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The Chopping Block: Zcash +400%, Tempo’s $500M Shock, EF Pay Firestorm & AWS/Base Meltdown feat. Mert - Ep. 929
01:00:04
Mert (Helius) defends Zcash’s +400% “encrypted Bitcoin” surge and clashes with Bitcoin maxis. We unpack Tempo’s $500M raise and Dankrad’s EF exit, Mert’s USD Manlet pivot (USDT vs USDC on Solana), and the AWS/Base outage—what “decentralized” should really mean.
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- [00:00]
Aseeb
And part of that is the fact that ZCAshers have just been sitting in a dumpster for the last like five years where like the price action has just been going nowhere. It's been like slowly bleeding down and all of a sudden there's this, you know, opening of a meadow and, you know, trumpets blaring and light shining on you and all of a sudden, oh, zcash is the best trade in crypto. I can understand why it feels threatening to a bitcoiner to have zcash have that be the philosophy behind this price movement.
- [00:29]
Mert
Not a dividend.
- [00:30]
Tom
It's a tale of two Kwan.
- [00:31]
Aseeb
Now, losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
- [00:34]
Tom
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
- [00:36]
Aseeb
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.
- [00:39]
Robert
Alec Eth is the ultimate defi Protocols are the antidote to this problem.
- [00:45]
Aseeb
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks the 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.
- [00:54]
Tom
Hello everyone.
- [00:56]
Aseeb
Next we've got Robert the crypto connoisseur and czar of super state. He is currently cosplaying as Tarun, so he is late, but he will be rolling in shortly. Joining us today we've got special guest Mert, the main manlet at Helios. Welcome back, Mert.
- [01:10]
Mert
Hello.
- [01:11]
Aseeb
Hello.
- [01:11]
Mert
Yes, thank you.
- [01:13]
Aseeb
Yes. And I am Aseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping blocks at XYZ for more disclosures. So, Mert, you very generously offered to come on the show because I think last episode we were talking about the crazy run up in zcash and I think the boys were saying that they had some skepticism about how organic and or orchestrated this run up in zcash was or how fundamentals driven it is, let's say. And you did not seem to take to that too kindly. So we thank you for your very generous offer to come on the show and to bash our heads in. I think last time you came on, I think this was like at it was in person that we did a podcast in Dubai. It was in Dubai.
- [01:56]
Mert
Singapore or Dubai?
- [01:57]
Aseeb
It was in Singapore. It was in Singapore. It was Singapore. That's right. And I think at that time I called you the mad dog of Solana. Because anytime anybody is wrong about Solana, you would just come at them like a ghost. And it does feel like you have softened, but the zcash thing now has become your new animating thing that you're haunting people over. Talk to me about how you think about that.
- [02:20]
Mert
Yeah, it's essentially the meme, not now, babe, somebody's wrong on the Internet. It's basically just my personality in some sense. But, yeah, I certainly softened up on Solana specifically. And one reason is just the physics of it, which is to say, as you get more successful as an ecosystem, it starts to look more and more ridiculous to hunch down, basically. And I was helping Solana much more when they were the underdogs. But once you're already near the top, I'm not going to say they're the top of everything. It starts to look like you're bullying people, literally. And also, I feel like a lot of the things that we said for Solana, like, for example, high volume fees actually adding up to making a lot of revenue for the chain, that was controversial in 2022 for some reason, but then we proved out that it does work, at least, you know, I don't know about the future, but it did work for this year and like a year and a half now. And so there's not that much left to disagree on, so to say, obviously there's Mev and then you won, so.
- [03:26]
Tom
There'S no more fighting is what you're saying. It's over.
- [03:29]
Mert
I don't think we want it all.
- [03:30]
Aseeb
You're basically Napoleon. You've, like, united all of the he.
- [03:33]
Tom
We. There are no more worlds to conquer.
- [03:35]
Aseeb
Yeah, Yeah.
- [03:36]
Mert
I would say it's bought us some time of peace. It's a momentary time of peace after a good showing. Okay, now with zcash, this one's pretty. I just. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons for why I started talking more about it. I've actually been talking about it since last ecc. Now, obviously, I wasn't talking about it as much, but I have been talking about it and obviously people don't necessarily pay attention unless the price goes up, in which case they need to rationalize what happened. And obviously when the price did go up, I did jump on the momentum to, like, be like, this is the time to actually spread the word around privacy. So, like, certainly there's a lot of speculation around it and flows and there's traders involved in all these different things. So, you know, nothing in crypto is like, you know, you have Ben Graham on the corner there just doing value investing. Based on fundamentals. It's always a very chaotic motion of like flows and speculation and discussion. But one thing that that brought out was just how. How little people knew about, you know, how privacy works, how shilla transactions work, where anonymity set is. And like, then I basically started realizing, okay, we are really behind on this as an industry. I mean, people didn't even know that stables can be frozen, like central, central issued stables. Like, there's just so much that people who are like knowledgeable in crypto, like you guys know that we not even realizing how little the new folks know. And so like, you know, that combined with price action and all these different things kind of just added up. That makes sense.
- [05:19]
Aseeb
That does make sense. So, I mean, just to give some context to the viewers, so right now, this month, Zcash is the number one token by price performance. It's rocketed up something like 400% over the last 30 days. Crazy price movement. Now there's been this little bit of a civil war breaking out among OG bitcoiners who are now seemingly threatened or shitting on the zcash movement or claiming that it's being orchestrated, that this is a coordinated token pump quote, unquote. I think Lyn Alden said, don't become exit liquidity for coordinated token pumps. You've got ANSEM now jumping into the fray. You've got Luke Dash Jr. Jumping into the fray. There's a lot of, for some reason, you seem to have now pissed off the bitcoin crowd. And it's kind of mostly you and Naval who are on the other side pushing the Zcash story as well as the Zcash OGs. But very clearly their voice is not nearly as powerful with the new generation of crypto investors. As you said, you know, a lot of the Zcash OGs, they've been around since, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017, and their audience is a little more oldies, you know, a little more people like us who follow them. Whereas this new generation of the folks who really have, you know, size, for lack of a better term, it's really kind of yourself Naval and some of these newer influencers like Ansom, who are driving a lot of these flows, it seems. How. How do you think about this bitcoiner backlash and how do you interpret it?
- [06:48]
Mert
Well, to be clear, I'm also getting old. I'm going to turn 30 soon. So that's not great.
- [06:54]
Aseeb
What? 30 is old? Oh, geez, Come on, man. Don't do that to us.
- [06:59]
Mert
In crypto, it's it's not great. My employees call me Encore Eddie. So the bitcoin thing is kind of interesting in that I wasn't necessarily expecting it, to be honest. Now there's, of course, whenever you're talking about a blockchain, you don't want to generalize to every single person on that chain. There's different. Different groups and segments of. Of population, so to speak. And I would say, for example, like, the guys like UDI are maybe making fun of zcash in like a joking way, but they're not, like, against it fundamentally. They have better things to do. The interesting thing with the bitcoin people is that they do seem a bit more threatened than I would have figured. I think it might be stemming from the fact that, you know, it was framed in a way, as, you know, this is encrypted bitcoin, right? Like, hey, look at all these people encrypting their bitcoins, which was basically just people swapping bitcoin to Zach via near intents. Right? And I think that really started being pissing some of them off. Now, I'm not sure why. Like, it seems logically or at least inconsistent on a principles level, which is to say you had all these literal shitters and scams and papers go up to billions of dollars and they didn't say anything about those. But the one project where it's literally like, very similar to bitcoin in terms of tokenomics, and it's just encrypts it via ZK and that makes it private. And then like, even Hal and then like Satoshi have quotes about like, how they wanted to do this. That's the one project you choose to, like, get angry at. That just seems weird to me. And then, you know, then. Then there's the, you know, exit liquidity, pump and dump thing. And it's like, okay to. To calm myself down a little bit. That part like, really makes me angry because it's like, okay, what chain am I on? Okay, I'm on Solana. I run most of the infrastructure. You know, I have a big following. It would be infinitely easier to pump and dump literally any other scheme or token than to mark it by a proof of work token that has been distributed for eight years where everybody's down horrendous. Like, it just. And by the way, you can go to jail for writing privacy code, right? As you guys know, with like, some of the.
- [09:23]
Aseeb
Very well. Right, that's right.
- [09:24]
Mert
There is no more negative ev. I mean, I'm sure there are some more negative EV plays to do. But like, with zcash, it's about as low as it gets. I can pull a tempo, and I don't think I would be able to raise as much as them, but I can just talk about, oh, I'm going to fork Solana and whatnot and raise a pretty big round. And it's like. It's just not about that. Right. It's about like.
- [09:49]
Aseeb
So if I could summarize, you basically saying, look, if I want to pump and dump, it's going to be the most legendary pump and dump you fools have ever seen. That's what I'm getting from you right now. That's the energy. Is that a good summary?
- [10:01]
Mert
I would say, yeah, if that was my main goal. There are way easier ways and more effective ways and less visible ways than to just buy the token.
- [10:10]
Aseeb
Yeah. Let me just say, look, I don't think anybody seriously thinks that MERT or Naval is pumping, dumping a token. I think there is a little bit of you guys. The rhetoric that's being used around zcash is now stepping into the lane of bitcoiners. And there's of course, this contradiction at the heart of bitcoin is that now all the bitcoiners are talking about ETFs and BlackRock buying their bags. When, of course, the animating philosophy behind bitcoiners is this cypherpunk. Screw the banks, screw the financial institutions. So there's a contradiction now embedded in this market that's becoming increasingly connected with TradFi. And Zcash is not that. Zcash is actually that kind of pure love of the game cypherpunk, pristine ethos. And part of that is the fact that ZCAshers have just been sitting in a dumpster for the last, like, five years where, like, the price action has just been going nowhere. It's been like slowly bleeding down. And all of a sudden there's this opening of a meadow and, you know, trumpets blaring and light shining on you, and all of a sudden, oh, zcash is the best trade in crypto. So it does. I can understand why it feels threatening to a bitcoiner to have zcash have that be the philosophy behind this price movement when bitcoin now has kind of sullied its claim to being this kind of pure cypherpunk coin. Not to say that bitcoin is captured or something like that, but it's just.
- [11:36]
Robert
How has bitcoin sullied it?
- [11:38]
Aseeb
Not that bitcoin sullied it, but like all the bitcoin influencers, all they talk about now is ETFs, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's obviously what, at the margin, is impacting the price of bitcoin. Or they talk about Michael Saylor buying bitcoin in a public company. This is what you talk about if you're a bitcoin influencer now, which is just very different than what it was like when I first came in this industry. That's not what bitcoiners talked about. They talked about the sovereign individual and the right to privacy and all this stuff. They don't talk about that anymore.
- [12:08]
Robert
Well, they always talked about price, and they always talked about price because that was the stimulus for adoption through this, like, social. Social consensus around, like, what is a good cryptographic asset. Right. So I don't think it's actually that different. I think, you know, bitcoin is almost not unique in the fact that there's reflexivity to it. And it's always been based on this, and it's always been this, like, positive, you know, feedback loop of price leads to attention, leads to adoption, leads to price, leads to attention, leads to adoption. And so the ETFs and all of that is just the latest chapter in this reflexivity narrative. But I don't even think it's that fundamentally different than what it's been going back to 2011.
- [12:58]
Aseeb
I'm not arguing it's fundamentally different, but the question we're trying to answer is why are bitcoiners uniquely offended by zcash going up, as opposed to hashgraph or whatever, whatever random stuff is pumping on any given day?
- [13:11]
Tom
I think when the critique is valid, that's when it stings. It's very much like, methinks the lady doth protest too much. I mean, to Mert's point, Satoshi literally wrote like, oh, yeah, it would be great to do ZK proofs over the entire chain, but I just don't think it's technically possible. And it's like, well, they did it and it exists and it must sting a little bit and not have that be part of bitcoin. I think various reasons for that, but it does kind of speak to the way the culture has evolved over 10 years, which is like, you didn't get all the cool features and things that were supposed to be part of it, and they just kind of got pushed to other ecosystems that now people call them shitcoins.
- [13:46]
Mert
I just don't quite understand as a $3 trillion asset, almost like the mentality of the pie Being this fixed, like Zcash is like a $3 billion asset. Like, it's quite a bit smaller now. Oh, okay, cool. But like, it's just, you don't have to just pick one or the other, right? You don't have to just be like, oh, well, I'm doing zcash, so fuck Bitcoin. Like, that's not how it works. Like, I hold both. And I think most sensible people who, like, you know, if you are very low risk tolerance, you know, relatively speaking for crypto, then you're probably going to just hold bitcoin. If you have a slightly higher risk tolerance but you actually believe in the ideals, then you might also add zcash. But like, it's not like you must sacrifice one for the other. Like, that's just not a dichotomy that exists in my view.
- [14:34]
Aseeb
Fair enough. All right, so let's shift gears from one drama to another drama that's animating crypto. Twitter. So there was a recent announcement of Tempo, the blockchain that's incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, the VC firm, that there is a fundraise that they conducted at a $5 billion valuation. $500 million they raised, led by Thrive and Green Oaks Capital, Sequoia, Ribbit Capital and Svangel all participated. Apparently Stripe and Paradigm did not invest in the round, but of course they already owned a large chunk of this chain from their prior investment. Where I think they co led a seed round or something is the way that it was framed. Now this fundraise, one of the biggest fundraises that we have seen. This is larger than, you know, the Monad fundraise is larger than almost any L1 that I have seen for a pre launch layer one fundraise. That being said, this is obviously a very different kind of chain than any of the other chains aforementioned. This is a chain that's nominally incubated by Stripe, which is one of the largest fintechs in the world. And of course, having Matt Huang at the helm of this thing, running it day to day, makes it a very different kind of beast than most of the other L1s that we've seen. So now there's been a lot of backlash against this fundraise and a lot of the backlash is coming from different places. But one of the pieces of backlash has been that this is quote, unquote maximizing for Tempo, not for Ethereum. And so you had RSA Ryan, Sean Adams from Bankless, you had Joe Lubin coming out and saying the same thing. Joe Lubin stated the goal of Paradigm and many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem. And then on top of that, after the fundraiser was announced, there was announcement that Dankrade, who of course is one of the key people at the Ethereum foundation and a longtime Ethereum researcher, he is joining Tempo. He's going to remain a research advisor, but he's going to be full time at Tempo. He said the real world moment is now with Tempo, that at Tempo's Ethereum values aligned and open source can now integrate back into Ethereum with innovations that are made at Tempo. Everybody was very upset that Dankrad was going on to Tempo. Many people claim that it was bearish for Ethereum. They called it a talent drain, a worry that corporate L1s are stealing from the commons in some way and that Ethereum is now on its way out. And this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum in some way seeing this talent exodus going to a chain like Tempo. Lastly, there was a letter that was published seemingly in response to this by Peter Zelagi, who was the head of development at Geth, I believe. I can't remember what his title was, but he was basically the guy who owned Geth for the last seven years. And Peter Zalaghi published a memo that he wrote to the EF leadership over a year ago. And in this letter he basically revealed that he felt that the Ethereum foundation at the time, of course the Ethereum foundation has turned over as of the beginning of this year, but as of the time he sent that letter, he felt that the Ethereum foundation was extremely political, that basically resources and decision making was very centered around Vitalik and his inner circle and his friends. That the fact that they were underpaying people very dramatically and not allowing them to take on any kind of other economic interests was naturally going to lead to this talent exodus. And lastly, he revealed that he had made 600k roughly in the six years that he'd been at the Ethereum foundation, meaning that he was paid very little for a developer of his stature compared to what most people expect developers with that kind of experience to make. And so this on the whole has led to all this big kerfuffle that Tempo seemingly has awakened within the Ethereum community about how Ethereum's relationship with both the Ethereum foundation and with these corporate chains ought to be conceived going forward. So want to get quick reactions? TEMPO FUNDRAISE ETHEREUM DRAMA what was your guys thoughts seeing all this play out?
- [18:21]
Robert
Congrats to Tempo on a great fundraise. I think if this were to trade today, just based on where everything else as an L1 is trading, given the backing strip, I think it trades on an FTV of 15 billion. You know, how much is going to be trading? You know, everyone releases a small portion of the float. But, like, if this were trading today, it would be over 5 billion. I think, objectively, given who's involved in how it's structured, it doesn't feel that expensive. So kudos to them for a $5 million fundraise, you know, bringing great people on board. Kudos. That's what you should be doing. And so I just want to say, well played.
- [19:03]
Aseeb
Well, there was a great tweet by. I think it was Conejo Capital who tweeted Paradigm. In addition to this fundraise, they ended up acquiring Ithaca, which was the Layer two startup that joined the Paradigm on.
- [19:15]
Robert
Acquiring Paradigm and marking up Paradigm.
- [19:19]
Aseeb
That's right. To fundraise by Paradigm, because, of course, Paradigm also invested into Tempo, which is an interesting. So there's a lot going on there. Tom, what was your reaction?
- [19:28]
Tom
This reminds me of there was some corporate chain that ended up building its own EVM or maybe building on Solana. There was some other drama over this summer. It was like some big company announced that they weren't going to be building an L2 or something, and then everyone got really mad.
- [19:47]
Aseeb
Was that Robinhood Chain?
- [19:49]
Tom
No, Robinhood Chain's an arbitrum.
- [19:51]
Aseeb
Oh, that's what they're an L2?
- [19:53]
Tom
Yeah. Gnomes.
- [19:54]
Aseeb
Yeah.
- [19:55]
Tom
Anyway, very, very similar thing where there's all this moralizing and hand wringing and it's like, no. I mean, the actual answer. This is a loser mentality. The actual answer is that clearly there's something not sufficiently good with the current offerings that they chose to go and build this thing. And you have to recognize that you're in a marketplace and you have competitors, and if your competitors are winning, you should take that as a lesson and figure out what you can be doing better. I think all the thing around Dankrad, it's like, what is the standard here? That he is not allowed to leave the EF and he's not allowed to go work at another block. That's obviously insane. And I think so much of it is this culture. I mean, he was kind of caught up in this weird EF culture war, and people were yelling at him and Twitter and he was defending himself, and it's like, yeah, I probably would not want to stick around and work there either. And so I think you really have to look inward and think about what can you do to make the culture and make the place a better place, place to work, versus just sort of finger wagging at these people that leave, which obviously going to happen at some point. And also, again, it's maybe more representative of Ethereum than Dankrad or something.
- [20:58]
Aseeb
Well, to fill in the backstory there. So dankrad and Justin Drake last year were named as advisors to Eigenlayer. And if you remember last year, there was all this hand wringing about, oh, is Eigenlayer capturing the Ethereum staking layer? Is this some kind of systemic risk? And they were chided very aggressively on Twitter as being somehow greedy and terrible people. And so Peter Zalaghi points this out in his letter that he wrote to the EF leadership that the backlash to the two of them going on and taking this advisorship basically was a message to everybody at the EF that either you can be Ethereum aligned or you can make money. And there is no doing both. Right. You sort of have to. It's a little bit like working for the church. You know, if you work for the church, like if you're getting rich, it's a scandal. Absolutely not. You either choose one or the other. Either you're in non profit land or you're in for profit land. And if you go from non profit land to for profit land, then you're also a terrible person. As you can see here. Like, there's just the insane degree of backlash to dankrad going over to Tempo. And to be clear, I think actually most of that is not at dankrad. It's mostly at Tempo, which is also interesting that, like, people don't seem to be mad at dankrad, but they're mad at Tempo for poaching him.
- [22:07]
Robert
How can you be mad at Tempo for hiring, like, good people? Like that makes no sense to me.
- [22:13]
Aseeb
I. Look, don't. Don't look at me. I didn't say anything. Mert, what's your. What's your reaction to this whole drama?
- [22:18]
Mert
Well, there's quite a few things there, but, like, maybe some summary of it is one. Yeah, I mean, there's. I don't understand how people can get mad at Tempo. They want to build their own thing and they want to hire the best talent. That's how it works. They're not gonna shoot themselves in the foot just so people on Twitter don't yell at them. If they are to do that, they're gonna fail. Okay, that's. That's Very obvious. I think I. I have some other thoughts on Tempo, which I wrote about a while ago, which I. I don't think payments chains are going to work as L1s. I do think they might work as L2s. I don't think they work as L1s. We can talk about that if it's interesting. But other than that, I think losing Dankrad is, like, huge. I like, I think it's like losing, like, Chevy Durant in some sense. Like, I think Dankrad was probably the main reason why I respected Ethereum, to be completely honest. You can see this in some of my posts where I'm like, glazing Ethereum sometimes and it's like basically just glazing Dankrad. Like, he would debate with Tolle and I was like, okay, this guy actually can debate with Tolly, which is not something I've seen too often because Totally just finds these weird technical loopholes all the time. And then, I mean, the thing that I was most shocked by, to be completely honest, was that Peter Guy getting 600k over 6 years, which I thought was insanity, right? The. The lead dev for the client making 100k per year. Like, I know he's European, but, like, there's got to be a limit to how absurd you get. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, his code is securing how many billions of dollars and he's getting what, zero percent of that in some sense? Like, I think that's just. I think that's just like whoever was doing that and organizing that organization to align incentives should not be able to run an organization again. Like, that is a colossal failure of leadership. I pay my. I think everybody on my team more than that. Like, that is. I just. That part is still by far the most shocking. And if people are being paid that way, then you obviously cannot blame them for leaving.
- [24:21]
Aseeb
So there's a quote in his letter where he says, to paraphrase Vitalik, quote, if someone's not complaining that they are paid too little, then they are paid too much.
- [24:29]
Mert
If somebody's not complaining they are paid too little, then they are paid too much.
- [24:33]
Aseeb
Yes. Basically meaning that everybody should be complaining they're paid too little. Otherwise, like, so clearly a lot of this was coming from Vitalik himself in that there is this. You know, it's ironic. And part of the reason why people found this so perverse is that of course Vitalik's a billionaire and he made enormous sums of money from. From his work at Ethereum.
- [24:53]
Mert
Well, I think he's like he's, he's like, pretty. I. I feel like Metallica is not. You don't want totally running foundation. You want like garage, basically. You know what I mean? Like, Vitalik doesn't even. I mean, he has like a few posts where it's like, yeah, I don't fly economy because, like, it's not a good deal for me. And it's like you have a billion or he flies economy, but he has a billion dollars and it's like kind of weird. Or like laundry. That's what he said. Yeah, yeah, like sometimes like, like he'll literally do the. And I think there was a tweet that went viral about doing laundry at the hotel, like not being worth it or something. And I was like, okay. Like he is, like, he's, he's literally just. His mind has to stay intellectually consistent with his principles, which is why he should not be in charge of running a business. Right? Or like running an organization where. Because nobody's. He's gonna have a very different value set than most of humans. You know what I mean? So like, you need, you need somebody to balance them out.
- [25:54]
Aseeb
And to be clear, Tamash has now come into the ef. From what many people were saying in the comments, the EF vibe has completely changed. Tamash has experience running engineering organizations. Vitalik, obviously, you know, he started Ethereum at whatever it was, 1718. So it's no surprise that he maybe made a lot of organizational mistakes. And he admits to that, that he did make organizational mistakes early on, trusting the wrong people. And it seems like there's probably also some cultural issues that were taking place at Ethereum. I remember actually when I first came in the industry, 2017, the first thing I thought that, okay, I should go work as an engineer at one of these organizations. And so actually, I don't think I've shared much about this, but the first year that I was in the industry, I'd left Airbnb, where I was working as a software engineer and decided to come work in crypto full time. And I interviewed at Coinbase, interviewed at Consensys, and I was thinking about interviewing at the EF because at that time I thought, oh, the EF is the most prestigious organization. Of course, Ethereum was the center of the universe at that time. But I had heard from somebody who worked at the EF that they just paid like shit and that it was really not a great place to work. And so I decided, okay, nevermind, it doesn't make sense to work there, even if it's Prestigious in some sense. And I came to realize, oh, it's prestigious. Like working at the Linux foundation is prestigious in that it's sort of a weird, wonky, kind of rainbows and unicorns kind of place to work. But it's not necessarily the place that is going to set you up for long term success. And I think it's very difficult for foundations to have that kind of organizational rigor. I think Solana foundation is probably at this point the gold standard of what a well run foundation looks like. In large part because of what Lilly has done. Coming in as a business person and realizing like, hey, you actually need to be really competitive. You need to think clearly about talent, you think about reporting lines, you think about OKRs and accountability and all this stuff. Whereas at the Theater foundation historically it was like Infinite Gardens and how, you know, sort of this vibes maxing approach to organization building which results in this. It's like so many years later and we, we all kind of knew from a distance that the EF was not the best run organization. But seeing the wheels coming off a little bit like this where you've got Peter Zalagi basically throwing everybody else under the bus because he stepped down a year ago or something, wasn't it? I think it was something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know what it is. What was the animating thing that made you decide like, yeah, you know what, screw everybody I worked with, I'm going to publish this letter. But it does seem like, man, he was nursing this, this frustration for a long, long time, which is, which is not good to see. So I do think it's a lesson to anybody running one of these organizations that look, we are past the religion phase of crypto. You cannot run an organization like this.
- [28:45]
Tom
Oh no, I would just. I also read Peter's letter and it reminded me of, I mean part of it is obviously you've got public critique and getting dogpile. I remember one time I had this tweet, this is maybe like four years ago, it was making like a cathedral in the bazaar reference, which is kind of these two different styles of organization and planning, like top down versus bottoms up. And it was like, you know, sometimes you want the cathedral and you actually end up getting geth. And then Peter I think saw it and chimed in, he's like, well, what if geth is the cathedral? And I was like, yeah, it was sort of a slight. Then I was like, oh shit, maybe I was part of this. I'm shitting on geth in public. But I think the point still stands, which is you end up selecting for a very strange group of people if you end up having your organization this way, with incentives structured this way. And maybe it works for things that can have a very long time horizon and they don't really exist in a market. They're intended to be purely research. But the fact is, as we've even seen with the TEPO thing, Ethereum is in a marketplace and it does have to be competitive and it is ultimately selling a product. And so I agree. I think under Tomash, it seems like things are moving in a much better direction. And who knows, maybe this is more opportunity for a reset. Even though I agree Denckrad's great.
- [29:54]
Aseeb
Well, okay. I want to engage with the strongest version of the critique that people are levying at Tempo, right? So what a lot of people are saying is that, look, when everybody was aligned, when everybody was like, yes, we all need to row in the same direction, because Ethereum stands for these values that the whole community can get behind when you have more and more corporations coming into the game. And in a way, this may be similar to what we saw with something like Linux, is that you've got the AWS of the world coming in and taking all these open source projects and monetizing them and making so much money hand over fist that it's kind of like crowding out the ability for these public goods to really become monetizable on their own. And it may well be that Tempo does just say, look, we're just going to outpay everybody in the EF because they're all people who know a lot about Ethereum and know a lot about GATH and know a lot about the evm. Why wouldn't that be a cause for concern?
- [30:45]
Robert
Because capitalism is always about hiring the best people and paying them the most amount of money and taking them from academia or taking them from places where there's an arbitrage to be had because they're under compensated.
- [30:57]
Aseeb
But this is a public good, right? I mean, that's the quintessential public good.
- [31:00]
Robert
But again, why would anyone mind that a public good is paying up, so to speak, right? Does anyone get mad when Facebook is overpaying for AI engineers? We sort of laugh at them. We're like, oh my God, you paid a billion dollars for an engineer? That's insane. I don't know. It's just the market at work. I don't think this is even that interesting is what the market should be.
- [31:23]
Aseeb
Obviously the single event. If it's Just one engineer got hired. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Obviously it's not that interesting, but I'm pointing more towards the principle because I want to steel man. The frustration that people feel or the fear that people feel. They're like, hey, now that these corporate chains are all raising a ton of money and they're all coming into this game, why wouldn't they just pick apart everybody who's working at the EF and pay them more than they're making you think they should, you think that's the optimal allocation of talent, is that everybody good at the EF goes and works at a corporate chain and gets paid way more.
- [31:51]
Mert
They should, they should pay wherever is most competitive and whichever wherever aligns best with their values. Right? You're not going to. Because what's the alternative? The alternative is central control in some sense, right? Like or shaming. Like these are not things that are long lasting or sustainable. This is also what I like, I'm going to, I'm going to just bring in Solana to this conversation about Solana, which is like, it's just like ruthlessly competitive. We just, it doesn't, there is no alignment on Solana. It's, it's more like you just have to compete or you just fall off and die. Like it's, you know, and some people might think, oh well, you know, like you can't build a public good that way. But like, you know, totally sole principle is that if you have permissionless competition at each layer of the stack, then you just let capitalism do its thing and like the free market picks the winners for each part of that stack until you have the best kind of holistic product. Otherwise you don't have this feedback to reality. And if you don't have that feedback to reality, then the system doesn't last anyway, right? Like it can't be any other way. It's like kind of the physics of the situation. Like otherwise you get what you get. People becoming bitter and resentful and then writing public letters about how much of a sheep ass you are in some sense, right? Like it's, it just doesn't work. Now what Ethereum should do is they should pay these people more. They should tell the story better, they should run the organization better, right? And like they do have a very strong social layer. And it's like, you know, use that, use some of the richer patrons, let's say so to speak, like the Joel Lubins of the world and just compete, right? Like you can't just cry about competing. Just compete and be better, win I.
- [33:29]
Tom
I mean, I agree. I think there is kind of this worry that you get sort of long term privatization of the public goods, right? If it's like, well, eventually it's almost sort of like Tempo is sort of dumping on the market in sense of crowding out any potential ability for anyone else to bid because they have these sort of corporate backing. And then it's like, okay, gradually it starts out open source and gradually, gradually, gradually starts to move indoors. But I think the kind of maybe, I mean you see this a little bit frankly what happened out with, played out in kind of AI land where it's like actually the best in class models aren't open source anymore. I think the maybe interesting undercurrent though is there is this kind of evergreen desire and push for open source from really good engineers. And so you still see, I mean OpenAI obviously released its own open source model a couple months ago and so it is still somewhat prestigious and there is this ethos of yeah, we should still be publishing open source and trying to make public goods. And even at these large corporates I think really talented engineers still see the prestige and have this sort of maybe philosophical desire to go and work on these areas. So maybe you don't get total sort of corporate monopoly at some point. But I mean I see why people are upset but the answer is not to finger wag, it's to be better.
- [34:45]
Aseeb
So I obviously mostly agree with you guys but I'm also sympathetic to the intuition that it's actually very important for society to have this religious priesthood that doesn't live within the market system and within Ethereum that was like the ef, right, for better, for worse. And maybe it wasn't so explicitly communicated but it was certainly there. And the norm enforcement that took place of hey, take Dankrad and Justin Drake who they were like hey, we want to get paid, we're going to go and take this advisorship with eigenlayer. And the immune response from the Ethereum community was overwhelming. And if that was Mert or whatever, somebody else, nobody would have given a shit. It'd be like oh yeah, whatever, of course Merck can get paid, he's in the private sector. But the idea that somebody who's, it's like the equivalent of someone in government taking a kickback or something. The fact that we understand that there are these different spheres with different rules is actually very important to upholding civil society. In crypto we have public goods. People talk all the time about oh, public goods funding and how do we maintain the commons and blah blah, blah. And so it does seem like there is some tension here. Like the fact that people are responding this way is not because they're sort of losers or they don't want to compete. It's because they understand, like, hey, there is something special about the people who are upholding the layer one. And it's certainly true and valid criticism of like, hey, pay more. Like you guys have the money, obviously they have a gigantic pile of eth. They can pay people more. But it's also probably true that like, you know, the Linux foundation or whatever is never going to pay people as much as, you know, Microsoft is going to pay them just because they literally don't have the resources. Because that's why they're called public goods problems. That's why there's this whole body of economics around how to solve public goods problems. So I don't have a great answer, but it does feel to me too simplistic to say we should just abolish the specialness that people feel about the ef that oh, the EF should just be like any other organization competing for talent and it should have the same rules as it does anywhere else. Anybody else at any other organization takes a advisorship, I wouldn't care. I don't think anybody else should care. I do think people should care if somebody at the EF goes and takes an advisorship with some company that's politically sensitive. I think it's right that people care and I think it's good that they continue to do so.
- [37:01]
Robert
Well, I view this from a really macro sense in that there will be different approaches in the Darwinian process of creating blockchains in a hyper competitive atmosphere. I think there will be chains that are religious in nature, right? Maybe that is Ethereum. Maybe there'll be some new chain that comes out that's even more religious in nature. It says we have to be double, double, triple pure, right? Everything will be tested and the Darwinian process will decide what people actually want or people care about or what people value. I don't know if the average user of a blockchain cares about how pure the developers are.
- [37:37]
Aseeb
Frankly.
- [37:38]
Robert
I don't know if the application developers really do. I don't know if the end users do. So I think it should be tried. I think someone should take it and run even further with it. Someone should make a blockchain that's like, you know, you know, we survive off of water and Soylent and like we only talk about our blockchain. We have no other hobbies, right? But I, I really don't fault anyone at play leaving Ethereum to go to another chain because they get paid more. I don't.
- [38:04]
Mert
Right.
- [38:05]
Robert
And if the market, once a super pure thing, it will be created.
- [38:10]
Aseeb
I think in a way though, Ethereum as a product has been pretty shit over the last few years. Right. So just objectively speaking, it's not the fastest blockchain, not the best ux. There's all these foot guns with the EVM and all this stuff and nevertheless it's managed to hold onto its position. Why is that? I think a big part of it is this special valence that Ethereum has because of the purity and the high priesthood and the smells and bells, so to speak. I do think that's doing something in the same way that the fact that the bitcoiners are really mad at zcash. Okay, that's absurd that that's happening, but it's also really important that that's happening. That's like part of the reason why Bitcoin is Bitcoin because it has this religious contingency that Barachain doesn't have. For Barachain, when the party's over, it's over and everyone goes home. Whereas like for, for Bitcoin and for Ethereum, even when nobody else cares and the lights go out and the price is doing terrible and it's at 1800, there's still like the monks chanting and you go into the sanctuary and like they're still there and the flame is alive. And I think, I do think that's meaningful.
- [39:14]
Mert
Well, yeah, it is meaningful. And so like that's why I'm not sure how much this really fundamentally matters. Like when you're that mission aligned or you have a specific mission that you're trying to solve, then you're going to attract those types of people anyway and you're just, it's like the, it's adverse selection, right? Like the people who care much more about the money and not because they just like are money hungry, maybe it's just a life circumstance, are just going to do what's best for them in that circumstance. But if they're like, oh, I really want to work on like interesting consensus problems or really interesting open source rust shit, you're going to attract those people and that those people are going to aim for learning, prestige in some combination of these, like money won't be the main motivator for all of them. So I, I do think the public goods thing is I, I do think for Ethereum it needs to be A bit more market driven. Like obviously public goods can't be entirely market driven, but like there needs to be some demand for it that is a bit more bottoms up rather than like public goods shouldn't, shouldn't just be centrally planned. Like on solana we run RPCs and we don't open source everything. And so over time people have actually basically like the users, like the market has said, hey, we actually want, we don't want this much vendor risk, like can you guys get your shit together? And then so it's like a bunch of these RPCs, including us, kind of started coming together to open source some parts of the stack because the market demanded it. Right. And so there's like this equilibrium between the two and I think all Ethereum needs to really do is shift a bit more towards market driven. Not abolish its values or anything like this, but come back to reality a little bit. Right. Just don't completely ignore it.
- [41:01]
Aseeb
Okay, so this is a good segue into one of the other topics I wanted to discuss, which is speaking of coordination problems, this notion that you introduced MERT called USD Manlet. And so what is USD Manlet? USD Manlet was this idea when the whole USDH Hyper liquid stablecoin drama was going on. You proposed like, hey, right now the dominant stablecoin on Solana is usdc. Why are we giving all the yield to Circle Jeremy Allaire? In the same way that, you know, the same thing was happening for Hyper Liquid, why doesn't Solana as an ecosystem come together and say, hey, let's make our own stablecoin and let's kind of almost form a union effectively and all agree that we're going to privilege or prioritize this stablecoin that's going to be dominant with the Solana ecosystem, with the revenues going back to Solana or going back to the ecosystem. Now in the time since you said that, Jupiter, which of course one of the largest defi protocols on Solana, announced that it was creating its own white label stablecoin in partnership with Athena. And it doesn't seem like I've seen any progress on this USD Manlet thing. And we on a previous show claimed that we did not think this was going to work because there are just too many disparate parties that have different incentives within Solana and it's kind of too hard to coordinate all these people. It's like coordinating a gigantic trade agreement among 20 countries or something. It just doesn't generally fails when you try to do that.
- [42:24]
Robert
Well, it could Be top down. It could work. I actually love Mert's idea.
- [42:29]
Aseeb
It's an interesting idea. The question is, will it work demonstrably with hyperliquid? It was obviously more straightforward because hyperliquid as a single application, it's just easier to do that without having a big UX hit. Whereas across all these applications, the UX hit is spread out across everything that has to do, bridging and whatever, ever flipping into one asset or another or whatever. So I wanted to pause there, give some background for the, for the audience. What's going on right now with USD Manlet? Anything that we should know and how are you thinking about it now? You know, a month or so down the road now that you've socialized this idea within Solana?
- [43:01]
Mert
I think so since that time, Phantom and Jupiter came up with their own stable coins. And I, I think it's a very difficult incentive problem because he who has the distribution and the users just obviously has like he who controls the front end basically controls everything. And Phantom and Jupyter control the front ends on Solana, right? Like that's going to be 90% of the flow, maybe, maybe 80 or something. And so whatever they decide, that's kind of what's going to happen. Now the thing is, USDC does strike deals with people, right? Like they do share some of this yield with some of these teams and so who ends up being left?
- [43:42]
Aseeb
But the yield doesn't go to Solana per se, it goes to the team with which they strike the deal.
- [43:46]
Mert
Correct? Correct. And so but what ends up happening is the only teams that end up needing this are the teams who don't have the negotiating power, the bargaining power, you know what I mean? So it's like this adverse election problem and I think Solana is too advanced of an ecosystem where there's so much competition between all these different, different teams that they're not going to be like, you know, I'm just going to give away my leverage. Phantom is multi chain, for example. Why would they do that? And then Jupiter, I mean Jupiter wants to launch their own chain too. So it's like, why would they do that? So I think the idea was, I think with something like M0, where like everybody kind of has their own, but then it all kind of has like this shared liquidity base at the bottom where you can swap them out, could be interesting, but I think it's not going to necessarily work. So I think the smart play actually, so I changed my mind on this since then, is to incentivize Tether more on Solana as opposed to launching. Because the one thing USCC fears is usdt and like Solana is one of the few ecosystems where USCC has a huge edge over usdt and it's not super clear publicly why that's the case. And so as USDT comes more onto Solana and there's more of a. Less of a USDC domination, then you're really forcing USCC's hand to compete. Offer more for the builders and the app level people. Right. So I actually think that's probably the stronger play.
- [45:23]
Aseeb
So.
- [45:24]
Mert
So anyway, it's not going to work.
- [45:26]
Aseeb
Okay. So basically I want it to work.
- [45:29]
Robert
Come on, make it work.
- [45:31]
Mert
So there's also that, right, you need an organization to some extent that's driving this. And it would basically have to be me or somebody who's equally annoying publicly. And I'm not sure who that's going to be. It's so much opportunity cost to not work on your own business to drive value. So again, it's this incentive problem. It gets a little gnarly. I do think though, as you get more competition between USDT and USDC and perhaps even a third one like PayPal USD, then the market will kind of do its thing where they actually have to start competing in some sense.
- [46:13]
Aseeb
Interesting. I mean, so USDT has kind of not really worked on any chain in Defi. USDC is totally dominant on almost every chain with respect to Defi energy. So that does seem very hard. How do you imagine USDT would start to get a foothold on Solana?
- [46:29]
Mert
It really depends on the user type. So I did an episode with Rob on this and Laura where we were actually basically talking about the opposite sentiment, which is like, USDT is so good, it's hard to see how USDC or Circle the company will be able to compete with that brand. Right. Like, people in South America, for example, don't even say I want dollars. They say I want tether or something versus us have that brand. I do think that, you know, the one thing that I do like is that once I push that kind of messaging, I think more like there was some discussions, there was a lot of discussions between Solana people and like, everybody's like, oh yeah, like, we should probably start to think a bit more about this because like the thing that annoyed me, by the way, it wasn't like I was trying to be constructive, it was purely out of spite where I was like, this money from USCC literally goes to base, like, why? Why is this happening? And, and, and so Like, I was like, I messaged a few room salon. I was like. I was like, why are we, like, just directly funding somebody who's trying to compete with us? This seems a little weird to me. Anyway, like, to go back to your question on how would you do usdt? I don't know. It's just really going to be up to the defi teams, which is an area that I've generally stayed out of. But I'm not sure if you guys have seen my latest tweets, but I'm going to start getting a bit more into defi to see if I can help the situation a little bit.
- [47:56]
Tom
Okay, give us the. What's getting into defi. What are you doing?
- [48:01]
Mert
Wow. I would say.
- [48:03]
Aseeb
Are you vibe coding a priptex? Yeah.
- [48:05]
Robert
Leak the Alpha. Is this the thing that everyone talked about? Totally. Is building a new thing?
- [48:10]
Mert
Like, no, no, no, no. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not going to be building a perp sex. I'm not. You don't want me building a perp sex. You don't want, like, a, like, a volatile anger.
- [48:18]
Aseeb
I personally do. I completely do.
- [48:20]
Robert
I do. What we do.
- [48:23]
Mert
You want, like, a calm guy like Jeff who's, like, respectful and knows risk?
- [48:28]
Robert
You're mostly respectful. Come on, make a perp, Dexter.
- [48:32]
Aseeb
It depends. It depends on who's talking. I do feel like that is true for Mert. Like, relative to Jeff, Mert's, like, primary motivation is spite. And so I do think that it creates a very different kind of exchange. I imagine that's built out of anger as opposed to out of a desire for efficiency.
- [48:47]
Mert
Yeah, I've been compared to. Not in terms of intellect or business ability, but spite to Bill Gates in the early days where he would just try to destroy people. I'm not trying to destroy people, but I do get angry. But anyway, in terms of some Alpha, I guess it would just be that I'm sick of getting a seizure when I try to trade things on Solana. Like, I feel like a meth addict after I go on some of these UIs and try to trade things. Right. Like, it just does not feel like it's designed for regular people or that I have the data to make any decisions that I need to make. So that's some alpha that I would give.
- [49:25]
Aseeb
All right. I don't know how deep that Alpha was, but I appreciate you sharing that.
- [49:30]
Mert
That was like.
- [49:31]
Robert
That was like.
- [49:32]
Aseeb
So coming. Coming back to your anger at base, it seems like there's now even more motivation for that anger. Which is that there was a massive AWS outage today. At the time that we're recording this podcast, it's been going off and on for like 12 hours now. Seems like maybe it's resolving, but it sort of came back, so it's been very intermittent. It hit a bunch of applications across the Internet, so signal was down pretty dramatically for the day. There was issues on a bunch of, of course, Web2 websites, but the most notable within Crypto is Coinbase had massive downtime. And then we also saw Base the layer two go down, which of course unsurprising given that it's a centralized sequencer, that the centralized sequencer, I guess, was running on aws and as a result transactions were just failing on base. Apparently Metamask was also having issues via Infura, so there was a few other applications that had issues. But you had a lot of people basically dunking on coinbase base the L2 complex for not being sufficiently decentralized and for having a lot of the nodes, especially that run RPCS on Ethereum being run on aws. And you had Lawrence from Wildcat stating angrily, tapping my debit card against the reader, trying to pay for groceries, but getting bounced because it's a crypto credit card settling on an L2. And so turns out all these interconnected things end up failing together. So, thoughts? Is there any referendum that is to be had? Or is this like, hey, you know, whatever, AWS goes down, what are you going to do? What's the vibe, Bert? Are you angry? Is this fuel for your spite? Or are you just like, ah, it happens.
- [51:09]
Mert
Okay, so to be very clear, I'm not like angry at Coinbase in general. I actually like most people there. It's just I'm angry at them making money from Solana Liquidity. Anyway, okay, the AWS thing, I think so. I don't know the details here. I just saw people say that Base is down. I don't try to transact on it, so I'm not sure myself. But like the news outlets did say it, so hopefully they are not lying. Okay. I think it's kind of embarrassing that there is not like a failover or like some geo redundancy. Like that's not a hard. Coinbase already does this with all the other systems, by the way, and really any Web2 organization does it, so I'm not sure how. There's no fallback to a different cloud region. Like even aws like West.
- [51:54]
Aseeb
AWS west was working. It was only AWS east that had downtime.
- [51:58]
Mert
I'M missing something there. Like maybe some reverse proxy stuff doesn't work or people don't implement client fallbacks. I don't know how the EBM guys do this. It's also pretty ridiculous to me that Infura went down. Like as an rpc, I'm not sure why you're using aws. Like nobody serious on Solana as an RPC would use AWS now. Okay, that's probably also going to be because it's too expensive but like you're always going to have a lot of redundancy. Like you just have to because that's the single point of failure and everybody yells at you the whole time as an RPC provider. So you know, I don't like mean to dunk because I think like fundamentally it's a solvable problem. Like just have a failover in a different region. So like I'll leave it to the EVM guys here. I must be missing something because that should not really be a thing.
- [52:42]
Tom
I think the AWS outage was like rolling across regions globally, but obviously it started in US east, but I think it hit most regions. But to your point, you would think you would at least use some sort of multi cloud solution especially I think migrating an entire site like Coinbase seems very, very difficult. But for something like just migrating a sequencer you think would be not extremely difficult or at least to your point, if you're an RPC provider, having nodes on different services not seem extremely difficult. So I also don't quite get it, but it does seem like also one of those things where it's like there are so many points at different levels of the stack where if you have an outage the whole thing also kind of doesn't work. Like okay, even if these did work and the data indexer is down, then the site's not going to work so you're not going to use it anyway. So maybe this is a lesson for about redundancy. But I mean also this is also kind of a blue moon thing. I don't know if there's a lesson.
- [53:34]
Aseeb
Yeah, multicloud has gotten a lot easier than it was, you know, call it five, ten years ago. There's just so many more solutions that will kind of make easier a lot of the really finicky, pointy edges of multicloud. But I agree for something like base it is kind of unacceptable for there not to have been failover. My guess is that probably there was some bug and they just didn't test it and probably they have some failover solution because it's just very difficult to imagine that they had not contemplated what happens if AWS east goes down. So my guess is that we're going to get some postmortems and some of them are going to say our failover didn't work. I really hope that's what happens because all these people have DevOps people and system reliability checklists and all this stuff.
- [54:19]
Robert
DevOps, this is literally what they do.
- [54:22]
Aseeb
I don't know if I'd call Coinbase the king of DevOps. Why are they the kings of DevOps?
- [54:28]
Mert
They have a guy, Mike Michael, who works on that team, and he's probably like a top two engineer I've ever seen. So it's hard for me to believe that it was like an engineering oversight. Maybe it was a priorities thing. Like, hey, we need to get people to coin it.
- [54:47]
Robert
There's a web of effects, right? So like half the APIs that these things use also went down. Right? So it's not like, okay, we built on us east, that's down, right? It's, hey, we're using like 19 different APIs from other third parties and like five out of.
- [55:03]
Aseeb
For the sequencer, they're using APIs, but who knows?
- [55:07]
Robert
But like, there's so many.
- [55:07]
Aseeb
Like, for Coinbase, sure, if Coinbase has got a lot of different, you know, they got a hand chain analysis and this thing and like, whatever.
- [55:13]
Tom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to Robert's point, it's like, oh, if the CICD provider also goes down, then it's like, okay, the failover go to, you know, is going to work. So it's like, yeah, there's. If there's. And maybe you can always, again, finger wagon, say, well, you should have thought of that. And maybe they should have thought of that. But yeah, this is obviously a global, global issue.
- [55:29]
Mert
Yeah.
- [55:30]
Robert
The ultimate blame rests with Amazon. And, you know, we can look to them. You know, they were proudly tweeting.
- [55:37]
Aseeb
No, no, no.
- [55:38]
Robert
Absolutely.
- [55:39]
Aseeb
No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. No, that's not how it works. Like, these are global services with gigantic, like billions of dollars inside of them. You cannot just say, oh, whoopsies, Amazon is down. That's never happened before. It's like. No, it has. It literally has. So if you're building a robust system that has real money that people are going to lose if the system doesn't work. No, they absolutely should have some money.
- [56:05]
Robert
We're not disagreeing on this, right. I'm just saying that we could be making fun of all the different crypto applications as well, but the Root of the issue is fundamentally everyone is building on one domino. Okay.
- [56:20]
Aseeb
Because obviously not everything fails.
- [56:22]
Robert
I mean, yeah, but like, how many people are building on Google Cloud and.
- [56:26]
Aseeb
Like Microsoft and like, some people. Some people.
- [56:30]
Robert
A small. A small amount. Almost everyone's building on Amazon. That's.
- [56:35]
Aseeb
That is not correct. No, I don't think that's correct.
- [56:38]
Mert
Yeah, no, no. But what's interesting is because there used to be a criticism that Solana is like an AWS chain because it's like the skeuomorphic thing to say because it's the biggest cloud provider.
- [56:49]
Aseeb
I thought it was like a Hetzner chain. I thought that's what everybody made fun of it for.
- [56:52]
Mert
Oh, Hetzner blacklisted Solana. Like, you're not actually. You're actually literally not allowed to run on Hetzner. And they did the same thing, Ethereum. In fact, they banned Ethereum like a year and a half, two years ago. And then somehow all the Solana nodes went down. This actually already happened with like, Hetzner actually literally took off all the nodes offline. But people used to say, like, oh, like Solana's AWS chain. But what's interesting is barely any Solana nodes can use AWS because AWS bandwidth costs would literally bankrupt you. Like, you need to use bare metal, which ends up making it like, more decentralized in some sense on certain vectors. But yeah, I mean, I will give them the benefit of the doubt here because, like, the same thing happened last week too, by the way, which was like, lighter went down because their AWS configuration was wrong or something. So, like, something, something weird is going on with the L2s, where I'm not quite sure. I think like, the status quo has been so much like, compete on product, compete with hyper liquid. We need to ship products that, like, as a business person, as a product person, you're kind of like, okay, fuck the tech debt. AWS isn't going to go down. We're just going to show products and then it actually does happen. And then you're like, oh, well, maybe we should prioritize it now.
- [58:05]
Aseeb
Yeah, but there's levels. It's like when you're a tiny startup. Lidar is like a pre GGE trading app. It's been out for whatever, a year, six months, something. Base is one of the titans of the industry, right? It's like signal. No excuse for signal going down. That's a application that people rely on potentially for their life. And if Signal's down, it's like, oh, I can't communicate Securely with somebody I'm supposed to be, whatever, doing something with reconnaissance or something that, like, they're like, I think this is one of these places where the anger is justified that, like engineering, like, these products, people rely on them for real sums of money, but also, like, their lives. And if somebody, you know, I don't know, just got liquidated for a gigantic pile of money or just like some bug caused something to happen because this thing went down, that's real economic damage. Like, it's not something that's like, oh, well, you know, pumped up, fund is down. Nobody can bid on shitters today. Like, there's a. There's levels of seriousness with which you need to take engineering robustness. And I think it was. My guess is we're going to get a lot of postmortems and they're going to tell us that it wasn't as straightforward as we're imagining of that literally there was just no plan. But, yeah, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, as a wise man once said.
- [59:22]
Robert
Mike Tyson.
- [59:23]
Aseeb
Yeah, that's right. Okay, well, with that, we are on time. Mert, thank you so much for jumping on with us. I know it's very late where you are. Anything that you want to plug, where can people come find you?
- [59:34]
Mert
I'm sure they'll see me on their Twitter if they haven't muted me already.
- [59:38]
Robert
What's the name of Dex?
- [59:40]
Aseeb
Mert? Yeah, it's not a Dex.
- [59:42]
Mert
It's not a Dex.
- [59:43]
Aseeb
New decks. All right, so go trade on Mert's new decks. If you don't find it, you know, just Google it. I'm sure something will pop. I'm just kidding. Don't do that. There's no Dex. Thanks, Bert, for jumping on. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you all next week.
- [59:57]
Tom
It.