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- [00:00]
A
My guess is if they had been forced into acquiring this team for the outstanding token FDV of 100 million, they would have been like, guys, like, there's no way that's happening.
- [00:11]
B
Nothing is unhackable ever, guys, ever, ever, ever, ever. And if someone tells you that it's unhackable, run so fast.
- [00:22]
A
Yeah.
- [00:23]
C
DAOs are notoriously inefficient.
- [00:26]
A
How dare you? How dare you say that about a.
- [00:28]
D
Beautiful D. The open interest in like, size of dollars, I think on these prediction markets is actually just not that big, I think relative to the mind share that they've got.
- [00:40]
A
Hey, everyone, I'm Kane Warrick and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. I'm here with Luca Net, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, and Taylor Monahan Security at Metamask. And we have a special guest guy from Athena. Hey, guys, how are we doing? All right, before we get started, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible.
- [00:59]
E
Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients. Like Pith, Moonpay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go to market, BD and partnerships, capital markets, advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more, driving execution from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction today, visit Multichain adv. Com.
- [01:38]
A
One quick thing before we get started. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just for builders about 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. uneasy money. All right, let's get into it. I feel like it's actually good timing that we've got you here, guy, because we've got lots of interesting governance debates within Defi. So, yeah, I feel like you're going to have some takes on that. First one we're starting with is aave, Civil War and A Question of who owns the Protocol. Um, so one of my. My favorite tradfi guys is Matt Levine from Bloomberg, and he talks about, like, who owns a company all the time. And so it feels, you know, pretty amazing that Defi has finally invented that same question. But for Defi who owns the protocol? A governance debate kind of emerged because aave. So we have AAVE Labs and the AAVE Dao. And the AAVE Dao is this like loose collection of people and token holders, token voting, etc. And then AAVE Labs is the kind of Labs entity that does a lot of the engineering work, marketing, etc. And there was a deal with Kaoswap a dex dex on Ethereum where the integration fees appeared suddenly to be going to AAVE Labs, not the AAVE Dao. Now you could be confused and be like, but wait, isn't it the same thing? And it's like, no, actually it's like some different people with different controls, etc. And, and this was different to a previous deal that was done where fees were going to the AAVE Dao that was a deal with the paraswap decks. And this basically created a debate about like privatization of fees and who owns the fees, who owns the fee revenue, who owns the protocol, who owns the IP. Mark Zeller called it a diversion of 10% of the DAO income and a potential breach of alignment. And then a few days later, another token holder proposed a poison pill where the DAO will seize AAVE Labs, IP trademarks and equity to turn it into a DAO controlled entity, citing a pattern of unilateral monetization. Obviously, Stani, the founder of aave, stepped in here and said, no, no, no, guys. AAVE Labs is entitled to monetize its own front end. This is our front end. We built it. And prior to that, the revenue was a voluntary donation, which I thought was pretty amazing, but he acknowledged that DAO should have been consulted. So who owns aave?
- [04:37]
B
Oops.
- [04:40]
A
My hot take as a former ETH land holder is that the token holders own the thing. But this comes down to a question of rights, right? If the token holders own the thing, do they have a right to all revenue? Or can people who are not necessarily aligned with the token holders monetize the A IP via front end and keep that money for themselves? That's, that's kind of the fundamental question here, is like, is it okay for the IP holders of aave? I think one thing when this is all going on that I thought would have been the most entertaining outcome. So for. For anyone who followed the WeWork debacle back in the day, Adam Newman famously, when they changed from we work to we sold the name we, which he had trademarked to we work for $5 million. And obviously AAVE means ghost in Finnish, right? So like, clearly Stanley was the only one who would come up with that. So I thought it'd be quite entertaining if Stanley was like, hey, you know what? I'll sell you the name aave and the IP for like 50 minutes. Million bucks.
- [05:53]
B
That would be next level evil. Okay, so if we talk about who can do the things, obviously what's going down right now is highlighting that perhaps there were some unexpected parties that could and would do things. If they can't do those things legally or technically, then we wouldn't be here. Right. This wouldn't even be a debate. I think a lot of people are having a debate around, like, who should, like, how should this have been structured? And I think there's a lot of lessons learned there, but these aren't lessons that we haven't learned before. Right? Like, daos have always been very. The DAO foundation model has been very weird since very early days. And it's mostly been to avoid any accountability and regulations and laws. And that has some downsides, it turns out. You know, the whole structure is meant to basically remove liability from all parties, which also removes accountability and internal accountability as well. So I don't know, I. It just kind of sucks, I guess. Like, really, we're going to do this again? Um, but you know, I'm. I'm just. I've never been bullish on daos and I never will be.
- [07:21]
C
I probably take a similar stance, right, like at the end of the day and actually it gives me a question. I actually have a question to ask after this. But like, like, daos are notoriously inefficient.
- [07:35]
A
How dare you. How dare you say that about a beautiful daos?
- [07:39]
C
Yeah, they're extremely inefficient. I remember they tried to make me. They wanted. After I bought it some. After I bought Pudgy Penguin, some big holders wanted me to like, take the money that I used. Like, they wanted me to put everything into a dow.
- [07:52]
A
And I was like, what would happen to my money?
- [07:53]
C
They'd be like, look, everyone would respect you, make the money back. I'm like, that sounds insane. Not only that, not only that, it's insane from the perspective of like, every DAO experiment has failed and at the time it was trending in that direction. And so when you have a front end, like, correct me if I'm wrong, AAVE is defi infrastructure. The AAVE token is powering that. Obviously holders of that token can participate, I guess, in the infrastructure side. But it sounds like this is like a front end debate. And whenever you're Trying to push the boundaries of a front end. I think having a DAO in the middle of that is a huge mistake. I think a huge mistake. And you're looking at things like they did. Like, I thought they just had one of the most amazing consumer app launches from like an experience perspective of all time. It's like one of the great consumer apps that I've ever felt and experienced via crypto app. They're clearly not being negligent or pocketing that money. Like, they're clearly building. And then my question to maybe you guys is, you know, I actually got really bullish on AAVE when they released that app. Is that app a part of the token accrual model or is that defined in the whole front end bucket? That'd be like an interesting answer that I would like.
- [09:13]
A
Okay, no los dos. Like it is both in the thing and not in the thing, right? Like, and this is, this is the weirdness because it's like, okay, you got this amazing mobile app that's powered by AAVE, the protocol, but uses AAVE's IP, which is not owned by the protocol. It's owned by Labs. And Labs is, I guarantee you, if you look at what the App Store, you know, company that released this app is, it's going to be AAVE Labs, right? You know, so there, there is this weirdness of like, who actually is getting the benefit of the thing, right?
- [09:52]
C
I would say AAVE holders. Regardless, what do they want, like the money to go into some inflated super big treasury that's not getting spent anyway? Margin. Like, what extra revenue is that going to do to the $500 million balance sheet that probably is Ave's, you know, Dow balance sheet. What's the couple extra million dollars going to do?
- [10:14]
A
Right? Outside of principle, sir, it's the principle of the matter that like, and you know, it's interesting, like aci, right? So, so Mark Zeller, who I know guys had some interesting interactions with him on the timeline back in the day, but I've, I've kind of gotten to know him, right? And like he is an A soldier. He's in one of the, the group chats that I'm in and he's quite active and like, he's an ABE soldier. Like, he's just there for the calls. Like, that's all he's trying to do. And I think that the view is that like, no A is actually a pretty good dao by like most measures. And we shouldn't, you know, kind of paint the AAVE dao with the same Brush as like other, you know, daos that have failed or whatever. Like, we are actually kind of maintaining this and, you know, if we just start siphoning off funds to labs, then we're. We're basically in like a similar situation to Uniswap. And I think the view is like, this is going in the wrong direction. Not the right direction from the, from the DAO side of the things. But yeah, it's a, It's a tough one. I don't know, Guy, what's your, what's your hot take here?
- [11:28]
D
Yeah, I think it's not even specifically with ave, but like, broadly being a point. I think the last few weeks with we saw the Axel on News. This week with Circle, we saw Tensor selling some bit of the business to, to Coinbase. And then I think there's another one with Pump Fun where there's a bit of, I guess people upset with the fact that like, you own a token and then the IP and sort of activity of the business is just being sold out entirely separately. And I think that's sort of part of a broader theme that's going on here. To your question, Kane, which is like, factually, if you own the token, you don't actually, really, actually have the rights, is kind of like what we're kind of seeing pretty consistently across all of these different events. I think, as it relates to the, to the AAVE piece this week, I personally think it's much easier as like a single structure where you never have any question whatsoever that cash is going to a separate entity, different developers who are doing different pieces and trying to sort of extract the margin out of doing that. I think especially when you sort of consider just like the size of the cash flows that are coming out there are just pretty insignificant, I think, compared to like the size of aave, the valuation of AAVE and having like this negative sentiment that sits around it. It's like, does $10 million sitting in a different side pocket really move the needle for someone who owns hundreds of millions of dollars in this token that's worth billions on the other side. So I think that, yeah, I've always been of the view that you kind of want to keep these things extremely clean and simple, which is just like, if there is cash flow being produced, it's just one entity or one sort of bucket that's receiving that. And I obviously think that, like, people increasingly are sort of converging on that being the token. And I think Uniswap and what Hayden did a few weeks ago with their proposal, I Think I had a lot of respect for the way that he sort of changed direction almost 180'd from what they were doing historically. And yeah, I'm sure the other guys will work it out. I was with Stanley this week and I think we both know that he's. This is not like a nefarious thing that he's doing and he's like the most aligned person behind ave, you know, the founder. He's still here like eight years later. So yeah, I know that he's got like the best interests at heart for what they're doing and they'll sort it out.
- [13:39]
A
I think the interesting thing is like, you know, organizations though are made up of people, right? Like even if you have a semi benevolent dictator like Stanley, right, Like it may not even be the case that he was across this, right. Or like you might have been like in a room and someone's like, hey, we got this cow swap deal, like where do we throw the cash? And it's like chuck it in that bucket. And not really thinking that this would turn into, you know, pitch, a pitch battle. But I mean, I think like more broadly, you know, talk about Uniswap. We've spoken about this a couple of times. Like, you know, there is this movement towards clarity of token ownership and token holding and you know, what, what do you own, what rights do you have? Etc, which I think, you know, is, is kind of coming from. It's not like Hayden was like, I don't want to say he was anti token or whatever, right? Like they released a token that was somewhat forced upon them by, by sushi, right? But they released a token and then they were like, oh shit, like this is going to have consequences. Like let's not, let's kind of get out of the way of it, right? And then, you know, now we're in a different regulatory environment and so they're like, actually, let's fix this problem. You know, I think Hayden the whole time has wanted to kind of have more clarity, more certainty for token holders and anyone else involved in Uniswap. And I think that's the same thing for Stanley. Like, you know, Etheland was a pure Dao. Like AAVE's gotten huge and there's been, you know, all of these different things that have kind of emerged over the years. Like, yeah, I think everyone involved wants clarity, but it's hard to kind of see a path out that's super clear here.
- [15:26]
B
Yeah. And I think ultimately this is all around expectations, right? So the token holders, okay. So the reality is that tokens were created for a variety of reasons. A lot of those reasons include basically, like, avoiding the legal situation that was in yesteryear, right. Or in the case of Uniswap, like, literally because sushi came out of nowhere and was about to vampire them. So even though people have these expectations around these tokens, I'm not sure that they've ever been super logical based on, like, the realities of the teams, right? Like, none of these teams ever came out and said, like, these are what these tokens are going to do. You're going to have like, full ownership and voting and fees and say anything about the token.
- [16:17]
A
Right. Like, you have to just be like, ah, there's a token over there. Make of that what you will. Right?
- [16:22]
B
Like, and so I think that that's one thing that I would say is actually a failure of the sec, right. Even though they were actually going after enforcement against Uniswap and against many, many others, ultimately what it did was it created a huge amount of uncertainty where the expectations were not clear. And ultimately you could argue that if, if token holders had expectations and believe certain things about the token and then got rugged. Part of that is a consequence of people sort of dancing around and trying to avoid 100%.
- [17:01]
A
Like, it's. It's a direct consequence. Yeah, like, well, I mean, the most ironic thing is AAVE came out finally this week, the same week, and was like, hey, the SEC has finally capitulated and said, actually, you guys are okay. Like, like, you know, six years later or whatever, right? So, you know, the unintended consequences of six years of SEC investigation, you imagine, you know, you know, that there are these lunatics, like, looking over your shoulder at everything you do. And, you know, there's no question that creates, like, perverse incentives to obfuscate things. And, and you know, and also, like, it's not like you have this regulatory regime that's like, hey, here is a bunch of clarity about what you can and can't do and we're going to watch you really closely. They're like, hey, everything you're doing is bad.
- [17:53]
C
And.
- [17:53]
A
But we're not going to tell you which things, like, good luck to you. Right? Like, it's.
- [17:59]
B
Yeah. And so when I think about. So I like to, like, zoom out and like, listening about, like, best outcomes, like, if we could go back in time, like, what's the best outcomes? In my opinion, the best outcome for uniswap, for aave, for everything, right? Is that from day one, the token expectations and the alignment around those Expectations was clear, like, nobody's getting rugged, Nobody has falls. If the token was designed to catch all the revenue from all of the front ends, let's define that and then let's do that. And then if you fail to uphold that, that's going to be problematic. And obviously, when you have that clarity, then you also have accountability that can come with it, right? If AAVE were to have said previously explicitly, like, all the fees from all the front ends are going to the dao and then wakes up one morning and rugs that that's a problem, right? And it's a clear problem, and there's paths to recourse for adjusting those problems. That's one of the worst things that happened from the regime is just like, none of that was available. And so everyone. Everyone sort of gets rugged all the time because they're all operating on these undefined, unclear expectations.
- [19:11]
A
Also, there's. There's no norms, right? Like, if you go into tradition, there. There are norms that, you know, and I remember guy like you and I talking early on when you were designing governance and like, you know, literally every single thing that you did, you sort of have to design from first principles. You're like, what is the optimal thing given my circuit? Like, that's not how TradFi works. TradFi. You're like, I'm starting a company. I go to Delaware. They give you a thing. You write a couple of points in there. And like, every single person who's interacting with that company has really clear expectations. If you do something weird, like Adam Newman, we work style. Everyone goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Right? But tokens, it's like every single token has their own weird, idiosyncratic, bizarre structure because everyone invents it from whole cloth every time, right?
- [20:04]
B
And it's not just AAVE and uniswap. And I mean, basically everyone. It's not just everyone that has, like a legitimate token, right? And it's operating in good faith. This also creates a huge opportunity for, you know, malicious people and scammers to deceive people, right? And that's what, you know, ultimately my problem with sort of like the legal and regulatory approach to this ecosystem is, is it just makes it so much easier for people to be scammers. And then it also just confuses the heck out of everyone who's actually trying to operate in good faith and, like, innovate and. And deliver good value. It makes it really, really hard because, you know, now in. In both the Uniswap drama and the Aave drama. There's strong arguments being. Being really heavily debated on Twitter right now that are calling both of those, like, basically scammers. Right? And if you're like, average retail, I don't know, it's gonna drive you to actual scammers.
- [21:01]
A
Like, yeah, yeah. If everything's a scam, then, like, you get this false equivocation of, like, nothing. You know, everything's a scam. Ave is. If Ave is a scam, then, like, shut the whole place down.
- [21:13]
B
Exactly. So, I don't know, it just sucks. I hope that the coming years will improve the situation and, you know, I hope aave, I have faith AAVE will, you know, work through this. But I hope that this is like a new era of figuring out what actually works with regards to foundations and daos and token holders and rights and expectations. And we actually just get back to innovating, not avoiding laws.
- [21:38]
A
All right, let's let. If. If we don't have any more. I'm sure this is going to come back. We've been talking about Dallas. This feels a little bit like bare market things, like. But it's going to get so much more interesting if we do get into, like, a prolonged bear market here. For sure, the. The Dow warfare is only going to escalate, I feel like. But let's move on to Solana Fire Dancer. So Fire Dancer is a Solana client, validator client that has been in development for, like, three decades now, I think made by Jump Crypto and is finally being released or was finally released. The interesting thing is, you know, this is my. My favorite thing about Salon is how they get to, like, have the same fights that Ethereum did, like, but, like, three years later, four years later. So now there's this client diversity conversation going on of, like, you know, how validators should be running. Fire Dancer versus this, you know, versus the. The OG validator client. What, What I think is also interesting though, and. And this is a conversation that kind of brings up Fogo as well. The. The SVM chain that is going to come up next year, I think is.
- [23:00]
D
Or it's.
- [23:01]
A
It's kind of out, but in, like, closed alpha. So Fogo runs on the Firedancer client only. Right. Whereas Solana has, like, backwards compatibility with the OG client. You can't just switch to Firedancer. So even though Firedancer is a lot faster than the old client, there is some tension between which client do you use and what are the potential issues of, like, having this new client, which is much faster, but also having to maintain Backwards compatibility and it holding Solana back. So I think when Fogo is fully live running on this pure fired answer client, it's going to, you know, create a little bit of attention in the Solana ecosystem is my expectation. I think there's already been a little bit of tension here. But you know, overall I think it is bullish for Solana to have multiple clients. Like, it's taken a while but we've finally gotten there.
- [24:02]
C
I'm bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish. Fire Dancer, somebody that I'm not gonna dox like that, I think is the smartest technical person that I know in crypto. Says that it's not gonna go. It's Fire Dancer on Solana is more of a pipe dream than I think people think.
- [24:23]
A
That's what he said.
- [24:23]
C
And I actually spoke to him about it last week, believe it or not.
- [24:26]
A
And like huh, Why I got brought up, I don't know. Yeah, I mean this is the, the thing that I've, the discussion that I've, I've seen many times is like, okay, you've got a much faster client but you've got an existing network. You can't. And this is, you know, go back to like Ethereum times, right? Like we had, you know, we had proof of work and we moved to proof of stake. And I think there were four or five validator teams that were funded by the EF via grants and various other community things, various forms of communism. And those clients went out and kind of competed with each other. And I know a couple of those teams quite well. The Sigma prime guys are in Australia and so, you know, Lighthouse and some of those clients, there is a bit of tension because they're like, our client is better and therefore people use it. And you know, this is where all the Lido conversation came in of like, you have an obligation to have client diversity, etc. So it will be interesting to see whether or not Solana foundation steps in and kind of forces people to use these different clients or incentivizes them maybe through some non communist form of incentives. I don't know. It's Solana so you never know what they might do. All right, let's, let's move on to this circle. Axel, our deal. So guy, you, you brought this up in the discussion about aave. This is even more wild to me, like from a dow bearishness perspective. Right, so, so circle. So I think there's two things. One, there have been more acquisitions like mergers and acquisitions in crypto in the last two months than like maybe in all of history. I don't know what that means. If that is like some indication that we're maturing as a, as an industry, but like we are actually finally seeing mergers. But it's crypto. So the mergers are going to be fraught and insane, and I think this is one of them. Where Circle has acquired the Interop Labs team and ip. So the equivalent of acquiring AAVE Labs, Right, but leaving the token and protocol behind. So the core developers, they've acquired, they've acquired that team, but not the Axl Token or the network. So axelar fell like 15% after the markets realized that it was kind of being left behind in this deal and that there's no direct benefit to token holders, but the network is now going to continue independently under community governance. Now, the reason why my hot take is, the reason why we have so few mergers and acquisitions in crypto is, is because the premium that a token commands in the market usually is so insane that no person would ever, like, I don't know what the market cap of Axelar is. Maybe someone can, can tell me. My hot take is going to be like hundreds of millions, right?
- [27:42]
C
It was hundreds. It was a billion a year ago.
- [27:44]
A
It's 100 million today. 100 million today, right, so. So it's 100 million today. My guess is Circle did not acquire the Interop Labs team and IP for 100 million. My guess is it was more like 5 or 10.
- [27:57]
D
Right.
- [27:58]
A
And if they had been forced into acquiring this team for the outstanding token FDV of 100 million, they would have been like, guys, like, there's no way that's happening. Even though Circle has a lot of money, right? So instead they're like, why don't we just acquire the team and you guys can basically like move on and leave the network behind. Which is pretty wild. I don't know. Speaking of, like, what rights does a token holder have?
- [28:27]
B
Spoiler. They have no rights. None whatsoever. Like, the, the builders, the creators of the token, have no obligations whatsoever. They want to go join Circle. Okay, like, what's, what do you. What are you going to do about this? Is it right? Do I think it's like the best outcome for everyone? Like, no, they frickin. They built their entire thing from the, from the token right on the backs of the token holders. And then they're like, okay, sweet, bye. Like, it sucks. But at the same time, like, I don't. There's just, there's no structure for accountability here. And I don't think that it's sort of a lose, lose. Like if you were to force the structure so that circle would have to buy out all the token holders at the market value circle, wouldn't they go find another team?
- [29:22]
A
And that's the fundamental problem, right, like that, that right there is the crux of the problem is that like the market and acquire, looking to acquire and you know, you have these, these issues in tradfi, right, where it's like there's a thing that's trading at like, you know, a premium, the shares, you know, are fairly illiquid. And then someone comes along and like makes an acquisition offer and it gets rejected by shareholders because they're like, like if the, if the token holders had the ability to reject this acquisition, they absolutely would. They'd be like, no way. Like circle, you pay 100 million or. And then it's like, well, it's not worth 100 million. It's like, I think there's a lot of token holders that would say, too bad, that's the price of the token and we'll see you next year when it's worth 20.
- [30:10]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [30:11]
B
And that's the most interesting thing about the tokens is that it's not, we call it alignment, but it's actually not aligned or creating alignment in a lot of cases.
- [30:22]
D
Yeah. And I think there is like a sensible middle ground here which isn't like full security law disclosure type stuff, which I think is probably too onerous for, you know, the speed at which like crypto moves. But I do think that like we can point to something like this and just say it's obviously just not a great situation for people who are buying into these things when you have like absolutely zero claim or right on anything. This to me feels like a pretty basic thing that most people should be getting if they're buying into something which is like the team that's actually built this isn't going to turn around the next day and walk off. But it hasn't obviously been crystallized in any formal way. Now I do think like the gatekeepers who could actually drive change here are probably only decentralized exchanges, which is like if you're going to get a listing on a Binance or a coinbase or whatever it is, you need to agree to XYZ in terms of what actual claim and rights people buying into this token would actually get. I don't know exactly what that looks like across the industry, but I think if it is going to change at all, it probably has to be done at the centralized exchange level. Because I think they sort of gatekeep, you know, people getting access to these products.
- [31:30]
A
The problem with like sex listing conversations, right, and I may or may not be having some conversations like that at the moment is their, their motivation and, and concerns are like all about liquidity and vesting structures. And like they're, it's not, they're like token holder rights. It's basically not even in the conversation. There's no conversation whatsoever about like what obligations does, you know, the protocol have, the team, the dao, et cetera.
- [32:07]
D
Which is kind of what I'm suggesting. Maybe we should revisit and change because like you can kind of ignore it for so long. But if even the centralized exchanges, right, are incentivized for their users to not consistently lose money the whole time and if people are coming to, you know, gambled in the casino and they're consistently losing, they're going to stop at some point in terms of coming back. So yeah, I think for like long term health and structure, I think something like this does make sense in, in like a light form.
- [32:36]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it's just, you know, it goes back to partially just how fast things were moving partially the, the regulatory regime around such things, right? Like doing any of those things like giving token holders rights like you're gonna go to jail. Yeah, yeah.
- [32:55]
A
Without, without some regulatory. Well, I mean the interesting thing is like Luca, you can just be like, it's a meme coin, bro. Like and you know, obviously your situation is, is quite a bit different to you know, most, most defi. Protocols where it's like this is a representation of the ip. I mean how, how do you think about the Pengu pudgies, little pudgies, Rogs dichotomy?
- [33:23]
C
Like it's an interesting one because if you actually think about the problem, it's a lot more complex than you think. So like for example, the line of thought came around at one point where we were like give equity to NFT holders or token holders. We've thought about that. But if you actually think about, right like you, you can put an insane ceiling on where these things all of a sudden the speculative asset doesn't become speculative anymore, right? And so like you almost kill the fun. Like from a strategy perspective, like you could kill a lot of the fun. I actually think guy is completely correct in terms of like the thread that he's pulling. I think like step number one that's like every exchange can implement that is if a team does this, it's like auto delisting because if you actually think about it and look at the charts and they're actually getting rewarded for doing this. So, like, Tensor is a perfect example, right? So, like, Tensor is trading a lot higher than it was pre the acquisition in which the team completely left the project, right? Like, at a minimum, if these things happen, these things have to be like, auto delisted within 48 hours. Because, like, because they're, you know, if I'm in, if I'm a team member and I'm looking at the Tensor chart, I'm like, this is great. I'm going to have more liquidity if I do this right, and I'm gonna get a cash out. And at the end of the day, like, you have to understand the human element of this is like, traders, like, you can sit, you can have this, like, very, like, purist approach. And. And I remember, I felt like over the years I've gotten burned for having this approach, and I'm a little jaded on, like, this stance. But, like, when it's all said and done, everyone's out there for themselves, right? And, like, right now, this thing is. This thing is looking like the best thing for a founder to do who has, like, a failed token. And I think it starts with, at a minimum, delisting. I think for my take, like, there's a lot of pros and cons to this, and I think the biggest one is just putting a ceiling on the speculative asset. Because all of a sudden, if my token is a proxy for equity, you know, you are now, you're not. You're no longer. The story that you're telling yourself is no longer the story of, you know, we're getting a billion impressions a day. We are the mascot of crypto. We're the biggest consumer brand that's ever come out of crypto. You're now then looking at my revenue and my ebitda, right? And you're like, you're doing the math on that. You're not doing the math on the memetics and the culture and comping it to a Doge and a Sheba. I'm now like a standalone brand coin. And that's like, all I am. And I better, like, hope I can fucking, you know, 5x revenue next year. If not, I'm cooked. So I think, like, it's a. It's a catch 22 that I think, like, everybody be like, I would love some pudgy Penguin equity. But, like, if my. My take, and this is, I have a very unorthodox stance here. You Know, I think all tokens are a proxy of mind share. I think if you index them for anything else, I think it's a big fat, giant mistake. I even have a really compelling take on buybacks and how that thing is a complete giant farce. As somebody who's put $20 million into the books before, it really does, right? It, it, it's, it's, it's all just proxy of mind share, right? Like, and if you don't, like, you know, bitcoin has won because it's proxy. The mind share of digital gold and digital gold and the mind share that that's been able to capture has increased over time, right? And people have believed that. I, I, I actually just think like a lot of people need to understand more of what this, this stuff is, which is again a proxy of mindshare. And that's, and, and that is a, that's a bless. It's a catch 22. It's what makes crypto so great and in cases like this, it what makes crypto, you know, awful and feel immature and feel, you know, lacking in substance. But no one's, no one's crying when it pumps a thousand percent. So it's just like, it's, it's really.
- [37:19]
A
I think this, like, I think that's actually, that's very interesting take and it sort of aligns with one of the, the views that I have around token prices expand and compress based on people's time horizon. At the moment, people's time horizon is next week. And so everything gets compressed because everyone's like, how much will this thing be worth next week? What is it going to do next week, how much better will it be, etc. And so everyone starts to become super bearish because they're like, this thing was worth so much money, this token was worth so much money when everyone was looking out to like 2035, right? In 2035, if crypto is, you know, the rails that all finance works on and this thing has the mind share today and it maintains that mind share, then it's obviously going to be worth, you know, trillions of dollars or whatever the math is, right? But if we're looking at like what happens in, you know, two weeks in January, then, you know, probably it looks a lot more bearish, right? So it's almost like early stage companies in a nascent industry, whoever is the dominant one, you go, well, if this industry expands 100x, then the dominant one, the one that has captured the most mindshare, attention, traction, whatever you want to Call it is going to continue to dominate. But if, if everyone all of a sudden goes actually that industry is a joke and is not real, then having the most mind share doesn't really help you. Right.
- [38:51]
C
The problem here is actually quite paradoxical because you know, in times like this the trader becomes an investor when in reality like a majority of the liquidity sloshing around in these things are quantitative traders.
- [39:04]
A
Right?
- [39:04]
C
And a quantitative trader is not an investor. So it's like you're a quantitative trader when you want to be and then like when things are not going your way, you're an investor and you want investor rights and all the things that come with it. You have to be like honest with what you're with. A lot of these people are doing, I promise you a major 98 of the people complaining about this are quantitative traders. You know, trading the chart and trading, whatever, you know, analysis and RSIs they have going. You know, it's not again, another catch 22 with crypto is like, it's one.
- [39:33]
A
Of the things that I same thing with farmers, right? Like farmers become your number one user very quickly when like the farming, when the fields become barren, all of a sudden they're like, I'm your best user and you're treating me badly. How did this happen? All right, let's move on to Rushi. So Rushi was the founder of a token called Move Movement Labs, which was a new. A new L1. Shockingly, can you believe it, it was an L1. So Movement Labs was going to build a new L1 and it was going to be based on the MOVE language. Now my favorite part of all of this, and I don't think we've talked about this yet, K so I'm waiting for your head to explode. But the best part about move, if you're not aware of this, is that as a language it's unhackable. So that was the claim fame on why Move and Movement based chains were going to be so good. And Rushi sat there one time and said to me, the thing is, the MOVE language is so good that it's not hackable. So if you're using any other language, you're basically, you're ngmi.
- [40:54]
B
Nothing is unhackable ever guys, ever, ever, ever, ever. And if someone tells you that it's unhackable, run so fast.
- [41:05]
A
Yeah. So Rushi's come back and he, there was a whole drama. He was ousted from, from Movement Labs because there was this market making drama of tokens were sold right after tge. They had token locks, etc, you know, talking about like token incentive, missing alignment, token holder misalignment. Right. The, the, whether he controlled the tokens or labs controlled. Someone had a bunch of unlocked tokens and dumped them. And yeah, we, we ended up, we ended up with him coming back running. Now, a VC fund, I guess, which is extremely on brand for someone who's dumping.
- [41:54]
C
I think it's liquid. I think it's a liquid fund.
- [41:56]
A
Oh, it's a liquid fund. Okay.
- [41:57]
C
Red as a liquid fund.
- [41:59]
A
Okay. All right.
- [42:00]
B
Is that better? Does that make it okay?
- [42:07]
C
Yeah, no comments.
- [42:08]
A
I mean, in fairness, like a liquid fund, their job is actually to dump tokens, right? Like to just buy and sell tokens. So to go back to your point, Luca, they're just traders, right. But I think the claim was they're going to help scale markets or something like that. So, so yeah, I'm not going to lie. This, this Knicks group scares the shit out of me. I, I can't imagine anything good is going to come out of this.
- [42:34]
B
I just wish, and this is super idealistic, okay, but I'm just going to say it anyways. I just wish that when someone royally screws up and screws over everyone, that they wouldn't be able to come back. Like, there are so many talented, legitimate builders and people that are innovating here that deserve that mind share and that chance to thrive. Instead, we just keep doing the same freaking broken record of these stupid scammers. And the amount of money is just absurd. And I just wish it wasn't like that, that's all.
- [43:06]
C
Yeah, I think my, I, I, I share a similar line of thought. I think my problem is that's like, I think, like, obviously people deserve a second and a third chance. I think that's always important. I'm more frustrated with the fact that like, you know, he, you know, people can come back and go raise $100 million. I think that, I think the, the raising of the hundred million dollars is the bigger problem. Right? Like, who are these capital allocators? But what I've learned, I think I mentioned this in the last podcast. You'd be surprised how stupid some of these guys are. The more that I like, maneuver around, I'm like, dude, you manage how much money. You're like a big retail trader, you know, you're no better than that, than that, that, that guy, you know, sitting in his mom's basement on Forex. You just have a couple hundred million dollars in size. You'd be so surprised how many, like, of these Guys I speak to, and I'm like, I just told you what you're, you know, some. Some guy will like, message me and be like, so what are you doing? What's. What's the big. What's the big buy? I'm like, look, man, Pengu is the face of crypto. You know, I've. I've talked about you like, five times around this, you know, Look, I'll tell you, I was a move investor. Rushi was a young founder. I was friends with him. I thought he was a good dude, you know, materially, I can't speak to what he did. I don't know that much about it. I was a stoked move investor too, up until, you know, the whole. The whole drama and nonsense. Yeah, who knows? I mean, look, he's. Yeah, who knows? I don't have much of a take other than that.
- [44:40]
A
All right, guy, if you've got nothing to add.
- [44:44]
D
Yeah, I'm not sure I do. Yeah, I'm not sure everyone deserves a second chance to come back to the space. Sometimes we just need to.
- [44:52]
A
Well, I mean, that. That's a. It's a good point, right? Like, you know, should people get a second chance, third chance, eighth chance, whatever? Like, in this case, I think it's fair to say, like, Rishi turned up, things happened. This is his second chance. Like, does someone deserve a second chance? Part of the problem is that no one has any clarity as to what actually happened. Like, there's, you know, I'm sure there's people who know, but, like, if you're on the timeline, like, Like, I'll say myself, I don't. Like, I wouldn't, you know, hand on heart, say, like, I am 100 certain that this is exactly what happened and this is what this person did, etc. Etc. Like, there's. It's so hard to know in. In crypto, sometimes what actually has happened. And. And, you know, I mean, I go back, I think I've mentioned this before, but, like, when Doan got the subpoena in. In whenever it was 2020 or 2021, it just happened that he was on stage, I was on stage, and Gav Wood was on stage. Those are the three people that were on stage at that time, right? And someone tweeted, someone just got a subpoena as they were walking on stage to speak. And everyone was like, who was on stage? And they were like, it was these three. Right? And I was like, guys, it wasn't me. And everyone was like, sure it wasn't. And then, like, Gavwood didn't say anything, then everyone's like, it's definitely Gav Wood. Because he didn't say anything. And if he didn't say anything, then we know it's him. And, and like Do Kwon meanwhile, is like, it's 100% not me. And everyone was like, oh, do seems like a good guy, it's fine, it probably wasn't him. But like, genuinely for months afterwards people would be like, it was really you, wasn't it? Like, like people, it's so hard to know. Like this was like hundreds of people watched this thing happen. And yet crypto Twitter could not figure out what actually happened. How are we supposed to untangle who owned the tokens, who sold them, whether it was a market maker, et cetera, like without some investigation and report or something like that, which is never going to happen. You know, it's easy for someone to just be like, no, no, no, it was all a mistake and then raise $100 million.
- [47:01]
B
But yeah, yeah. And by the way, so the MOVE thing was actually, I've seen some of the documents regarding that, the stuff that came out, it is extremely weird.
- [47:11]
A
And the fact that the deal is terrible. Like it's a terrible deal very obviously, right?
- [47:16]
B
And the weirdest thing that I, that I kept going back to and I kept, I was like, someone please answer this question. Is like, okay, so you have movement labs, you have Rishi, you have the tokens, you have these market makers. You have market makers that are sort of known to be like shady, sketchy, right? Like binance, like kicked Web3 port off, but the deals were with these like entities that like, some of the entities were like Web3 port, but it was like like a Gmail address. And then you have like other entities that just like don't even exist. And I was like, there was a point when I saw the first like couple documents and I was looking at them, I was like, wait, did someone at MOVE just get like, like business email compromise scam? Like, is this or were they intending to do this deal? And I think they, I think the final outcome was that they intended to do this really sketchy deal. But for a minute there I was like, did, did they get, did they get scammed? Because like there's a really common sort of like Nigerian esque scam where basically they, they'll compromise an email or sort of get in the middle of communications and then like change the. Right, so you think you're doing a deal with or paying an invoice or whatever. They sneak in they divert the flow of your funds to a new place, which is the scammer controlled address. For a minute there I was literally like, can someone clarify this? Unfortunately, it seems like the clarity was that they did intend to do a deal with a no name entity where this other entity was on both sides of the deal and like, was a real mess.
- [48:54]
A
But this comes back to the exact.
- [48:56]
B
Thing of complete disaster.
- [48:58]
A
But we don't. This wouldn't happen in tradfi because you have structures of how an IPO happens and there's particular people and yeah, it's inefficient and yeah, you know, there's a lot of costs and transaction costs and whatever, but you know, you can't just invent your own way of doing everything because people will be like, hey, let me see the docs. And then it's like a crayon, you.
- [49:24]
B
Know, like, what is this Gmail address?
- [49:29]
A
Like, and so, so, you know, no, everyone would be like, all right, like, well, obviously I'm not like dealing with crayon guys, right? But in crypto it's like, like, maybe they're like, smart kids might be fine.
- [49:39]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:40]
D
All right.
- [49:40]
B
Because we keep giving them $100 million.
- [49:45]
A
Before we continue, here's a word from our sponsors that make the show possible.
- [49:48]
E
Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients like Pith, Moonpay Commerce and, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go to market, BD and partnerships, capital markets, advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more, driving execution from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction Today, visit multichain adv.com.
- [50:28]
A
All right, welcome back everyone. So Tarun and Dan, we talked about this last week. They have made up. Tay posted in our channel the Mike Tyson holding two doves now kith. So yeah, that was, that was pretty hilarious. I wish we could share this screens. I would, I would put that meme up. Maybe we'll tweet it later. But yeah, they. They seem to have backed away from the brink, which is good. I don't know, Tay, what was your, what was your take in the end of all of that?
- [51:07]
B
I'm. I'm so happy that they made up first off, because I think that it was a really common situation where the specifics that Dan was taking issue with and the specifics that TARUN was like, the point that TARUN was trying to make was they were all ultimately like, not that out of alignment. Like, Dan was taking a lot of issue with the headline and the way the research was done and the technicals of the research, while TARUN was basically like, wait, but there's definitely like a better way to do this and there should be some formal research on ADL and the harm that it caused. And like, especially if there's like a better mechanism. I appreciate the debate because I learned so much about the different mechanisms. And I think it was like two or three episodes ago, I was like, what? What would reduce the harm? And we did get a lot of answers out of that. I mean, it's not. We don't really have answers, but the conversation is there, so we could potentially have answers someday. And all in all, I hope that both Dan and Tarun, because here's the thing, ultimately, I believe, even though I do not have the technical expertise and understanding of this stuff, I believe that there's probably a way where 1010 could have been less harmful for people while the protocols could still remain. Like the risk to the protocol could be about equivalent, meaning that the protocol is not going to blow up. Like, I truly believe that. And I hope that Hyperliquid and all the others keep trying to improve that so that end users, that we reduce the harm that can come to end users. And I think that this conversation is part of that. Ish.
- [52:50]
A
Well, I mean, guy, we've got you here. We talked a month ago about 1010 and ADL and Athena's position and centralized exchanges. So if I were you, this would be the thing that would be keeping me up at night. So what's your take on this? How do we solve adl?
- [53:11]
D
Yeah, I think it's also probably worth clearing up pieces. I saw in the timeline around Athena having like special treatment and stuff on ADL contracts with the exchanges, which isn't correct.
- [53:24]
A
So you're confirming that. That Athena does, Right? You got some side deals.
- [53:29]
D
The opposite, which we don't. I wish we did. And if we did, I think we'd be talking about it more and, and making that clear to people. But I think generally the way that the waterfalls work is that they tend to like ADL accounts that have the highest amount of leverage and like unrealized P L that sits on the account. So the idea is that if you're going to be transferring wins from one user to cover the loss of another. You tend to sort of start with the riskiest accounts, I. E. The guys who are the most levered and in the money. Because Athena doesn't use any leverage and tends to just be on A the largest exchanges. But B just BTC and ETH. You haven't actually seen ADL and B2C and ETH on the four largest sex venues in the last six years. So all the ADL's that we saw even on 1010 were basically like really a liquid altcoins and then hyper liquid. That was kind of like the, the buckets of where they fall. So that was just a very intentional like risk decision that we took which was like you can make more money doing the basis on a liquid shitty altcoins, but we just think it's safer through the cycle to be doing this on BTC and ETH on the large exchanges. So yeah, just to address that piece, there were no side deals. It was just kind of like a risk management type of decision that we took early on which obviously paid off on that day. I think the one piece that I think the industry should consider to try and improve the way that this sort of ripples through is basically like some traders actually want to kind of be closed down during an ADL like when the markets crash. So like a lot of people who are short on hyper liquid on the 10th when you're getting closed out of your position like ADL's tend to be pretty close to where the bottom of the market is. And in some ways it is actually like a self reinforcing mechanism which is like when the ADLs are occurring it's kind of actually causing a bottom within the market while that is happening. And there are some people who would like to actually be closed out quite close to the bottom by the protocol itself. And I think a lot of people who are short and hyper liquid on the day kind of made like a perfect exit basically from that position. While that was happening, the people who got screwed the most were actually people who are doing the basis on long perhaps on one venue and then short perhaps on the other. So like you kind of got away with it if you had like spot long on one side, short the ribs on the other, but when it was derivs on both sides you kind of got pulled out of one leg and then it didn't match up at all. The reason I'm giving that context is that actually if you gave users the option to say I want to be ADL'd when this put me at the top of the queue, right? If your account that you're using there is just directionally short things or doing spot versus per basis, you might actually just say I want to be at the top of the waterfall. While other users, like Athena for example, we never want to be touched within that waterfall, please. But actually just like putting it on the user to just like select and click and say I would actually this is where I would like to sit within the waterfall. Anyone who's like opted into it first, you do like a pro rata socialization for those users of the losses and then you sort of go down to the mechanic that works now for everyone else as you go through it. So that's one thing which I think we could improve. And I think the second one is.
- [56:43]
A
It wouldn't be crypto though if we didn't like auction that off. Right. Like we should, we should auction off the right to be at the top of the adlq. Who's building this? Come on, someone.
- [56:55]
D
Yeah. And then I think the other one is actually just like transparency around. If you remember in the BitMax days, you actually had like a bit of a meter on your account which is saying like you're close to the top of the ADLQ or not. And it wasn't like perfect information, but it was some information so that you can actually try and address things yourself to try and reposition where you.
- [57:16]
A
It was like a picture of Arthur and a Ferrari, right. It was like driving along like getting closer to the adlq.
- [57:23]
D
And yeah, I think like there is no clarity whatsoever with how insurance funds are being used on centralized exchanges and how that interacts with ADL's. Specifically. Like it's kind of some exchanges will dip into the insurance fund, sometimes they won't. It's very different in terms of the treatment on different coins. I think this just feels like a very easy thing to make extremely clear to people and just put on a dashboard which is like this is the insurance fund that sits next to each coin. Because the more that you can like give people this information to price things, the better. Liquidity is basically because the only thing that everyone hates is like uncertainty. And if you give people information to say this is where you're sitting in the queue, this is the size of the insurance fund. You actually don't see like liquidity gap out in the same way that it did on the 10th of October de.
- [58:06]
A
Risking if they think they're.
- [58:08]
D
Yeah, like market makers are like, I don't have this information. So I don't even want to trade. Like there isn't even a price that I want to touch this because, because I'm just like shooting in the dark. And so I think the more that you can actually just give people these inputs, it's actually useful signal for a lot of these market makers to actually just turn up and provide liquidity when, even when the world's like crumbling.
- [58:24]
A
So this wasn't on our agenda. But you raised an interesting point. I haven't done any research other than just seeing this on the timeline, but Hyperliquid burned a bunch of hype that was in their assistance fund, like yesterday or the day before it was already burned or something like that. Does anyone have any info on that? Because I, I, it did feel a bit strange to me. I was like, like, why are you burning the assistance fund?
- [58:57]
D
Yeah, no, I think it was, that was like the buyback wallet where the programmatic buybacks had been deposited. And I, as far as I understood, no one actually had access and control without like a hard fork of the.
- [59:08]
A
Chain to be able to go, okay, right, so they just, they were like, but so that's not the assistance fund then, right? Like that couldn't be the assistance fund if it's in an inaccessible wallet.
- [59:19]
D
Well, if you, I think you could hard fork, Hard fork the chain and then be able to reallocate it if there was like a huge hack or something like that. But I can kind of see where you get into there, which is like, was it buybacks to then use for a rainy day? Because now like the rainy day thing has been banned. So. Yeah, there isn't like a reserve fund that's sitting behind things.
- [59:39]
C
Fund denominated in hype doesn't make any sense. So it's probably not that. Right? Because, I mean, do you have assistance funds denominated in the native currency? I mean, isn't that like the FTX debacle, right? Like everything was denominated in FTX tokens or once it blew up. So I hope, I hope the resistance fund is not denominated in hype and it's denominated in dollars. But this seems like they're just, this seems like the buyback wallet and they just.
- [60:03]
A
The buyback wallet.
- [60:04]
C
Yeah, that's fine. That's great.
- [60:06]
A
All right, we'll do some more. We'll do some more research. I just saw a few people being like, they burned the assistance fund. I was like, that we might need assistance guys. Like that might.
- [60:15]
B
You always need assistance guys.
- [60:16]
A
You always need assistance guys. Like, why would we do this. All right, next thing that we're moving on to North Korean fake Z Zoom. Crypto scams go daily. So Seal team 911 who are volunteer organization. Is that fair to say? I don't think they monetize their activities. A volunteer organization that tries to keep everyone safe have warned that North Korean hackers, some of whom are good friends of Tay and I. I was actually, I did message. I did message fake Nick. So one of the North Korean hackers. Yeah, So I messaged fake Nick and I, I was like, hey, I'm really sorry to see that you've got this scam tag. And he was like, yeah, this is. I don't know what's going on here. I don't know. It's like so amazing. Just like the level of, of like this is not fair. Why would Telegram target me? I haven't done anything wrong at all this account. But anyway, so these guys go around and they compromise telegram accounts and you know, so they'll compromise my account and then they'll message you and be like, hey, let's jump on a zoom call. So if I ever message you asking to jump on a zoom call, run like, I'm not going to ask you to jump on a zoom call. And then they have all of these different ways of getting you to basically like run some software on your machine. Like I thought this kind of declined a little bit. Tay. Like, what? How come back?
- [61:49]
B
It's so much worse.
- [61:51]
A
Really?
- [61:52]
B
Yeah. Because they've completely so fake Nick, fake Wyatt. Those were fake accounts. Like Nick and Wyatt didn't get hacked.
- [61:59]
C
Yeah.
- [62:00]
B
Right. Over the last year they've pivoted to basically only using taken over accounts. And so it's like if real. Your. If. If real Nick, where you had conversation history with Nick had been like, hey, nice fight man, or whatever he said, and then was like, let's hop on a zoom. Like the likelihood that you would detect that red flag as being like, wait, Nick wouldn't ask me to get on zoom. The likelihood just is infinitely lower because you actually have the conversation history. Right. And most of the victims. So the other thing is that actually now they, they're more unlikely to say target you from like from Nick's account because you and Nick actually like talk quite frequently and have interactions and stuff. What they're doing. Is that something that's super common for like VCs, BDS, founders, CEOs. Right. You have this whole like old history in your telegram of like this person that you met at a conference once and like you Took a selfie together and you had a great conversation and then like you never talked again. And you like remember them and you have like positive vibes with them. They'll restart those conversations and be like, hey, we haven't talked in a while, like, we should catch up. And for founders who are raising rounds or potentially raising rounds or looking for partnerships, it is completely disarming because you have prior conversations, you met the person irl, you met the person in real life, you exchanged telegram handles in real life. And it is, it bypasses people and then they're also just, they're just quite good at like, so that bypasses, right? And then there are red flags that will pop up and people do tend to like sort of detect sometimes, but they're very good at just being like, no worries, they'll tell you straight up. Yeah, yeah, no worries, don't worry about it. My, my security, I had to do the same thing. My security team tracked it. Like, it's fine, just click the button, just run the thing and then it completely.
- [64:03]
A
Your game is social engineering, right? Like, you know when, when my. So I had like a, a random domain registrar, right? And they got social engineered, the domain registrar got social engineered. And I think this actually happened to, to you as well, guy, where like the registrar got social engineered because they've got a bunch of support people wherever they are, you know, who are tired and they're not used to like a high value thing being secured by these systems, right? And this was just like my family office domain. But these guys went and were able to social engineer the support agent who isn't even supposed to have, by the way, the power to like redirect DNS, but somehow did. So they somehow got like escalated up to someone who actually had the power to do this. And that person was like, yeah, sure, you seem like a nice guy. I'll just change the DNS records on this domain for you. And it took me like weeks and weeks of like hammering these guys for them to even admit that that was possible. I'm like, listen. And so I eventually social engineered one of their guys who was like a bit of like a kind of. What's the best way of putting it, like, like a kind of pissed off employee. Like they, they were like angry like. So I kept going to like, different people and eventually I was like, hey, just, I need your help here. Can you actually do this? And this guy's like, yeah, we can actually like, they tell us not to say.
- [65:35]
B
So you like, you like re. You like?
- [65:38]
A
Yeah, yeah, I Mean, they're all going.
- [65:40]
B
To take yourself back.
- [65:41]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [65:43]
D
And.
- [65:43]
A
And so, so I was able to, like, create, like, some affinity with this guy. And he was like, let me help you. I'm so sorry this happened. This company's a piece of shit. Like, it was hilarious. And so, so, so he, so he was like, yeah, like, I can fix this. And so then that guy was my point of contact from, like, then on.
- [66:00]
B
Yeah. And that's the thing, is that. So why do people get scammed? Why do people get taken by this? Part of it is they just don't understand what could happen. Like, like, oh, like, dude, who's going to spend a huge amount of effort trying to change the DNS of this domain.
- [66:16]
A
Yeah.
- [66:16]
B
And it's like, they don't realize, like, oh, if you redirect a crypto domain, there's like, millions of dollars on the table for that.
- [66:22]
A
Yeah.
- [66:23]
B
And it's similar with these, with, like, the fake zoom, fake team scams. People just, like, don't realize that when you somehow. When you. If you copy, paste something into Terminal and like, press run. If you. They use AppleScript, which is like a Terminal ask program. You do that if you install a new application. All of those things can do basically anything.
- [66:47]
A
Completely own you.
- [66:48]
C
Yeah.
- [66:48]
B
And they do it silently. And this, the malware that they're doing is really focused on Macs. And it is. It is the. It is incredible. Horrible.
- [67:00]
A
Now, as a Mac user, right? Like, you have a little bit of a sense of like, I'm on a Mac, like, I'll be okay.
- [67:05]
B
Yeah, no, but, but.
- [67:08]
A
So this, this was actually interesting as well. I use Dynamic Wallet for one of the things that, that I've been building. And Dynamic Wallet injects into the browser console this giant red text that says, like, this is a bad place. You should.
- [67:26]
B
Don't copy paste.
- [67:27]
A
Don't copy paste. Don't paste anything in here. Don't do anything. Right? And it was funny because I was like, it kept popping up, right? Because I updated Dynamic and they've. They've changed the thing. And I was like, if I were the scammer, what I would do is I would be like, hey, I need you to open the browser console. And then there's a little button with like a cross out of it. Like, press that real quick. Like, you got to press it really quickly or the person's red. And then it clears the console. And then it's like, all right, now I've got them. And it's like, you just. If you're if you are thinking from that like adversarial perspective, like every attempt to prevent people from owning themselves, you can get around.
- [68:01]
B
So yeah, yeah. And I want to just emphasize with the. Because this is the thing, this is like the real damage to these is they're using the existing accounts, the existing Telegram accounts. And so it really looks like you have the prior conversation history and they just like, they just go down the list and spam everyone and it's, they're patient and they're dedicated and they will just act like normal people. The most important thing that people need to know is like if you're a victim of one of these and they get your Telegram account, you have to one, warn everyone. But two, if they like don't get your Telegram account for a second, you have to go into Telegram and there's like a thing under settings, under devices where you can kill all of the sessions. It's called literally terminate all sessions. You must do that because they're not logging in with your password. And so a lot of people, what's happening is that even when they know that they've been hacked, they'll just update their password. But because the malware is taking all this, they're taking the session keys, they're using that to re log in. And so we're seeing people get hacked even weeks after they got like initially hacked. They'll have their Telegram taken over because they just. Exactly. And so I'm really hopeful, we're all really hopeful to break the cycle especially they are just going to town right now. We saw like maybe like 15 new accounts get taken over last week. Wow, 15 that we know about. So these are like English speaking crypto Twitter users. Who knows what's going on with like the LinkedIn and the Chinese community. Like they're also getting taken. It's so bad. I hate everything.
- [69:42]
A
All right, we've got like a minute left here. Let's quickly talk about leverage in Polymarket. So someone invented leveraged poly market positions and as is inevitable if something is successful enough. So we saw how well this went for leveraged NFT positions and we're like, let's roll it out to Polymarket this. My immediate reaction to this is like this feels like pure insanity because most Polymarket positions are super liquid and I feel like there's just like people are going to come and do crazy stuff to these positions and people are going to get wrecked and it's, I don't know, I haven't looked into like the dynamic and mechanism design of this. So Maybe they've got like protections from like WIC liquidations or something, but it just feels like there's unintended consequences all over this thing.
- [70:41]
C
Another basis trade for Guy.
- [70:43]
A
Let's go.
- [70:45]
C
The market keeps expanding.
- [70:49]
D
Well, I was gonna say, as long.
- [70:50]
A
As you're farming the basis on President AOC's election, just to build up a bit of a war chest for all of us when we're in the Gulag, I'm okay with it.
- [70:59]
D
Yeah, I was gonna say I was quite surprised. I think it's a cool idea, but, like, I don't know how big the market actually is. Like the open interest in like size of dollars, I think on these prediction markets is actually just not that big. I think relative to the mind show that they've got like, you see people talking about the stuff obviously in the real world and in crypto like a lot these days, but I think it's like a few hundred million dollars basically across both, both Calgary and Poly market. So, yeah, I'm not sure how big the actual market can be for lending against this stuff.
- [71:31]
B
Well, it gets bigger if you leverage it. Right.
- [71:34]
A
I was about to say. But all we need, if we inject, that's that, that's the whole thing. If we just add some leverage, then it could become $100 billion and then the problem goes away. So, final thing before we wrap up, Metamask added bitcoin support, which is pretty cool. Only took 15 years. Congrats, guys.
- [71:57]
B
I'm so proud of our team.
- [72:00]
A
It feels to me as like, as a, as a, you know, Metamask enjoyer. I still use Metamask. I never switched to Ravi. I tried it and, and it was not amazing and I went back to Metamask. It feels to me like you guys have been rolling stuff out very quickly lately, which as a pseudo competitor in Infinix, I don't appreciate it. If you can go back to being complacent.
- [72:27]
B
We still have a huge amount of work to do, but yeah, we've gotten so much better. And we've also paid down years of tech debt, which took an immense amount of effort from every single engineer on our team. Like the most grueling, tedious, horrible amount of effort to pay down the tech debt. So we are definitely in a better position. I swapped, swapped, slash bridged from eth to bitcoin just to see how the flow was, and it was like super seamless. I was so impressed. You can just get bitcoin and it just goes. And it's in your existing bitcoin wall. It's so nice. But yeah, well, you know we've gotten good at rolling out these new networks. We've gotten good. We have prediction markets now too. I think the biggest thing is like we still have a lot of just rough edges and especially for the power users, like we hear you. I'm a power user my own.
- [73:23]
A
Like you got to pay down that hardware wallet tech debt.
- [73:26]
B
The hardware wallet, like when you have 100 plus accounts. Like we're still working on those but hopefully we'll get there someday soon. But yeah, it's, we're not. We're still going.
- [73:41]
A
Awesome. All right, that's it for this episode of Uneasy Money. Thank you Guy for joining us. It was fun. See you on the other side of the holidays. Thanks for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained feed on X YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy holidays, everyone.