Taylor Monahan (4:09)

Yeah, something happened. There was. It got exploited. It was a pretty technical exploit where they. I mean, you might have to fill in the gaps, but basically the way that all of the these sort of, like, types of smart contracts and liquidity pools and trading things, how they, like, work, is there's automatic things that get adjusted perpetually over time every single time there's a trade. The logic of the smart contract code handles all of that. Ideally, you can't trick it into giving you a better price or a worse price than the broader market. In this case, they're able to use this one set of functions that allowed calls to be combined. Able to do that and then combine it with a rounding issue. So we're talking about at the very tail end of the decimals.

Kane Warwick (5:10)

Yeah. So there are two things here that I think were interesting. One, this whole batch function thing was about saving gas. So it's like, especially go back to 2021, Ethereum gas was super expensive. So it was like, hey, just this one small tweak and this will be cheap from a gas perspective. So there's. There's that element to it as well.

Taylor Monahan (5:32)

Yeah. And so basically there's like, let's just say dude comes along and finds this thing that allows him to make a. Like a very long stack of calls that sort of like go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and exploit this rounding issue. These, like very. These decimals. But combined with everything else that he was doing, he was basically able to end up manipulating the current state of the contract to make it believe that the attacker basically had way more money than they actually did. That was the very first transaction. Basically deployed the contract. Did this whole long series of stuff that. Yeah. That impacted the state. And then the second part of it was that then they just withdrew that money. And because the smart contract state had like a bad number in it, the attacker was able to just withdraw.

Kane Warwick (6:34)

Withdrawal all the funds.

Luca Netz (6:36)

Right.

Taylor Monahan (6:36)

Yeah. A huge amount of money. And so I think we have. It was like 70 million on ETH and then a few million on things like base and Polygon and Arbitram and Sonic was a big one. Bear Chain was a big one. There's 13 million on bear Chain.

Kane Warwick (6:54)

There's a whole Bear Chain arc that we can get to as well. Right. So it was over 100 million that was stolen. I don't know. Other than Bear Chain, which we can talk about in a second. I don't know if much of it was recovered or where that kind of sad or if people have any idea as to who may have been behind it. But it's definitely.

Luca Netz (7:24)

The.

Kane Warwick (7:25)

I think the scary thing for me with this a. I was a big LP in Balancer V2 back in the day, so that was a bit petrifying. But also this. This contract's been on mainnet for four years.

Taylor Monahan (7:40)

Yeah. And that's the big thing.

Kane Warwick (7:42)

So. So I saw a bunch of speculation around, like, how can something be on Ethereum for four years with a bug like this and not get exploited until now? Like, what's.

Luca Netz (7:54)

What.

Kane Warwick (7:55)

How does. Like, what's your hot take on. Like, how does something just last that long and then someone stumbles across it?

Taylor Monahan (8:01)

Yeah. So I think there's like a combination of things that, like, specifically for these types of incidents where it is something where the team is actually security conscious. It's been on chain, there's tons of forks. It's been audited multiple times.

Kane Warwick (8:18)

And presumably the forks have been audited as well. Right. Like, it's not like this is just, you know, them yoloing a few audits in 2021 and then.

Taylor Monahan (8:28)

Right.

Kane Warwick (8:28)

Forgetting about it. Right. So, no.

Taylor Monahan (8:30)

No repeated audits. Like, over time, the forks, you know, there's just like so many different things. Um, the first Thing I think that contributes to it is that you have over time, like the, the sort of the knowledge that people have and expertise that people have and the assumptions that people make both on the security side and on like the blackout side evolve. And so these precision rounding type issues like they've always been known about, but it's only been really more recently that people have realized that they can be way more dangerous than it was previously thought. So the assumption before was basically like, as long as it rounds in the protocol's favor, it can't be exploited. Because even if they do the exploit, the protocol is going to profit, not the attacker. However, over time, you realize because of the other mechanisms that are within the contract or adjacent contracts or whatever, even if it rounds in the protocol's favor in one place or both places or whatever. Yeah.

Kane Warwick (9:42)

Bad things happen. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy. It reminds me a little bit like the kind of evolution of this, of mev. So back in the day. So MEV is like minor extractable value or we call it something else now. I'm too old. That, that, that was the validator or something or other. I don't know. Anyway, it's like the, the ability for people to manipulate the order of transactions to make money effectively. Right. And pre. Uniswap, the first like uniswap, front end right there, this was like a theoretical construct that people were like, you know, eventually maybe miners might do things to like change transactions and extract value, but it was like this theoretical thing that people were like, it's never really happened, so it's probably theoretical and not likely to happen. And then one day uniswap turned up and it became like sandwich attacks, like changing the order of transactions and, and manipulating the state of the contract on the way in and the way out to, to extract value became a thing. And then everyone was like, oh, it's not a theoretical thing, it's actually real. And then here we are today.

Taylor Monahan (10:59)

Yeah, exactly. And that's like the, that's, you know, it. I think in such an adversarial environment, you're just going to have like, there's so much money on the table, you're going to have these evolutions happen really, really quickly. I think all of us are still asking the question, like, what do we do about it? Because we're not quite convinced that like, you know, forcing these teams to just do more audits is necessarily going to.

Kane Warwick (11:32)

I mean, clearly audits didn't solve this problem. Like, if audits were the solution, then this Would have worked. Right? And it didn't. So.

Taylor Monahan (11:40)

Yeah. So, like, obviously a lot of the bug bounty and contest companies are pushing bug bounties and contests, saying that those are the solution. Maybe they are. Like, maybe they help. But I think that, Yeah, I don't. I don't have, like, a good answer at this point. I think that there needs to be. There has to be, like, another layer of mechanisms to help prevent these. These massive losses.

Kane Warwick (12:07)

Well, speaking of other layers of mechanisms, Verichain had another layer of mechanisms that they, that they used, which was, you know, coordinating the validators. And Luca, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this, right? So, you know, as someone runs a chain. So Bear chain saw this happening, coordinated the validators, because There was about $13 million across a couple of balancer forks on bear chain, coordinated the validators, validators, halted the network, and then basically did like a precision validator update that brick the funds and. And return them, which is aggressive. I mean, I, I tweeted about this and said, like, I'm, I'm here for it. I think, you know, if you are centralized enough to be able to coordinate something like this, you should. But, you know, Luke, I'm. I'm curious. Your so abstract didn't have any Balancer V2 forks on it or.

Luca Netz (13:14)

Wow, wow.

Kane Warwick (13:14)

Don't bullet there. How did you manage that one?

Luca Netz (13:18)

Yeah, well, in hindsight, it ended up biting us in the butt a little bit, but we were so anti defi, right. And so like, consumer focus. What I ended up realizing in hindsight, and it's been a focus of ours of recent, is like, defi kind of powers the chain. And so I was like, go deploy your defi.

Kane Warwick (13:37)

Can you give Vitalik a heads up on that one?

Luca Netz (13:42)

It is super imperative for a chain to really run efficiently and functionally, at least for the end user that defy is present. So I was actually so negligent and pushing D5 builders away and trying to bring consumer builders in that when the consumer builders came, the liquidity machine wasn't churning as efficiently enough. And then so now we're doubling back and getting the defi. That's actually one of the few times where I really kind of fell on my sword on that one. And I was just like, oh. But I kind of take the stance just in regards to what Vera chain did. I think there's really two types of blockchains. There's one which I think serves as a decentralized network state, which I think is important for humanity and its function and its Purpose is to be alive and functioning no matter what. Right. During the apocalypse, during a world war. It just needs to work. And that to me would be like Ethereum. Ethereum is the decentralized network state and I think there's very few that are close to being what Ethereum is. Then on the other side of it, I think I look at blockchains like performant payment rails. Right. Stripe and PayPal competitors. Right. Ones that are borderless in being able to attract borderless liquidity and borderless composability. And those to me every single time there's a hack that I think involves a meaningful amount of money. You should, I don't know if the terminology for bearer chain was a rollback per se. It sounds like they did something clever with the validators, but in my case you roll it back, you edit the validators, whatever you need to do. If you, I think are trying to be, you know, a performant payment rail, like I am not selling abstract or building abstract. And I think most blockchains are not trying to build a decentralized network state which is supposed to be immune. You know, I'm trying to compete with PayPal, I'm trying to compete with Stripe. I am a better medium of exchanging value than I think those centralized venues. And though you know, most L2s and most chains are centralized, I think we embody a decentralized ethos in the sense up until I think users funds are compromised in which I think you take a very centralized approach every time. That's my opinion.

Kane Warwick (15:48)

Yeah. Tay, what's your.

Taylor Monahan (15:50)

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I always have the stance like it's, it's for a long time now, like if you can do something, you absolutely should. But I'll also say like you probably shouldn't be able to. Right. But that's, you know, it comes with time, it comes with other trade offs and security and where you are sort of at in your go to market. And so yeah, like if you can, you should. But ideally I think that people would be better off if you know, if they're building these robust networks where, where you couldn't be able to do that. I think most of the chains, like Bear Chain for example, you know, it's pretty fresh. They're still able to coordinate the validators they did. So I don't, I don't really see a problem with that. And I also don't see it as like a long term, A long term like you know, they're going to pay this. Yeah, like.

Kane Warwick (16:50)

Yeah, yeah, Fair, fair.

Taylor Monahan (16:51)

I think it's just where they're at on, on their, their journey. Right. Rather than being, you know, more of a testament to like who they are. But yeah, I mean, but I think.

Kane Warwick (17:03)

You know, the fact that they did it though, right? Like most, you know, how many, how many chains were hit with this? I would say, you know, there's like, there's a little bit of like coordination, effort there, right, but there were maybe 10 chains or something like that that, that had balancer forks on them. Um, so the fact that they were able to like respond quickly, coordinate to do it, you know, and didn't LARP as like. Oh no, sorry. Like the validators, you know, we don't know who's running them. They're not in our basement. We can't do anything. Like they, they just, you know, they just did it. So. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Interesting precedent. There is also, there's also the, the kind of um. And this is, I think a lot of the times, certainly in like OGDEFI days, right. A lot of the, the pushback from teams that could have done things and didn't do them was like unintended consequences. Okay, we rolled this back. What about the people who had trades that get unwound or, you know, like how do we weigh up? It becomes like a, you know, network trolley problem, right, of like one balancer hack versus, you know, three people that get run over by a train. Like what are we, what are we doing?

Taylor Monahan (18:20)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's what for me, if I'm working with a team who like theoretically could do something, I do try to respect that. I have no idea like what their, their situation is in terms of like the protocol or the product or the RPCs or whatever it is. And it's always going to be a trade off, right? So if you freeze the chain, it is going to have an impact elsewhere. If you can take a more precise action and intercept the funds without impacting anything else. In a lot of senses that's better because you don't have that potentially a contagion type situation happening. However, those mechanisms are usually limited to teams that are just really centralized and it also like introduces a huge risk because.

Kane Warwick (19:17)

Well, exactly. Like if you can freeze the bridge, right, Then someone can unfreeze the bridge and then it, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Taylor Monahan (19:25)

Or take other actions. So like we see all the time, we see with hacks where X Bridge gets hacked. X? Yeah, X protocol gets hacked and then you know, you dive into it and it turns out that like, you know, one dude ran malware on his computer that compromised the special key that was just living on his freaking computer and now everything's compromised. And so, yeah, that's why I'm always pushing people to, you know, like, if you can do something, do it. But at the same time, like when you're building your protocol, you need to understand the risks and the security precautions and.

Kane Warwick (20:00)

Yeah, and really speaking of bridges, I don't know if this is still an ongoing. Is this an ongoing thing, this hyperliquid bridge are trying to get an update. So. So I mean, one of the big concerns that people have had with hyperliquid is there's a bridge on Arbitrum that you know, is secured by stuff, right? I wish I had that, the like Cheeto door lock meme thing. But like, you know, it's hard to say what is actually securing that bridge, right? Like, you know, what's the OPSEC around it, etc. Etc. But obviously it's freezable because it appears to be currently frozen. So, you know, the, the bri. The bridges are the scariest part of everything, unfortunately. I think is the, the TLDR there. But maybe we can't comment any further, so let's go on to ICOs. We' well, actually, I think there's probably a whole thread about token distribution and I'm sure Luca, you have many, many thoughts about this, right? So we have had an interesting period of like Mega Ethan Monad and their various distribution methods that they're kind of employing at the moment and the trade offs between them and airdrops. And then we had Haseeb from Dragonfly jumping in saying, you know, airdrops are I guess, kind of a scam maybe, but not sure who was being scammed. Maybe centralized exchanges are being scammed by airdrop farming, etc. So maybe we can unpack that. So Coinbase has got their own ICO platform now and they also acquired Sonar, which is the Echo ICO platform that Cobie built. So it seems like we're back in the ICO meta. We've had plasma megyth just did their ICO on sonar. Now Monad is doing an ico. Yeah, Luca, thoughts on the ICO meta coming back?

Luca Netz (22:19)

I'm super stoked for it. I mean, as long as we don't rue the day for it four or five years from now for God forbid the administration stance changes and they start going after everybody. I think that'd be my only fear with it. But in principle, there was a statistic that I read the other day around just regular IPOs. IPOs back in the 1990s, early 2000s just made everyone rich. If you held them for a relatively good period of time because the prices were so good, that has since dwindled, at least in the traditional markets. Obviously ICOs kind of brought a little bit of that back in 2018, 2017, obviously with a lot of harm. There's a lot of scamming going on with those ICOs, but also a lot of great case studies came out of there. I do, functionally, I am a believer of putting money where your mouth is. And I do think that. I don't think airdrops are bad. I actually debated this stance at the Harvard Debate Club, like literally four days ago. I took the stance of like, airdrops are good just because I have a really good argument as to why they're good. And I can defend it, obviously, obviously being off the backs of one of crypto's biggest airdrops in Pangu. But I do think there's. I think the problem with airdrops is actually not the mechanic, but who it services and who it attracts, right? The demographic and the type of user and community member. I think it's more of a demographic problem than a functionality of distribution problem because I would argue.

Kane Warwick (23:52)

Okay, so just to jump in there, because, you know, with Penguos it was a kind of multifaceted airdrop, right? So there was an airdrop of tokens to NFT holders who held the pudgy penguins. NFT or little pudgies, which at the time were like $50,000 each or something, right? Like this was not like a everyday person's JPEG that they were running around with, right? Like it was. It was mainly OGs and eth whales who are holding them. So those people got tokens. But then you also gave tokens to a bunch of people who had done various things. Like what are, what are some of the examples of like ecosystem token distribution that you guys did?

Luca Netz (24:36)

Yeah, it was like uniswap buyers and holders, Jupiter stakers, OpenSea users. You know, I think it was a list of like 50 different Proto friends, right? Like certain layer 0 users try to target. In hindsight, there was a whole business scheme that I could have done and I didn't, which was like, hey, I'm gonna airdrop your community, make sure you airdrop mine. But we had done this for such a short period of time, in hindsight was we gave away so many tokens and I actually ended up ruing it because what ended up happening probably two, three Weeks later after the drop. And Kane, I know you called me out on it and I, you know, I, I didn't mind it and I appreciated the take regardless. But what we were starting to see was we could, because there was so many eligible wallets, we started to see people that were connected to a couple of like centralized wallets that had thousands that were claiming and it was clearly Sybils who had, you know, put one jupe staked and gone through. And we hadn't filtered that it was a proxy and a mistake just on how quickly we basically went from hey, we're going to launch Pengu to it actually launching, which is a five, five week time frame. So we ended up closing the claim a little early, which obviously created a little bit of backlash, but nonetheless, yeah, that's how the. It was basically 50 plus percent of the supply, 25% to NFT holders and then 25% to active crypto participants.

Kane Warwick (26:01)

Right.

Luca Netz (26:02)

And so the big one, like I airdrop people don't know this, but abstract users got like $100 million, you know, farming on abstract. So it was cool.

Taylor Monahan (26:13)

When you're doing the mechanisms for these and you're like, okay, well let's like grab the uni holders and whatever. Like, what's the underlying thing that you're going for though? Like, because there's like a goal, right? You're not just trying to like throw. You're not literally, you're not literally just trying to give random people free money. Right? There's like goals and demographics or something.

Luca Netz (26:33)

Yeah, so it was a couple things. I think when we filtered the actual data, we were methodical in trying to attribute who was a loyal user on each of those respective platforms and what defined a loyal user. And so each loyalty was defined differently across the different platforms that we were awarded. But you have to understand that the story and the motivation for Pengu outside of the NFT holders distribution, the thought process was, was at least in our mind, that nobody was going to buy a token where 25% of the holders were just dumping on everybody else's head. So we had to make this. It was, it was. I. I wouldn't.

Kane Warwick (27:11)

Right.

Luca Netz (27:11)

So I had to make this a group thing. And, you know, the whole idea around Pengu was actually to go and eventually flip Doge and like, what does that story act? How can you actually tell that story? Well, the story for me is Penguin is the face of crypto. It's the mascot of crypto. It's the people's coin.

Kane Warwick (27:29)

Right.

Luca Netz (27:29)

And if it's the people's coin, it has to be distributed as such. It has to be for everyone. Everyone has to win from that airdrop and has to contribute from it. And so we went initially, like, who supported us, right? The layer zeros, the uniswaps of the world, people who have, like, you know, shown us value, went and try to index in the best of our ability. And we missed some. Like, I, in hindsight, should have hit up all the Infinix patrons again. It was such a fast sprint. But.

Kane Warwick (27:55)

You actually did. So, funnily enough, you guys did. You did. So you gave us a block of tokens and we were like, huh? How do we distribute this? Because you were like, here's your tokens. And we're like, oh, man, now we've got a job to do. And so we. We actually, like, figured out a way to do this. But this was crazy. This was like a very interesting insight for me because we didn't get the tokens for like a month afterwards, right? So, you know, there's like an argument for someone doesn't airdrop. There's a bit of a race condition of, like, people trying to rush to sell as quickly as possible when the price is still high. If they believe the price, price is going to go down. Right? You know, and so there's like this kind of dip that. That happens. But this was a month later, so the price had stabilized. Like, there was no crazy volatile price action. There was no reason whatsoever. We then got the technology to airdrop things to people. Did the Pengu airdrop finally to both patrons and non patrons. And we watched this in real time as like 85% of people just sold it straight away. And we were like, what is like. And it wasn't like this was even a huge airdrop per person. It was. It was maybe something like 15 to $20 up to like 300 per person. But we were just watching this stream of activity as people sold it. And I was like, okay, like, that is a very, very good lesson in. Because you couldn't argue that, like, there was a rush to. The price was fine. It wasn't that many tokens. There was no. There was no reason to. To rush to sell it, but people were like, climbing over themselves to try and sell this thing. And I was like, this is just a bad. It was. It was kind of like the realization that, like, giving someone something for free means they're probably not going to value it. And, you know that. I think it's been, you know, if we talk about Monad's Airdrop. There were a few things about it. One, it was a bit strange and hard to grok, right? So Monad was like, okay, guys, we're doing an airdrop. We need you to connect all your wallets, your socials, all of this stuff. Then we're going to calculate the distribution and in four days you're going to be able to do the thing, right? So everyone connected their wallets, did all the things, and then these boxes appeared and people were like, okay, boxes. Weird.

Taylor Monahan (30:38)

Cool. For the record, my daughter loved the boxes.

Kane Warwick (30:43)

My fantastic.

Taylor Monahan (30:45)

She like, so my kids.

Kane Warwick (30:46)

Yeah, my kids who have pudgies, right, they both have pudgies. And they, they. My son, every morning for the next like four days, who's six, was like, are there more boxes?

Taylor Monahan (30:56)

Yeah.

Kane Warwick (30:57)

So like, it worked for kids. The kids loved it. But my daughter, who's 9 on the second day got a lot less tokens than her brother. And she was like, literally she's like, I'm going to throw this computer out the window. She was so mad. And so I was like, wow, this is a very interesting representation of expectation management here because the first day she got way more tokens and her brother, and then second day she got less and she was not happy about it.

Taylor Monahan (31:22)

So that, yeah, the sibling rivalry fairness was probably not on the Monad priority list. Yeah, no, my daughter, she, yeah, she still wants to open boxes. Like, yeah, I need that front.

Kane Warwick (31:36)

I know everyone, everyone on crypto Twitter is like, no more boxes. And the kids are like, so. So I think the, the weird thing was though, it was like, hey, boxes.

Luca Netz (31:45)

Right?

Kane Warwick (31:46)

And then. So everyone opened their first three boxes and then they were like, come back tomorrow for more boxes. And we were like, what? Okay, cool. And then we came back the next day and the boxes were like, kind of empty. And it was a bit weird and a bit disappointing. And then we had the third day of boxes and I think everyone was like, it just built up too many expectations. And I think the fact that it was like ended up being with, you know, the tokenomics were 3% to the airdrop. And I'm sure Lucas, like, what the hell is going on here? 3% is not enough. What were you guys doing? Because you guys did half of the supply, right?

Luca Netz (32:30)

52%. Yeah.

Taylor Monahan (32:32)

Jesus.

Kane Warwick (32:33)

3%.

Luca Netz (32:35)

Mind you, I think I'm probably the biggest airdrop percentage wise on like a billion dollar plus token ever. Yeah. So I was, I. But I was going, and I'm going for a different story and a different history and it's a different type of Token. But, you know, I will tell you, the last couple of months, I've been like, I've been fascinated by some of these distributions because I'm like, man, you guys got some big balls on you, because I would not have the balls to give my community so little. It's been interesting to watch. I mean, you know, there's a couple in a couple of case studies, so. But I will tell you, it's maybe a very needed paradigm shift. I can tell you, for the builder and the entrepreneur, this paradigm shift is a lot more advantageous, which I think is. Obviously, I'm not complaining, but I'm telling you, some of these distributions, I'm like, man, if I underwrit that with my guys, and we maybe different companies, different thesises, but I do believe until crypto matures, we haven't crossed that chasm of maturity yet, where it's still sentiment and narrative, right? And like, I'm still. My argument at the Harvard Debate Club was, you know, in a world where this stuff is majority, majorly driven by sentiment and narrative, you need champions and you need your army. And to galvanize and to create that army of champions is to reward them and to be generous and to align them in the most, you know, lucrative and grand way possible.

Kane Warwick (34:01)

Right?

Luca Netz (34:01)

Which an airdrop can be a function of doing that. And then my argument was, is that if you airdrop so little, it's because of your inability to galvanize and rally the troops of champion. Because though people do sell, I would also make the argument, right, like penguins, evident in the chart. We had that massive drawdown, you know, off the backs of the spy Melania Trump bullshit, but we also had one of the biggest run backs up of all of the last 180 days. And that reflexivity, I think in part was because of that generosity and that goodwill. And who really hates Pengu if you ask around? I mean, I'd be remiss to find somebody who says, I hate that coin.

Kane Warwick (34:41)

Yeah, I don't think. I don't think there's many people. I don't think there's many people. And so this is an interesting. So Haseeb. Haseeb had this long thread about airdrops and, you know, what. What they were trying to achieve and airdrop farmers. And this is, you know, it's an evolving space, right back in the day, when we did our airdrop in 2017 for Haven, the point, which is definitely dating me, but the point of airdrops back then for ICOs was to be a proxy for the demand for the token when the ICO happened, it was a way of signaling if people were willing to jump through hoops to get this token, given that there were an infinite number of tokens that were being created during the ICO era, that something must be good about this project.

Luca Netz (35:33)

Right?

Kane Warwick (35:33)

It was like a signaling mechanism. So you did a big airdrop and people would do all the things that you asked them to do to get the thing. And it was a way of kind of, kind of signaling it. But it was very organic. There weren't yet at that time like giant civil farms and industrialized farming and all of that stuff. It's changed today. Today it's like industrial farming activity and civil farms and stuff that try to capture the value from airdrops. And Haseeb was sort of saying, you know, the metrics. Like, you know, basically the farmers come and say, we pump your metrics for you. Right? This is a paid service. And then Haseeb was like, okay, well if you're pumping the metrics, who are you pumping it for? Like, who is that signaling to? Right? He's like, it's not us. And like, you know, cool story, bro. I don't know if I 100 believe that, but like, sure. But like it's not, you know, it like someone is benefiting from industrialized farming. Right? And this was the interesting thing for Pengu, I guess for you guys is that like this is all retroactive. It wasn't like you had like a four year campaign of GMing in the pudgies discord or like you just have to hold, hold the thing. Like so. So you guys didn't actually maximize that like metric side of side of things.

Luca Netz (37:00)

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm, I'm a. The, the metric that I maximize for is mind share and marketing. And in an event where, you know, Pengu launched, mind you, there's an important fact in all this because the distribution is actually probably. And no one's actually really. I've never talked about it, so I do think it's worth 30 seconds because the magnitude was so massive. I mean you can, you can't point to many coins, if any, that had that much of a liquid float given to the people. And everyone always complains and underwrites the huge drawdown. But people are forgetting that airdrop for the first four weeks before the market imploded was up into the Right.

Kane Warwick (37:41)

Right.

Luca Netz (37:41)

And so there's this argument that airdrops lead to down only. But I would also argue that because that airdrop was so massive if you remember, in December we had like eight videos with 10 million plus views. Everything we were dishing out was getting insane distribution. I mean, I've never seen a crypto company get more views and impressions than we did in that December Sprint, like every week one, I think the biggest video got like 30 million views.

Kane Warwick (38:08)

Right?

Luca Netz (38:09)

And I don't, you know, you know, I want to see the real data. So we didn't touch that or do anything to that. Like that is just pure off the back stuff. But it was the distribution number that would that attributed that. And it wasn't until Trump, you know, extraction event and Melania and then the tariff nonsense did we draw down and we were the first thing to sell. But it's actually really interesting, like what if the tariff nonsense didn't happen? What if the liquidity black holes and the Hayden Davis special didn't happen? Maybe we still go up into the right, which when you think about IT, every other VC, any capital allocator would tell you, 52/ percent airdrop, you're a madman. That thing gets smoked.

Kane Warwick (38:47)

But it actually didn't.

Luca Netz (38:48)

And it didn't because everyone was galvanizing around it, everyone was talking about it, everyone was promoting it. And something that should have, you know, mathematically been down only the second it released.

Kane Warwick (38:58)

Yeah. So, so I think this is an interesting question as well. And like, you know, Tay, you guys are claiming to do an airdrop. No comment. Huh. So, so like, if, if we assume that 90 something percent of people sell the air drop, right? What is the, the purpose of that exercise, right? Like, you know, if the idea was get tokens to people so that they like the project, care about it or whatever, you know, let's assume that 95% of people are going to sell the Metamask token airdrop that they get, right? And I'm telling you, if I don't get a big airdrop, I'm raging on the timeline.

Luca Netz (39:46)

So.

Taylor Monahan (39:47)

Me too.

Kane Warwick (39:51)

So, so it's like, uh, but, but if, if everyone's gonna dump it, what's, what is the point of, of the exercise, right?

Taylor Monahan (40:01)

Like, yeah, yes, yeah, what's the point in exercise? And you know, we've been dealing with the, this for, for a good minute now because we did it last cycle as well. Everyone wanted us to airdrop and everyone was like, like farming metamask as if we were doing an airdrop. And it was really interesting because I kept trying to figure out why, like, what was it that people actually wanted, right? Because everyone, like, dude, we would tweet and it would just be like, just, just piles of like one token. One token, one token. And I never really figured, like, I never really got to the bottom of it. There's like a huge, just this like, mass of people that are just like around. And like now it's all the AI bots. But back then it was, it was very similar. It was like these robohuman reply guys, I'm still curious, like, what is it that people, that people want? And like, for the most part, my.

Kane Warwick (41:00)

Hot take is it's, well, we don't have ICOs.

Taylor Monahan (41:04)

Yeah, yeah.

Kane Warwick (41:05)

Like, if MetaMask, hey, we're gonna do it. Yeah, like, but even, even still, like, you know, people want to speculate or own or, you know, have exposure to the Metama brand token, whatever, if you don't sell it to them. And you know, my guess, I mean, I don't know, maybe like ICOs are back. Maybe you guys do ICO and sell tokens to people, who knows? But if you don't sell it to them, then the only way to get access to the thing is to farm it, right?

Taylor Monahan (41:37)

Yeah. Yeah. And that's it.

Luca Netz (41:40)

I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt. I do like the blend though, of the ICO with the airdrop. I think that is like a pretty fair medium where, like, you do have loyal power users who contributed your network and that have given you tons of value, you know, to your product. And there should be that. But I also think that, hey, if you want to, you know, play this game and be a part of this ecosystem, like, I do like, I do like the combination of the two. I just wanted to interject, but I'm so sorry.

Taylor Monahan (42:05)

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think the question is like, okay, so what do you want? What do the users want? What are they trying to get? And then as a builder of a product with users in an interoperable, decentralized ecosystem with so much going on, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to accomplish? And a lot of our highest level priorities are basically just creating value for people or even sort of like broader. It's like we're trying to unlock people's ability to interact with all these different things and create value in all these different ways. And so that's always been the big question with a theoretical MetaMask token is what exactly would this token do? If you ask Twitter back in the day, they would just say, oh, just take the revenue off the swaps and redistribute it through the token. And I was like, okay, if we want to redistribute all of the swaps fees to people in like, a fair way, we would just get rid of the fee. Like, right. Like, why would we do this convoluted mechanism of having it, like, route through this token? Like, there has to be something else in order to create value. Otherwise you're just doing like a little weird value loop where things get lost and like, real allocated in a weird way.

Kane Warwick (43:29)

I think MetaMask is an unusual market participant, right? But you can imagine, okay, imagine a world where MetaMask said, We need money, right? And you don't. But let's imagine a world where normal startups, you want to expand to Solana or something, right? But you already did that suite, you want to expand to Sweden. So you're like, all right, we need a billion dollars to expand to Swede because we need to rebuild all the technology or whatever. And so you do a big ico, you sell a bunch of tokens and then people own the token and it's like, well, how do we return value to token holders then? Sure, it makes sense, right? Like, you know, take fees from the thing, generating, you know, revenue or whatever, and put it into the token. You know, there's many good examples this cycle, I think of, of that. But when you're already established and profitable and working, you know, it feels. It does feel weird to then go, let's do a token. But everyone wants the token because they. They want to be able to speculate on it, Right? It feels, it almost feels like metamask is ripping people off by not having a token.

Taylor Monahan (44:45)

Yeah. And that's, by the way, like, we have internal conversations about this as well and like, mad disagreements. Like, it's not. I don't know. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about MetaMask and what we do. But, yeah, I mean, for years we've talked about wave a magic wand type stuff, right? What would it look like? And then we've also talked about just realistically, again, how do you get that. How do you get sort of the economics to, again, not just sort of weirdly redistribute existing value, but actually, you know, do something to unlock value or empower people or.

Luca Netz (45:29)

Yeah, style rewards, which I thought was clever. Everyone gave you guys shit for it, but that's where it has to go, right? Like, you can't just subsidize just to subsidize, Right. Like, at the end of the day, a lot of my Metamask volume was because I only knew how to swap through MetaMask. At a certain point you don't need to reciprocate that. Those fees that I gave you, because I did that provided a product that allowed me to make money elsewhere. There's just like the problem is the brain rot it's created, right? It's not actually the function, it's the brain rot. It's like a woke mind virus that's just like, like plagued its way through like this cohort of like crypto users. You know, it's like, yeah, that's what we have to figure out. But the Amex style reward system I'm totally aligned with. Right?

Taylor Monahan (46:15)

Like that, well, that's what, that's where we sort of arrive, right? Like we're, we're still. There's a lot of things happening. Okay, Consensus metamask, huge place. I don't know all the details. There's things happening all over the place. I do know because I played with it. The new rewards is super freaking cool. And in my opinion, is it boxes?

Kane Warwick (46:32)

Tell me it's boxes.

Taylor Monahan (46:33)

There aren't boxes, but I might have to go into Slack and tell them that we need boxes. But basically what it is is that.

Luca Netz (46:40)

You.

Taylor Monahan (46:43)

It'S built in. I think it's only on mobile right now. Like extension is rolling out soon. But basically you, you take certain actions and do certain things, most of which you would already normally be doing if you're a Metamask user. And then you get little points but then you level up and then those points unlock things. And so we have stuff that's happening on Linea, we have stuff that's happening. If you get to a super high level, you get Super Premium Free 247 Instant Special Customer support, which is like, I don't know if anyone values that, but I do. And the team is super happy to be like, they're like, oh, we're going to have like a new group of people that we can help out, but there's also like lower fees. Yeah, there's all sorts of things and obviously over time they're going to evolve, we're going to see what people respond to, see how else it's going to work with the product and stuff. But that's in our opinion, like a lot of like sort of the downsides of a token was like the question of like, then what do you do with it? And so I think that's why we ended up focusing on this rewards mechanism first and then go from there. And yeah, again, there's a lot happening. We'll see where everything lands.

Kane Warwick (48:01)

I think it's Luca. You said earlier tradfi has shifted in the last two decades from private companies IPOing early, you know, like Google was like four years old or something when it IPO'd. Like Amazon, like three years old, whatever. And all of the value creation happened in public markets. Right. You know, it's actually interesting when you look at Metamask as what, like nine years old or something? Eight. Yeah. Nine years old. And you guys have an IPO'd, you're ripping everyone off by not having it. Imagine if you guys did an ICO in 2017, how happy everyone would be.

Taylor Monahan (48:48)

I'm not convinced that's true though. Like.

Kane Warwick (48:53)

But you know, it's. You can see how people get themselves there, right? You can see how like you guys are super successful, you've done all this stuff and no one like users didn't get a chance to own it, didn't get a chance to farm it, didn't get an airdrop, didn't, you know, you know, whatever. So speaking of fee distribution and fee mechanisms, Uniswap has proposed for the 28th time now, I think the fee switch being switched on jokes. I think it's only the third time, which is still pretty dire, but I think this time it's real.

Taylor Monahan (49:30)

Yeah, of course it's real. It's heating this time. Like insert the. The founder wants his yellow Lambo meme.

Kane Warwick (49:41)

Yeah, so. So I think, I think, you know, this speaks to a couple things. One like the regulatory shift in the U.S. right, that Hayden even feels comfortable proposing a governance change. But maybe the, you know, the fee switch and all of that stuff was, was super interesting. I think the thing that maybe was the most interesting to me was the price action and what happened around the announcement and subsequently. It's been three days now and I think it's almost completely round tripped the announcement pump, which is kind of weird. And I think it speaks to the fact that everything in crypto now, all price action is, is driven by perps these days, which is. Yeah, it's, it's kind of crazy.

Luca Netz (50:43)

You were, you were getting into it before this call which you basically were alluding to like all the volume being purpose volume and I've seen the same thing just like doing all the data and looking at whatever what's going on across the board, which make I think makes like 10, 10 that much more scary. Right. Because it was really perps, all that perps liquidity that got smoked. And it's a different even venture. I mean so much of the landscape that's changed because a lot of people have gotten burned and they've lost so much money. But I think 1010 is going to have a lot more ramifications than I think people think. And I'll leave it off on that. Kane. Hey. I know you guys are going to wrap this up. I just. I'm five minutes late to something, and I miss. Scheduled something, so I'm gonna let you guys take it from here.

Taylor Monahan (51:26)

All right, well, bye, Luca, and we'll see you next week.

Luca Netz (51:29)

See you next week.

Taylor Monahan (51:30)

Yeah, but I just saw Aerodrome and Velome are merging.

Kane Warwick (51:35)

That's crazy. Well, so. So my. My. My story about Velodrome is back in, I guess, 2020, maybe 20. 20, 2021. Synthetics. Discord was still, like, the place where basically everything happened, right? You know, any. Any kind of. Like, there were so many projects that launched out of there that people were in, like, our DJ and Trading Channel. And one day, these Velodrome guys showed up, and they're like, we're the best decks ever.

Luca Netz (52:10)

History.

Kane Warwick (52:11)

And we were like, what? And they're like, yeah, we're the best. We're, like, the best guys. No one can touch us. And we were like, oh, okay, cool. And they're like, no, no, no. Like, we're serious. Like, you have to use us. And they just, like, hammered our Discord for weeks and weeks on end to the point where I was like, these guys are insane. Like, what? Like, this is so crazy. And. And I. I basically got to the point where I was like. I just faded them completely, and they did, like, a big airdrop of Velo to, like, SNX holders, because we had eventually had, like, an SNX pool or something. And then I sort of forgot about it, because they were. It was on optimism, right? Velodrome was on optimism. And then Base launched, and they forked their own protocol, which was a bold move, and put it on base and called it Aerodrome. And it became, like, the dominant decks on. On base. And then Bass became maybe the dominant L2, I think at this point you'd probably say it is. And so they became, like, this dominant decks, and I guess now they're merging, so I probably need to go through my wallets and find my Velo tokens. I'm sure I've got some sitting around somewhere.

Taylor Monahan (53:33)

Yeah. And I know I'm, like, scrolling, so I don't have all the details on, like, what exactly is happening, but.

Kane Warwick (53:39)

It was always weird to me because they kept on talking. No one had ever. Yeah, no one had ever tried that before, it would be like synthetics. We went from mainnet to optimism. If we had just forked the protocol, which in hindsight probably would have been a good idea. Right? Just fork the protocol. New token, new name, new everything. Instead, everyone did it for us. And forced on every chain on BSC and everything. We probably could have captured some value there if we had thought about that.

Taylor Monahan (54:13)

Yeah. Okay, so there's numbers. It says aerodrome holders get 94.5% of the new token, with velodrome holders getting 5.5%. Does that sound right?

Kane Warwick (54:24)

I mean, it sounds right for velodrome. Aerodrome. So the other fun thing about aerodrome is there is this ongoing, what I can only really describe as a psyop from them about why their tokenomics are the best.

Taylor Monahan (54:41)

Yeah.

Kane Warwick (54:42)

And. And like. But this is kind of like, very on brand for them. Right. Everything they do is the best thing. It's why I actually think they. They do so well on base because Bass has a little bit of that, like, kind of, I don't know, American exceptional.

Taylor Monahan (54:59)

Yeah.

Kane Warwick (55:00)

Shameless exceptionalism. Like, we're so exceptional and. And amazing that we can do whatever we're. We want. And it's like, what? Wait, what? It's like, no, no, we can do anything because we're the best. So, like, nothing we do, you know, you can't criticize us. So. So they. They have this. This, like, lock tokenomics thing.

Taylor Monahan (55:24)

Yeah. Because that's. That's what I know it from. If you do certain loops on base, then you get. The emissions are wild.

Kane Warwick (55:31)

You get the emissions. Yeah, the emissions are wild. But a lot of the projects on base have complained about this because effectively what happens is you bribe, you know, and this was. This was Curve who kind of invented this ve. Token locking thing. But Curve did it like. Curve was like, okay, we're doing this for governance reasons because it was 2020, so they didn't want to go to jail. So it was all about, like, governance, power and what have you. And then Aerodrome was like, hold my beer. It's not about governance at all. It's about, like, token emissions. And so all of the arrow kind of incentive loops are about basically projects bribing aerodrome holders to put liquidity towards their pools, which ends up selling the tokens of the projects. And so a lot of people have criticized them about that. And then their response is kind of like, you're a bad person. Like, how can you criticize us? And it's pretty hilarious. But they've done really well. And I think they're now saying they're going to combine to take on Uni on Mainnet. Maybe.

Taylor Monahan (56:41)

Yeah, because that's what I saw them. They went to town on the Uniswap V. Oh, yeah.

Kane Warwick (56:47)

They were them and them and Michael from Curve.

Taylor Monahan (56:50)

Yeah.

Kane Warwick (56:50)

I told Michael I was on. On the timeline. I was like, just sit this one out, bro. Like, just. It's in bad taste. Coming in over the top, being like, we're bet. Like, our fee switch is better than your fee switch. I was like, come on.

Taylor Monahan (57:04)

We do like that in Crypto. Everything is.

Kane Warwick (57:08)

It's very, very PvP.

Taylor Monahan (57:09)

Like, the second that anything good happens to anyone else, you're like, no, it's me. It's about.

Kane Warwick (57:15)

No. Pay attention to me. Exactly. I know. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, let's wrap it up. This has been fun.

Taylor Monahan (57:24)

Yeah, no, super fun. And I think we're gonna do it again next week, and hopefully it'll be.

Kane Warwick (57:30)

Unless they cancel us, pretty dire. We've been planning this for, like, a year, right? So if we get canceled after our first episode, I might. I'm. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna take it.

Taylor Monahan (57:42)

Well, please don't cancel us.

Kane Warwick (57:44)

All right, that's our first episode of Uneasy Money. Thank you all for joining us. Tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on Unchained feed on X YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. We will see you next week.