the show ends. What are we at?

[Tom the Defi Maven]

This is A extreme dud. Probably my worst tweet of all time.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Don't delete it. Don't delete it. I'm going to retweet it.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Four likes.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

I've never had a tweet get only four likes in my entire life.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

18 minutes in.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

This is the worst metrics I've ever.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Okay, but a lot can change. A lot can change. You got four other.

[Robert the Crypto Connoisseur]

Day one. The token just launched.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, Give it time. Give it time.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Day one.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

There's a lesson here. There's a lesson here. You have failed to learn it.

[Tom the Defi Maven]

Yeah. Writing by committee is always.

Okay.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

We're up on time. Kevin, how should we. What should people do to engage with Monad? Here's your plug. Go for it.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Yeah. Probably the easiest way is to go on Twitter. Go to onad. M O N A D. The pin tweet has a very easy explainer.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

And just type how shitty it is and how terrible you think.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Right. Tweet anything about Monad.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Monad. You suck.

[Kevin Shitposter]

If you want more.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Yeah, right. Tag, Intern and his mom.

[Kevin Shitposter]

Tag at mom learns, crypto. Mention Monad and some hateful thing. You will definitely get more than four likes in 18 minutes. Hey, it will work, I promise.

[Steve the Head Hype Man]

Let's go. Excellent. Excellent. Love it. All right, that's it from us. Thanks, everybody. Be back next week. Sam.