The Chopping Block: Tokenomics Reset — ICOs Rise, UNI Turns On Fees, MEV Goes to Court - Ep. 949

Summary

Unchained: The Chopping Block – Tokenomics Reset — ICOs Rise, UNI Turns On Fees, MEV Goes to Court

Host: Laura Shin
Guests: Aseev, Tom, Tarun, Robert
Date: November 15, 2025
Episode: 949
Timestamps: Bracketed throughout

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the paradigm shift currently underway in crypto tokenomics – with a pronounced move from airdrops to ICOs as the primary token distribution method. The Chopping Block crew, consisting of crypto insiders and investors, unpacks the resurgence of ICOs, Uniswap’s major governance pivot, and a headline-grabbing MEV court case. Expect heated debate, inside baseball stories, and some fresh takes on how regulatory and community landscapes are reshaping what comes next in crypto.

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1. The Rise of ICOs and Collapse of the Airdrop Meta

ICOs Make a Comeback

• The episode opens with a spirited discussion about the return of ICOs, spotlighting the Monad and Mega ETH token launches.
• ICOs are being handled through more established platforms like Coinbase, with stricter rules on flipping tokens and attempts to channel tokens to committed holders, not short-term speculators.
• “You’re putting in the hands of someone, but you’re not putting in the hands of your users… so why don’t you just sell the tokens on the market and skip the middleman, which is essentially what an ICO is. So I think the ICO is the right answer.” — Aseev [00:00]

Oversubscription and Rules for Good Buyers

• New rules echo IPOs: rapid token flippers risk future exclusion.
• “If you quickly flip your shares that you get in the IPO, you basically get…you can’t participate in IPOs for a while…Coinbase is doing the same thing. So you can participate in the ICO and flip it, but if you do, you may not get to participate in future ICOs.” — Aseev [06:05]
• “These sales are extremely oversubscribed and so obviously the leverage sits with the sellers.” — Tom [07:16]

Influence of Crypto Personalities & Social Media

• “ICO Beast,” a prominent influencer, lost allocation in the Mega ETH ICO after publicly sharing plans to hedge profits, prompting debate about trust, ethics, and PR mechanics in token allocations.
• “Why were you bragging about your hedging strategy? …You’re telling everyone, so you’re also creating adverse selection for yourself.” — Tarun [07:49, 08:34]
• FOMO and influencer optics vs. alignment with project goals discussed.

2. Are Airdrops Over? Data, Debate, and Disillusionment

Farming Fatigue

• The crew (especially Aseev and Robert) criticize airdrop farming as costly, gamified, and largely ineffective for building sustainable userbases.
• “At this point in 2025, we can look at all of this as just marketing…And in general, if you’re attracting the right users, then that marketing is well spent. If you’re attracting the wrong users, marketing poorly spent…I think, you know, nine times out of ten, it’s poorly spent.” — Robert [11:21]

Notable Data Point

• There is little evidence that airdrop recipients become sticky, high-value users.
• “It does seem like the experiment has been run and that we don’t have almost a single example of a sticky airdrop. It just is crazy how much churn airdrop recipients have.” — Aseev [15:53]
• CAC (customer acquisition cost) vs. LTV (long-term value) framework: In crypto, airdrops rack up CAC with minimal LTV.
• “Airdrops as a product would just be non existent already. It’d be a crater.” — Aseev [15:53]

Exceptions: Defi, Linear Airdrops

• Some success seen in DeFi projects where airdrops are directly linked to metrics like liquidity provision or lending/borrowing.
• Outside DeFi, most airdrops are gameable and unproductive.

ICOS As The New Model

• “The ICO is the right answer…if you know that this interim thing of like, okay, people who show up and like do random actions on my testnet is not actually my long term users, then I’m not accomplishing the goal of getting tokens in the hands of long term users. So I might as well get them in the hands of long term buyers.” — Aseev [16:51]

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3. Uniswap’s Fee Switch Flip: Protocol Unification & Governance Milestone

A New Era for Uniswap

• Uniswap’s drastic shift: burning 100 million UNI, collapsing the company/frontend vs. protocol split, and turning on protocol-level fees.
• “They are dropping all the front end fees, the wallet fees, the API fees, allocating 20 million a year to a Uniswap growth budget and turning on the fee switch. And this will basically finally make it so that the UNI token is the primary beneficiary of everything within the Uniswap ecosystem.” — Aseev [21:58]

Regulatory Chill Thaws

• Many attribute the prior division to the hostile SEC environment, which led to years of legal ambiguity and personal cost for Uniswap’s team.
• “The act of issuing a subpoena and creating these cases is extremely expensive and invasive. I had thousands of hours of my life lost on this and millions of dollars spent in legal fees…in between where it’s like the act of not even really enforcement can still ruin these companies.” — Tom [26:12]

Industry Ripple Effects

• “This is the start of a new meta, frankly. I think people were waiting for Uniswap as a standard bearer for a long time.” — Robert [27:18]
• A “second act” for DeFi tokenomics is underway, as other projects are likely to follow Uniswap’s lead.
• “All investors, whether they hold the token or whether they hold the stock, unified. They’re all unified. Unified in favor of one asset. And if that’s not the case, you’re going to get conflicts of interest…” — Aseev [31:11]
• Speculation on the legal structure and thanks to legal architects like Miles Jennings for paving the way with the “duna”/DUNA structure.

Notable Quotes

• “If Uniswap’s not afraid to do this the right way…No one’s going to be.” — Robert [28:39]
• “Everybody should celebrate. Totally.” — Robert [31:00]

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4. MEV Goes to Trial: Law, Game Theory, and Crypto Ethics

The Case: “Low Carb Crusader” MEV Bot

• The Perer Buen brothers ran a bot that “sandwiched” other sandwich attackers, netting $25M in seconds. Indicted on wire fraud and related charges.
• The defense: everyone involved was sophisticated, there were no complaints from victims, and everything was transparent.
• The prosecution: framed the actions as deception and criminal exploitation.

Complexity and Mistrial

• Multiple jurors ended in tears; all were overwhelmed by technical details (MEV, PBS, mempool mechanics).
• Mistrial declared; DOJ intends to retry.
• Discussion about “rule of lenity”: If it’s not obvious something is criminal, it shouldn’t be prosecuted as such.
• “The answer here is that clearly these guys should be acquitted. Because if you had asked me…is sandwiching sandwich attackers illegal under criminal law? …If it’s not obvious, then it should not be criminal.” — Aseev [46:06]

Game Theory, Permissionless Systems, and Legal Ambiguity

• Tarun provides key insight, knowing both parties, explaining the economics and technical nuances, and arguing the gray area between protocol rules and out-of-protocol manipulation.
• “In a world of permissionless transactions, all is fair in love and war and someone lost. But…I do kind of get the idea that this is extra protocol in the sense that Ethereum’s consensus rules do not give you any guarantee on this.” — Tarun [43:22]
• Comparison to traditional markets (spoofing laws), which also grapple with borderline manipulative behavior.

Critique of Prosecutorial Priorities

• Panel criticizes the DOJ for prosecuting complex, uncertain “victimless” crypto exploits — especially on behalf of a non-US victim who did not testify — while ignoring rampant, clear scams.
• “If you told me someone made a scam token and then owned 80% of the supply and rugged someone…why are we not prosecuting that?” — Tarun [50:02]

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5. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Aseev [00:00]: "So I think the ICO is the right answer."
• Robert [11:21]: "Nine times out of ten, it’s poorly spent, people are attracting the wrong users, the wrong audience…"
• Tom [07:16]: "These sales are extremely oversubscribed…obviously the leverage sits with the sellers."
• Tarun [43:22]: "In a world of permissionless transactions, all is fair in love and war and someone lost."
• Aseev [15:53]: "Airdrops as a product would just be non existent already. It’d be a crater."
• Robert [31:00]: "I have tremendous respect for them doing this. I view this as…such a major milestone that everybody should celebrate totally."
• Tarun [19:36]: "Very few of the things that actually do well in long term value have done big airdrops. That's...a CAC vs LTV story."
• Aseev [46:06]: "If it’s not obvious then it should not be criminal. That’s the rule of lenity…"

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6. Key Segment Timestamps

• [00:00] – Opening remarks on new ICO wave, Monad & Mega ETH
• [06:05] – ICO flipping, parallels with IPOs, buyer incentives
• [11:21] – Airdrop effectiveness, airdrop farming, and failures
• [15:53] – Statistical unviability of airdrops for user retention
• [21:58] – Uniswap’s historic “fee switch” and value unification
• [26:12] – Regulatory pressure and the personal cost to Uniswap
• [27:18] – Impact on broader tokenomics, predictions for DeFi meta
• [38:38] – Low Carb Crusader MEV bot case, summary and legal debate
• [43:22] – Permissionless game theory, protocol vs. extra-protocol actions
• [46:06] – Rule of lenity and boundaries for criminal cases in crypto

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Conclusion

The Chopping Block team brings an insider’s, sometimes irreverent, perspective to defining issues in crypto's evolution: from airdrops and tokenomics to legal boundaries and regulatory sea changes. The episode paints a stark picture of the death of the airdrop meta, the reemergence of ICOs, and the unification of protocol and company value via Uniswap’s bold governance move. Finally, the MEV court case highlights the ongoing clash between on-chain innovation and off-chain law—a drama that’s far from finished.

For regulars and newcomers alike, this episode captures a critical turning point for crypto’s evolving playbook.

Transcript

[Aseev]

You're putting in the hands of someone, but you're not putting in the hands of your users. You're putting in the hands of somebody who's turning around and selling those tokens directly on the market. In which case, why don't you just sell the tokens on the market and skip the middleman, which is essentially what an ICO is. So I think the ICO is the right answer.

[Robert]

Not a dividend.

[Tarun]

It's a tale of two pawns.

[Aseev]

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

[Tom]

Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.

[Aseev]

Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.

[Tarun]

Alec Eth is the ultimate pun.

[Robert]

Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

[Aseev]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So, quick intros. First you got Tom, the Defi maven and master of memes.

[Tom]

Hello, everyone.

[Aseev]

Next you got Robert, the cryptic connoisseur and czar of superstate insert AI Robert, voice Good evening. Then we got Tarun, the gig of brain and grand Poobah at Gauntlet.

[Tarun]

Yo.

[Aseev]

And I am Aseev, 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. Please see Shopping Block at XYZ for more disclosures. So, gentlemen, the market is hurting once again. It seems like every time the NASDAQ sneezes, crypto catches a cold. And once again, it's like a down day and crypto is just getting walloped. So it seems like a lot of this has trickled into private sales and pre launches and optimism around token launches. And a lot of this is coming into now the the rise and re rating of ICOs. So let's talk through this. So Monad, in which I believe everybody on the show is an investor, Monad is doing an ico and so originally they did an airdrop. That airdrop garnered some, I'd say both positive and negative sentiment from people in the community. But then they disclosed very recently that they're actually doing the first ICO that's being done through Coinbase. They're going to be selling, I believe it's $187 million of Mon tokens at a fully diluted valuation of 2.5 billion. Now, if you look at the private markets right now, there are pre market futures for basically people guessing what the TGE price is going to be when it finally comes out that is floating up and down quite a bit, but it's roughly in the neighborhood of 2X where the Reserve price seems to be for the sale. And this is leading to a lot of discussion about is this the new future of token distributions? So there's a lot of discussion about both this ICO as well as the Mega Eth. Ico, Mega Eth also in which we are all on the show are investors. And very different reactions to both of them. But I think it's kind of galvanized this conversation about if we are moving away from airdrops as the primary method of token distribution or moving toward ICOs. The first thing is what does it mean to for the way in which these tokens are going to get distributed, for the way in which we think about decentralization, the way in which we think about retail participation. There was a big conversation that I got involved in. I wrote this thread because this guy, ICO Beast we'll talk about a little bit. He's like a big crypto influencer, kind of token sheller guy, ICO beast, basically. First two things that he got in the news for which I related to the story. So the first thing was that he got a big allocation in the Mega Eth ico, which we talked about a little bit on a previous show. And in the Mega Eth ICO he got I think like a million dollars of allocation. And he tweeted, oh, I'm going to go. I have so much allocation, I'm up so much. I got to figure out how to hedge this thing. And when his tweet about this went viral, the Mega Eth team decided to take back his allocation and cancel it and give back his money. They didn't like take his money, they gave him back his money. They said, you are refunded. We're going to give your allocation to somebody else. Because of course the sale was massively oversubscribed. And this led to a big conversation about, is this cool? Is this the way that we should be doing things? In the second story concerning the same guy, icobeast was he later tweeted that basically airdrop farmers are parasitic. They're a terrible foundation on which to build a community. And airdrop farmers complain about everything. And they're just kind of down only signals of the failure of crypto distributions and that we should stop rewarding airdrop farmers. And he got crucified mostly by farmers seemingly for this take. And then I kind of came on afterwards from a VC's perspective. To give my perspective as somebody who obviously we deal a lot with looking at airdrops, farmer metrics, the dilation of metrics that are caused by farmers. And I basically said that as an investor we try to remove farmed metrics as much as we can from our analysis of a protocol and we think farming at this point has become pretty toxic and difficult to consider to be positive sum for projects. So all that being said, wanted to get your guys reactions to the panoply of things that we're seeing around both the ICOs and around the airdrops and what's changing in the meta. Tom, why don't, why don't you start?

[Tom]

Well first of all, ICO beast, I have to say, typical Kalshi affiliate, I'll just leave it at that.

[Tarun]

Secondly, the amount of bias in this episode from the beginning to now is hilarious.

[Tom]

It's just a fact. It's not an opinion. It is literally a fact. I think maybe you brought this up in your tweet and it's come up, I think in other investments too, that generally for these pre launch sales or investments, you are contractually prohibited from selling forwards on your tokens or hedging your tokens and the team reserves the right to revoke your allocation if they find out that you're doing that. And so it's like you didn't read the docs, you didn't read the contract. This is kind of hard for the course. So I guess that was kind of on him for not even reading that. But I do think it's more of just a ethical thing that yeah, I don't blame the team for not wanting people who are going to immediately try to flip their token for a quick profit. The whole point of doing it this way instead of doing it through an airdrop or other sort of distribution mechanism to try to find people who are long term aligned and are going to be holders and are going to believe in the project and they're excited about it. And so you know, even, even short of that, like I don't know why you would tweet that when this kind of defeats the whole purpose of why there is a token sale in the first place.

[Aseev]

So interestingly so Robinhood, you know they have these IPO IPO direct to retail feature within, within Robinhood and within Robinhood anybody can participate. However, if you quickly flip your shares that you get in the ipo, you basically get like you sort of get on timeout and like you can't participate in IPOs for a while if you're like flipping too aggressively so they can't not offer it to you, but they can sort of like give you a timeout from the product. Apparently Coinbase is doing the same thing. So this is their first IP or first ICO in their ICO product. But there's a rule there that like, okay, you can participate in the ICO and flip it, but if you do, you may not get to participate into future ICOs. And so it's kind of the same idea is that, you know, these kinds of private sales, they're meant to be a reward for good buyers. And there is a distinction between good buyers and bad buyers. Right. In an ipo, it's the same thing. You're, you're doing a roadshow and you look for people who are going to be long term reliant, who are going to be good holders of your asset and you're trying to place the asset and that's why you're giving them attractive price. If it's literally just, hey, take the thing and flip it and I don't really care how long you hold it, then just, you know, let the token float. Buy it on the open market. Why am I buying it? Why am I selling it to you in a private transaction?

[Tom]

Yeah, I mean, these sales are extremely oversubscribed and so obviously the leverage sits with the sellers. And so in a market where maybe that weren't the case, I could see how they could kind of get away with it. But this kind of comes back to like the luxury goods art discussion we had like two episodes ago where, yeah, there's this huge asymmetry in the market. So why would you think that, you know, you as one of many, many buyers, way too many buyers than there are sellers. Why you would think you would therefore get to like, you have this additional privileges, additional right to like, you sell this thing immediately. Like, obviously that's not true.

[Aseev]

Tarun, what's your take?

[Tarun]

I feel like everyone is just rediscovering all the constraints that people have in IPOs. And you know, we're just like researching the same search space, except maybe having different restrictions against derivatives and stuff. But also I just kind of think like, why were you bragging about your hedging strategy? Like, I, my main question is like, what's the deal with the guy who did or person who did this?

[Aseev]

I think like when you're a yapper, you just like, you know what's going to do numbers. And you can't turn off that part of your brain. It's Just like, I know if I post this, people are going to like it and so they're going to engage, so I should just post it. It's just like you become kind of broken in your inability to like, hey, you should not talk about this even if you're going to do it.

[Tarun]

Yeah, there's just like something very weird to me about it because it's just kind of like, okay, you're telling everyone. So you're also creating adverse selection for yourself. Like, everyone knows you're going to be hedging this. It's like, I don't know, I don't get the.

[Aseev]

Also like, everyone knows even if, even if you weren't going to have your allocation pulled, everyone knows that you're a shitty person to give allocation to in the future.

[Tarun]

Something about the whole thing doesn't make sense. Like, is this guy just that much of a moron? Like, I never understood.

[Robert]

Well, the flip side of it is maybe that controversy generates attention and followers and the attention and the followers are what get him on the list in the first place. And so, I mean, I'm not saying the calculus is perfect here, but maybe inside their head it's like being a Kol is all about getting the clicks anyway, so why not just get more clicks?

[Aseev]

I think there are some things that like inside voice, you know, keep that in there, don't put it out here. And I think this is one of these things that retail, I mean retail investors, especially in this, in this cycle, obviously they, they, they love this idea that VCs are the root of all problems. But one of the things that they're coming to understand now all of a sudden that they're actually getting the ICOs that they wanted is that one thing VCs do is they compete with each other on holding. Period. Right? VCs compete with each other to be long term aligned, to be good holders, to like hold for, to show the founder I'm somebody who, that you can rely on for the long journey. And that's part of the reason why founders choose certain VCs over others. And if you're a VC that's known for quick flips and you're not a long term holder and you're like trying to go hedge or trying to sell OTC teams, find that shit out, they talk, they tell each other, and people learn to avoid you if they can. The same thing is true of people who participate in ICOs. It's no different. The democratization of finance means you're democratizing every part of that. So now, that being said, it's obviously very hard to police people hedging because you can just go on hyper liquid or whatever.

[Tarun]

It's not hard to police them when they're telling you, yeah, exactly.

[Aseev]

The only way you could possibly fuck up this badly is by literally tweeting it. So, yeah, I don't know that part of the story is funny, but I want to maybe fixate a little bit away from icobies in particular, but more around the dynamics that we're seeing change. Right. So a lot of this discussion was galvanized by his tweet about is the farming meta over? Is farming now at this point where we think it's not valuable for projects to be farmed? I wrote a blog, I wrote a sort of tweet, long form tweet about it. And then Jesse from base tweeted yesterday that he was taking the other side. Basically, he said, like, no, no, no, I actually think farmers are great. I think farmers should be rewarded and instead we should build a bridge to allow those farmers to become more valuable community members, to become builders, to become all this other stuff. Kind of seemingly in response to what I was saying that I think the experiment has been run and that farming is basically a net negative to projects. How do you guys think about it?

[Robert]

I mean, I feel like we talk about this at least three times a year for the last four years that we've done the podcast. There's always the cycles of, are farmers good? Are airdrops good? You know, is any of this good? And there's moments where we're like, oh, yeah, like this is how you gain visibility and attention. And like, attention's the only true currency for a project. And there's other times where it's like, oh, it's played out. You're just getting the wrong people. It's the wrong attention. I think in general, in aggregate, at this point in 2025, we can look at all of this as just marketing, right? Marketing for a chain, marketing for an application, marketing to catalyze a user base. And in general, if you're attracting the right users, then that marketing is well spent. If you're attracting the wrong users, marketing poorly spent. And I think, you know, nine times out of ten, it's poorly spent, people are attracting the wrong users, the wrong audience. They're not attracting the things that create long term value and it's just a waste of everyone's time. And once in a while, like a project does it really well and they attract the right people and they build a user Base for their whatever, for their platform, for their protocol, for their thing correctly. And it's a good use of time. But otherwise, I mean, there's so much automation of these things now and like it's just a hot ball of users and capital that generally I think it's poorly spent.

[Aseev]

So if it's nine times out of ten that airdrops are a failure, are you basically saying that 90% of projects should not do airdrops?

[Robert]

Correct. Invent a new meta, try something new.

[Tom]

Tough, tough words from lushdaddy. I mean, I think I more or less agree in the sense of I think the implementations are bad. It's kind of like Goodhart's Law kind of thing where it's like the measure becomes a goal and then ceases to be a good measure. And I think that is basically what happened with. That's basically what's happened with Airdrops, where it's like teams don't know what they optimize for, so they choose something that's really not precise and doesn't really correlate with success and then that just gets optimized to shit. And then of course, okay, this actually doesn't have the end result that we want, but maybe there's a little bit of kind of sleepwalking to it and so people feel this obligation to go do it. But I think also as we've discussed, I think a lot of teams are just afraid to try something new. And so when someone else is the pioneer and they show that you can do an ICO and maybe it's successful, I think we will just see a million people kind of drafting behind them.

[Aseev]

As a great man once said, airdrops are kind of pointless anyway.

[Tom]

Great quote.

[Aseev]

Yeah, that's right.

[Tarun]

Wait, who said that?

[Aseev]

Are you serious?

[Tom]

Tarun, do you watch this show? I'm gonna blame it on the norovirus.

[Tarun]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, I'm just like, it's me.

[Aseev]

It's literally in the opening of the show. Dude.

[Robert]

Yeah, that's like in like the marketing commercial clip that we have.

[Aseev]

Yeah, every show.

[Robert]

Useless.

[Aseev]

Yeah, that's right.

[Tarun]

I think capitalism is always moving between CAC customer acquisition costs and long term value of users. And there's always just a. It's going back and forth between which one you spend on and crypto. Ironically, right now, whenever people talk about revenue meta or whatever, which just basically means long term value needs to be valued much higher than customer acquisition costs. It's funny because crypto is like usually the CAC vs LTV trade off for crypto and the rest of tech is the same direction. Like if everyone in tech is spending on cac, crypto is all about spending on cac. Everyone is focused on making money, crypto is focused on making money. But right now in AI everyone's focused on CAC and no real LTV at all. Just look at the bottom lines of everyone is growing tremendously and crypto is in the opposite direction. Focus on this long term value thing. So I think that separation is kind of interesting to me and in some ways that's why airdrops are kind of useless. Like right now people are really valuing things a lot more, not like fully, but a lot more on the LTV basis. Whereas like in the normal economy people are not valuing things on LTV basis, especially because of the AI stuff. So like it's sort of, to me that's the bigger thing is like if, if like an AI company didn't AirDrop right now, it would probably be successful, you know, and I think part of the reason is like it's basically like they're all competing for the same, they're all competing for like locking in users and they need to spend a ton on customer acquisition so they don't move. You know, like the number of IDE products I've used in the last three months is at least seven. That's like the last time I had no stickiness in a product was defi summer.

[Aseev]

It does seem like the experiment has been run and that we don't have almost a single example of a sticky airdrop. It just is crazy how much churn airdrop recipients have. And that doesn't mean that there aren't good products, that doesn't mean there aren't retentive users, but they just never come in through airdrops. It's just a terrible channel. And if you look at the nominal value of all the airdrops that have been delivered in crypto, you compare that to the amount of revenue even the biggest apps in crypto have, it's completely lopsided. If this was a company, if this was Google Ads and you were to learn that they have this bad of a conversion ratio on the spend that's going out the door, this company would be in the ground. Like airdrops as a product would just be non existent already. It'd be a crater. So I think the theory of airdrops was that, okay, well maybe it's not justified in terms of marketing spend, right? Maybe it's more about, well this is a necessary thing in order to Decentralize your protocol and or to put it in the hands of users. But now there's just an obvious like that, that lack of retention. What it implies is that these are not your users. You're putting in the hands of someone, but you're not putting in the hands of your users. You're putting in the hands of somebody who's turning around and selling those tokens directly on the market. In which case, why don't you just sell the tokens on the market and skip the middleman, which is essentially what an ICO is. So I think the ICO is the right answer. If you know that this interim thing of like, okay, people who show up and like do random actions on my testnet is not actually my long term users, then I'm not accomplishing the goal of getting tokens in the hands of long term users. So I might as well get them in the hands of long term buyers. And getting in the hands of long term buyers, the right mechanism for that is an ico. So now that basically the regulatory bramble is cleared, it does seem like this is obviously the right answer is for people to move toward ICOs. Now, all that being said, I want to caveat that, and I wrote this in the post, which I think some people glossed over, is that there's a category of airdrops that are these sort of linear airdrops that are more like classic liquidity mining. So this is like what Athena was doing, what hyperliquid was doing, where you're awarding a tangible metric that actually contributes to a product moat. So the liquidity has increased or the lend borrow has increased on a protocol. This kind of thing, which is mostly in defi, it basically doesn't exist outside of Defi. If you're looking at L1, you're looking at L2, you're looking at a consumer product. These are never what get airdropped. Uh, it's almost always some easily gameable metric of like touch every little thing on the app and then you get an airdrop and what you just do is you end up getting a lot of random people coming in and touching things on your app and then leaving. So I, I think that is the future is basically either linear airdrops pay for performance, this actually is necessary to bootstrap a product mode or ICO or. And ico.

[Robert]

So you're saying we go back to Defi Summer in 2020 and ICOs in 2017 and there lies the answers?

[Aseev]

Pretty much, yeah. I think we kind of had the right answer. But if you just take the union of those two. But the other thing that I think that I like that people are doing now with ICOs is again, it's not totally free for all. It's not just a public auction. Because if you're just going to run a public auction, then you might as well just float the token.

[Tarun]

Right?

[Aseev]

So this more IPO like ICO process actually seems like an interesting evolution. So we'll see. Maybe that's not the right answer. Maybe we discover that hey, the mega Eth sale wasn't as great as we once anticipated. Maybe it wasn't quite as much of a value add. I'm genuinely uncertain what to expect to see how these ICOs work out. But I think it's worth seeing. It's worth experimenting and seeing this kind of fixed price ICO process if this is the right answer for these things.

[Tarun]

I mean, actually I was just looking at revenue per protocol and it's like of the top 10, I think the only two that did an airdrop are Aerodrome and Hyper Liquid as of right now. And both of them are defy ones.

[Aseev]

Where is it?

[Tarun]

Not right now? I'm looking at just like instantaneous right now. Yeah, top 10 right now. Yeah, sorry, I'm not looking at moving average. But yeah, it's actually kind of interesting to just look because you're like very few of the things that actually do well in long term value have done big airdrops. That's kind of to my point of like this is a CAC versus LTV story. There's just not been any proof that CAC buys anything for you in terms of your product. It certainly buys liquidity for your investors, but it doesn't buy anything else.

[Aseev]

Yeah, yeah. I think the story is a little too facile to claim that this is a marketing spend because if it's marketing spend, your CMO should be like fired every which way if that's the kind of return on investment they're getting.

[Robert]

I mean these projects don't have CMOs for the most part. Right. It's like someone on the team has a Google sheet.

[Tarun]

When I start a token, there's only a cto. There's no cmo. I'm kidding.

[Robert]

Tarunecoin. Is that the announcement?

[Aseev]

There we go. Okay, so speaking of tokens and CTOing, another big story in Defi has been the unification of Uniswap and the activation of their fee switch. So historically, one of the criticisms of Uniswap has been there's kind of this two headed hydra which is that there's Uniswap the protocol and there's Uniswap the company. Uniswap the company controlled the front end, the front end charged its own fee. They had a wallet, they had a number of different products, they have the aggregator and then Uniswap the protocols on chain. And Uniswap the protocol on chain has never actually had a protocol level fee. So. And this was largely understood to be a product of the regulatory environment in the US that they were sort of, they had to do this, they were forced to do this, whatever. And Hayden, the founder of Uniswap, recently put out his first proposal to Uniswap Governance, stating that they were basically collapsing the distinction between the Labs and the foundation. They called unification. They're burning 100 million uni to compensate the prior non accrual of fees in Uniswap. They are dropping all the front end fees, the wallet fees, the API fees, allocating 20 million a year to a Uniswap growth budget and turning on the fee switch. And this will basically finally make it so that the Uni token is the primary beneficiary of everything within the Uniswap ecosystem. So this is met with a lot of fanfare, a lot of excitement. They also introduced some new protocol discount fee auction, which is like some fancy way to allocate more of the fee revenue away from validators, more toward arbitrageurs and more toward the actual LPs in the pool. But the main headline is that Uniswap fees were turned on response to the new regulatory environment in which they find themselves. And potentially a new day for DeFi, where all of a sudden these protocols that really should have been monetizing the whole time finally can start to accumulate these fees and to really actually make money. Tarun, what were your thoughts on the unification?

[Tarun]

Yeah, I mean, I think it has been in the works for a long time and there's been lots of jostling to get this over the line over many years. So first off, congratulations to everyone who has been beating themselves over the head with just the bureaucracy and stuff involved, while also getting pilloried on ct. Even though it's like not like they weren't trying to do this, they just kind of had a lot of other constraints at the same time. I think the one thing that I will say that in the final structure that was like a little bit different than what I had expected, like the one example where you have of like a Labs company dissolving into the foundation completely as opposed to being separate was Morpho, where Morpho's foundation, like ND bought the Labs company Company, but here the Labs bought the foundation, so it went the other way. And I thought that was kind of a weird different. Like I don't really understand.

[Aseev]

Can you buy a nonprofit.

[Tarun]

Well, open AI. Yeah, also. Yes, that's true. But also, also there was something crazy where like Mark Zuckerberg brought like a biotech the other day from the found Czi from the foundation. So right now I think foundation law seems very suspect because people are doing some weird games. But anyway, I don't totally understand how that worked. That was the number one thing that stood out to me in the announcement. I was like, how does that. How does that. Like, I had the exact same question as you and I was not totally sure. Although it could just be that they were taking the employees and the foundation winds down. I think that might be what's really going on. But yeah, look, I think they've been talking about doing this for a while. It kind of has been needed and I think it's good to finally get to the era where. Yeah, like I was saying, the long term value of these assets is like the front and center thing and. Yeah, so. But I will say, having seen many sub little pieces of this whole thing, there were a lot of people and a lot of pain that went through this. There was a very funny interaction today where this former SEC person who now is like at better markets was just like, they're just doing this to take advantage of the thing. And like, I don't know, I feel like all the people who had to sit through all the crazy dumb SEC stuff that then ended up just kind of being more of a personal attack effectively. Like, I feel like they're at least vindicated after many years.

[Aseev]

So yeah, there was this parade of people coming out and sharing their stories of being harassed by the SEC over the last four years. So I think we had the sushi swap guys come out. Actually. Ryan Sean Adams from Bankless shared his story about he used to run a validator company and he got harassed into shutting it down and that's actually why he went to go start a media company instead. So many people have gone through the same experience and I think Hayden as well as many people were responding to, I think her name was Amanda Fisherman, were responding to her with like, hey, we lived through this. This is not a theoretical thing for us. We lived under the specter of arbitrary enforcement and just this kind of like these scare tactics that the SEC was using over the last several years to impede us from building something that they just didn't politically like.

[Tom]

Yeah, I think that's the thing that Amanda Fisher and that kind of crowd missed that, like. Well, first, the SEC didn't win any of these cases, obviously, but it's like the act of issuing a subpoena and creating these cases is extremely expensive and invasive. I mean, hand in time, I had thousands of hours of my life lost on this and millions of dollars spent in legal fees, I imagine, obviously also hamstringing the product roadmap. I assumed he wanted to do this for a long time, and that was kind of why you had this weird labs foundation split. So it's like there's sort of this in between where it's like the act of not even really enforcement can still ruin these companies. So I think it's an extremely sick move by Uniswap. Honestly. I think in the back of my mind, I thought maybe there's a chance that there's sort of an opportunity to double dip a little bit, where it's like, okay, you can have the labs and it can generate profit and can go public or something, and you can also have the token. But I think, actually, again, I'm hoping this is the start of a meta where, hey, if Uniswap can do it, maybe I can do it. And we see more teams sort of moving towards, you know, unifying these two different shareholders.

[Robert]

Yeah, I think this is the start of a new meta, frankly. I think people were waiting for Uniswap as a standard bearer for a long time. You know, I think there's, like, three different aspects to this story, and they're all incredibly important. You know, one is they're writing, I think, the biggest wrong that has existed for the longest time. The uni token itself was, in a lot of ways, cannibalized by Uniswap Labs, the company. Uniswap Labs, the company was generating a lot of fees from the interfaces, and the token was earning, generating nothing. The token was pointless, very candidly. Right. The token had basically no point. It was a meme token associated with Uniswap protocol. This is the biggest conflict of interest that existed. And they are writing that wrong. Right. They're acknowledging the fact that, like, there was this weird divide between the two. There shouldn't be. Right. I think something should either be a protocol that's entirely token driven, or it should be a company that doesn't have a token. They went down the route of having both, and there was always questions about where value accrued, how it would accrue, how it worked, what the different roles were. Those questions are over, like they're put to bed. And I think that's an incredible victory. Right. I wish it never happened in the first place, but they are righting that wrong. Second, I think this is going to directly lead to an improved economic model for projects.

[Tarun]

Right.

[Robert]

If Uniswap's not afraid to do this the right way. Your point? No one's going to be. I think we're going to see this being the inflection point and a catalyst for a lot of experimentation in the same way that Defi Summer was where it was like, oh, okay, there's a new model. Like, everyone, let's try, like, offshoots of this. Let's see what we can tweak. What can we improve? How do we do it differently? With Uniswap going to a revenue token, I think a lot of other teams are going to be inspired. And lastly, there's the legal lawfare side of this that they're addressing. And this is overdue. I mean, a lot of these stories came out at the end of the Gensler term, like back in when Uniswap was served and all of these things. It's no surprise. But I think this also is just a testament to the fact that the Lawfare era against Defi protocols ended a long time ago. Right. It ended long enough ago that Uniswap had a gear to basically plan for this moment and turn it on.

[Tarun]

Right.

[Robert]

Because it's not an overnight thing. They're not just like, flipping the switch. I don't think they really had the pieces together a year ago. I think they basically, when the Lawfare ended, they were able to sort of think clearly and plan and set in motion this execution of what the token should be. And up until that point, they were persecuted, right? Like, very flat out. Like, you know, whether it's Amanda Fisher or whoever, you know, from that era of the sec, Uniswap as a company was unfairly and deliberately targeted in a vindictive manner. And it was chilling for Uniswap. This is something that they might have done years ago had it not been for a campaign of Lawfare being waged against them. And honestly, it probably should have happened years ago. Right. I'm relieved that it's happening now. I think everyone who's a developer, everyone who's an investor, everyone who's a user should say, better late than never and let this be the beginning of Act 2 in a lot of ways of defi tokenomics in a post Gensler era. But I think this is going to open the door to a lot more positive effects that are unforeseen.

[Aseev]

That was incredibly well said, Robert. And especially as one of the DeFi OGs, or maybe even the DeFi OG, it means it's especially powerful coming from you.

[Robert]

I have tremendous respect for them doing this. I view this as just such a major milestone that everybody should celebrate totally.

[Aseev]

This was one of the things, I mean, obviously everybody in the space loves Uniswap because they're just such the apotheosis of what makes crypto, Crypto, what makes Defi so special. They're the undertime. That's right. That's right. And they fought the fight for Defi against Gensler very nobly. And I think Hayden has always been one of these just luminaries in the space that has really always, again, been a great representative for the industry. That said, this was the one thing I was always critical of Uniswap for. And it's kind of like the original sin of having a token while also having a company and not making it clear that everyone's rowing in the same direction. And it's one of the things that I have been personally, because we work with a lot of startups, we invest in a lot of companies, and they saw what Uniswap did and they said, well, we should do that, too. And very often I was the only person in the room telling them, do not do that. It is a mistake. You will eventually have a conflict between your company and your token. And the right answer, everyone knows the right answer is, the right answer is there's one asset and we're all unified. All investors, whether they hold the token or whether they hold the stock, unified. They're all unified. Unified in favor of one asset. And if that's not the case, you're going to get conflicts of interest, you're going to get drama, you're going to get people working at odds with each other, and it's just the wrong answer. And if it's the wrong answer, you shouldn't do it. And so I've managed to talk some people out of this, but now that Uniswap has finally combined the two and gotten to that right answer that we all kind of knew was the right answer in the end. And look, I get it. There was obviously an enormous amount of regulatory pressure on them. And it's easy to say when you're sitting in the stands, it's a Lot harder to say when you've got the barrel of the gun of the executive branch pointed at your head, which is what Uniswap, which is the position uniswap was in, because they are the biggest protocol in defi and the most obvious target for many, many years. So respect to them for having gotten to the right answer and now showing a way for everybody in the space that this is the way the protocols ought to be run is regardless of whether or not you've raised venture capital or whether or not you have the ability to monetize on different layers of the stack, the value should go to a single asset. If you're raising stock, great money can go to the stock. If you have a token, value should go to the token. But you should not try to do both because it's a recipe for disaster.

[Robert]

Right? And I think they're going to excel at all the value goes to the token. It's a very simple capital structure. I think if every project has a very simple structure where it's all the value goes to the token, then everybody's going to be well served. I guarantee you at some point complexity is going to be introduced to, not, not. I'm not speaking about Uniswap. I'm thinking about just generally in the token space. And we're going to see conflicts of interest emerge again. Okay, it's going to be slightly different and I'll take a different structure. But if you look at capital markets in traditional finance, right, you have equity holders, equity holders look like the token holders, and then you have bondholders, and they fight and they try to undermine each other and they try to steal value from each other and they, they fight within one project's like, economic structure. We'll see that as well, right? We'll see. Even when all the value accrues to the token, we're going to see projects have other sort of value leakage or competition emerge. We'll see projects where all the value accrues to the token also issue some sort of debt. And then at some point there's going to be some conflict that does emerge again. Or we'll see a project with, you know, call it a partnership with another project to exchange value. And there's going to be conflicts that emerge and it's going to get messy. But at least we can start with a consistent and simple framework for how projects think about the economics of a crypto application or system, which is as simple as it gets. Which is it does a bunch of things, it makes money, that value flows to the token holders. Everybody's happy.

[Tom]

I would also say props to Miles Jennings from Andrew Eason for, I think, the putting out the duna, which was obviously instrumental in, I think, helping this happen. I think I was originally kind of critical. It was like, it's easy to put out some, like, new legal theory, but it's like, you know, why don't you dog food it? Like, why don't you invest in some dunas? Why don't you pour codes to be dunas? And they did. And it worked, apparently. Or so far. So I'll take my.

[Aseev]

Which one is the duna?

[Tom]

So Uniswap converted to the Dooney, which is a duna. Maybe a few months ago, Uniswap foundation.

[Aseev]

Converted to a duna.

[Tom]

I don't know which one because.

[Aseev]

Because totally.

[Tarun]

I think this is why. Yes, that's. That's, like, kind of why I was confused, because I'm not sure this actually happened as the. We should just get Miles as a guest.

[Robert]

Yeah, we should have him as a guest no matter what happened.

[Tarun]

Because honestly, the blog post did not specify this, and. Except it said the. Everyone from foundation is joining labs. And so that makes it sound like Labs still is the surviving entity, but then foundation was supposed to be the dune. So, like, I, I, I, I.

[Robert]

Maybe there's a contracting agreement somehow where there is a duna, and everyone works for labs and provides services to the duna.

[Aseev]

All right, let's not speculate on corporate structuring of nonprofit.

[Tarun]

This is. This is kind of why I'm like, I don't know. That was the. That was the only surprising thing where I was like, yeah, how does this work?

[Aseev]

Yeah, yeah. I don't think they acquired a nonprofit. That's probably not the way that they structured this. But we should. We should get Miles on the show at some point. I think it'd be a great guest.

[Robert]

I agree.

[Aseev]

Okay. Well, so speaking of the legal side, one of the other big stories this week has been the ongoing trial of low Carb Crusader. Low carb crusader, of course, being the MEV bot run by these two brothers, the Perer Buen brothers, these two MIT grads, very sharp sort of MEV sharps that were trading on chain. They famously had this sandwich attack where they sandwich attacked sandwich attackers by creating these fake coins that essentially would cause Sandwich Attack bots to lose a lot of money. They end up getting indicted by the DOJ for this MEV exploit that they did, which involved them kind of masquerading as a validator. I think that Was part of the way that the DOJ framed it was that they pretended to be validators when they were actually these evil honey potters. And they ended up causing these people to lose a lot of money who were otherwise running sandwich pots. So the bot made about $25 million in 12 seconds. They were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. And it looks like they ended up having a hung jury. So the defense was basically saying, look, there's no victim. The victims did not complain. Not there's no victims, but the victims did not complain. Everything was transparent on chain. But this is not a crime. This is not us going and victimizing these people. These are just, you know, they're sophisticated players kind of hitting each other. It's kind of like when you have these, what is it like bond market vigilantes that are going out kind of tricking each other with bond covenants that they're reading better than each other. This is that kind of stuff. This is grown up stuff. These are sophisticated players. If my bot beat their bot, that's nobody else's business. They shouldn't have been out there if they didn't know what their bots were doing. And the prosecution said, no, these people were exploiting the mempool. They were also searching on Google about statute of limitations and about prisons and what prison is like or something like that, what minimum security prisons are like this kind of. By the way, guys, if you're running MEV bots or doing anything questionable, never ever Google what prison is like because it's going to show up in your trial. Just top tip, maybe ask a friend instead of googling it. Anyway, so the trial ended up, it seems, legal advice.

[Tarun]

No, I'm kidding.

[Aseev]

This is the only legal advice I'll give on the show. So multiple jurors ended in tears, proclaimed that they had multiple nights of insomnia because they could not decide based on the evidence in this trial. To be clear, the trial was extremely complex. A lot of stuff about PBS and MEV and flashbots and all this stuff that I'm sure none of these jurors have any idea what the hell's going on. Anyway, they were deadlocked. After three days, the judge decided these jurors are not going to reach a verdict and declared a mistrial. The DOJ announced that they want to retry the case. So a mistrial. For those who are unclear on how jurisprudence works in criminal trials, a mistrial basically means that jury cannot make a decision. Jury has to be unanimous to indict somebody on criminal Charges in a mistrial. That means that jury was split. It was not an acquittal nor a conviction. The prosecutor can decide to go at it again. And it looks like the prosecutors did decide that. We're going to run it back, which would mean a new trial in February. Now the counsel for the boys is trying to have it dismissed on what's called a Rule 29 hearing, which is basically like, hey, I think even in the facts pled. This should not be a guilty verdict. But this is seen by many people as being one of these big is code law cases and kind of the inverse of the tornado cash case. So curious to get your guys reactions to what we're seeing here with this hung jury and maybe the kind of prosecutors coming at it for a second go.

[Robert]

I haven't followed the case. And even if I did, all this MEV sandwich stuff is above my intellect, above my level. So I'll leave it to the rest.

[Aseev]

What do you think the right answer is? What do you think the right answer is? Just off your gut.

[Robert]

I actually haven't followed this case at all. I don't really know the details of it that well. So I leave it to you.

[Aseev]

You are. Neither did the jurors. So I mean, it made them cry.

[Robert]

And it made their heads explode. So I'm in their camp.

[Aseev]

Okay, Major, Major.

[Tom]

It was crazy because like, you know, this is obviously if you just pick 12 people off the street, there's like zero chance to understand anything. But I feel like for this case they were talking about. Oh no. We selected these jurors very carefully. Over half of them have like master's degrees and like, still it was.

[Robert]

You ended up with a hunger MEV attack. Yeah, exactly.

[Tom]

Yeah.

[Tarun]

So I. I guess I have more of a direct connection to this case. I know James quite well for many years. Like four or five years at least. No, five or six years. Who's one of the defendants? I also know the person who referred the case to the U.S. what? Who is the person who was sandwiched the. The victim.

[Aseev]

Oh wow.

[Robert]

You should be on the jury's. Rune, you're like the perfect juror.

[Tarun]

I would be biased though.

[Aseev]

Yeah. You can't be on the jury if you know the defendant. Yeah, that's not.

[Tarun]

Actually the other thing is the person who referred the case, who is a non US national and was trying to get me in a civil case, they were going to sue under to be like expert witness, which I declined. So basically I would say that person is quite sophisticated. And you know, if you're Making this argument.

[Aseev]

One of the MeV bots that got sandwich.

[Tarun]

Yeah. So basically, basically, basically, you know a sandwich attack, right? Is like, I see an order, let's suppose it's a buy order, but the person didn't put. You know, when you're used to trading on an order book, you might say, okay, I want to put, I want to buy one unit at $1 $1 unit $1.01 and two units at $1 2. Or sorry, flip that. Two units at $1 unit, $1.01. Now imagine if you make an order where you say I'll take any price, I don't care, just get me three units, right? And so someone could front run you by basically pushing up the price. Then your three units execute, then they sell backwards. And that's what a sandwich attack is. And it has to do with the user not picking the right limits. And so there are people who do sandwich attacks. And basically what someone else realized was actually if I bundle all their sandwiches and reorder them in the right way, which James and them realized, I could sandwich the sandwichers and then take all their profit plus a little more from choosing the ordering. So it was sort of like a smarter sandwich attacker sandwiching a less smart sandwich attacker. But the interesting thing is the less smart sandwich attacker had a lot more capital and so that's sort of where the losses kind of came for them, I would say. It's actually kind of hard for me to know whether I consider this right or wrong because it reminds me of the same way that spoofing has a different definition in commodities markets versus equities markets. And in some ways this has spoofing regulation in normal SEC and CFTC world is sort of the analog of what a sandwich attack regulation might look like. At least that's the closest thing I can think of. And I don't know which side you count this on of commodity versus security if you're going to just fit the square peg into the round hole. I don't know what that looks like. I think in a world of permissionless transactions, all is fair in love and war and someone lost. But I do kind of get the idea that this is extra protocol in the sense that Ethereum's consensus rules do not give you any guarantee on this. Right? But the MEV auction sort of gives you some weaker guarantee on this. So like, is that bad? I think at the end of the day, you know, like the crying jurors, it's a question where there's clearly a victim and there's clearly Someone who performed the actions, but it's not clear if the victim and the person who performed the actions under it's not zero sum between them in some weird way.

[Aseev]

Did the victim testify?

[Tarun]

No.

[Aseev]

So they haven't even seen who the victims are. They just know theoretically that they're victims.

[Tarun]

Yes, but basically the permissioned aspect of Ethereum transaction submission, which is how they figured out who the samatures were, is that they're so in, in in MEV transactions there's this notion of a relayer and the relayer takes the validator who won the block and then they take a block that's formed with all the MEV transaction and they send it to them. If the relayer somehow, their identity has somehow been used before, whether it's by an IP address, they didn't hide their identity or the person submitting the block to the relayer didn't hide their identity, well then I can go to the relayer and ask who sent that. And the relayer, you know, that's like an on chain, you can find out who the relayer was. So basically there is this argument that like some of the MEV supply chain is like just centralized enough that this is not the decentralized protocol's fault, which I think was like if the prosecutors weren't kind of probably needed expert witnesses or something, prosecutors weren't kind of making deft arguments and more making these technical arguments. I actually think there is a kind of this case that like this, this thing is outside the rules of Ethereum and so it's not really permissionless whatever. But I don't know, I read the prosecution transcript and it sounded moronic to me and I was like, wow, no one talked to these guys before. And I'm kind of happy for it because I do still think there's something.

[Aseev]

You might be the person to talk to them. Wasn't it like how are they going to.

[Tarun]

I think there's something smart though about solving the optimization problem they solved to get to the right ordering. That was very, it was very clever.

[Aseev]

Clearly it was very clever. I think the answer here is that clearly these guys should be acquitted. Because if you had asked me, or if you had asked a reasonable person, is sandwiching sandwich attackers illegal under criminal law? I think you probably get different answers, right? Some people will say yeah, obviously, or some people say no, obviously not. And if it's not obvious then it should not be criminal. That's the rule of lenity, which is that if a person of ordinary intelligence cannot understand whether something is illegal or not, then if the law is not clear, then you should not. You should not give criminal charges to anybody. And if you feel like, hey, this kind of behavior should be illegal, then go to Congress, get Congress to pass a law and make that law really, really clear about what kind of behavior is legal as opposed to illegal. Now, for a civil suit, it's a different story. Right. If you want to go sue this person for damages and say, hey, this person intentionally harmed me, that's all well and good, fine. I think that's perfectly fair. And maybe they'd settle somewhere halfway, who knows? But the idea like, these guys should be on criminal trial for something that even the prosecution kind of doesn't totally understand and the jurors definitely understand.

[Tarun]

I know if you read the. Yeah, yeah. I don't think the prosecution presented a very good case, to be honest.

[Aseev]

Yeah, it's just like this kind of thing. It's like, look, it's totally understandable that, like, look, there's bad stuff that happens in crypto. There are absolutely people who are out there to hurt other people and who are breaking the rules and who should be put in jail. I think that is a big part of the role for these agencies. For the DoJ, which has gone after frauds and crime rings and Ponzi schemes and all this sort of stuff, which is very, very important. I think that's great. It's also true of the sec. The sec, even under the Gensler regime, was going after frauds and going after these people who are really out there to harm other people and lie about what they're doing. And I think that's really important. It's really valuable to police that. But this is not either of those two.

[Tarun]

By the way, one reason I brought up the spoofing laws is the spoofing laws don't impact your retail trader or average trader. They really are laws protecting market makers against one another or not. Which is why I think they're qualitatively the most similar thing to this, but it's also not clear that they apply. So that's another kind of point in your argument.

[Aseev]

Yeah, exactly. It's like when it's not clear, the answer almost always is that you're not supposed to be indicting these kinds of cases.

[Tarun]

But it's also, I do know the person who is sandwiched really was pushing to get this case through it. So I do think it's a little funny that the US Prosecuted this case on behalf of a foreign national.

[Aseev]

That part, to me, what is their.

[Tarun]

Nationality I won't dox.

[Aseev]

But, you know, if they brought this case and put some people in prison, they can just be anonymous like that. How is that okay? Shouldn't you be able to face your accuser?

[Tarun]

European. European. That's what I'll say.

[Aseev]

European. That's it.

[Tarun]

Yes.

[Aseev]

That seems kind of fucked up if they can't actually face the principal.

[Tarun]

Well, I just think it's like kind of weird the referral came.

[Aseev]

Isn't that also the principle of criminal law is your ability to face your accuser?

[Tarun]

Yeah, well, the thing. The thing. No, no, no, no. But the point is that the accuser, instead of doing the civil case, which I think they found would have like, low chance, decided to just try to push governments to go.

[Aseev]

Right. Which is kind of bullshit, right? Like, because, like, well, I guess the.

[Robert]

Accuser is the government. Right? The accuser is the prosecutor. The acc. This other person who's the victim.

[Tarun]

You don't have to write, but the victim is trying to push the prosecutor. And that was very clear in this case because they started trying civil and then they kind of.

[Aseev]

Yeah, I mean, obviously every criminal case is brought by the government. Right. It's not brought by a third party. But in general, in criminal cases, you have the right to face your accuser. The accuser cannot just say like, oh, I don't want to testify because that seems unpleasant. But because it's the blockchain, you can say like, well, I don't need testimony from the accuser because it's all on the blockchain. I don't know. So weird case all around. It just gives me bad vibes.

[Tarun]

Yeah. I also just didn't think it was like if you told me someone made a scam token and then owned 80% of the supply and rugged someone. I've seen zero cases of that form prosecuted. Why are we not prosecuting that?

[Aseev]

That's very well said. Yeah. There's so many bad things that have happened in crypto over the last like two years. Why this? You know? But.

[Robert]

All right, so just for the record, I quickly chat GPT this because none of the four of us are lawyers. So when it comes to facing your accuser, this comes from the sixth amendment. But really what that means is you have the right to be present when witnesses testify and you have the right to cross examine those witnesses.

[Aseev]

Right.

[Robert]

So if somebody instigated a criminal suit, it doesn't mean that you have the right to interrogate them, I guess.

[Aseev]

Right. So obviously if they're not actually there in the documents and like they didn't get a quote.

[Robert]

Yeah, I mean, it means you can cross examine the documents, what this means.

[Aseev]

Right, Right, right. Anyway. Okay. Well, I think we're up on time, so we got to wrap, but we will be back next week. Thank you, everybody. Stay strong out there and we'll be. We'll be back soon. It.