Uneasy Money: Why Crypto Still Can't Overcome Its ICO Struggles

Summary

Unchained Podcast: "Uneasy Money: Why Crypto Still Can't Overcome Its ICO Struggles"

Host: Laura Shin
Date: January 23, 2026
Panelists:

• King Warick
• Taylor (Security at MetaMask)
• Luca (CEO of Pudgy Penguins)

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Episode Overview

In this episode of "Uneasy Money," the panel unpacks the recurring disasters of crypto token launches, with a focus on the Trove token ICO fiasco, the cyclical failures of new fundraising paradigms, and the persistent struggles with transparency, scams, and broken trust mechanisms in the crypto ecosystem. They also dissect InfoFi’s demise on X (formerly Twitter), the limits of using payments as spam deterrents, and the ongoing challenges and transitions of major crypto infrastructure projects.

The discussion is frank, animated, and delivered in a builders-and-degens’ tone—heavy on skepticism, some frustration, but always attentive to deeper lessons and cautionary tales for anyone mired in or observing crypto’s on-chain circus.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trove Token ICO Fiasco & the Repeating ICO Cycle

[03:17–14:17]

• What happened with Trove:

  • Trove, aiming to become a perpetual futures market based on collectibles, held an ICO raising $11.5M.
  • The process was messy: oversubscription, confusing (and partial) refunds, a last-minute pivot to Solana, and a launch price that crashed instantly—“worse than a meme coin.”
  • Reports surfaced of aggressive paid KOL campaigns, and at least one KOL refused to participate due to lack of transparency regarding paid promotion.

• Quote:

  • "How is it that we can't figure out a fucking way to sell tokens to people and not have it just blow up immediately?" —King Warick [08:36]

• Deep, recurring problems:

  • Crypto keeps repeating its mistakes: ICOs, then IDOs, now “return to ICOs”—always with catastrophic launches for retail.
  • No equivalent to traditional investment banks (e.g., JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs) exists in crypto to steer launches and manage risk/hype.
  • Projects without knowledgeable partners or experienced advisors “get smoked every time.”

• Product vs. mechanics:

  • Panelists like the idea of tokenized collectibles but emphasize that technical and market realities—like illiquidity and the manipulability of price oracles—make execution nearly impossible.

• Quote:

  • "If someone tells you they're going to perp something that's completely illiquid, the person is most likely retarded… there are so many challenges." —King Warick [11:22]

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2. Influencers, Hype, and the ICO Hype Machine

[14:17–19:15]

• KOL-led paid hype:

  • Projects are increasingly bypassing VCs in favor of mass FOMO campaigns led by crypto influencers on X.
  • This isn’t more equitable: it's simply a new form of extractive insider game.

• Panel skepticism:

  • Panelists suggest treating any “new meta”—like perps on collectibles—as a red flag, especially when it’s paired with paid hype.
  • Anti-VC sentiment feels justified but ends up funneling users into even more extractive games (meme coins, pump-and-dumps).

• Quote:

  • "If 95% of the KOLs are in agreement about something and there’s no dissent...that is a crazy paid campaign being run on you." —King Warick [18:14]

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3. Alternatives to VCs: The Failure of Echo Groups

[20:55–24:04]

• Echo group failures:

  • Community investing groups (Echo) were meant to democratize access but quickly degraded into yield farms for organizers, with poor deal selection and carry fees rivaling VCs.
  • The supposed wisdom of the crowd was not superior to the expertise of seasoned angels or VCs.

• Lesson:

  • Every new system succumbs to perverse incentives over time, and mass participation doesn’t guarantee better outcomes—often the opposite.

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4. InfoFi and Micro-Incentivized Noise on Social Platforms

[26:04–34:04]

• InfoFi’s rise and demise (and X’s role):

  • InfoFi let users “grind” for points/cash by replying on X, incentivizing massive paid and botted engagement (“yapping” for dollars).
  • X detected and nuked InfoFi, showing it is finally aware of crypto’s promotional metas infecting its user base.

• Transparency paradox:

  • When paid engagement was public, manipulation was visible. Now, with private deals, shilling will continue—just less visibly.

• Quote:

  • "Stop incentivizing people to be butts on the Internet. Okay? Thank you." —Taylor [33:54]

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5. The Futility of Monetary Disincentives for Spam/Scam Mitigation

[34:11–58:30]

• Micropayments don’t deter bad actors:

  • Attempting to curb spam by charging for replies/emails historically fails—spammers are ROI-driven and legitimate users are simply priced out.
  • Transparent ledgers and public transactions enable address-poisoning attacks, as scammers can precisely target users about to move large amounts of money.

• Quote:

  • "You cannot successfully block out scammers, spammers, whatever. You just can't. With financial stuff, there has to be other stuff. And the second you do try to block them with financial means, you just destroy every legitimate user." —Taylor [57:39]

• Security anecdotes:

  • Luca tells a story of a sophisticated scam that intercepted an investment via address poisoning, resulting in a million-dollar loss for a VC. The lesson: never copy addresses from transaction history, always use address books, and never rely on surface UIs that prioritize unfiltered transaction history.
  • Taylor stresses the importance of user interface choices in wallet software for blocking exposure to address poisoning.

---

6. The Rise and Fall of Social Experiments: Farcaster, Nar, and the Problem with Social Crypto Apps

[35:50–49:21]

• Farcaster acquired by Nar:

  • Despite a $150M raise, Farcaster failed to break incumbent social giants’ network effects and was acquired by an infra builder.
  • The panel praises the risk—social apps warrant big, bold investment—but acknowledge the project learned painful lessons about echo chambers and scaling beyond a tech-native crowd.

• Key insight:

  • Real social innovation will come from drastically lower building costs and smaller teams, unleashing experimentation. Incumbents’ network effects remain daunting.

• Tipping and monetization as a killer feature:

  • Panelists argue that seamless, peer-to-peer payments/tipping (as implemented by their own apps) is still an underutilized killer feature only enabled by crypto.

• Quote:

  • "One of the greatest things about tokenization is the ability to take intangible things and make them tangible... if you assess the opportunity there, what is one of the most valuable intangible things? My answer is influence." —Luca [44:34]

---

7. The Chains That Stalled: Cosmos and the Pain of Building Away from EVM Standards

[61:28–67:21]

• Cosmos’ predicament:

  • The chain is technically solid but suffers from fragmentation, lack of network effects, and far less developer traction than EVM-based chains.
  • Moving from Cosmos to EVM-compatible stacks is now the clear trend, as developer experience and user base are decisive.

• Quote:

  • "No one uses it. No one cares. It’s a meme..." —King Warick on Cosmos [62:37]

---

8. Code is Law? The Paradox Rollback and Shifting Norms Around Immutable Contracts

[68:26–76:23]

• Paradox chain rollback:

  • A disastrous database migration led to a rollback to protect users (with the bug even, comically, taking Bitcoin to zero in the virtual world).
  • The community’s acceptance of pragmatic rollbacks signifies shifting norms: immutability is less sacred, user recovery is now respected.

• Quote:

  • "If you can and you choose not to, and you do all these mental gymnastics to basically morally justify you not taking an obviously good action... you're never going to build and ship anything of value if you're that disconnected from your people and your product.” —Taylor [72:40]

• Caveats:

  • True immutability is still a green flag, but most projects operate between fully immutable and fully mutable, and a pragmatic fix is now less taboo.

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On why crypto can't get launches right:

  • “It’s insane. It’s completely insane. Like, how is it that we can’t figure out a fucking way to sell tokens to people and not have it just blow up immediately?" —King Warick [08:36]

• On paid campaigns and false consensus:

  • “If 95% of the KOLs are in agreement about something and there’s no dissent...that is a crazy paid campaign that is being run on you right now.” —King Warick [18:14]

• On the futility of using payments to deter spam:

  • "You cannot successfully block out like threat actors, scammers, spammers, whatever… you just destroy every legitimate user." —Taylor [57:39]

• On tipping and influence as crypto’s killer app:

  • “One of the greatest things about tokenization is the ability to take intangible things and make them tangible... My answer is influence.” —Luca [44:34]

• On the shifting meta of rollbacks and “code is law” philosophy:

  • "If you can and you choose not to... to basically morally justify you not taking an obviously good action. I'm sorry, like you're avoidant. You're not good at building, you're not good at shipping, you're never going deliver value to people...” —Taylor [72:40]

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Important Timestamps

• 03:17 — Trove Token & ICO Failures
• 08:36 — Rant: “Why can’t we launch tokens right?”
• 14:17 — Patterns of Hype and Influence
• 18:14 — KOL Red Flags
• 26:04 — InfoFi: Monetizing Social Engagement on X
• 33:54 — “Stop incentivizing people to be butts on the Internet.”
• 34:11–58:30 — Security, Spam, and Micropayments Doomed to Fail
• 61:28 — Cosmos Chain’s Downward Spiral
• 68:26 — Paradox Rollback & Code is Law, Revisited

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Summary Takeaways

The episode is a candid, sometimes exasperated reflection on how crypto continues to reinvent new ways to repeat old mistakes. Whether discussing paid campaigns, another failed launch, or clumsy attempts at incentive design, the hosts see history echoing—scams flourishing, trust broken, and users left holding the bag. Yet, their spirit is not entirely cynical; they hold out hope for innovation in tough problems like on-chain engagement, truly fair token launches, and the elusive quest for a new social network model—if only the lessons of the past can be heeded.

Transcript

[A]

It's completely insane. Like, how is it that we can't figure out a fucking way to sell tokens to people and not have it just blow up immediately? The idea that you just like write three random words under every tweet and hope that that works is. Is kind of wild, right? Like, I don't know how anyone thought that was a good strategy.

[B]

No test transaction, just moving $20 million. No test, just boom, boom, boom. Got some balls.

[A]

Hey everyone, I'm King Warick and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. I'm here with my co host Taylor, Security at Metamask and Luca, the CEO of Pudgy Penguins. 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@unchained crypto.com uneasymoney before we begin, hear the word from our sponsors.

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[E]

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[A]

All right, let's see. If I had told you in 2017 that the price of Bitcoin would be linked deeply to the future of Greenland, I don't know if you would have believed me, but that's the world we live in right now. It's pretty wild. I'm sure there's a Greenland token that's even more intrinsically linked to the fate of Greenland, but for now it's just BTC price action. PA has just been wild. The last like, even the last like eight hours, it was like back up to 90 down to 87, back up to 90. I don't know what is going on. We can't figure it out, dude.

[B]

It feels like whoever. Because we still haven't figured out who blew up. Somebody definitely blew up on 10 10. Feels like whoever blew up is, like, not done trying to, like, recoup their losses. I don't know. I. I saw that scam Wick a couple days ago, and I was like.

[A]

Yeah, I had ptsd. I was like, no, please, out. What if it was the president of Greenland that. That blew up on 10 10? And that would. That would actually sh. All right, so our first topic today outside of Greenland is the Trove Token. So this. This is a very interesting situation. I think it was. It was quite interesting for me because the Trove iCo was going on at the same time that Infinix was doing the sonar sale. So it was quite. Quite funny to look at, like, the different take on Trove on the timeline. It was like, super positive on Trove. Trove was amazing. Future France, like, the most egalitarian thing we'd ever seen. And Infinix was a giant scam. And here we are. I guess, you know, the Infinix token hasn't launched yet, so maybe it'll also go down 98% in the first 15 minutes, but, you know, who knows? So Trove markets, they raised 11.5 million in a public token sale. There was originally so supposed to be a deployment on Hyper Liquid, and Trove was. Or is, I guess, or I'm not 100% sure where they're at now, but they. They. They're basically like RWA market for, like, Pokemon cards and. And things like that. I actually had one of our investors shill this to me, and I. And I had a look at it, and there's quite a few projects that are in the space, right, that, that are, you know, doing. Doing Pokemon cards, doing rare assets, baseball cards, et cetera, that you can, like, open up a pack of cards or open, you know, open a. Like some kind of loot box and, you know, cards come out. We need to do that for the pudgy Penguin card cards. Luca, I don't know, May. Maybe you're already planning that.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

We're coming.

[B]

Once Tay gets her box, we'll just do it right here.

[A]

We'll.

[F]

I'm so excited.

[A]

We'll sell Cat. We'll give it to an audience member. I. I've ripped 55 boxes with my kids now. We bought. We bought 60 boxes. We're down to the last five boxes. We need two epic foils to complete our foil set. And we are starting to lose hope. I'm not gonna lie. It's. It's pretty crazy. My son, like every morning wakes up, he's like, you can see he's got like this thousand yard stair where he's like, should we open another box? And then we open a box and it's like just. We never get these cards. It's crazy. Anyway, so. So, yeah, so trove is like, we're gonna, we're gonna create a perpetual futures market tied to collectibles, CS2 skins, a bunch of things. And they did their ICO, they did the token sale and it was oversubscribed. And then they like, didn't refund people or didn't fully refund people. I still haven't been able to get to the bottom of exactly how this worked. I saw someone write up like a long thing of like, why they didn't refund, but it seems like they refunded some, but not all. They basically kept the money. And right before the tg, they said, we're pivoting to Solana. So that was also a little weird. And then I think the ICO launched like, well under, well under the original price. The TGE launched at like under the ICO price and then went down to like a million fdb. So I don't even know how that's like, it seems weird. Like, that's like worse than a meme coin. So the whole thing is pretty wild. Apparently the other, the other component to this is there. And this is just like in the last few hours I've seen posts about this. They had a huge campaign where they're paying KOLs to tweet positive things about them. And One of the KOLs said, you know, I went through this whole process, I wrote up a big thing about it. And you know, at the bottom I want to disclose, like, this is a paid promotion. Um, and their manager, because KOLs have managers now, was like, no, no, no. The project says no to that. And then, and then they were like, well, I'm not doing it then. And so they like refunded the money, the whole thing anyway, then the thing blew up. So, yeah, it's. It's pretty wild.

[F]

So many of the KOLs are coming out and being like, sporting.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[F]

And then also there's like, you know, there's always the flood of people who like, have that, like, unanswered dm and they're like, oh, shoot, I missed out yeah.

[A]

So. So I think, look, you know, the interesting thing to me about this whole thing, right, is, like, we did this before, twice. We did ICOs, then we did IDOs, and now we're running back ICOs, and we still cannot fucking get this right.

[F]

Like, it's insane.

[A]

It's insane. It's completely insane. Like, how is it that we can't figure out a fucking way to sell tokens to people and not have it just blow up immediately?

[B]

I don't.

[A]

I, I. Yeah, like, I don't get it.

[B]

I've got a lot here.

[A]

Let's go.

[B]

Let's.

[A]

I need, I need some takes. I think a negative. Positive. I need something. Well, I also dodged a bullet, so.

[B]

We'Ll get into that in a sec, but.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Okay. I think, I think the first one.

[A]

Is, you know, if you take a.

[B]

Company public, you go to J.P. morgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and they do all the bullshit and they make sure everything's set up and they take their.

[A]

Fee and the thing launches.

[B]

If you're actually, if you're a token founder, right, there's no JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs. You either you either have the right investors or the right people in your corner telling you how to do it, or you don't. And if you don't, you get smoked every time. Like 99.9% of times. Like, there's maybe one outlier to the, to the rule. And that seems like a problem worth solving, I would think. Something that I've been thinking about, I know other people have been thinking about, but it seems like a pretty big problem. So that's one, I think. The other one is I love the product idea, right? Like, the idea, I think, has huge potential for pmf. You know, I'm somebody who rips tons of pudgy penguin cards, but also all the basketball cards and all the, you know, this physical collectible market is a huge one, $500 billion growing like 4 or 5% year over year, and they have huge liquidity issues. It's a very archaic system. Part of it, Part of the reason it being archaic is what makes it fun. But, you know, obviously I think there's, there's some innovation to come there. So I love the idea. The guy actually reached out to me and I wanted to help. Like, it seemed like, pretty kosher. He wanted to do a pudgy penguin collectible perp. Like, take one of our rare collectibles, add some perps.

[A]

I was like, all game. Yeah.

[B]

The guy that I was talking to was actually not any of the Guys that I knew were getting a lot of on ax. This guy seemed really smart, really kind. He ended up being like, we ended up. I was like, hey, let's, you know, let's do something. We ended up never doing anything and then the launch went to shit. So like thank God because I would have been fucking grouped into that. But it's a good idea, right? Like, and, and, and it had some promise. I mean the idea that obviously accrued huge value. I think where this went wrong is like, you know, I don't, at least the conversation I had with the guy that I was interfacing with didn't seem, it didn't seem ill intentioned and obviously they have some version of a working product live. Like it's not a complete sham, right? Like there is again, I don't know how hard it is. It seems like we're putting perps on everything. So like maybe like hyper liquid or something has made it really easy again. I'm not sad.

[A]

So like it is hard. And if someone tells you they're going to purpose something that's like completely illiquid, the person is most likely retarded. Okay, that's like the starting point. Like dig into like ask some questions and like see what you get back for them. Because if they're like, hey, we're going to like, you know, create perps on like the art market or something, right? It's like okay, what's your oracle? Like how are you doing this? Like you know, really there, there are so many challenges with making perps on illiquid assets. It's, it's just not an easy thing. Especially illiquid fragmented assets, right? Because then it's like okay, if we make a per on pudgy penguins, right? Is it the floor price? Okay, fine, like that's fairly liquid. Like that know on, on like this is the nft, right? Like NFT floor price per. Cool. Like there's enough, you know, there's enough movement but I promise you there is not enough liquidity for people to not get their faces ripped off on that all day long. Because like I could go right now and put a couple hundred eth into the floor price of pudgies and probably raise the entire, you know, raise the floor price by like I don't know, 20%, 20, 25%, right? There's no, there's no one with standing orders that's going to sell into me. Like there's a few, but like not enough, right? Like no one's like the floor price is actually 70 and therefore, if you try and push it above 7, 8, I'm just going to infinite sell into that. Right. Because they kind of can't. So there, like, there's a very challenging problem in taking in a liquid asset and making a perp. Like, it's just going to get manipulated, unfortunately.

[B]

Yeah. It seems like those oracles are so easy to manipulate too. Like you prices.

[A]

Yeah, totally.

[B]

Yeah, that. That makes sense.

[A]

Well, thankfully, I dodged a bullet.

[B]

I even.

[A]

I. You did.

[F]

Yeah, you did.

[B]

And honestly, Kane, you made me just realize I probably should think a little smarter. Technically. I was like, oh, you guys figured it out. So let's throw these like, in cold pounds on there was a little naive. And so I'm glad I didn't have to fucking deal with that.

[A]

Yeah, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that. But look, you know, my. My hot take on that is like, a lot of these problems are not intractable. Right? Like, they're hard problems. They're not intractable. And, you know, you can kind of iterate your way towards like, some kind of solution to them. So I think, like, the base case of not rejecting everything out of hand is actually fine. Like, I think. I think, you know, you don't want to turn into one of those people that's like, so cynical that, like, nothing can work. And everything that someone pitches you, like, ah, that won't work. I've seen that before. Like, I hate those fucking guys. Like, get out of the space. Like, go do something else. We're not done innovating here.

[F]

I don't know, I have a couple red flags that I'm just like, you know what? We're just not even going to waste time investigating. All right? And it served me well over a decade. Okay? So maybe you guys should listen to me once in a while. First thing is whatever the hype thing is. So right now it's perps, like, you have to put it in, like, the negative bucket land, and then they have to work their way out of that just by like, like riding the coattails on perps. And then this pattern where they do like, the most popular hype thing, but with another, like, cool thing that feels more genuine. Like, I've seen it so many different times. And so that's what stands out to me about this is like, this just seems like, like, if you kind of zoom out and you're like, I want to scam a bunch of people with.

[A]

Money, what is match these two narratives together?

[F]

Yes, exactly. Right. And so that one served me pretty well. I mean, I've also missed out on stuff. So let's be realistic about how my success rates on this.

[A]

You haven't lost money, but you made. You haven't made money either. So this is my point, right? Is like, it's better to get scammed every once in a while without on like a thousand x.

[F]

So. Yeah. And then the other thing I think is just. I think it's just really genuinely hard to like, unpack the intentions of people these days because just like, the conversation is all over the place. The sort of, like the trust indicators, the things that you have are all manipulated as hack. You also don't necessarily, like, want to operate solely on like, super great trust indicators. Like a project without any sort of like, attention and hype is not going to be great either.

[B]

Yeah.

[F]

But I do think that, like, I don't know, it's gonna be. I think it's gonna be hard to like, really get to a, to a, like a perfect position, but I think that we can at least get to a position where we don't like, throw a huge amount of money at someone who then immediately like, screws it up. Right? Like, yeah, I.

[A]

This is, this is the problem though, in like, you know, this kind of oversubscribed meta as well, right? Like, remember mega ETH had 1.2 billion in bids, right. Like, and you know, Mega Eth is very trusted. Like, been in the space for a long time, like, you know, good people, but it is possible to create enough FOMO that people will put 1.2 billion into a contract. Now there was also like sonar guardrails around that as well, right? Like, but, you know, like, that's a lot of money in a pot for someone to be like, oh, actually, maybe I changed my mind and the price is really 10 billion, so thank you. And then they just like go waltz up into the sunset. They've got your money at that point. What, like, what do you do? Right? So I, I think, like, you know, we tried, we tried so many different ways to like, stop ICOS from becoming super extractive. And like, CT is obviously because literally like everyone, you know, you can't trust KOLs, right? Like, like they're being paid to say things. So you have KOLs who, you know, and there's some that, that are, you know, transparent about this. But, like, it's all in balance. You really can't trust them. Right? Like, if that is the only indicator, especially, I mean, talking about, like, red flags, right? Tay? Like, one of the things, if 95% of the KOLs are in agreement about something and there's like, no dissent.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

That is a crazy paid campaign that is being run on you right now where people are throwing money and you know, let's say you throw a million dollars out at like the top 50 kols, right? Pay them 50k each or something like that to, you know, tweet positive things for a week, build up a ton of hype and then you raise $10 million. Like that's very positive PB for the person raising the money, right? Like so.

[F]

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. And I think the other thing that we don't touch on as much is like, some of this is like the new generation's like, rejection of VCs. And like anything that's even slightly professional is like this for me. Like, I still don't understand the KOL situation. Like, I don't understand how the, how people are operating off of that. Like, I see it and I'm just like, why would you listen to this person? They're literally being paid like, yeah, the.

[A]

Anti VC meta I do get, right? Because let's not forget there's a long period of time of like, low float, high FTV. You know, everyone bought the token at $0.01 and you're buying it at like $2, right? And they're just going to like dump into you forever, right? And so people, you know, people look for some alternative to that. They go to Meme Coins, right? Or they go to this thing or like they, you know, they do perps or whatever, right? Like, the job of most people in crypto is trying to make money. They're trying to like, you know, they're trying to find a way to turn ten dollars into a thousand dollars or a hundred dollars into a million dollars or whatever their target is. And if they see one game that is stacked against them, they will try another game. And you know, sometimes the game is stacked against you in a way where like, you can see what the rake is, right? Like VCs are like, we are going to take 50% of all of the value that is created in this place, right? And people go, oof, 50%, that feels bad, right? And then they're like, let's go to Meme Coins. And it's like the meme coin guy's like, we're going to take 99.9% of the value that is created in this place. And it's like, you can still make money, but you have to be one in a thousand, you know, person, right? And then, you know, it all kind Of.

[F]

But that feels better for some reason, right? That feels like. Because it's partially just the rejection of the VCs rather than like a return to first principles and being like, actually, what. How should I. What does success look like? How should I gauge this, et cetera.

[A]

You know, it's. It's funny. Like, I was, I was big into Echo early on, right? Like, we, you know, I had an Echo group. I was in a bunch of Echo groups. I was in like those early rounds, mega eth going back to like early 2024, right, like two, two years ago now. And like, Eko genuinely felt like it was starting to solve some of the problems. You had at least alignment between, like, the group lead. You know, it was kind of an ico. It wasn't exactly an ICO because it was early stage. There was no liquidity. But it was like, we can replace VCs with this approach. We can raise 2, 3, 4, $5 million. And even that got, like, very quickly turned into farming. You know, probably the biggest group, I won't name it, but there was. There was one particular group that did hundreds of deals with like a 10 to 20% carry raised. I don't even know, like, maybe like $500 million or something. Like, it would be some crazy amount of money with. With it, like 15, 10, 15, 20% carry on average. So, you know, like, it might be 20 mil or something like that. I don't, I don't know exactly how much it was, but like, it could be 20 or 30 mil of three roles into all these deals. And, you know, a lot of the deals were not amazing. And that became the most popular group because it had the most deals, they always sold out, had the most people in it. And it was like, this is adverse selection to a massive extent, right? Like, but even then there were groups that you couldn't get into. People wanted to do Echo and so they were like, well, I can't get into, you know, guy from Athena's group that does like one, one deal every three months or something like that. So I'm going to go into this group and this group is going to be, you know, my, my ticket out. And, you know, even talking to Kobe, he's like the, the idea that somehow from a project perspective as well, that, you know, 200 degens would be better than your classical angel investors or like Haseeb is ludicrous. And we've now tested this. We have empirical data. It is not better. It is definitely not better. Right? So it's a challenging problem. Like even, even when you have a system, which I would have and did argue like in Echo, that was one of the most well thought out schemes from like an incentive and mechanism design perspective. And it still has the ability to kind of unravel to some extent. It's. It's pretty.

[F]

Yeah, yeah. Because there's money. There's so much money on the table.

[A]

There's so much money that is. There's so much money. You're going to get adverse selection, you're going to get perverse incentives. People will find a way. They'll find the bug, they'll find the bug in the thing and they'll find the edge case that you didn't think through and you know, unless you're like.

[F]

Run it like they don't just like look at it, they will.

[A]

Oh quakely.

[B]

I know.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[F]

That's actually like a good transition to this next one though.

[A]

It is, it is. So I don't know, I can intro the info. Infofast stuff or what do you guys can take it up to you.

[F]

Do you want to say something?

[B]

Yeah, I, you know it goes back to my point though. It's like I think, I think the people don't know what they want outside of them wanting to make money just to like this viral point goes down to like I said earlier with Trove, it's like, yeah, the VCs like can help you do it to make the launch way better. I promise you. If those Trove guys had like a good person on the cap table that was aligned in a meaningful way, the launch, with that launch specifically, and Katie probably attested this, like that was a breakdown of like you didn't know what you were doing. That was simple through and through, right. Like that wasn't you either were you either scammed or you were completely oblivious and hadn't done it before and had nobody in your corner who had done it before and that was a complete. Right.

[A]

Like all the things that you just.

[B]

Have to like you underwrite if somebody good was in your corner, right, With a.

[A]

What are they gave like 20% of the tokens to DWF or something like that, right? To market make or like something ridiculous. That's the only way that can even happen, right? Like they gave like 20, 30, 40% of the supply to someone, some crazy market maker who just dumped into the chart. That's the, the only way that you can have a 98% down candle in the first hour is if there was like 10 times more float than was expected. Just dumping with impunity dumping.

[F]

Yeah, yeah. Which is insane.

[A]

Like, which is insane. But to your point, Luca, like, no one would advise you to do that. You can only do that if you had no idea what you're doing or if you're scamming. And like, you know, I don't know if I don't know the answer, but, like, you know, the result speaks for itself. The outcome speaks for itself.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, so speaking of making money in crypto, one of the ways that people try to make money in crypto over the last year was infofi. And the interesting thing about infofi, in terms of, you know, people running things, right, and people. People seeing a gap and you're running towards it, right, was that infofi really required no capital. You could almost convert, like, pure time and energy and effort into money. And so, you know, there was a. There was a category of people that was extremely attracted to this. And, you know, this is not the first time we've had this airdrop farmers, you know, saying GM and a discord or whatever. Similar, similar vibes, right? So this was, this was an extension in my mind of like the airdrop meta, you know, trying to maximize attention on the timeline. But this week or last week, I guess, sorry, ex nuked infofire just like completely lost the entire thing. Like, just like nothing will ever grow there for like 10,000 years. Like, just absolutely wiped it off the face of the planet. And, you know, like, whether you agree or disagree with infofi or you think it was a good idea or whatever, there is something in my mind at least about the fact that X is aware enough of this thing going on to actually go and nuke it. That feels so bullish for X right now. Like, they are actually tapped into what's happening on their platform. You know, one of the biggest criticisms of Twitter, the OG Twitter, right, was none of the fucking people who are running Twitter used it. They were not users of the platform. Like, and they actively talked about that, right? They're like, ah, yeah, like, they never tweeted, they never did anything. They never. They had no idea what it was like to be on Twitter. And, you know, Elon came in, it was like, I know Twitter.

[F]

I use Twitter a lot.

[A]

I use Twitter. I. I love Twitter, right? And so the fact that you've got people who actually know what's going on to sufficiently in, like, this niche category, right? Like, Twitter is a big place. Like, crypto is a smaller place. Infofi is an even smaller place within crypto. Twitter. And the fact that they were. Were paying attention enough to like go and nuke this thing is pretty wild and, and feels pretty bullish. So I think it also speaks to like they are paying more attention to, to crypto than they are maybe giving off right now. So. So yeah, infofi is over. It had a good bad run. I don't know. I know. Take it.

[B]

What's that chart?

[A]

Yeah, they, they didn't take amazingly well, I think. You know, interestingly, Kaito, whether they saw this coming or they, you know, Kaito was one of the first ones to it. They saw the perverse incentives. They saw what happened when they opened it up to like an infinite number of bots and they were already in this process of curating it. I don't know what happens to Kaido from here, to be totally honest, because, like, I mean, just even, even this one stat, right, the Yapper community, which was like a commi. Like an X community. So this is like a place where there's like a kind of its own timeline of people tweeting 157,000 accounts in there, which it would have been like a billion accounts if the bots weren't constantly getting nuked, right? But 150,000, I guess accounts that had escaped the bot purging all just the whole community got nuked, which is pretty wild as well. So, yeah, I don't know how infofi recovers from this because the primary vector in my mind was on X and if you can't access X, then I think it's over.

[F]

Um, but yeah, I genuinely don't know what you do from here. Like, as if you want, if you, if you believe in this idea that people should be able to yap and make money and whatever, I don't know what you do from here. I would recommend figuring out a different thing to do. But that's just me, I think, fundamentally, and I've, I've had this belief for so long. Like I, I don't think that like so many people say, like, you add money or you add a cost to something and that'll solve the problem and it always does the opposite. And this is like early Internet days when email spam was a thing. They're like, let's charge people for email. The result of that is not that the scammers stop paying for email. The result is that every single legitimate person doesn't pay and only the people that know they're going to have roi, which are the scammers, and the scammers pay. It's always like this. And I don't know why we have to keep relearning that, like, the money just kind of screws things up. But we do.

[A]

We always take the chance. We're always like, this time, this time it might work.

[B]

Made it. AOL marketing, basically, you know, it was.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

But, you know, so the interesting thing is, right, like, there was a period of time where you had this organic, somewhat transparent. You could see which, you know, which projects these. These KOLs were grinding on.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, the leaderboards were public. You could see everything. Kaito gets nuked. Basically, 20 minutes later, you have this backroom trove deal where, like, you, you know, no one knows what's going on. It's like direct payments. There's no transparency at all. So, like, there's an argument to be made that, like, it's only going to get worse when, you know, the KOL's now got a taste of blood. Right. They're not going to stop trying to get money for yapping about things.

[F]

Yeah. And I. I don't necessarily, like, expect that to change that much, but for me, it was the replies. So, like, oh, my God. It was like if I got tagged in a certain thing because luckily the bots were not latched onto me, but, like, if Zach.

[A]

Must be enough.

[F]

If someone tagged me and Zach in a tweet, or if Zach tagged me in a tweet, or every time I. Yeah. Or the metamask account, like, the primary metamask account, it was like, yeah, my feed would be destroyed by just like, it's not even slop. It's just, like, words. These, like, blank words. And it sucks because it. It makes it really hard to engage, like, on a genuine level, which is what I want to do. Right? Like, I want to have conversations with people on Twitter. I want people to read my stuff and I want to reply to them. I want to learn about cool things. And when you add this layer of incentives and you add money to it, and then you have all these people running around yapping, like, it just.

[A]

It really creates noise. Yeah, it's just noise. And like, you know, OG Reply guys. And I was a reply guy back in the day. Right. Like, you know, the goal was to say something useful.

[F]

Yes.

[A]

The idea that you just, like, write three random words under every tweet and hope that that works is. Is kind of wild. Right? Like, I don't know how anyone thought that was a good strategy.

[F]

I mean, that's what I mean. Guys, come on. Stop it. Stop incentivizing people to be butts on the Internet. Okay? Thank you.

[A]

All right. Before we continue, here is a word from our sponsors that make the show possible.

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[A]

Off the keys so far as going to be taken over by nar. I hope that's how you. I hope that's how you pronounce it. At first I read that as Neymar and I was like, like football players taking over Farcross so that they're turning it into I don't know. So. So according to Dan Romero, the deal transfers protocol contracts, code, repos, the app dev tools, and Clanker, which is their AI launch to nar. So I don't know what NAR is.

[F]

That's my question. That was my question. What is nar?

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

Infra.

[A]

It's like one of the infra builder tools for Carcaster. So I was just like, okay, so it's like an internal. Internal trans.

[B]

It's like I could give you the NFT comparison. It's like other side buying immutable.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

It's like $1, you know, or improbable buying other side.

[A]

It'd be that equivalent.

[B]

Okay, like the thing that helps power, it is now absorbing it.

[A]

Is now absorbing it. I feel like we've seen this before with chains but yeah, it's interesting with an app. So, so far, cross will raise 150mil in 2024 from Paradigm and Andreessen. And, you know, I. I love to make fun of Andreessen for putting money into dumb things, but this is not one of them in my mind, right? Like, the idea that we could rebuild Social was like, you know, one in 50 shots, you know, And I wouldn't even say that you declare defeat here and never try this again, right? Like, I think there is something to be said for continuing to try to build new social networks with different incentive structures. Like, there's no way in the world that the existing social networks that we have today will be the one that are dominant in like, 10, 20 years. Just, like, from an AI perspective, right? Like, you know, we're going to go through some kind of singularity and things are going to change. So having. Having, like, different incentives, trying different things, it makes total sense. The 150mil is probably like a bit large, in fairness, right? But it's Andreessen, like, they got to throw 50 mil at something. And I'm sure Paradigm and Andreessen were fighting over it, and, you know, whoever threw the biggest check in won. So. So, yeah, like, it feels you.

[F]

If you make progress in this area, right, like, if you like the. It's worth doing and it's worth doing, it's actually definitely more worth doing like 150mil into, like, a forecaster, like, good team. They're going to freaking 100% that Y editing rather than doing like, this, like, light social, you know, 5 mil here, 5 mil there. Like, if you're going to do it, you have to go.

[A]

You're not going to beat social with like, 10 mil. No, you're. You're not going to invent a new social network with $10 million, in fairness, right? Like, not today. And people get anchored to like, oh, my God, 150 mil round, right? Like, like the Mag 7, you know, like the scale that they're operating on. The. It's 20, 26. Like, 150 mil for a startup is actually not that wild. It's kind of what you need in order to, like, redo some huge thing. It's the equivalent of like 10 mil in the early, you know, whatever teenage years of this century. Or like, or like, honestly, like 2 mil in like the early 2000s, right? Like, you know, just the scale of. Of what things cost and, and inflation, et cetera, has gone crazy. So I, I think, you know, my hot take is that I think we learned a lot about what worked, what didn't work. You know, anyone who is trying to build a new social network is going to have a lot of data to mine from Farcaster. So yeah, I think, I think it's a bit unfortunate, but it was always. And this is Venture, right? Like Venture is like a one in a hundred shot, one in fifty shot, right for something to work. So yeah, it feels like it's fine.

[F]

I mean I don't think, I don't think that's gonna make her break paradigm or Andreessen. I think they're gonna be okay, guys.

[A]

They'Re gonna be okay.

[F]

I'm more focused on like the team and like, I don't know, like what did we learn, what did crypto learn, what did you know, what's the big takeaways on that front? The investors are gonna be fine. It was a valid that they went hard. There's like five years or something. So they really, they, they really tried. I mean for me it's just, yeah, it's just a segue that it's not. So two things. One is it is really hard, it's really hard to overcome the network effects. Like it is really hard. And then two, I think that like anytime your social is even potentially creating an echo chamber, it's like a non starter and crypto sort of similar in the sense. Like the apps and the products that sort of unlock more things and allow people to do more things tend to be just like infinitely more valuable than the things that do one little itty bitty thing, right? And I've watched this, I've watched this a few cycles now because everything moves so fast and people innovate so quickly and they all, they. It's very hard to keep up if you're trying to like chase the, the current meta. Like it's very, very hard to keep up. So I think, you know, I think.

[A]

There, there is this like, there's an interesting thing in like the early whatever 2000s, right, like 202007 to like 2012 or something like that, right. You had all of these apps, like once the App Store came out, you had these breakout apps that were able to like achieve virality, right, because all of a sudden you had this platform where you could write an app and release it and had massive distribution. I do think that we are in a place where something like a farcaster built by like, you know, two people using AI or whatever instead of like 150 mil from Andreessen has the potential to go viral and actually build up some traction, not as a one shot, right, but as like there are a thousand, two, three person teams that are trying this and one of those things will take off. Right? Like lowering the barriers to entry is the most efficient way to get better innovation. Right. If it costs $150 million every single time we try to reinvent social, we're going to do it like three times and be like, we don't have any more money left. Right. Maybe not entries then, but like, you know, they're probably not going to put 150mil into a social network next week.

[B]

Right?

[A]

But if for 200 bucks, three people in a garage can like cook a new social network and just like release it, you know, through, through some distribution platform and the costs of building an app go down to like a hundred dollars, we will, we're going to see some wild shit is my prediction. And like, I think that's the biggest takeaway for me with like the cost of engineering collapsing to almost zero, especially for proof of concept. Like, okay, fine, like whoever builds that thing, if they get to 10,000 users.

[F]

They'Re going to have to rebuild the whole thing.

[A]

You have to rebuild the whole thing. But you know what, rebuilding things completely is actually fine these days. You can just rebuild stuff from scratch and it's fine. So yeah, I think, I think we still have some work to do on social and I think that, that we're going to see more people try and try and kind of innovate here.

[F]

Yeah, like microsocial networks, it has to be just like actually different because the second you're, you're trying to compete with Twitter, then it's like, oh, you're Twitter for this niche audience niche thing.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[F]

And then it's like, you know, again, you're going back to, you're going to create this echo chamber. You're always competing. The network effects are always going to be working against you.

[A]

I mean, you guys, you guys have this on abstract, right? Like you, you guys have this nascent social layer, right? Like how, like what's your takeaway?

[B]

I have a culminating thought here. And my culminating thought is, I think one of the greatest things about tokenization is the ability to take intangible things.

[A]

And make them tangible.

[B]

And if you assess like the opportunity there, what is one of the most valuable intangible things that if tangible, could be an absolutely huge market. My answer is influence. And influence is derived from a social network. And so I very much think this is a trillion dollar swing. Whoever does figure it out, I think is going to have one of the biggest businesses in crypto. If you were to tell me, you know, Instagram was built on Python, if Instagram had a token and Python had a token, which one would be more valuable? I think Instagram. 100 times out of 100. Yeah. And I think there's something really big here that only crypto can enable. And so, like, to the point on the abstract side, you know, one little thing that we implemented and like, Steak ended up copying us, you know, obviously.

[A]

Because they have such a huge distribution layer, but, like, being able to tip.

[B]

Somebody seamlessly on stream and that money goes directly to them. Right. Was like, yeah, an interesting little use case. Had never been done before, but it, like, felt really good, right? This idea that I can just have a wallet, I see a streamer, and instead of sending them a gift that goes through TikTok and they take their fees and there's a. There's a payout of like, seven. That's 14 days. The idea that I can seamlessly transact and that was like, what might feel like a menial feature. It probably is, but, like, has probably huge ramifications for.

[A]

You know, how this is like the entire fucking point of crypto. Yeah, dude. Like, be able to peer to peer electronic cash. Like, you should be able to pay someone that you see online directly without it going through, like 15 middlemen. The fact that you guys invented that tech for this, like, is it 20, 26 and. Or I guess you did it like a year ago or whatever. But, like, how did it take us that long?

[F]

Like, because everyone wants their. Everyone wants their cut.

[A]

You still can't even, like, the thing that we've been looking at at Infinix is like, how do we send people money to their X account? Yeah, like, you can't send. I can't just send you money. Like, I see a good tweet, like, I should be able to send you money right? Like now, you know, talking about monetization and, you know, whatever I wanted to.

[B]

Do, you'll appreciate this, but because you can kind of like index on session keys. What I wanted to do is I wanted the actual social feed. Saigar ended up nuking it, but I wanted there to be like, if you. If. Because right now, if you upvote something on the portal, it's a transaction. So I was like, what if every like. Like you gave him a penny, right? Or like every like is like 5 cents. And so like, you. And you can do that. Like, no popups, no anything. Like, click. Like, buy the wallet buys inside of Your wallet. There's actually like social on crypto rails. There will be a monster trumpet one.

[A]

I agree. I agree. It's just we need. We need.

[B]

But you need a beast. And the crazy part and like, like, why it was, you know, a 16Z. Like, you can underwrite Dan and then that thesis and that potential, like, that's a. You know, I've seen. I've seen a 16Z blow a lot more money.

[A]

A lot more money.

[B]

A lot more dumber things. Like, that was a. Worth a worthwhile swing.

[A]

100% agree. Yeah, yeah, agree, agree.

[B]

And.

[A]

And again, like, a lot of empirical data, like, we saw what didn't work about that. Like, you know, Infinix did a ton of stuff on. On Farcaster in the early days. And one of the best things about Farcaster is that you had a very, very efficient filter for more technical people. Right?

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, the people who were on Farcaster were not the, like, dregs of humanity that you would get on X. And so you filtered out a lot of that. Like, and it did shift over time. And there were people who kind of came in, but, like, people were mainly there for the tech, which was amazing because you had this audience of, like, people who are in it for the tech that you could, you know, speak to very quickly and tap into. But, you know, there's a bunch of other stuff, right? Like, you get one thing right out of 10 things and you need it to be nine out of 10, and it just doesn't. It doesn't work. It's a hard game.

[F]

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, we loved it too. Like, we absolutely loved it because we have. So, like, we have the primary MetaMask account, which is, like, massive and like, it's. Right. And then we have a whole bunch of other MetaMask accounts that are for, like, actually having conversations with people, like, actually engaging on a deeper level. And then we all have our personal accounts as well. But, yeah, early days, not even early days, years of Forecaster, it was like we can operate as the primary brand, we can represent, but we can actually connect on the deeper level with people that are actually like our users and, like, both our lovers and our haters. Right? And. But on, like, this deeper level, like.

[A]

When we lower noise, like most peer signals. Yeah, agreed, Agreed.

[F]

Because if you, like, if you. I mean, you can go look like, if MetaMask posts something on Twitter, you're going to have. Okay, you're going to have D slo replies, okay, that are just like 5,000, right? Like, completely meaningless. You're going have like 20 fake support bots and then you're going to have like 10 or so like, people that are just like violently angry at you for no reason whatsoever. And then like two that are like, we love you, one token, and then zero. Today there are literally zero people that are engaging, like, actually with the conversation with the tech.

[A]

Like, oh, like this is. Yeah, like, how are you thinking about this thing? There's no conversation.

[F]

It used to be even.

[A]

I know it used to be. Yeah, I know.

[F]

People would, people would comment on the actual thing. You could engage, you could get feedback. Also, it also used to be that, like, people would come to the most recent tweet and be like, my stuff's broken. Help me. That's gone too. The only people that do that are, are the bots that reply to themselves.

[B]

Look, but if it cost you 5 cents to reply, I bet you all that stuff would disappear tomorrow.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know though, because, like, that's the problem. Like, that's what Tay was saying with email, right? Like, you know, there was a thing where people were like, oh, let's charge people to email, right? And. And it creates this very perverse incentive where a person who has no financial incentive to, to like something or a tweet or write a post will stop writing posts if it costs them money, right? Like, we forget sometimes in crypto that like, most people are not willing to spend. Like, I mean, this, this is like even something with like vibe coding, right? Like, you know, the cost of running a machine overnight is like, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks. 50 bucks a day is a lot of money for people. For most people, right? Like, if you're just churning through 50 to 100 a day in like credit, in tokens, right?

[B]

Through.

[A]

Through anthropics, API, most people can't sustain that. It's like a job, right? Of so know, we. We do forget sometimes that, like charging people to do things, you filter out a huge, huge group of people. Now, maybe that's okay sometimes, but scammers are going to pay $0.05 if the ROI is $0.06. Scammers are going to pay $.05 if the ROI is 5.00000001. You can call the VV like, just fucking pay the money. Do the thing. That's the challenge, right, Is like, they do the math. They do the Morse. They do job. Their job is do the math, right? And like, that's literally their job.

[F]

Yeah. Wait, hold on. I want to skip forward because this is relevant. The. Okay, so there's like this news that came out that was like ethereum activity is spiking, blah, blah, blah. And then. Yeah, and then this other guy came out and was like, it's actually all the address poisoners. And then I got in a little. I got a little heated with him because I didn't like his takes. But. But basically for those that don't know, address poisoning is those spam transactions that you get on chain. And so they show up. Like sometimes they'll show up in your wallet, they'll show up in Etherscan. If you send a transaction, you'll get like bombarded by like incoming or outgoing transactions that have like lookalike addresses. The reason they do this is because they're hoping that you will copy like you sent to your friend or you sent to your other address or whatever it is. And they're hoping the next time you go to send, you'll accidentally copy the wrong address and then send your money to the address poison or the scammer. This is like. It's been, it goes on for years. It's been on BSC and TRON and eth. There's even some ones on Bitcoin, which to me makes no sense because bitcoin's like UTXO and you use new addresses all the time. But like, yeah, they do exist. I've seen them. And they have like really interesting mechanisms and ways that they evolve both to make sure that they get into UIs, because so many UIs are trying to block them, but also they're very willing to spend money. So there was like these one guys that were, that were doing calculations based on the balance, based on the.

[A]

They made, they made what, 50 mil? 50 mil, right? So how like you can spend 50 mil worth of transactions is a lot of transactions. That's pretty crazy.

[B]

But we, we, we actually. And it wasn't that much. It was a meaningful amount, but wasn't like that much. But we got hit by a super, super pro.

[A]

I. A super pro.

[B]

We ended up tracking him. The guy ended up making like $200 million on people. But it was actually a venture investor who was investing in us who sent the money to us. He ended up just like, you know, insurance, taking the allen and sending us and actually funding lost like a million bucks. Basically a crow got in between. It was like a, A middle mayor.

[A]

And it was. But it was really sophisticated.

[F]

Yeah, it is shit. It's wild.

[A]

That's why I never do test transactions. I tweeted this the other day Never do test transactions.

[B]

Just proven a million dollars, no tests, just boom, boom, boom.

[A]

That's how you. $10 million of the die as well. Right?

[F]

So just, you know, technically it's true because the second you do the test transaction, you will get more by like 30.

[B]

That's what the talk.

[A]

Okay, they're targeting the test transaction.

[F]

So now that's how you lose your money too, though, just in a different way. The solution is use an address book, label your addresses, get an ENS name. Yeah, like do that. And never. Guys, never, never copy from your transaction history. Like metamask, we don't show you your transaction history like that. So it's not even an issue.

[A]

Do not use that as the, like just don't like, if you're going to do it, if you're going to do a transaction and you're going to do a test transaction, put the address that you're testing into place that you trust on your machine or whatever, like a scratch pad or something, like an iOS node or whatever. Copy that, do the test transaction. If the counterparty confirms that they have the funds and that is an important step, not just that they saw it on a block explorer, but that they actually confirm it, then go back and copy it and do this from the same place.

[F]

From the same place.

[A]

Not from mask, not from Meta Scan, not from Soul Scan or whatever. Like go back to your scratch pad. Same address. Exactly. Yeah.

[F]

But yeah, so what's. I just found it when I was investigating these. The ones that really threw me for a loop was I was like moving some big money around. They were sending me $10 USDT.

[A]

Totally. Yeah.

[F]

I was like, yo, there's pony. This is profitable.

[A]

It's crazy. I know, right? It's probably.

[F]

Turns out it's profitable. And so when I like that was a really a wake up moment for me because I was like, if they're willing to spend $10 to send it.

[A]

They were getting filtered out, right? Like the filter was like sub, sub a dollar. And then they went over a dollar. And then I think etherscan started filtering out like, like low value transactions and starting to like triangulate it and. Yeah, exactly, like $10 per transaction. But also, you know, it has to be based on the address value, et cetera, et cetera. Like they're, they're obviously thinking this like, but it goes back to the point they're doing the numbers. They're doing, doing the numbers and they're going, okay, this address has $50,000 in it. Sending them $10. If there's a one in a thousand chance that they make a mistake and send me the 50 grand. It's worth it.

[F]

Yeah, it's just, it's wild numbers. And like, ever since then when I think about like, yeah, payments for social or payments for anything, right, these micro payments, I always just go back to that. And I think that ultimately my conclusion is that you can't, you cannot successfully block out like threat actors, scammers, scammers, spammers, whatever. You just can't. With financial stuff, there has to be other stuff. And the second you do try to block out them with financial means, you actually just destroy every legitimate user because there's no legitimate user on earth who's just going to send $10 randomly around because there's no reason to. Right. The only ones that do that are the spammers. And so then you've just built a plant a platform for spammers. And so then the question obviously is like, okay, so then how the hell do we. How the hell.

[A]

This is also like, this is also, I would argue a function of like transparent ledgers, right. If someone can see you doing a test transaction, you know, especially like from your, let's say you. Yeah, like, let's say, let's say you do, you know, let's say your safe has 100 grand in it, right? And you have 10 different assets that are all $10,000 or whatever, right? And you go, okay, USDT $1 transaction, classic test transaction, $1 USDT transaction. The follow up's probably going to be 9999. Right. And they can see that. So you know, one of the things is like not having a transparent ledger using some kind of zero knowledge moon math tech so that they can't see you do the transaction. Right? Yeah, you do the test transaction. And yeah, anyway, well, I also.

[F]

Wait, no, hold on.

[A]

Okay.

[F]

If you're using an interface king, I don't know what wallet you're using, but like when you're using one, if it's showing you. Okay, well, okay, if it shows you, like if you send a big transaction out or a little one or whatever with a balance and you get in your seeing the spam transactions and especially if then there's a little copy button, then like that interface is basically is like giving free real estate to scammers. And there's a ton of ways that you can like change things without playing whack a mole affair scan. The blog explorers are in a bit of a different position because like their whole job is to show the everything.

[A]

Exactly. They can't start filtering stuff out without it getting back.

[F]

Yeah, but for a wallet, do users want to see every single transaction that comes in their wallet? No. Do they want to see every single scam token? No.

[A]

There's a funny, There's a funny story about this. We, when we built Infinix the way that we built it, it was. And we ended up in a situation where we know about deposits but we can't actually filter them. And so we don't have like proper deposit detection where we show you the deposit. So we just don't show it to you. So you actually can't do this inside of Infinix because we don't have the technology to show deposits into your. Into your wallet.

[F]

No, I mean, that's. By the way, that's Metamask as well, is like we show you the activity from your internal state logs. But we don't.

[A]

Yeah, we don't.

[F]

We never scaled up the infrastructure to show everyone's transaction history all the time for every token on all the chains.

[A]

It would be impossible. It would be impossible.

[F]

And as a result, we have like literally zero address poisoning victims ever. It's fantastic.

[A]

Yeah, I know, right? It's so. So it turns out, where do we land? Is Ethereum? Is it all spam? Like, are we finger to blow spam line? Yeah. Okay. All right.

[F]

I mean, I don't know.

[A]

So from. From chains with too much activity to chains with no activity, Cosmos is losing builders. Cosmos to me feels like it's in the horrible, horrible un. Uncanny valley trough of despair of being like just real enough but not used enough. That like it's hated by everyone. Like xrp. It's like it doesn't do anything. Like it's like it does things now, right? But like, realistically, no one uses it. No one cares. It's a meme, right? The chain is a meme. There are many chains where it doesn't matter whether, like Cardano. It doesn't matter whether it does anything. Like Japanese grandmothers are still buying it for reasons, right? Because the chain's a meme. Cosmos is in this weird position where it is actually usable. You can do stuff with it. You can build these, these sub chains on. On Cosmos. And yet it's like, just doesn't work. It's just like they've just never.

[F]

I don't know, they just never chain on Avax.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's. And so, so people are like, okay, you know, I mean, we saw this with DY X, right? Like that to me, two Years ago, whenever it was, was like the. The nail in the coffin, right? Of like, okay, DYDX went there and it just, like, activity fell off a cliff. And that was coming from starknet, which was already grim in terms of, like, how do you get to it? And like, you know, the. The bridging and stuff like that. Especially back in the day. Now it's a lot better. But, like, back in the day, it was really hard to get onto starknet. Right. I mean, even like starkware. Right. Like, the original version, like, bridging was hard, it was super clunky, needed a different wallet, et cetera. And then Duadi actually went to Cosmos and it got way worse. It was crazy. So, yeah, I think it seems like the incentive is for a lot of these builders who are building subnets to now build EVM L1s or L2s. And, you know, this has been, I think, something that. That has been going on for a while, but just like the EVM interop and all of the tooling and infrastructure that you have access to, it's just so hard to kind of build a chain somewhere else. It feels like a massive uphill battle even when you're doing ZK stuff. Like, you know, there's obviously challenges with ZK sync that you guys have dealt with, I'm sure, Luca, but, like, you still get so much of the evm.

[F]

Yeah, it's totally evm.

[A]

It's. It's hard. It's hard evm, but it's still evm. So you get a bunch of things right.

[B]

Like, Like, I'm stoked we picked the ZK stack, though, because I think that's.

[A]

Where, you know, it's.

[B]

It's. It's now clearly like his own little bullish thing. It's like, yeah, yeah, I picked it. We did have some troubles, right? Like, there's. There was a couple things. You know, it's almost like one to one, though it wasn't like, EVM equivalent at one point.

[A]

Like, when we first did.

[B]

It was like, a huge pain in the ass.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But now it's like, they're on par. And now they're actually, like, they've gone from, like, behind in terms of, like, usability to, like, on par.

[A]

And now, obviously, because it's on the ZK stack, there's a slew of things.

[B]

That we can do that others can't. So I'm actually pretty stoked. I'm really glad we made that decision.

[A]

In hindsight, for the longest, I thought.

[B]

That we made a mistake because there was More resources, more money, more integrations.

[A]

With other people, friction, and you're segmented and fragmented and all that stuff.

[F]

Yeah, I still feel like Cosmos is so much worse in terms of segmentation. It's just a whole different mental model, a whole different culture.

[A]

Yeah.

[F]

Sav is all different. And I don't know, it's just. Yeah, the tech is good, though. Like, the tech. Like this.

[A]

The tech is good. You know, it's funny, I remember Turun said to me, like, four or five years ago, he's like, the best chain is near. He's like, best chain, best chain, best tech. And, like, the more I've looked into the near ecosystem, the more I'm like. Actually, I think, like, he was right. Like, it is the best tech, but it's so hard to be your own virtual machine living on an island and trying to attract people there. It's just. It's like really, really hard.

[F]

And at this point there, the. I think before we were like, spin up these L2s and these L1s to spin them up. And, like, the tac arguments held like some amount of water at this point. I think we're probably past that stage. The applications, the existing user base, the existing infrastructure, the switching costs, all of that adds up. I do not want another freaking wallet. I have so many wallets. I've played with so many chains. I don't want to keep track of another address. I don't want to remember another Block Explorer. And ultimately, I think increasingly so people are. Are just like. Like, if you. Again, if you're this little app on this random chain, you actually.

[A]

New wallet, a new wallet, like, and, you know, even, like, for. For us, we've integrated a bunch of different chains. We've integrated SVM, EVM, you know, a bunch of L2s. We got stuck on the ZK sync stuff, and we haven't circled, like, we got to a point where we're like, this is really hard.

[F]

We.

[A]

We didn't do it. And then now it would be easy, but we haven't circled back around to it. But, you know, we've done, like, swee. We've done, you know, some. Some random chains. We need to. We need to circle back to. To abstract. It's. It's high on my list. All right, guys, I got. I got a drone. I'm sorry. Okay, cool. All right, easy, easy. I think you want to go one more topic. We'll see you next week. But, yeah, so the last one is Paradox. So Paradox rolled back their chain, I guess. Chain app, chain App. App chain. I mean this is another one of those ones where like very obviously beneficial for the majority of users, I think. Right. It was like so bad and so, so painful for almost everyone involved. Right. That it's really hard to sell. Like, you know, code is law on this one.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Like, yeah, it was a. I don't.

[F]

Know what people were expecting.

[A]

I don't know if database migrations ever fit into the coded law. Yeah, like belief. But I think once it's a database you kind of go eh. If you need a database and you fuck up your database migration, then that's probably rockable. I guess.

[F]

And by the way, they didn't just like the impact was that somehow the database migration resulted in Bitcoin going to zero.

[A]

It's wild. I know.

[F]

Which is like, you know, I thought, yeah, 10, 10 was bad with some of the ones that went to zero, but Bitcoin didn't go to zero.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Bitcoin held. Held above zero, thankfully. So.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So it feels okay. It feels, it feels. Oh like, you know, better to. There was, there was like a. There was a period of time I think, where if you did any kind of rollback, even if it was net beneficial to most of the participants. Right. That people would be like, this is now a scam and I'll never use it again. Right.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

I think the meta has shifted a little bit to the point where it's like if a mistake is made even by the team that impacts everyone and they don't attempt to fix it, then I will never use this thing again.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's real. It's the big shift.

[F]

And the thing is, is that. So I always just go back to this. Like if you can't, like Bitcoin can't roll back, like it's just not a thing that can happen. Right. But if you can and you choose not to and you do all these mental gymnastics to like basically morally justify you not taking an obviously good action. I'm sorry, like you're avoidant. You're not good at building, you're not good at shipping, you're never getting deliver value to people because like it's just such a. It's such a unique case. And I think that anyone. That again, assuming that you can. Right. Assuming that there's a case where you can do something that like fixes it and choosing not to. And especially choosing not to for philosophical reasons.

[A]

Yeah.

[F]

Like code is law. It's like the biggest red flag for me today. Yeah, the biggest.

[B]

There was a period of time where.

[A]

Like consensus was code is law. And if you do do something like this, most of us believed it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And, and, but you know the funniest part about it, I think it's worth unpicking this as like a final point. Right. It was like philosophically, code is law. Pragmatically I would prefer code to not be law because I need to build stuff and so I kind of need some like proxy contracts and like non immutable stuff in there. Maybe you throw a database in, whatever. Like, you know, that's pragmatically what I need to build. But it's not what I believe, it's how I live. But what I believe is this other magical system over here. And so when anything went wrong, it was like, no, no, no. The magical system is what rules us, not the actual reality on the ground.

[F]

But again, that's avoidant. And you're just basically.

[A]

It was fun, it was a fun way of living for a period of time that we all.

[F]

I still stand by the fact that like people who actually go hard and get it right and ship stuff that's like immutable or nearly immutable and actually decentralized, like that's the biggest green flag for me. But the reality is like 99% of the stuff is somewhere, it's somewhere between a vibe coded database and like a multi sig. And in all of those cases there's going to be opportunities to, to fix things and if you can, you should. There's like, there's a few situations where like it gets kind of gray because the impact you can end up having like adverse impact or unintended consequences on other things with the action. That's like those are interesting conversations to have and like where are your values and stuff? But it's so rare, honestly. It's so like, it's, it's usually like do you want to help the people or not? And there's, there are a huge amount of people who go, we can totally fix this. And it has like very little risk to, to basically anyone and we're not going to. And I just say you're, I just like, I just look at you and I'm sorry. Like you're, you're never going to build and ship anything of value if you, if you're that disconnected from like your people and your product.

[A]

Yeah. The actual reality on the ground. I, I think, you know, like there was there, there was a period of time where tooling was so bad and I think, I think it's gotten a little bit better. But there are some, like, very fundamental challenges, right? Like, if you are going to build. And Uniswap's a great example of this, right? You need V1, V2, V3, V4. Every single time. It's a new factory contract that is immutable. You need to. There's still fucking liquidity. I found liquidity in a Uniswap V1 pool. The other day, I was playing around with something, I had a wallet, and I was like, oh, that's weird, because there were no LP tokens back then, right? Like, it's just a magical position in a contract, right?

[F]

Yeah. And it doesn't show up anywhere.

[A]

It doesn't show up anywhere.

[B]

And.

[A]

And I was like, that's a weird transaction. What was that about? And then, like, I still had. I still had value in there. So. So there's. There's, like, there's. That's really hard, like a. Like, you still there, by the way. Like, it never still there. I mean, but that's the nice thing is, like, it is immutable. It didn't get hacked, so it's still there. So that's cool. Should, right? But every single time you have a new version, which, in fairness for Uniswap's, like, every two years, you need to drag liquidity across. It's like, you know, it's an attack vector for your competitors to try and, like, drive a wedge. Like, it. It is challenging. We don't have good automated systems. You know, it'd be amazing if, like, there was a really easy way to go. Okay, everyone, like, opt in to, like, migrating and, you know, move to V4 and we'll make it super easy for you. But we've never really built that technology, so I don't know.

[F]

And most of the time, I would recommend teams avoid it because it adds just another layer of complexity. And we just haven't gotten to the point where our Uniswap is a really rare case where they build things in a way and then they go to town on the security of it from day one, and then. And forever after, and then. Then they ship it. Most things don't. And, you know, as we've seen in the last, like, six months, we've had a lot of old things get hacked.

[A]

Old things get hacked? Yeah, it's crazy.

[F]

A lot of them. And a lot of them were sort of assumed to be secure and probably, like, were secure.

[A]

Multiple orders, like, yeah, they were secure at some point because they had, in some cases, billions of dollars. Like, most of the time they've got a long tail. Like there is this decay function where like the, you know, you know, it goes from a billion dollars of TVL to 100 million to 10 million to 1 million. Then it's like 1 million. The long tail of things. Is it worth going after? And it's like, well, no, it wasn't.

[F]

But it wasn't. But now it is. But now it is. Yeah. And there's been a lot of them. And then, yeah, the. I think just like the security posture and like knowledge has improved on like the auditing and the builder side. But also there's just this thing, I think. I don't know if it's AI specifically that's helping out, but I think the tooling and like the, the tooling and the knowledge and maybe the AI, they're able to like hold things in their head and put together much more totally complex, like attack flows. That probably was like way less effort.

[A]

Yeah, no, it's. It's actually crazy. Like you can, you could like one of the things that I do, you can build sub agents, right, that are like fine tuned on the training. They cut out a lot of context and they just are like. And you can tell them like you are an autistic code auditor, your only job. And it. And it won't get distracted with anything. It'll just go in and like understand like the like fine details of things. Yeah, and it's wild. It's wild. It is wild. All right, we'll wrap it up there. That's it for this episode of Uneasy Money. Thank you for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained feed on X. We haven't been kicked off there yet, thankfully. YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week.

[F]

Awesome. Bye, guys.