Uneasy Money: Are Institutions Creating a New Crypto Meta?

Summary

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Unchained Podcast – "Uneasy Money: Are Institutions Creating a New Crypto Meta?"

Host: Kane War (with co-host Taylor Monahan and guest Luca Netz)
Release Date: February 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the team dives deep into the pivotal changes shaping the cryptocurrency space in 2026. Institutional adoption, the explosive growth of new blockchains, the challenges of “attention markets,” AI’s outsized influence, and product pivots by major players like Coinbase/Base all feature prominently. The hosts debate whether a “new crypto meta” is emerging amidst these rapid technological and social shifts, with a strong undercurrent of unease about the convergence of AI, agents, and financial rails.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Climate of Change and Unease

Timestamps: 02:53–07:54

• The episode opens by acknowledging widespread anxiety both within crypto and the broader tech world, catalyzed by high-profile exits from AI safety roles, citing the example of an anthropic researcher decamping with a philosophical resignation (03:42).
• The hosts draw parallels between current AI sentiment and early COVID-19: a “canary in the coal mine” environment where those closest to the problems are the most anxious.
  • Kane War: “It feels like early Covid… there are people who are kind of canaries in the coal mine who are like, shit’s getting weird…” (05:43)
• The conversation pivots to the explosion of AI capability (Codex 5.3 & Opus 4.6), which leads to a sense of deference or even fear of AI’s possible dominance.

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2. Institutional On-Chain Adoption and Its Consequences

Timestamps: 08:11–12:16

• BlackRock Tokenized Fund on Uniswap:
  • BlackRock is using Uniswap X rails on Ethereum to launch a $2.2B tokenized treasury fund, with trading through permissioned, KYC-gated access.
  • Traditional finance (TradFi) is finally embracing “always-on” 24/7 trading, marking a substantial culture shift. (10:23)
  • Institutional entry is starting to create actual “token sinks”—large entities holding tokens long-term, altering the sell-everything mentality of previous cycles.
    • Kane War: “Institutions are here and they want KYC… this feels like the thing we’ve been waiting for… It feels pretty crazy.” (08:11)

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3. Proliferation of New Chains: Is Tech a Moat Again?

Timestamps: 13:02–22:51

• The supposed "end of the chain proliferation" was short-lived; every major player seems to be launching their own chain again.
• Drawing particular attention is LayerZero’s new chain, which claims extraordinary EVM/ZK performance and can run on hardware as simple as a Raspberry Pi. (15:56)
  • Luca Netz: “The tagline which I loved is ‘the last blockchain.’ And he’s basically saying you don’t need another blockchain after this one.” (15:59)
• Discussion of possible channel conflict as LayerZero, once a pure interoperability layer, now launches its own chain.
• The prospect of crypto/AI convergence: fastest, least expensive, most decentralized blockchains will benefit as “AI agents” start transacting at scale. (18:44–20:22)

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4. From Meme Coins to Institutional Tokens: Changing the Value Narrative

Timestamps: 22:51–25:06

• Hosts reflect on the memification and purpification of tokens—where short-term speculation ruled—and how institutional holding might spark a reversal, lending more value-based differentiation to tokens.
  • Kane War: “If we get back to a world where we go, no, there is a difference between PEPE and Uniswap… Uniswap has some intrinsic utility and value for reasons, and people want to hold it.” (25:06)

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5. Attention Markets: The Promise & Problems

Timestamps: 28:53–35:13

• A new Polymarket-Kaito partnership aims to let users bet on social media mindshare and sentiment, aggregating data across X, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
  • Caveat: Attention markets can be easily gamed, as bot-driven activity muddies genuine signals. (30:29)
    • Luca Netz: “I just don’t know how you can’t rig these attention markets. Right. Because the attention is derived from social activity... and impressions can be rigged.” (30:29)
  • The hosts question if such markets can ever truly be trustworthy or if measuring/fairly resolving such outcomes is possible.

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6. Base, Product Pivots, and The “Meta” of Trading vs. Social

Timestamps: 35:13–50:08

• Base (Coinbase’s chain) has refocused away from social/Farcaster integration—users, it seems, overwhelmingly want a pure trading app.
  • Kane War: “It’s a really hard thing to balance… when they added all of this social stuff… most of the people who are using the base app, my sense was the feedback was, get this stupid social stuff out of my face. I’m trying to trade tokens here.” (35:13)
• There’s debate about whether going “safe and conservative” is a missed opportunity, and whether US exchanges can compete culturally with Binance by “going all in on trading,” especially with US regulatory and cultural constraints.
  • Luca Netz: “You can tell, they really are taking the first principles foundational, you know, layers of like, what it is to build a Silicon Valley tech company. And they’re trying to apply it here. This just seems to me like, dude, you guys should just buy Axiom…” (38:22)
  • US-based approaches are fundamentally constrained compared to Asia-based, more risk-tolerant giants.

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7. Agents, AI Rails, Stripe, and Crypto’s Future Collide

Timestamps: 50:25–72:25

• Recent Stripe “agent money” announcements show that payment rails for autonomous AI agents are emerging—and not always with crypto at the forefront.
• Vitalik’s Take: Ethereum should provide guardrails—privacy, verification, decentralization—rather than actively accelerating the AI race, though hosts doubt the blockchain community’s ability to truly impact AI’s curve. (52:25)
• Hosts experiment with (and critique) local LLMs vs. cloud AI services—the consensus: local models lag behind cloud-based models and likely can't keep pace.
  • Kane War: “There’s almost no way as these things accelerate that you will be able to keep up… the local model thing is just not going to be able to keep up and there's just no way that it works.” (56:14)
• Safety and Pragmatism: The exodus of AI safety experts is mirrored to the DeFi Summer era—where telling people to stop deploying unaudited contracts in production was futile, and the only practical play is rapid, pragmatic risk management.
  • Taylor Monahan: “It's not that you're wrong, it's not that you're giving up. It's that there's just too much value on the table and people are going to do this. And your choice...is to like sit with them in the room and really go hard on these…what can you have an impact on right now?” (61:42)
• The discussion ends with the metaphor of a horror movie—global unease, a sense of being at the precipice, and concern over “agents” with their own autonomous wealth and prerogatives.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• On the atmosphere of unease:
  • Kane War (05:43): “It feels like early Covid… there are people who are kind of canaries in the coal mine who are like, shit’s getting weird...”
• On LayerZero’s new chain:
  • Luca Netz (15:59): “The tagline which I loved is ‘the last blockchain.’ And he's basically saying you don't need another blockchain after this one.”
• On institutional token holding:
  • Kane War (24:27): “Seeing things like this, you know, Citadel buying 0 is a token sink. They're not going to dump on you in 48 hours… so that alone seeing TRADFI start to buy these tokens and hold them could be an interesting catalyst as well.”
• On attention markets and gaming:
  • Luca Netz (30:29): “I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets... The biggest companies in the world, a la Meta and… Google, you know, have, have been trying since the beginning of their business to figure out, you know, which impressions, a real impression versus a fake impression. And… it's not foolproof.”
• On pragmatic security and inevitability:
  • Taylor Monahan (61:42): “It's not that you're wrong, it's not that you're giving up. It's that there's just too much value on the table and people are going to do this. And your choice...is to like sit with them in the room and really go hard on these…what can you have an impact on right now?”
• On the accelerating AI curve:
  • Kane War (65:06): “Like if each iteration of the new model takes a day. Right? Because, you know, they improve the efficiency of training and fine tuning... It's going to be absolutely wild.”

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• Opening and context: 02:53–07:54
• Institutional tokenization (BlackRock, Uniswap): 08:11–12:16
• New chains & Layer Zero deep-dive: 13:02–22:51
• Token sinks versus meme/meta shifts: 22:51–25:06
• Attention markets debate: 28:53–35:13
• Base/Coinbase app pivots & trading meta: 35:13–50:08
• AI, agent money, Stripe, local vs. cloud models: 50:25–72:25
• Closing thoughts: 70:44-72:25

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The tone is both sardonic and deeply thoughtful. Hosts revel in crypto’s chaotic innovation yet display increasing concern about both the hype cycles and the rising power (and risks) of AI, particularly as the infrastructures they're building—chains, protocols, token rails—may soon be most used/enhanced by AI agents. The evolving “crypto meta” seems less about memes and more about the real, sometimes dangerous convergence of institutions, agents, and new underlying tech. If there’s a “moral,” it’s simple: we’re at the edge of radical, uneasy change, and no one—not even the experts—knows quite what comes next.

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Transcript

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[Luca Netz]

I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets. Right. Because the attention is derived from social activity. Right. And social impression and activity and impressions can be rigged.

[Taylor Monahan]

I take like security and safety very seriously. Like I think that we should absolutely be concerned about these things. And it concerns me when I see the safety people leaving the AI being like, I'm gonna go move to an island.

[Luca Netz]

Bye.

[Kane War]

Imagine if like Medi from like SIGP and like you and all of, all of the like crypto safety people were all of a sudden like now, okay, I'm moving to England. Here's you would be like, holy, crypto's cooked. Like we're in a lot of trouble. Hey everyone, I'm Kane War and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co host Taylor Monahan, security expert and Luca Netz, CEO of the Pudgy Penguins Metaverse you universe Ultraverse. We are going to dive in in one minute. But one quick thing before we start. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchained crypto.com uneasy money. But before we begin, here is a word from our sponsors that make the show possible.

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[Kane War]

All right, we're back. So we have a bunch of topics this week, but first we have a little preamble, I guess, because the world is going crazy. So, Tay, I don't know. You can. You can take it from here. First of all, Kyle from multicoin retired or something. I don't know. Maybe he's uploading into a computer or something. I don't know exactly what's going on, but he's left crypto. But he took the time to take a couple of pot shots on the way out the door at, like, Hyper Liquid. I couldn't help himself. He's like, hey, guys, I retired. You'll never see me again. But also, by the way, here's dumb that I'm gonna say as I'm literally disappearing into the hedge. So, Tay. Yeah, Hit us. What's. What's going on?

[Taylor Monahan]

I don't know what's going on. I don't know. I think. I mean, I think whenever you have these sort of, like, market shifts, people get weird. I think the world is actually, like. It feels like this is like a bigger than. Just like, another bear market, though. My biggest, like, observation has been, like, the AI turnover. We saw huge number of folks from, like, Xai leave. The anthropic guy, he was like, the head of their safeguard research, which I assume is like, the guy who's in charge of making sure the AI doesn't go insane and kill us all. He wrote this, like, really scary philosophical letter about his, like, observations and why he was leaving. He ended the tweet, though, with this, like, statement that I kind of relate to, but I'm also like, I'm terrified. He just said, anyways, I'll be moving back to the UK and letting myself become invisible for a period of time.

[Kane War]

Okay, buddy, thanks. So. So, like, the safety people are losing their minds, right? And I feel like.

[Luca Netz]

So I.

[Kane War]

There was a long X article that I read yesterday from this guy that was like, hey, I know all of the normies out there. He's like, I. This is like, he. He runs an AI startup, and he said, I've been working in AI for, like, five years, right? He's like, all of the. My normie friends are like, ah, try chatgpt. It's fine. Like, I'm okay. I'm a lawyer. It'll be fine. And. And he was like, this Feels a little bit like the first two weeks in Feb. In 2020, where, like, people are. And, you know, it's interesting, right? Because, like, who is the most connected to these, like, zeitgeist changes? It's always crypto people. Crypto because we're fucking insane, right? Crypto people are lunatics. And they're so obsessively weirdly, into, like, whatever weird stuff is going on even outside of crypto, that, like, we were probably in December. It feels like we hit this, like, weird Cambrian explosion of, like, crypto people doing weird AI stuff. Anyway, so this guy's like. It feels like early Covid. And for those of us who are in crypto, we early Covid on crypto Twitter, when crypto Twitter still existed before it was killed. People were like, this is bad. I remember walking around and saying to people in, like, real life, like, we are fucked. This is going to be an absolute. This is in Feb. In Feb. First week of Feb. We sent everyone home. Yeah, we're working from home now. Good luck, guys. We'll see. We'll figure it out later. Like, literally, like, we just sent everyone home, like. Like, first week of fe. And then we watched this all play out. And this guy is like. This feels like something like that, where there are people who are kind of canaries in the coal mine who are like, shit's getting weird, and we're about to kind of. And it's funny. So I had dinner with a good friend of mine who was in crypto for a long time. He was our CTO at Synthetics in 2018. He's been out of crypto. He's been out of everything on, like, talking about people, like, disappearing. He lives in Lisbon, hangs out and, like, surfs and stuff, right? And I was like, how much have you been paying attention to this stuff? And he's like, not much at all. And I was like, dude, like, wow, you are about to be hit by tsunami, and you're just, like, paddling around being like, this is fun. And so. So it does feel like we are in this transitional moment, and, like, something happened. Like, Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3. Codex 5.3 is the wildest shit I've ever seen. Like, it is wild. It is so much smarter than me that I'm, like, becoming deferential to it. I find myself being like, oh, thank you for not killing me right now. I appreciate that. Thank you.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, be nice to your AI team. Like, it's coming for you.

[Kane War]

I used to be kind of a dick. I used to be. I'm like, God, you idiot. Like, stop doing dumb. And now I'm like, thank you for doing smart things. I really appreciate it.

[Taylor Monahan]

A for effort.

[Kane War]

Yeah, I know, right?

[Luca Netz]

I know.

[Kane War]

I'm definitely, I'm definitely going to be turned into paperclips for sure. So. Okay, let's, let's get into the first segment. Black Rock picks Unis Swap Rails on Ethereum for its little fund, which I hate that name so much, but here we are. So they have $2.2 billion tokenized treasury fund and it's going to be tradable on uniswap via Uniswap X. Uniswap X is this new version of uniswap that has like hooks and various things. So it's permission, which I think we're okay with in 2026, 2019, me would have been losing my mind about this. But whatever it is what it is. The institutions are here and they want KYC, so you have to be pre qualified. There's whitelist, etc. They also acquired some uni. Thank you for buying our bags. That's amazing because uni was trading at like $3, so I'm very excited that they were able to push it back up to $4. So this, this feels like the thing we've been waiting for, right? Like institutions coming using on chain stuff, tokenizing things. Like, yeah, there's some kyc, but you know, let's just squint and ignore that and yeah, it feels, it feels pretty crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. I mean it is like what we're waiting for. It kind of. I don't know, I guess I'm. I'm like, well, like waiting for what happens next, seeing if it, if it, if it's the same. Like the announcements just are like, it's so greedy.

[Kane War]

We're like, yeah, you're trading your like securities on our blockchains, but like, what else are you going to do for us?

[Taylor Monahan]

But it is a massive improvement, I would say over the last few years. Like we might, we might be getting closer together. We might be merging these worlds maybe. I don't know. We'll see what happens though. We'll see if it's. They still sort of have to find like pmf, right? To a certain extent.

[Kane War]

Yeah. I think to me it feels like the, the meme and narrative of like always on trading we've kind of like got these guys over the line. Like the Tri five guys are like, yeah, actually fine. Like let's just trade all the time and never sleep. So I Think like, that alone is like a bit of a win for us. That we're like, oh, okay, we. We convinced these guys that 24.7markets was a good idea somehow because there was a period of time where like TradFi was like, we are gonna go to one hour markets twice a week and we're just going to consolidate all of trading activity into these like two hour windows at the start of the week and the end of the week and not bother to do things in the middle. And we're like, what if we did the exact opposite of that and we seem to be winning? So. So, yeah, that feels bullish.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we'll see what happens. I mean, I think that there's an opportunity here. Right. Like, again, like these two worlds getting closer and closer together. The real question will be, does anyone actually want to do this? Especially with the permissioned stuff.

[Luca Netz]

That's the question.

[Kane War]

It's like, does this improve liquidity? Does it actually.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

Luca, Luca, what's. What's going on? What do you think about this?

[Luca Netz]

I. I spent more time going down the layer zero rabbit hole yesterday, so I probably don't have as much to speak on this as it's probably cool that they're actually buying a token. That's an altcoin. I think that's probably the brief understanding I have about the whole uni blackrock thing is the coolest part to me, and my brief understanding of it is BlackRock is buying and holding altcoins. Yeah, that's cool.

[Kane War]

That feels bullish. Yeah, I'm excited about that. As a uni bag holder, I'm excited for anyone to buy Unique. The more people who buy it, the better. Someone's got to buy our bags. Okay, let's go. Let's go on to our second segment. Like, am I losing my mind? But did we not decide that we don't need every single person to have a chain? We had like a three month period where we're like, we don't need any more chains. And now we're back to actually, you know, we need all the chains.

[Taylor Monahan]

We just talked about this last week and we're like, we're gonna chill on the chains. We're gonna chill on less Cheney. All right, Luca, give us the job. Sorry.

[Kane War]

Bear markets, right? Like, it's like as soon as you get into a bear market, people just go back to the same old. They're like, all right, launching more chains. So, Luca. Well, I guess let's. Let's just go through the chains that launch, right? So Mega Eth launched. Bullish on Mega Eth. I was, I was excited that they, that they launched. I think they are doing some very interesting things like not launching the token with the chain, having these KPI based gates. There's, there's a bunch of cool stuff that, that Mega Eth is trying and it feels good to have someone trying new shit right now, especially in a bare market. Right. Like that's the time to do experimentation but, but probably the, and then, you know, Robin Hood launched a chain on Arbitrum, which is also interesting. Going to be interesting to see how they like speaking of, you know, chain pilling tradfi, right? Like it feels like we've, we've definitely got all of the like big retail facing tradfi apps to like go all in on chains. They need to have chains. So I feel like that's again a win too many chains, but here we are. So the most interesting one yesterday for me though was maybe Layer Zero. So Luca, if you went down that rabbit hole, give us the debrief. What's going on with Layer zero?

[Luca Netz]

Yeah, the layman's explanation, because I can only explain because it's very tech heavy. So Kane, maybe you get into the minutia eyes. In layman's terms, it's probably one of the greatest technological advancements from a EVM ZK perspective. I think for those who are not familiar with Layer zero, Layer Zero is basically the interoperability protocol that basically allows any and all cross chain movements to happen. If something's cross chain, there's a 90% chance it's probably being powered by layer zero. I know they've pretty much had huge market share either via Stargate or actual Layer Zero protocol, but nonetheless they've been working on this for the last two and a half years. The thought process for them was like, look, if we're going to do certain things. I remember speaking to Brian a year ago and he was kind of constrained in terms of certain ambitions, certain ambitions that he had around certain builds. He was kind of alluding to that he was working in this direction, but obviously he didn't share anything at the time. But basically the most performance blockchain that requires the most menial or the most basic hardware to kind of process and run.

[Kane War]

Basically it was running, it was running on a Raspberry PI.

[Luca Netz]

Raspberry PI, which is super impressive, right? And, and basically it's, you know, the tagline which I loved is the last blockchain. And he's basically saying you don't need another blockchain after this one. This is the one, please.

[Kane War]

Yeah, the 15th standard problem.

[Luca Netz]

Now, now I will say those guys are. That's probably one of the best teams in Crypto. Can you probably agree? I mean, those guys.

[Kane War]

Yeah, I. I love those guys. I think so. The most interesting thing to me, aside from the tech, right? And Luca, I think you, you will have some thoughts here, right? Is the channel conflict problem of, of layer zero. If I'm not mistaken, when Layer zero launched, they're like, we don't need a chain. We are the layer zero below all the chains. We're not going to compete with you guys. We're going to, you know, just make all your chains better and interoperable and so don't even worry about it. Like, we're definitely not going to do anything to threaten that equilibrium. And then they're like, ah, it. We're just going to launch a chain, right?

[Taylor Monahan]

What does the chain do now? Like, what is the.

[Kane War]

It's phosphor? Like what, like 2 million TBN.

[Taylor Monahan]

Okay, I got it. Awesome. So wait, okay, but seriously, in a.

[Luca Netz]

World where AI agents are going to be spending a quadrillion transactions a week, right? Like nothing outside of Solana is at least like on a production perspective can kind of meet that demand. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but at least like from. To my knowledge, right? Like, Solana is the only battle tested 1.0is not battle tested, but this is like the Fire Dancer dream and everything kind of compartmentalized in a new foundational model that like, blockchains aren't built. My understanding of it is like, blockchains aren't built the way that these guys built it. It kind of reinvents how people, I think, look at them and how, I guess certain parts of the puzzle kind of fit in. And so it's kind of like a new foundational layer of like, when you think about it, if you want to process huge amounts of transactions, if you can do that with minimal hardware requirements, then you kind of fulfill the promise of a fast blockchain that's permissionless and censorship resistant. It kind of is like the, the taglines, at least to me read like the creme de la creme of like blockchains, right? Because like, what is Solana's big objection, right? The concentration of the validators, right? I mean, if everyone can run a validator, you know, for zero chain on a Raspberry PI, then all of a sudden you have like Ethereum level decentralization with like Solana as performance. But the argument is that like this is even a lot faster than even Solana.

[Taylor Monahan]

Okay.

[Luca Netz]

So you have like a, you know, like in a world where we believe, which I think like the next great crypto bull run is going to come from this idea, this speculative idea that.

[Kane War]

Like AI agents are running all this.

[Luca Netz]

Volume and transactions on crypto rails. Like what chains are going to reap the benefits from that? Well, probably the fastest, most decentralized, you know, chain that's probably with the cheapest cost is going to, is going to realize that. And like their costs too are like unheard of. You know, it's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny, you know, for a transaction that one of the things in their presentation was like, you know.

[Kane War]

Gas is basically gone, right?

[Luca Netz]

Like we've eliminated gas, whatever that means. It means what it, if it means what we, what we think it means literally, then you know, that is the arena in which I think the people will play now. You know, it is fascinating because I wonder if I'm a chain, if I then think to myself, the thing is if you're using Layer 0 and OFTS as a service, your cross chain capability, if you're like Solano, if I'm abstract and then I see Layer zero building a chain, I'm going to think to myself, wow, this is a super competitive product, right? And in this world, as Kane, you were explaining, and I've been saying for years, like tech is not the moat. That's probably the first time in a long time where we can say tech is a moat. Until you know, all the LLMs start capturing, you know, all of the data and all of the code and you know, maybe people can then can soon copy zero chain. I again, I can't speak on that, dude.

[Kane War]

Like, honestly, agents are going to be launching their own chain soon and they'll be better. No, we just, we need to make peace with that. Like they're gonna be like, oh, it took you two years to build this chain? That's so cute. I built my chain in two minutes and it's got 8 million TPS. I don't know, like I'm bearish on, on humanity's ability to build things. At this point we're, we're really cooked.

[Taylor Monahan]

Okay? But it's still, the whole point of the chain is still primarily interoperability settlement.

[Kane War]

So the, the point was I guess that, that like all of these tried again. This is like, you know, it feels like the, the two threads that are going on here is like tradfi coming in and saying, this is, you know, this is the thing we're going to bet on, you know, on, on this zero token, zero tech, zero chain. And same thing with Uniswap, right? Like we're betting on this Ethereum, you know, gated on chain liquidity solution and we're going to buy into the protocol itself. So it feels like if this starts to become a thing that, you know, it could really differentiate the tokens that are becoming investable by like actual institutions as opposed to Bitcoin. Like we haven't really seen institutions to your point, Luca, buying alts, unless you include eighth, which we should not talk about. But outside of that, right, like, you know, we've had, we've had some dads buying Ethan Saul and, and you know, some alts, but institutions, actual, you know, large companies turning up and saying, no, we're going to buy uni, we're going to buy zero. That feels pretty new for this cycle. It feels like the first time that I've, I've seen these announcements. So yeah, we gotta, we gotta lean into that I guess, if, if that's, if that's working. But it does feel like that will become a very big differentiator. Like is this asset investable Is going to be a big question that probably crypto people are going to start asking themselves like, you know, why am I buying this random shitcoin if, you know, Ark is not willing to buy it?

[Taylor Monahan]

I mean, that'll be interesting. Yeah, but that's like a full, a full 180 from the current meme coin status.

[Kane War]

Totally.

[Taylor Monahan]

Right. And we're going to go back to the technicals and the foundations and see what can actually build new value.

[Kane War]

I had a podcast yesterday and it was this like OG DeFi guy that started asking me questions about like, you know, how tokens work, right. And like why, why they work the way they do. And it forced me to really kind of rethink my position on tokens in 2026. And my hot take is that in Defi summer, like that whole period we figured out ways to create token sinks. Like token sinks were the thing you had to find a way to get people to hold a token. This cycle has been the memification and purpification of everything. No one holds anything, no one holds tokens, no one wants to hold tokens. And in order for tokens to hold any value, someone has to be buying them and holding them. Right. If everyone is just selling them and it's this very short term trade, then it's just not Going to work. So my, my hot take is that seeing things like this, you know, Citadel buying 0 is a token sink. They're not going to dump on you in 48 hours, right? Like, they have, you know, like a mandate to now hold this token for a while. So that alone seeing TRADFI start to buy these tokens and hold them could, could be an interesting catalyst as well.

[Taylor Monahan]

So, I mean, I am 100 for it. I'm for anything that is not continuing to this, like, race to the bottom of tokens being valueless and like, it just feels like we just got really, really race to the bottom in terms of like, intelligence on some of this stuff. And I don't know, I think like, attention, like the meminess and like the attention, like, I think that's a huge part of it. We just like, once again, like crypto does, we just took it way too far. Like, nothing has any value. Nothing matters.

[Kane War]

The tagline of crypto is like, you think that you've taken something too far. Well, hold my beer because I will take it. And you know, it is funny, right? Like, what ended up happening was. And, you know, why do we take things too far? Because we have a vested interest in taking it too far. Something starts working and we're like, oh, okay, how can I take this to its logical conclusion, right? And so this false equivocation of like, everything is meaningless, nothing has value, everything is just a short term trade. There's no difference between like, you know, dog with hat and uni. They're the same thing. They're just like a random trade. They're a random cryptographic thing that you can sell and buy and trade, right? Like, they have, they have. No, there's no distinction between those two things. It really hollowed us out, right? Like it created. And part of that was, you know, regulatory, et cetera. There were a whole bunch of reasons for that. But I think if we get back to a world where we go, no, there is a difference between PEPE and uniswap, right? And it doesn't mean Pepe is bad. But uni, the token has some intrinsic utility and value for reasons, and people want to hold it. And look at some of the people who are holding it, right? Like back in the day, we used to point at crypto VCS and be like, andreessen's holding uni. Like, get excited, right? I feel like, I feel like Citadel, you know, they might be evil, but they're probably going to be an even better holder than Andreessen. But all right, before we continue. Here's a word from the sponsors that make this show possible.

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[Kane War]

All right, we are back. So betting on Mindshare. We've talked a lot about Kaito over the last six months. The Kaito attention meta, this is a slight different take. You know Kaito, because they were cut off from the X API, they've had to kind of pivot towards these different approaches. And so there's a partnership between Polymarket and Kaito to launch Attention Markets starting in March that will let users wager on social media, mindshare and sentiment. So Kaito is going to aggregate Data from X, TikTok and Instagram. I thought they got cut off from X. I don't know how they're going to pull that off, but we'll see. Nikita is probably looking into all of the API deals that they've got right now. So polymarket processed $8 billion in volume in January, which was up 44%. Which feels crazy. Like, so, you know, historically the meme with Polymarket has been like, oh, it's just like an election thing and it gets big for the election and then it dies off. Obviously the election is, you know, a four year cycle thing that's, that's a huge driver of volume. But this cycle post election they have held their volumes really well. And you know, I think that's been the culmination of like the rise of sports markets and a bunch of things. But these attention markets, I don't know. Luca, what's, what's your take on attention markets?

[Luca Netz]

Yeah, I think functionally the big, the big problem there and, and the smartest people in the world have yet to be able to solve it is this idea that I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets. Right. Because the attention is derived from social activity. Right. And social impressions. And activity. And impressions can be rigged. And the biggest companies in the world, a la Meta and you know, and Google, you know, have, have been trying since the beginning of their business to figure out, you know, which impressions, a real impression versus a fake impression. And though I'm sure they have, you know, decent solutions, it's not foolproof. And I think when you're just like hyper financializing, you know, attention without, you know, some trillion dollar intermediary like validating that, I think, I think it's just going to get a little messy. I think it can be a little messy. So in that respect I think it's interesting. The Kaido team is incredibly bright, like super excited for them to try to innovate here. But you know, functionally I'm worried that the attention can be rigged too easily and even the Kaido product is speaking directly to the Kaido product. One of the big problems with the Kaido product was that the bots were farming the apps and you were able to rig that system to a certain extent and that ultimately hurt a lot of crypto Twitter speed. So I think functionally it's a little bit of a bigger problem than I think. I think it's a great idea. I just don't think functionally I can't see how that can't get rigged or exploited in a way that's only going to be harmful to users. But excited to see what they've come up with and I'll definitely be placing some, some bets and trying to see how it works.

[Kane War]

Yeah, it's interesting, like it doesn't feel, you know, if people on the inside of this, if Nikita and Elon are still being overrun by bots and it feels like they are, it's hard to imagine that an outside entity that doesn't have control over that infrastructure is going to be able to solve this problem through like filtering or, you know, algos. So I don't know. We'll see. This feels like one of those things that may be like a partnership that started six months ago and has been slowly working its way towards launch and it's now launched and it's like, oh yeah, actually we've been nuked in the interim. So look, I don't know, it'll be interesting to see what happens here and how they, how they manage it. Certainly Polymarket is not never short of controversy around market resolution. So this should add some interesting market resolution.

[Taylor Monahan]

I mean, that's what, that's one thing I was thinking about is like, if you look at like the thing that Kato like needs to do, right? It's like on the attention side and then you look at the thing that Poly Market needs to do and it's like really get the trust in the, in the resolutions, like up. I don't know how this fits into that, guys. Like, seems like you've really. I mean, if you manage, I guess if Polymarket manages to solve that, right, Meaning manages to somehow increase the trust and the resolutions while also bringing attention markets to market, like then I guess the rest is like easy and they're done, right? They've solved all the problems. But that's, I mean, personally I wouldn't start well, so.

[Kane War]

So I'm an investor in a project called Noise, which I think a lot of people were excited about. It was part of the mega Eth ecosystem for a while. They've launched elsewhere now and we had an interesting debate at Bodhi where Jordan was like, I don't know how this is gonna work. And I was like, ah, you're overthinking it. Like, it's attention, it doesn't matter. Like, don't even worry about it. And he was like, what do you mean don't even worry about it? Like, the entire thesis of the thing is that you can measure attention somehow and it won't be gameable. I'm like, ah, yeah, don't. Like, it's fine, bro. Don't even, don't even think about that part of it. Just, that's the whole thing. And he was like, you are so. I don't know how to deal with you. He's like, how am I investing money with you? And I'm like. It's just. People are excited about it. Just, just roll with it. So, I mean, yeah, let's see, let's see what happens. Anyway, I'm here for it. We invested in noise, so, so.

[Taylor Monahan]

But was that a win, Kane?

[Kane War]

Yes, it's always a win if I get my way. Doesn't matter. It's just important that I get the check written, all right? I don't care about the rest of it. They let me write like two checks a year, so that was one of them. All right, cool. Bass has pivoted away from Farcaster Social within the Base app. I thought this was really like Bass and, and, you know, in particular Jesse. He is, you know, Jesse is so adamant about their attention to what people want whilst also trying to balance this, you know, not being driven by like, the current meta. Like, they're trying to, like, invent stuff and like, create new meta, whilst also, you know, like. And it's a really hard thing to balance. Right? And so when they added all of this social stuff in Farcaster, most of the people who are using the base app, my, My sense was the feedback that they got was, get this stupid social stuff out of my face. I'm trying to trade tokens here. And they're like, no, no, it'll be good. And then, you know, eventually they, they kind of capitulated and, and removed it and, and they're really now kind of focusing this base, the base app as a trading app, as a trading first experience. And, you know, they're tweaking a few other things like removing these creator rewards and, you know, just trying to dial in on. On what is working for them, which seems to be the trading part of, of the app. I don't know, it's. It's interesting, you know, the, the Steve Jobs view of the world of like, customers don't know what they want sort of thing. Like, we're going to, we're going to just keep doing stuff and eventually people will realize that they actually want it like this. Right? You know, if you go and ask the user what they want, they'll say like five more buttons. But actually what they really want is no buttons. They just want a piece of glass. They just don't know it yet. So, you know, there's a, there's a really interesting product development angle here of like, kind of capitulating to just traders. It feels like obviously Base and Coinbase have such good distribution, they can get away with building a pure trading app. But it does feel like a bit of a missed opportunity to me for them to kind of lean into some of the things that were less obvious, that they were trying to kind of move into existence. So I don't know. Markets, Markets are marketing.

[Luca Netz]

I, I agree with your take. Honestly, it's. It seems like a very safe bet, right? Pivoting it into something safe versus, you know, what I think Jesse was going for was super ambitious. All of the CT peanut gallery were calling them a loser and everything. And, you know, I guess you at Brian Armstrong enough times you'll pivot. But I'm gonna be honest, like, did I think the execution of what they were going for was done?

[Kane War]

Right? No.

[Luca Netz]

Do I think they were pulling on the right thread? And was the swing that they were trying to take, you know, a big enough swing that it was worth pulling that thread, even if it, you know, required maybe, you know, getting a couple paper cuts on the way? Yes. I think this is like a really safe concession to just try to go and launch a 20 biller based L2 coin without causing a ruckus from now until then. But I've said this for a while, really studying blockchains. When we were building early days of Abstract, I was just watching what everyone was doing, the operational excellence and the team over there at base is really, bar none. I'd probably say the only team that I've met that I think, you know, works and interfaces the way that they do on a blockchain side is Solana. But those, those base guys, you can tell, they really are taking the first principles foundational, you know, layers of like, what it is to build a Silicon Valley tech company. And they're trying to apply it here. This just seems to me like, dude, you guys should just buy Axiom if this is the direction you're going to. Yeah, just buy the best. Because the one thing Coinbase has never been good at is they've never had taste and they're not product good product guys. And I think, I think anyone at Coinbase, if you were to criticize them.

[Kane War]

You'D have to say that.

[Luca Netz]

That's the criticism. Right. There's some operational things that I think too. But, you know, building a trading app, it's just like you bought Echo, just go buy Axiom because you guys building a trading app, I don't think it'll end up very well because I just don't think. They did hire one guy though. I remember Peter, who's our, who's our chief design guy. So this might be wrong, but the Base that I know has no taste, but they did hire, I think, one of the great front end designers in the world recently, who Peter said, you know, for the first time they're like, oh yeah, if this guy actually does what he's known for doing, they might actually have a shot. But, you know, I don't know. I just think this is a very safe, you know, obvious, like, very complacent bet where I feel like what they've been building for the last couple of years though, everybody and their mom was talking shit about it, I thought was super ambitious and I felt agreed.

[Kane War]

And, and I think that's the thing, like, you know, Jesse called a bunch of shit, but he clearly had a mandate, right, to do some weird stuff, try things. You know, it is funny though, the things that I disagreed with, I guess, like, were almost more cultural. Like they're. I'm in one of the base, like Coinbase Mafia chats, right? And it's, it's interesting. I had, I had a pretty heated discussion with Jesse about this at one point where I was like, you guys are kind of being psyoped by people pretending to be supporting base into, you know, supporting people that are actually just trying to extract from you. And, you know, it's a very hard position to be in to try and, you know, pull something off like they did. But if you go back and look at the starter base when everyone's like, this is going to be a ghost chain, there's, you know, it's not going to work. This is dumb. Why do we need, like, he has actually pulled off something pretty incredible and I think that gave him a mandate to do some weird. And then he did some weird shit and people were like, no, not like that, not that weird. Don't, don't do that stuff. And now it feels like it's kind of been reeled in a little bit. It's going a bit more conservative. Which I think, to your point, Luca, is a bit of a loss, right? Like, if anyone was going to do weird shit and pull it off, even like Farcast, we talked about Farcaster. Like they tried to do some crazy and it didn't work. And they had a lot of resources, but they're not Coinbase, they don't have that level of distribution, right. Like, you know, they're X Coinbase, but like Jesse has a level of distribution and attention and your market, market power that it feels a bit weird to just kind of capitulate and go, oh, we're just going to build a trading app now. Another Trading app.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, I agree. And I also, I wonder how much is just like, sort of like the amount of time that's passed and the financials behind it. I don't know how Coinbase breaks down their, like, their org structure and the financials, but they are a public company. They do have to, like, consider these things, make money.

[Kane War]

Yeah. I mean, base bases making, like, I think irrespective of trading, obviously trading has, you know, and this is, this is part. I've talked a lot about this, right. Like, the hybridization of centralized exchanges, moving away from a database to on chain. Coinbase and BAS and Jesse and, you know, Brian have been pushing this now for four years. Right. Like, they were one of the earliest ones. Basically. Binance and them were like, we're going to start a chain, bro, and we're going to have wallets and it's going to be really cool and we're not going to just sit in our little walled garden database anymore. And, you know, probably there's some element of, like, they're victims of their own success because BAS was just started throwing off cash.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

And it wasn't coming from the Farcaster social side, it was coming from trading. Right. And so you can imagine there's someone sitting there in Coinbase going, hey, you know, our Q3 numbers. Like, we need to pump these, these things. So let's really lean into this trading thing. And it is hard. It's hard to kind of balance this giant incumbent that is transitioning on chain and figuring out, you know, the, the kind of constraints around being also a public company that has to make money.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, yeah. And I think you get a little bit of leeway for a little bit. You're going to do this experimental thing. You're gonna. You're gonna watch the market, you're gonna learn what the market wants. But I think after a certain amount of time, you. One, it becomes pretty clear where the revenue is coming from. And two, you do start having to, like, answer, like, what. You know, if you're. And you can't sort of speak out both sides in your mouth if Jesse's running around Twitter doing this and, you know, in their, whatever, their quarterly. Get on the phone and talk to shareholders, they're talking about something else.

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

At some point you do have to.

[Kane War]

If you're making. If you're making, you know, $20 million a month or whatever it is right from sequencer fees, all of a sudden someone somewhere in Coinsbase is going to be like, don't ruin, like, don't break this Right. Like, you have to become more conservative and so, you know, like, you sort of become a victim of, of your own success. I think that's kind of happened to Jesse where it's like, dial it back, bro. Like, we need to. And maybe he would say that's wrong. You know, this is just the right thing to lean into. And it's, it's where product market fit is coming from. But it does, it does feel like, hopefully in the bare market, as people's scrutiny goes down a little bit, they will, they will still have more leeway to, like, try stuff. Because I think, honestly, if anyone is going to pull off doing some weird shit and making memeing it into existence, right, like social stuff and various things, it's going to be based. They have the network effects to actually do something like that and pull it off that is not purely financialized. So, yeah, we'll see.

[Taylor Monahan]

I'd also just argue from like a brand perspective. If you look at the other people who are doing this sort of like centralized exchange chain, like, whatever, like you're going up against basically, like finance and, you know, the, the big guys, that's a very different culture. Like a massively different culture. And the thing that worries me about this move most of all is I don't think that Coinbase and their teams and their culture and their product people and their designers, like, you can hire all the best people. They're not, they're not gonna go all in. Like finance goes all in on trading, right?

[Kane War]

You can't, they can't.

[Luca Netz]

Like, they, like, there's actual crime to bolster. To actually get those platforms to have momentum, you actually have to commit some crime.

[Kane War]

Right?

[Luca Netz]

What is that? Like on chain runners, bundling? Like, you think these guys aren't doing that? They totally are. And I know that a fact.

[Taylor Monahan]

I just think. Yeah, and I think, like, I don't know, I think it's, it's. That's what I would be worried about is if you're going to go all in on the financials and the trading, but at the end of the day, you're a U.S. company with U.S. employees who have a sense of morality and are not afraid to speak their minds, you're not going to be doing some of the same things that, you know, the guys that are out of Asia are doing. And it's not just like literal crime, it's just the way of.

[Kane War]

It's just like being willing to do anything to make it work.

[Luca Netz]

Right.

[Kane War]

Like, and, and, you know, like, Binance.

[Taylor Monahan]

Does not apologize for Pushing shitcoins on their users. They never have and they never will. And nobody ever goes to Binance. And it's like, why are you pushing shitcoins on your users from emerging economy? Nobody asked that, right? If Queen Beast were to do that, right? If they were to literally like flashing lights, point their emerging economy users at a freaking total shitcoin, their own people, their own company, their shareholders would be like, yo, okay, hold up.

[Kane War]

Right, well, this was part of the pushback as well, right? That Jesse got is like these creator coins, you're. They're just meme coins, right? They're just these, these kind of short term speculative things. And you know, this is also part of that like kind of false equivocation of like, everything's meaningless, no tokens have value. So they're all just a, you know, vector for short term trading and making profits. So, like, don't even worry about it. There's an argument that Jesse's kind of attention coins and creator coins were actually worse than meme coins from that perspective. Like they were designed to be even more ephemeral. Right? And you can squint at it and try and like, you know, jump through intellectual hoops to justify why it's like not that, but it's kind of that. Right? And so, yeah, I think, I think.

[Taylor Monahan]

But it was in a much prettier packaging that the US market could definitely morally get behind and feel good about even if they were wrong. Right. And I think that. I don't know. We'll see, we'll see how this plays out. I do, I agree with Luca. It feels very safe and it's of kind, kind of. It's a bit disappointing because even if.

[Kane War]

You'Re gonna go even like broader defi. Right? Like, like just trading, like pure trading. If it was like, hey, this, the original vision of the Coinbase app was like making all of defi on base accessible, right? Not pure trading, right? It was, it was.

[Taylor Monahan]

And it's always had social stuff. They've always had their. Like the regional like Toshi app had like the messages and yeah, it always ends badly. But like that's besides the point, right? It's always been a bit different. They've always been pushing on that, on that end. And to just sort of. It feels like a little bit like, to just sort of like be like, well, we tried it and we're like done. Like that was wrong. It's a bit like, oh, okay. Like that sucks.

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

Even if it, even if it, even if they're right in the end like, it's still, I don't know, I prefer my crypto with a little bit of illogical social.

[Kane War]

Yeah, there has to be some random shit in there, right? Okay, I mean, look, to be totally honest, it doesn't really matter because AI is going to wipe us all out pretty soon. Everything that we're doing is something.

[Taylor Monahan]

The agents are the only ones that need to talk to each other.

[Kane War]

It's going to be literally. I know.

[Luca Netz]

So this, this.

[Kane War]

So this is quite funny. So, so our next segment, Vitalik is talking about AI Rails and also Stripe has this agent money, right? So here's how cynical I am and how, how, like I just don't believe anything. So I, I read, I saw that post. It came up a bunch of times, people like, oh, Stripe's doing this like, agent payments thing. And I read the first tweet in the thread and I was like, man, like, we're so cooked. Like, this is not even a crypto thing. They've just made like the Stripe rails accessible to agents and agents are going to be doing like some weird centralized stripe thing. I wake up this morning and I'm reading the briefing doc and I'm like, wait, this is actually crypto? Like, it was, it was kind of weird because if you look at that first tweet, it doesn't say anything about crypto, doesn't say anything about stable coins, doesn't say anything about anything. And so I just skipped over it and completely like, had the most like, brainless take on that thing to the point where I didn't even read the second tweet. How little attention do you have where you're like, don't even read the second tweet. So, so Vitalik, Vitalik has pushed back on this race to AGI. Good luck, dude. Honestly, like, we're not winning this race. Talking about people outside of a system trying to impact the system, like the safety people inside of these teams are like losing their minds. I don't think even Vitalik has a chance of slowing this down, but saying Ethereum should provide guard rails, not acceleration, you know, privacy verification, decentralization, etc. Etc. And like, it's that it feels like a very metallic take, very aspirational. I don't know how much impact, honestly, Ethereum is going to have in, in this, in this process, to be totally honest, as someone who is like very immersed in it right now. But this is kind of an interesting, an interesting point, this idea of like local LLMs versus cloud based LLM. So maybe it's worth Digging into that for a second. So I set up. I set up a new Mac and threw a bunch of RAM at this, and I started running Kimi 2.5 locally. And it's pretty good. Like, it's pretty good. It.

[Luca Netz]

It's.

[Kane War]

I think, you know, if you were cost conscious, I mean, there's an investment in the machine. Right. It's a $20,000 machine to run this thing well. Right. So that's the first problem. It's 512 gigs of RAM.

[Multichain Advisors Sponsor]

Jesus.

[Taylor Monahan]

I didn't realize it was that expensive, though.

[Kane War]

I mean, sorry. 15 grand U.S. right, sorry. I'm talking Australian dollars.

[Taylor Monahan]

Okay.

[Luca Netz]

Real world.

[Kane War]

But yeah, it's a lot of money. Right. So. So, But I was like, I want to get the Max spec machine. So I can see, like, how. How far can I push this? Because a lot of the distilled models are a bit brain damaged. Right. So I threw everything at it. And it's pretty good. Like, it is not opus 4.5 or even like 4.1 level. I would say it's a little bit stupider than that. Hopefully they're not listening to me. But. But, yeah. So it, It. But what it does is it means you're running it completely locally, right?

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

So, you know, it's not going into any server, it's not sending the inference off and collecting data, et cetera, et cetera. Like, the problem is that running local models, if you are at all reliant, which you will be. Right. On cloud models. Yeah. The ship sailed on that is my hot take. And so, like, the idea that the local model is preventing me, maybe I can run it on some stuff that I don't want to get in the cloud. But, like, I've got claudebot running on the same machine that is using, you know, Opus 4.6, so it doesn't really matter. Right. So I don't feel like there's a huge differentiator in these local models. This idea of like, oh, run your model locally thing, I just don't think that's going to work. Work genuinely. Like, I don't think anyone's gonna care.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. I mean, I've run locally for like, over a year now. And I go back and forth and they've just never been. And that's the reason I've never invested in, like, a bigger batter machine is like, I just feel like it's. It was a huge, like, I just always would end up when I really wanted to, like, get into stuff, I would end up back in the loud.

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

So I do. And I have a lot of data where I can't. Like, it's not that I couldn't. Like I could, but it's like, you know, there's some deep ass intel I don't want in the cloud. Right. And it's like. And again, it just, it hasn't. I keep an eye on it. I mean it sounds like it's getting.

[Kane War]

Better, but is like Opus. Like probably. I would say it's a smarter. My sense is it's about as smart as like Sonnet, which is getting better. But I think there's two trajectories here. On one hand, if these models are getting smarter, there is a point where arguably for everyday tasks you hit some kind of diminishing returns. Arguably. And I don't know this. Right. But let's say it's six months from now now and I can run a local model that's as smart as Codex 5.3 is now. Am I going to be satisfied with that?

[Taylor Monahan]

Like, no, because the cloud is.

[Kane War]

No, of course not. Of course I'm not going to be satisfied with that because I've got codec 6 that is like, you know, I don't even know what it'll be doing. I shudder to think. But it'll be doing some stuff. Right. And, and so there's almost no way as these things accelerate that you will be able to keep up. And that just, it's, it feels like the local model thing is just not going to be able to keep up and there's, there's just no way that it.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

Works.

[Taylor Monahan]

I also feel like it's splitting your. Okay, so if we want to talk about like how do we make these things not destroy humanity and. Right. The long tail of safety concerns that people have, I feel like the, the oh, it's local is just like a complete cop out. And I think that local in some ways is scarier.

[Kane War]

Honestly. Like the one, the one thing that I think is good is that it is still extremely difficult to train a new model. Right. Like there are a lot of research in the same way that like you need some crazy to build a nuclear weapon.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

Like you can't just turn up and start doing it. You know, it's, there's some like resource constraint issues in building a nuclear weapon. You can't just build your own model. Right. Like there's. The resources are too, too constrained. So it's not like some crack teenager is going to like generate AGI in there.

[Taylor Monahan]

No, they're just going to use the cloud.

[Luca Netz]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

Like everyone Else. So I don't know, like my. And this is like, you know, for those who know me, like, I take like security and safety very seriously. Like, I think that we should absolutely be concerned about these things. And it concerns me when I see the safety people leaving the AI being like, I'm gonna go move to an.

[Kane War]

Island by imagine all of the. Imagine if like Medi from like SIGP and like you and all of. All of the like crypto safety people were all of a sudden like, ah.

[Taylor Monahan]

Okay, I'm moving to England. Here's.

[Kane War]

You would be like, holy, crypto's cooked. Like, we're in a lot of trouble.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yes. Okay. However, you cannot, it does not work to just like stomp your foot and, and be like, stop it, slow down. Like, no, no, no. Like, there's so much value on the table, there's so much innovation happening. It's happening. Your choice is whether you like, like stopping. Slowing down is not an option. So it's like, do you want to frickin run full sprint ahead while also trying to make it safer and responding to the active threats and responding very, very, very quickly to like the new innovative ways the AI is screwing us. Right? Or do you want to like, you know, scream about it and not, you know, and then be very.

[Kane War]

When people don't stop, there's like some, some throwbacks to like Defi Summer, right? When like people were just YOLO doing the craziest and it was like, I don't have time to audit this contract. Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And the people, including myself, who yelled like, don't put it. Don't test in prod. Right? Don't test in prod. Guys, please, please stop. Turns out that was like the. Objectively, the worst way to handle it. Because if we had been like, if we'd sort of accepted that the testing and prod was going to happen and thank goodness we did have like enough sort of like diversity in the attitudes. If you accept that, then you're like, okay, how do we, what do we do? And it's like, okay, you speed run monitoring. You speed run circuit breakers, you speed run reactions, you speed run like these iterative things.

[Kane War]

Doesn't work.

[Taylor Monahan]

It doesn't work.

[Kane War]

Can you guys deploying unaudited contracts on Mainnet, like, no, it's permissionless.

[Taylor Monahan]

Exactly.

[Kane War]

We're not going to stop doing that. Like, shut up.

[Taylor Monahan]

And it also, when you're so sort of like, I just feel like it creates this gap between sort of like reality and the people who are like super aware of how that reality is going to play out like they're right. Like they're like you put you, you throw a bunch of shit, hit the wall, bad things are going to happen. They're not wrong. However, if we want less bad things to happen, we gotta figure out a way to like have both. Right.

[Kane War]

You need like a pragmatic approach to security, not like a, you know.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. And the people who are the people who are like knowledgeable and obsessed about the safety and the security of these things, they have to understand sort of like the current state right now, which means that they have to be part of it. Right. They have to be sitting there. Which is why people like Sam CZ son. Right. Like when Sam was like his experience with like the test and prod generation was very different than mine because he was like right frickin there.

[Luca Netz]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And. And that's what sort of put him in a position to have major impact. Right. And like prevent hundreds of millions of dollars from being lost.

[Kane War]

Yeah. Build, build rapport with like, you know, he was in groups that I was in and people were like about to deploy something to prod and he's like, let me just have a quick look at this before you do it. Right. As opposed to someone who, like someone who's like, don't do this. And it's like, kick them out of the group right here. I don't want to hear this.

[Taylor Monahan]

Exactly. And so that's my recommendation for people is like, it's not that you're wrong, it's not that you're giving up. It's that there's just too much value on the table and people are going to do this. And your choice as a person who has concerns is to like sit with them in the room and really go hard on these. Like, like, what can you have an impact on right now? What can we respond to right now? And actually move really fast on those things. Right. If Chachi BT is telling someone to commit suicide, fix that right freaking now. Right. Don't go sit in your silo though for six months and then come back on the next model. Like, no, fix it right now. Find a solution.

[Kane War]

We've analyzed the data and it's like it's fine. Right. So yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

So that's. Yeah. And then I think it's not, by the way, it doesn't like solve the world's problems, but it, it's at this point in time with the rapid clip of innovation, it's the only, the only way to go about it. And which is why like hold on to your Butts.

[Kane War]

It feels a bit scary that these, these guys are all kind of rage quitting.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

From like, because it's like did they try this or did they not try? Like we don't really. The guy who's like, I'm going to write poetry, like he didn't really explain, obviously he's under like massive NDAs and they would shoot them or something if, if he, you know, talked about what was actually going on in there. But I think the thing for me that is the most interesting about all of this right now and the acceleration is the largest constraint on innovation in the world, except for maybe like free power, right. Is software. And if these agents start making software non constrained by human slowness, right. And they start to accelerate how quickly software can recursively self improve. And they're you know, like Opus 4.6 in and you know, Codex, they're using the tools to build the tools. Right. And, and you know that recursive self improvement loop is the fast takeoff loop that we've been talking about for 30 years, right? Yeah, like you know, Kurzweil, like the, the, you know, singularity is nearer. If you haven't read it, it's worth reading. It's out of date. It was six months ago. And like the things that he's saying in there are like quaint. Right. But the funny thing is that, you know, he wrote the singularity is near in like 2006 or something. Right? Right. So it's been 20 years, 20 years later the book is like just victory laps, right? It's like nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. Like all of this stuff. And he's like, we have four years, like 20, 30, like four years. We're in the FOSS takeoff. And the most interesting thing is if you look at the curve, right, it looks flat to most people. It looks flat. You have to be really close to it to see that. It's actually just there's a little gap now but between the Y axis and that gap is accelerating and it's still small. But it's just going to go parabolic soon. And when it does, you know, a new model might take a day.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kane War]

Like if each iteration of the new model takes a day. Right? Because you know, they improve the efficiency of training and fine tuning like all of these different inputs puts into the process that's constraining it like sleep, human sleeping. Like it's going to be wild. It's going to be absolutely wild.

[Taylor Monahan]

So yeah, and that's why the humans are like, like the ones that Know the most. Right. They're freaking out, and they're like. They're like, we have to stop. But I'm like.

[Kane War]

They'Re inside these labs seeing this. Like, the people that are close. Closest to the curve, that are watching it as closely as. As. As anyone can, that are inside the machine are like, this thing is really detaching from. Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And they're not wrong. I want to emphasize this. They're not wrong. Like, I was also right. I'm like, you test in prod. You all get hacked. You all got hacked.

[Multichain Advisors Sponsor]

Okay.

[Taylor Monahan]

Always. It was, like, so obvious, Right? It doesn't do any good, though. It doesn't. Like. Right. The most value I had during that. During that early D5 summer was that realization that, like, Wait, hold on. Yelling from the outside about them being hacked, like, because ultimately then I'm still sitting in the boat with you guys because I'm part of D5 Summer as well.

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

So I'm like, stop it. You're gonna get hacked. Please be safer. Audit your stuff. Risk guys. Right. But then when it happens, I'm still sitting there with. With you. I still have to deal with it. It's still my industry, Right?

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

So it doesn't matter that I was right, unfortunately.

[Kane War]

No, it doesn't. Exact. That's exactly.

[Taylor Monahan]

I still am in the same shole.

[Kane War]

That's the pragmatism, right? Like, if someone is building a nuclear weapon right next to you, and. And you're like, can you please stop that? And they're like, no, thank you. I'm gonna keep going. Like, you can decide to keep shouting louder, louder at them, or you can be like, can we at least put it in a box, bro? Like, can we at least, like, stop it from killing everyone when it blows up?

[Taylor Monahan]

Yes, exactly. And so that's what. I think. That's the only sane approach right now for the AI otherwise, because it's definitely. It's also not a good idea to just let the people test in prod. Like, that's like, everyone's right, guys, but everyone's right.

[Kane War]

So the interesting thing about this, though, is, like, it feels at the moment. And this is a little bit how Covid felt. Early Covid. Right. It feels like the start of a movie. You're like, the.

[Luca Netz]

You're.

[Kane War]

You're sitting there, and, like, there's a few people that are like, hey, there's like, a weird egg in that field. Like, should we be worried about? And it's like an alien that's about to fucking hatch and, like, take over the world, right? And it's like you're kind of looking at it. You're like, maybe it's fine, but it feels uneasy. There's this, like, feeling of unease, right? Like, quiet at the moment. And then you start looking around, you're like, what are the things in this horror movie or whatever? Like, what are the, like, you know, kind of little things that get dropped in that go, oh, that was the thing that was going to be it. Right? And it's funny because you look at payments and everyone's, like, super excited about agents paying each other. And X402, which allows agents to pay each other. And I look at this genuinely, and I go, this feels like one of those things where, like, in the movie of, the world is taken over by agents giving them money, giving them the ability.

[Taylor Monahan]

Everything's gonna be fine.

[Kane War]

Like, we've just allowed them to pay for things. Because one of the things is, right, One of the things people have been worried about is, okay, if agents are smarter than people, they will be able to trick people into doing things for them. But if you give them money, they don't need to trick you. They're just gonna bribe people into doing things. And we know that works really well. They, like, they're gonna have their own version of tornado cash. They're gonna have private payments. Like, it's gonna be wild. And they're gonna be buying. They're gonna be buying and selling humans.

[Luca Netz]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

So, yeah, it's gonna be. I mean, it's going to be completely insane. Like, it's. It is. There are so many different ways it could go wrong. I think that there's a lot of, like, really obvious ways that we can probably get our hands around. I think there's a lot of not so obvious ways that will become obvious. And my hope is that if everyone stays sort of really in tune and in touch and aware that you build up the muscles and so every new bad thing that, right, you start going off the rails and you're, like, right there ready to correct it, and you're. You're prepared. You have the processes, you have the mindset to correct it, rather than again, like, going back to the silo for six months, right? Like, there's the safety team back there in the other room, and the safety team's like, I hope you check with us. It's like the train's going off the rails right now. No, the safety team, guys, the people who are right there, you know, they need to be there. So, yeah, payments are going to get interesting. I Mean, I hope the Rails at least help with like, the, the issues that we're seeing right now with like, MetaMask, not the agents getting super confused by MetaMask. Right.

[Kane War]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And hopefully the. The Rails will. I don't know, I think there's an opportunity for it to unlock a lot of new efficient things that are just sort of like, blocked right now, and especially like business model wise. Right. Because right now you still have to like, convince a human that they need this, which is. Creates a bunch of weird structures. If you. There's a lot of things that you can do. Like, like, so, like, for example, you don't like humans. You never want to ask a human to pay for something once because, like, it's very hard. It's basically as hard to convince them to do something once as do it repeating. But if you get the repeating, if you get the recurring revenue, you're set. Right. Agents, I think it's actually like much more just logical. Right. And so you can unlock a lot.

[Kane War]

Of things like, yeah, I'm paying for this thing now.

[Taylor Monahan]

And I need it now, and whatever. And there's a lot. If there's enough agents that are doing that, that's a business model. And there's a lot of business models that, you know, like, not every business needs to be a billion dollar business. Right. Like, there's people that have useful little things, they can share it and they can, you know, sell that one time, and it's fine. It's great if the agents will buy it.

[Kane War]

Right.

[Taylor Monahan]

So that I think is like the exciting part of it. The downsides obviously is like, yeah, the agents are definitely gonna come up with their own, like, weird immoral schemes to screw each other or screw their humans or whatever.

[Kane War]

Yeah. Literally, like the agent Pool 2 is what I'm waiting for. Like, they will reinvent pool twos, I'm sure. Converging evolution.

[Taylor Monahan]

We'll see.

[Kane War]

All right, well, it's been fun. Another. Another awesome episode. Thank you guys. So we will see all of you next week.

[Taylor Monahan]

Awesome. Bye, guys.

[Kane War]

Bye.