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- [00:00]
Kane
But this is the problem with things that are not real. Like when something is purely based on belief, right? And you put too much belief into one guy and you believe that he is going to prop you up and then that belief is questioned, right? There's no fundamentals for us to go back to and be like, no, it's fine, that strategy is selling Bitcoin because the bitcoin fundamentals have never been greater. Look at all of the revenue that we are generating, right? Like this is the fundamental, like it's, it's such a belief based system that we believe it will go up and it'll, it'll be a store of value, whatever. But like if one guy has too much of it and we think he might dump on us, there's nothing to stop. Like it is the rational move, right? Like if I said to Luca, I've got, you know, I've managed to accumulate 50% of the supply of Pangu, right? Have you been buying it? You didn't realize, But I own 50% of it, right? And I'm like, but actually I might sell some just to see what happens. Like, you know, let's, let's test the market, see how liquid it is, right? Like a normal person, a rational person who's holding Penguin would be like, well, I'm getting out of the way. This guy, this guy holds 50% of the pengu supply and he's just like testing the market like he's a lunatic. Clearly, right? Like, like how did he get it? What is he doing with it? Why is he here? And why is he trolling us? Of course you're going to be like, I'm just going to sell to get out of the way. I don't want to be on the other side of this trade if someone's going to potentially dump 50% of the of a thing, right? So yeah, of course people panic.
- [01:52]
Luca
Sold.
- [01:53]
Kane
Of course they did. Hey everyone, I'm K. Mark and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make
- [02:05]
Sponsor Announcer
Multi Chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50+ billion dollars in enterprise value for 80+ clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets, build real traction. Today@multichainadv.com I'm here with my co host
- [02:24]
Kane
Taylor Monahan, security expert and Luca Net CEO of Punchy Penguins and chief advertising sales executive for the show. So if you don't like the ads d on Twitter, if you do like the ads, let's get more of them going. And today we are joined by Porter Stoll, CEO of W3IO. That's a good URL. I like that URL. I saw that and I was like, this guy gets URLs. So Porter's got a decade of experience across IBM blockchain. Coinbase is the important one for this morning. Filecoin and Hedera hold that against you. And he's now building AI agents and progress programmable infrastructure for onchain finance. So Coinbase, let's get into it. Coinbase has woken up, it's a bare market and they've decided that they. This is like a weirdly like anthropic move. Like we're just going to take on everyone, everyone that's doing everything, we're going to go and do that. So, yeah, what's. What, how long, how long has it been since you've been in Coinbase?
- [03:32]
Porter Stoll
It's all of a sudden been a moment. I want to say it's coming up on four years now since I was at Coinbase, but you know, when I see the big announcements from yesterday, I think this is just a continuation from the strategy they've had from four years ago. And what I see is like, look, they're making a concentrated effort to be the one stop shop for everything retail and everything institutional. And look, I thought it was a banner day for Coinbase. I think the narrative is going to quickly shift from everyone focused on the SpaceX and anthropics of the world to what Coinbase is doing. From what I see in my seat at W3, the conversation's all about software development and AI today. But we're going to wake up one morning and that conversation is going to be about AI and money. And Coinbase is in a fantastic market leading position when it comes to that moment. You know, if you looked at all the.
- [04:25]
Kane
They are, I think, I think it interesting, right? Like, so I, I had a chat with, with a friend of mine who's in Coinbase, right? And we, we have a group and someone was like trolling Coinbase about some of these announcements and I was like, man, like you're really going to town. Like, these are good announcements and you're just like giving it to Coinbase, right? And, and my friend called me and he's like, why is there like this antipathy towards Coinbase? Like, you know, why, why do people like get frustrated? Like Coinbase does something cool or they announce a cool thing and people like, ah, Coinbase, stupid Coinbase like, do you have a sense of why the market, like, and what. Like, this is not like institutional investors. This is like degens in the trenches that have this like a bit of a, like, almost a sense of frustration or animosity towards Coinbase. And I don't really have a good answer for it myself.
- [05:30]
Porter Stoll
You know, I've talked to a lot of customers throughout the years, mostly on the retail side, but typically Coinbase charges higher fees than most other exchanges.
- [05:40]
Kane
I mean, djens hate fees, so they hate fees that checks out.
- [05:44]
Porter Stoll
They also.
- [05:45]
Kane
That's why they didn't like Metamask.
- [05:47]
Taylor Monahan
I was about to say there's, there's. It's a lot. It's quite similar. The fees. Okay, so the fees. Definitely. Having a business model is not defi.
- [05:57]
Kane
Guys, we've talked about this, right? It's funny because, like, you know, there's the two sides of this, right? There's DJ who are trying to make money, and they're like, you're taking my jobs, right? Like, you're taking my money. I need to make money. And then on the other side, there's like the communist cypherpunk weird wing that's like, money shouldn't make money bad to make money. Like, don't make money. And then there's like the. So, Luca, like, what's your. What's your take? Why are people frustrated with Coinbase? Why do they react to stuff like this?
- [06:31]
Luca
Because the core functionality of Coinbase, which is buying digital assets, still isn't as good as its competitors. And I tell. Say this is a Coinbase power user. I can't tell you how many times me just executing simple trades doesn't work the same way that it would on Hyper Liquid or Binance or some of the major incumbents. The core product still isn't on par
- [06:54]
Kane
with the other products.
- [06:55]
Luca
And so when you're asking yourself from. From a user perspective, and then obviously you charge the highest fees, you have this idea where it's like, okay, you're doing all these cool things, but can you just do the thing that you're supposed to do and that you built this whole company around just as good as your biggest competitors. And I think, like, once they achieve that, I think you can go and do everything else. But it seems like they're going wider, not deeper. And like, the truth of the matter is, is, like, I have more problems buying coins on Coinbase than I do any other exchange.
- [07:27]
Kane
I mean, Porter, like, you were in. You were in Coinbase for a while, right? Like, you must have a Sense of if you've been around for a long time. And like, I was a cracking customer for. For a really long time, right? And I would talk to my crap cracking guys and I'd be like, why is this so bad? Like, why? Like, why? And they're like, it's just old, man. Like, you know, we've been around since like 2011. The infrastructure is old. Things have changed. Like, Porter, do you have a set? Like, was this a thing in Coinbase that people were like, fighting against or frustrated by that, like infrasold, or is that just Coke?
- [08:05]
Porter Stoll
It was a different world four years ago. Most of the time people were complaining just about basic customer service on trades and liquidity, like access to their account. Now it's, you know, we're not having those conversations anymore that we were having four years ago. Specific when it comes to Coinbase. So, you know, there's. I'd say they're constantly raising the floor, but the floor doesn't really get headlines.
- [08:27]
Kane
So, I mean, like, freezing your. The. The account freezing stuff, right? Like, yeah, that was a pretty low bar. Like, don't freeze. My account is a fairly low bar for people to.
- [08:39]
Taylor Monahan
So, yeah, I think too, it's just. And Madam Ask, it was the same. We were always on the losing end of this.
- [08:45]
Kane
And you didn't praise people's accounts at least, right?
- [08:48]
Taylor Monahan
No, no, we were not. But I think, like, some of the. A lot of the feedback actually is like, totally legitimate and is. Is valid and people are frustrated and, you know, whether it's the UX, the fees, like all these things, like 100% valid. But then at some point you're like, sort of big enough and winning enough that it becomes cool to shit on, like, Metamask or Coin.
- [09:21]
Kane
I think there's a little bit of that. A little bit of that is.
- [09:24]
Taylor Monahan
It's a good like. And so a lot of times we would see things that were really not like that big of a deal. They were not like, they. They were issues, they were quickly resolved. Cool. But for whatever reason, it was like the sort of like the noise around it was. Was bigger than the underlying issue. And I do think that that comes a little bit from just like, being in. In that position. I think it also comes from when you're in that position, it's much easier to like, for real or be perceived as like, sitting in your ivory tower. And I think both Coinbase and Metamask, again, struggle with that as well. Right. Like, whether it's 100 real or not, there's definitely A perception that a bit
- [10:14]
Kane
detached from the trenches. Like, Luke is over here being like, I just want to buy some bitcoin, bro. Like, love it. Let me do it. Why. Why is this hard? Right?
- [10:24]
Taylor Monahan
So.
- [10:24]
Kane
So I think, like, I think it's all of those things, but I. I do think that there is a sense of, like, you know, if you guys are the biggest, the oldest, the most successful, you're a public company, all these things, like, you know, get. Get these core things, right? But to your point, Porter, like, they're like, okay, sure, we probably. I mean, four years ago, we're talking, you know, 2022, like, the last bear market, right? Like, they're like, all right, like, we get it. We've heard your feedback. You know, we're not sitting in our RV tower. We're going to go and do these things. And they've gone and done that. They've raised the bar. They don't shut people's accounts down. They've got Kobe doing customer service now. The best customer service rep in the history of the world. And so this then is like, okay, this is the Net, like, the next thing. But, Luca, you're like, you still haven't quite landed the core functionality. Like, when you. When you see this. This presentation, do you. Does it give you a sense, like, okay, they're going to focus on the core, or does it feel like they're distracted by, like, a bunch of other things? It doesn't feel like they're going to.
- [11:32]
Luca
I mean, the core is like, can I buy on my dashboard, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana without having, like, we are down notification or having to refresh my page four times for the page to lo.
- [11:46]
Kane
Appropriately, you know, like, but so merging the US Spot markets, right? Merging Deribit. Merging the international derivatives. Like that, to me, like, speaks, like,
- [11:59]
Luca
yeah, no, it's great.
- [12:01]
Kane
Removing tech debt, like, consolidating liquidity, all of that stuff. Or are you saying, like, it's more fundamental?
- [12:07]
Luca
No, I think it's even more fundamental. Like, the page doesn't load. Like, on all my different device. Like, I can't once a week, I have to troubleshoot it to buy Bitcoin. Like, charts won't load. Like, it's. It's. It's even more basic than that. Like, principally, you're right. Like, correct. Like, all of these things do support, like, the. The better, you know, the tightening the spreads, like, adding deeper liquidity, like, so it's better for sales. And, like, I get all these things, but, like, my problems are like, beyond that, my, my problems are like, can the page load efficiently and effectively? I was having. I actually had this issue on zcash. So I, when zcash drew down, one of my positions ended up being in a loss. And so the beauty about crypto in there, yeah, you don't have to wait 30 days to. You don't have to wait 30 days to tax loss harvest. You can just sell and then buy back again in real time. It's like a great crypto tax feature for those who are not familiar. And so then I sold and then I bought back again and then call the position a million dollars right as I was buying and it was filling it, basically the UX showed me that I only had X amount of zcash, no cash. But it was. I put a million dollar buy, but only 700,000 filled. And then the mark price on my ux said that Zcash was at like 380. When it was at like 300, like, it just, just wasn't breaking. It just wasn't.
- [13:35]
Kane
It was like, how do you get
- [13:36]
Luca
this like, well, bare bones stuff like mark price and like uxui translating to the price and like my dollars coming out and then my dollars coming in. Like, very simple basic exchange is this,
- [13:47]
Kane
like, this is Coinbase Pro, like the Coinbase event.
- [13:53]
Porter Stoll
Hey, Kane, question for you. And you get like a story like Luca, who's obviously super user dgen versus the mass market retail. How do you view Coinbase as it straddles that gap?
- [14:06]
Kane
It's a good question. This is one of the challenges, and I know Tay felt this metamask right on one hand. I want to use Scroll. Why the fuck don't you support Scroll? I'm over there trying to farm it and you guys, the support for it, it's not great. It's this 100 people that want to do that thing, right. You're on like the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge sort of thing. Right. And. And then there's like, you know, I can't like, put in my seed phrase and it's not what. You know, there's like the, the core, like the core stuff.
- [14:41]
Porter Stoll
Yeah.
- [14:41]
Kane
And when you have so many users, it is hard, right? Like, you have. You have a lot of pressure to. To have like, both, you know, breadth and depth and. And like tech. That is a real thing. Like, I'm sure, you know, like, it sounds like. How long have you guys been building? W. Three.
- [15:02]
Porter Stoll
Two and a half years.
- [15:03]
Kane
Right. Okay.
- [15:04]
Porter Stoll
So.
- [15:04]
Kane
So the interesting thing is, right, you started when we were still like, artisanally coding everything, right. Which I, too, unfortunately, started to start up then as well, and it's a nightmare. And now, like, we can go much faster and, you know, whatever. There's a lot of, there's a lot of questions about, like, is that good, et cetera, but tech debt accumulated over, like, more than a decade is brutal, right? And even when you go, okay, we're going to fix this thing, your surface area of everything that you touch across Coinbase must be a nightmare. And I know, Tay, you guys spent, like, two years trying to, like, just people, like, just give me a button. And you're like, it's not as simple as that.
- [15:49]
Taylor Monahan
We're trying, I swear to God.
- [15:52]
Kane
Like, we wanted you to do the button. We really do do. It's not that we hate you, it's. The buttons are harder than they were.
- [15:58]
Taylor Monahan
Like, yeah, yeah, it's super real. I'm curious, though. Okay, so. Because I, I, I don't know, I kind of like this announcement. I don't know. And I'm not a big coin.
- [16:10]
Kane
That's, that was the thing. Like, I saw it and I was like, this is, this seems super bullish. They, they. I think the, the key thing for me, right, is, and, and Luke, I know that you believe this. Like, you know, trading and traders are the thing that keeps crypto working. Right? Defi and traders and, and finance are the thing that keeps crypto working. It's the thing that keeps the lights on. It's the thing that pays the bills. Right? And so if you're not focused on that and you're also an exchange, it feels insane to me. Like, you, you, you have to be focused on that. And I know Coinbase has, has said, you know, that this is a focus for a while. I'm going to fix these core issues and, you know, fix customer service, et cetera. This does feel like the next component of that. And it does feel like they're, you know, when they bought Deribit, and I was an investor in Deribit, so I appreciated them buying deribit, but also it was a bit of, like, a shot across the bow that, like, this is a thing that we value. We value. It was the best options exchange, one of the best derivatives exchange. We're going to bring these products to our users. And so, yeah, it does feel like Coinbase has kind of woken up and at this, at least, external realization of, like, we've got to get the trading stuff right.
- [17:36]
Porter Stoll
I still think the biggest thing I heard from yesterday was from Jesse, the Payment side, they had the base MCP and you know, more announcements on x402King question for you or anyone on the panel. If you had the leading agentic payments company that was at like anthropic level scale and security, how much is that worth? Like I thought that was the real sleeper yesterday.
- [18:01]
Kane
Yeah, I think this is kind of the challenge. Right. That and you know, we've been working on Agentix stuff at Infinix for a while and it's still even as much effort and time as we put into all of this, it's still not clear like what the user facing form factor should be. Right. You could put little agentic chat box inside of your metamask, you know, browser extension. Right. And be like, don't worry T, we're not doing that. But you could, you could and just say like I want to talk to this agent and tell it things that I want to do. You know, I want to, I want to go and you know, do a trade on, on hyperliquid or, or whatever. But it's not 100% clear that that's like the best UX right from. And again like this is like user facing trader want to do a thing instead of clicking a button. I want to talk to an agent or I want the agent to propose things to me and have this interactive thing on the payment side though, right. Like as in facilitating agentic payments. That is not really user facing. Right. Like that's infra. That's like be the best place for agents to be interacting with each other and moving money around. And so, so I do agree with Jesse on, on that aspect and I think the base is by far the only ones thinking about this. Like not even just like the furthest ahead. Like they're the only ones who are really even thinking about this. It's just the last mile of how that connects to the user is still unclear to me.
- [19:47]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. And especially for D Johns, it feels for me. And you know, there, there were when I was still at metas, there were a lot of conversations about this and it's still, I don't know, it feels dangerous the second you start abstracting stuff away. Right. Because it makes sense. Like on the surface where you're like, I want to be able to just tell my agent like go buy 10 bitcoin or whatever, but you actually do want to feel at least like you're in like real control of that. Which is why the, I think progress here has like just not been as great.
- [20:25]
Kane
I think it's far more interesting Agents paying each other is like, I want to pay for this, like, API call. And it's not 10 bitcoin, which is.
- [20:35]
Taylor Monahan
It's like $10.
- [20:37]
Kane
It's like, it's. It's like maybe 0.000001 of an API call, right? Like, it might be like a tiny fraction of a second sent. And. And so that's like, oh, yeah, sure, like go and do that thing, right? But again, like, you know, it has to come back to like, what is the user benefit? Right? Like what, what does the user get out of these agents interacting with each other? How does it make my life easier?
- [21:02]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, and it's going to be a chicken egg problem too, right? Because you're like, oh, yeah, actually that would be cool if my agent needs to go do something and needs to make a call or needs to buy this thing or whatever. Like, super cool that you can have the system behind the scenes that like handles it. And then I sort of like up front can define whatever cards that limit so that it doesn't like, spend my whole budget, whatever. But you do have to have the other end of that, right? What is the agent going out and buying and stuff. And so it is until you get to that point. I still feel like it's pretty theoretical. I mean, but at least they're working on it, in my opinion. Like, I hate to say it, like, actually, so.
- [21:40]
Kane
So Porter, right, Like, you're. You're building agentic tools, right? And, and you know, obviously you've been doing this for a long time, longer than it's probably sensible, right? Which is bullish. But. But, you know, we've talked about this with Anthropic a lot, right? Like, you know, you're out there building canva, like doing your, you know, living your best life, right? You built a, whatever, $30 billion company. Then Anthropic's like, we're gonna kill you. Like, you know, and so this is not quite that, because I don't think Coinbase is as scary as Anthropic, but when you see the, like, Coinbase's lenient agents, like, how do you feel about the competitive landscape there?
- [22:24]
Porter Stoll
So, you know, I, I had this conversation with my team this morning. Do we view this as competitive? In a way it is, but it's. Coinbase competes in a very specific way, convenience. So again, like, I'm a Coinbase power user.
- [22:38]
Kane
Luke is rolling in his grave right now.
- [22:40]
Porter Stoll
I know I use the credit card, I use it for stablecoins, I use it for payments, I use it for buying and selling Bitcoin or other cryptos. So I go for the convenience. And I think when people look at agentic payments, especially large enterprise, like, I have no idea how to do this and I get why it needs to be on chain, but I just, I want to, like, one stop shop at Coinbase. Great reputation, works with aws. Boom. I can, I can get going on this today. So my point of view is, well, you know, you need to have. If someone wants to go to the Chinese menu of like, I want this for custody, I want this for my payment rail, I want this for compliance. You know, my whole point of view is I'm offering something different. So I like, look, I am a convenience buyer, but I'm trying to tackle the point of the market where people want more a la carte.
- [23:35]
Kane
Got it, got it. But, yeah, I mean, you know, like, if you're doing anything in almost anything in crypto, right, Coinbase today, it was like a bit of a shot across the bow, like we're coming for, which is a very anthropic thing. So, you know, I think that's also a little bit of like, where, where the, you know, antipathy comes from, right? Is like, Coinbase is both your competitor, but it's also, you know, a place where, like, so many teams get acquired, they, you know, invest so much in the. So it's like there's a little bit like, Binance, like, there's no ambiguity, right. They're trying to kill you and your whole family. They're going to steal all your money and leave you poor. Right, like, and that's their goal. And it's like, very clear that that's their goal. Right. Coinbase is like, no, no, we're friendly, we're not. We're not going to do that sort of thing. But then they, like, drop a new. Like, I know you didn't intend to kill me, but it's the same result.
- [24:32]
Porter Stoll
Right, yeah. Real quick on Coinbase and I'm sure the culture there, this part of the culture is still the same. I worked a lot of places in my life and the product management discipline that they had at Coinbase was like nothing else I'd ever seen. I had colleagues who worked at Google and they said Coinbase was 3x, the product management discipline to do, like to put out great products. You can't assemble a crew like that and put restrainers on them. Of course product people are going to deliver great products. So when you look at yesterday, that's what I saw.
- [25:06]
Kane
Yeah, so. So I think the one of the most. There were a lot, there are a lot of things, right? But one of the most interesting or maybe controversial things that came out of this announcement was. And you know, whenever anyone says this is the real thing, right, Crypto people are going to get up in arms. I dare say this is real. So they, they announced real tokenized stocks, right? But to the best of my knowledge and, and I only woke up an hour ago, so maybe this has been revealed. You guys can tell me. But it wasn't clear what the mechanism of reality was being applied to these stocks. Is that still like not clear or what? Where are we at with that? I don't, we don't know. We don't.
- [25:57]
Taylor Monahan
I'm involved.
- [25:58]
Kane
So, so like, you know there's a bunch of different ways that you can do tokenized stocks, right? And back in the olden days when Synthetix first did this, the only real way was Synthetix and Mirror, which is its own story. Out of mirror came the 100 foot monster named Do Kwon. But the only way you could really do this was synthetic equities, right? Like we didn't have any off chain mechanisms that wouldn't, you know, cause you to get immediately arrested that would allow you to like own equities in a bag and then like tokenize them the way that we do now, right? We had only just like 2018, we'd only just been able to like do this in any kind of semi regulatory approved way with staples like true USD, USCC. All of these guys in, in 2018 were like ah, regulators aren't going to kill us. We've got stablecoins that are backed by US dollars that are like in a regulated bank account, etc, but we didn't have the technology for that for, for equities because the SEC is somewhat sensitive to this, right? Somehow six years, say eight years later or whatever, we can, we can do it. But there's a bunch of different ways that you can do it. You can like create a vehicle that owns the thing. You can create like a direct iou. You can create what, what's unclear to me is Coinbase is like there's no derivatives, no IOUs. Now a token is not a share. They are a different instrument, right? Like for, for a whole bunch of reasons. So it can't be one. And, and you know there are guys, right, like you know, Leshner is out there saying well actually you can do this. Like Superstate is saying like let's make a share and a token, the same thing, right? Let's issue a thing that is like a real share and a token. The, the technology is an ERC 20 or whatever. The, the legal standing is that, you know, this weird hybrid.
- [28:19]
Taylor Monahan
Right.
- [28:20]
Kane
But obviously you can't do that for SpaceX. SpaceX are like real shares not issued by Superstate yet that we know of. And so I don't really understand what this means.
- [28:34]
Taylor Monahan
Like, what is real? Right?
- [28:36]
Kane
What is real? What is.
- [28:37]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah.
- [28:39]
Kane
Do you have a, like, Porter, do you have any vibes on this? Like, what. How do you think they're going to do this?
- [28:44]
Porter Stoll
I've seen enough technology announcements throughout my day where you have the big splash moment and then the details come within a reasonable, hopefully reasonable amount of time afterwards. So I think what you're looking for, Kane, is going to be the proof because you're a detail oriented guy, you want to dive in and do your research. And I think that's coming. Whether or not it will pass mustard like for your standards, tbd. But I think you're going to get a lot of that documentation coming forward for sure.
- [29:15]
Kane
It's just, it's just funny that like you would, you would come out and be like, oh, we're the first to do this, right? And everyone's like, the first to do what? And you're like, don't worry about it.
- [29:26]
Porter Stoll
That like I said, tech, like 20 years of tech conferences I've seen.
- [29:32]
Kane
I know, I get it, I get it. But like, but you know, the difference between crypto and like a normal tech thing is like how adversarial it is.
- [29:40]
Porter Stoll
Right.
- [29:41]
Kane
There's so many people that are looking to like poke holes in your thing. Right. That if you come out and say like, oh no, Al is real. Like they're not going to forget that. They won't like wake up next Tuesday and and be like, oh yeah, Coinbase is fine. Like they're going to be writing long like threads on this whole thing and, and whatever. So, yeah, I, I think that, you
- [30:04]
Porter Stoll
know, given we know if you look at Coinbase custody, I think they like the custody is the key here. That is the unlock to tokenize stocks. Sure. My guess is they're holding one for one. So you. They have the actual stock in possession on a share basis that allows them to create the token. I'm assuming that's how they're doing it.
- [30:25]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, they didn't, their announcement didn't say it didn't say like, I mean at the end of the day it's tokenized stock so it's going to be say colloquially, like a wrapper right around the real thing, Most likely, yeah. They just said no derivatives, no IOUs, meaning. Right, which those have specific meanings, obviously, like. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, if they're going to custody them, I mean, why not? They can do it, right? They have all the licenses.
- [30:59]
Kane
They definitely can. You know, like the interesting thing though, right, is like, you know the debate of USDT versus say usdc, right? Or true USD back in the day, right, Was this debate of like, is the money there? That was, yeah, you know, that was like, is it like. And you know, true USD and USDC were like, yes, the money's there, like we can show you the bank account.
- [31:24]
Porter Stoll
Right?
- [31:24]
Kane
And tether was like, now bro, we can't. And so that was the like fundamental debate, right? And so I think if Coinbase is just saying no, we have a brokerage account that holds these shares, one for one that will be audited, that's probably sufficient. I just don't know if that is differentiated. Like, I think there are other people that are doing that exact same thing.
- [31:46]
Luca
Right?
- [31:47]
Kane
So it feels weird.
- [31:48]
Porter Stoll
Question for you, do you think the short term goal is to be the first major platform to do 24. 7 Stock trading or is it something else?
- [31:59]
Kane
I mean, there's two things here. One is no one cares, like genuinely like. And Luca, you, you will, you will. I think back me up here. You want exposure to SpaceX. I don't think that you care that much provided like the counterparty that you got exposure through is sufficiently liquid, whatever, that you can get your money if you make money, that you care whether it's like a share certificate that they can send you or like people don't care like shares as long as you
- [32:38]
Taylor Monahan
don't get rugged, right?
- [32:40]
Kane
Like, long as you don't get rugged.
- [32:42]
Luca
As long as I can sell at the mark price and get filled, I don't care. Nobody wants voting rights. I mean, who's buying stocks nowadays to get voting rights? Anybody?
- [32:55]
Kane
So then it's like, I don't really care about what the instrument is. I care about the venue, right? Is the venue solvent? Is the venue have liquidity? Is it actually tracking the price? What is the price mechanism? What are the fees and things that I'm paying? And this is where I think, like, it's quite interesting over the last three months, especially like I talked to some of my market maker friends and they're like, all of the push is away from token launches, token liquidity, you know, like as in native, native on chain tokens for token backed projects. And all of it is towards like equity perks. Because the, the, you know, the thing that we have, right, is, is this instrument that no one else has, which is perps. And so if you have perps and you have a liquid venue, it's actually like the by far the best instrument because you have all the optionality. You can have a 1x leverage per position. That's the same as having direct holding the share. Again, predicated on the venue being real and not rugging you, et cetera, all of those things. Right. And so My guess is, Luca, you're just as happy to hold one share certificate of SpaceX as you are having exposure to one share of SpaceX on HYPERLINK.
- [34:22]
Luca
Totally agreed. You want to know something cool, Kane? Nobody knows this, but I'll share it on this podcast.
- [34:29]
Kane
All right, let's do it.
- [34:31]
Luca
Know we made an instrument, a new financial instrument to basically launch tokens directly on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. One to one to crypto markets.
- [34:42]
Kane
Who's the we in this? Igloo. Igloo, right.
- [34:47]
Sponsor Announcer
Okay.
- [34:47]
Kane
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so is that happening? Like, what's, what's going on there?
- [34:53]
Luca
It's happening, but I thought I was just ch and the spear in the spirit of this conversation.
- [34:58]
Kane
And so what's the, what's the intent behind that? If you can, if you can share that? Like what, like where. What's the like, product niche that that slots into?
- [35:07]
Luca
Well, when you think about it, I think when you look at ETFs and DATs, like what are the two issues? And what was really a big issue post 10 10? I think post 1010 it was very clear that any net new token launches until proven otherwise was a giant mistake. And so you had to tap into a different liquidity.
- [35:28]
Kane
Thanks for giving me the heads up on that one. Appreciate that.
- [35:33]
Luca
The second one is, if you look at ETFs and Dax, right, like ETF SV drag Dax, if there's a premium to M nav, like the treasury holding company acquires that premium.
- [35:46]
Kane
Like if you actually think about a
- [35:48]
Luca
token launch, if you should be able to launch something on the New York Stock Exchange or on the nyse, and that should be able to trade one for one, it should be redeemable in crypto markets. And so that was kind of our thesis and we spent a lot of money figuring it out. Superstate, guys. Remember when I mentioned that six weeks ago?
- [36:10]
Kane
Oh, right, yes.
- [36:11]
Luca
Yeah.
- [36:12]
Kane
You end up. And here we are. Yeah. Okay, nice so the idea then being you could take a token, like a DAO token. Take like AAVE as an example.
- [36:26]
Porter Stoll
Right.
- [36:26]
Kane
Of something that's actually. So you can take AAVE and list that on an Aztec.
- [36:35]
Luca
Yeah. And the beauty about the structure is it's actually defined as a security. And so you can get fees back to holders directly from the platform. So you can do distributions of the protocols revenue directly back to shareholders holders.
- [36:51]
Kane
Wow.
- [36:52]
Porter Stoll
So.
- [36:53]
Kane
So the listing process though, Right. Like, I went through this with another. Yeah. How do you.
- [37:00]
Luca
How do you actually get listed entry? Because of the fees associated to underwriting that the major banks.
- [37:07]
Kane
So it's the equivalent of like a direct listing or something. Correct. Right, interesting.
- [37:12]
Luca
And you can also write. So if you wanted, you could sell 10% of the network directly to bankers. You could do it. You could run it like a traditional ipo, you know, sell it to Morgan. And so it's like an IPO ICO, but with TradFi. Rails first. The big barrier to entry here is there's only so many people who can do it, because that underwriting process, if anybody's familiar, is a $10 million, in some cases 15, even $20 million process, depending on how they do diligence.
- [37:43]
Porter Stoll
I mean, so did I hear you correct? Not only do you have a 10% to the bankers, then you have a 10 million underwriting fee to get on, get listed.
- [37:50]
Luca
Right. But the, the feed of the bankers, you don't give it, they fill it. So you do a certain price, like a billion dollars. You raised a hundred million dollars directly from Goldman or Morian or Cantor or whoever. And then obviously some, you know, you. But before you even get there, they have to fill. And then the cost to fill costs about $20 million, depending on how quickly somebody fails and how rigorous the due diligence is.
- [38:17]
Porter Stoll
That's.
- [38:18]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. Can I just say it is wild to me, because we have like. I just feel like the, the. All the stuff lately is like you have the meme coins and like more degeneracy over this way. And then like this real world. I mean, not really real world, but like, whatever. We're like also merging crypto with Chad Fi. Right. Socks and all of this stuff. Like we're. But it's like a reverse. This is the thing. We're like reversing into it, but then over.
- [38:46]
Kane
No, but I think, like, it makes sense. We got the best rails. We got the best rails.
- [38:52]
Taylor Monahan
I just think it's so interesting. It is so. It is like, because it's night and day.
- [38:57]
Porter Stoll
Taylor, were you at defenses this year?
- [39:00]
Taylor Monahan
No. I mean, I watched some of the stuff online, but I was not physically.
- [39:04]
Porter Stoll
Like, I've never seen so many sport coats in a crypto conference. It was back.
- [39:11]
Kane
Wow.
- [39:12]
Taylor Monahan
It was back. It's been a minute.
- [39:14]
Kane
That's like 2018 era, like Midtown Manhattan.
- [39:17]
Porter Stoll
Oh, yeah, David Center. I was at that one.
- [39:19]
Kane
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [39:21]
Porter Stoll
So.
- [39:21]
Kane
So like, I think, you know, and this again, this comes down to like, why, why does it make sense for base to focus on these agentic, you know, the agentic infrastructure on base because it is such an obviously better mechanism for agents interacting with each other using stables. Right. Now, how do we productize that and make that a useful product is still an open question. Right, but it's like just obviously the best Rails. Right. And I think that that's the case for perps as well. Right. Like we have all these instruments that are really powerful instruments that, you know, give you a whole bunch of properties that people. People, you know love. So of course tradfi and, and crypto gonna get merged.
- [40:12]
Porter Stoll
We haven't talked about one of their major talks yesterday, which was the credit card. What I love about the credit card is for my normie friends who I want to get into Bitcoin, I say travel points suck. Get the coinbase card, earn in Bitcoin and you'll earn progressively stack over time. Like, I don't know if you tried.
- [40:32]
Kane
This was a thing. This was an old school coinbase pitch, right, that goes Back to like 2015 era Coinbase, right, Of like stack stats with the, with the credit card or something, if I remember correctly. Yeah, right. That would have been a good, good strategy. All right, so Porter, are you a fan of Fable? You a Fable fan? You want to, you want to stick around and chat to us about Fable or you got to jump?
- [40:58]
Porter Stoll
I got to jump.
- [40:59]
Kane
All right. Okay. Thanks very much for being on the show. We're going to go to our next ad break and we will be back in a second.
- [41:08]
Sponsor Announcer
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.
- [41:50]
Kane
all right, we are back. Fable. Fable. Fable.
- [41:55]
Porter Stoll
Fable. Fable.
- [41:57]
Kane
Oh, man.
- [41:58]
Taylor Monahan
I've been waiting all week to talk to you guys.
- [42:02]
Kane
Oh, it's so bad. Like, okay, so the story is that Mythos was announced, like, months ago now, right? And they're like, this model is so good that we cannot give it because we can't trust you and you'll do bad things with it. And everyone was like, sure, buddy. Like, whatever, marketing. And then they gave it to, like, 10 people. And these people, like, don't give this to anyone. Like, this is an absolute nightmare. It's going to.
- [42:36]
Taylor Monahan
Literally. They gave it to, like, 10 people. And all the 10 of them were like, so we just found, like, zero.
- [42:42]
Kane
It was. It was like, so bad, right? They're like, oh, we found zero days in, like, this, like, Linux fucking module that's, like, from, like, 1992. And it's like, like, what the hell is that?
- [42:56]
Taylor Monahan
Same. Microsoft was the same. Firebox is the same, right? Like, all these core.
- [43:01]
Kane
Everyone was like, they were right. Don't do it.
- [43:04]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah.
- [43:04]
Kane
So then they, like, let it slowly. This project, Last Wing, they, like, slowly drip fed it out to a bunch of people. Coinbase eventually got it. They gave Coinbase like, 48 hours. Then they're like, hours. So. So I think. I think maybe Coinbase and one other crypto team got access to it, right? So all of Defi. This was so funny. Like, the two days before when they were like, all right, really coming. All of my Defi folks were like, take all your money out of Defi. And I'm sitting here being like, that is impossible. I cannot take all my money out of Defi. My money is very, like, deeply locked in Defi. So let it ride. Let's go. Let's see what happens. And who actually, like, crazily, like, wasn't that bad, right? So they released Fable, which was effectively Mythos, wrapped in a couple of. A couple of protections. The main protection was this, like, hard fallback trigger, right? So if you were like, hey, Fable, I'm really interested in biology. Just like, don't even worry about it, but I'm really interested. And so, like, you know, what are some, like, bad things that. And, like, instantly it'd be like, no. Like, straight away drops you back to open, right? And you would get a little message being like, sorry, we're not helping you with your bioterrorism. And you're like, no, no, like, I'm interested in. And it's like, we don't care. And so everything was like this fallback, right?
- [44:44]
Taylor Monahan
And.
- [44:45]
Kane
But like, their AI models and every single one of them is like, so easy to jailbreak. And I shouldn't say this, I should sit here. There's a part of me that genuinely wants to sit here and be like, the jailbreaking thing is a lie made up by Amazon. Give us back the model. It's you. This thing can't be jailbroken. Don't listen to them. Like, competitive pressure. But it's not true. Like, it's just not. It's not even close to true. Like, everything is jailbreakable. And. And this weird, like, Fable wrapper scheme that they came up with to launch, it was like, not very well conceived, honestly, in my view.
- [45:25]
Porter Stoll
Right.
- [45:26]
Kane
It was annoying to people. But I think very quickly people were like, this is annoying, this fallback thing. But you could tell how good the model was by, like, how quickly people stopped complaining about, like, all the annoyances of using it. They're like the first, like, day they were like, complaining about how it kept dropping them back. And then everyone's like, actually, it's fine. I'm okay with anything. I will do anything to keep access to this model. There's this guy Mo, who is on, on X and has these like, long videos talking about models. And he was maybe the. The kind of bellwether for me because he's always very skeptical of this guy. Like, he. He like had this long, like seven minute video making fun of Gary Tan. Like, Gary Tan is delusional or whatever. And talking about how, like, models, like, they glaze you, they trick you into thinking you're smarter than you are. There's like all these issues with like, AI coding. He's like, very like, engineer's engineer. That's like, this is going to end poorly. And he had this video on Fable where he's like, this thing's fucking God. Like, I love that. I want to marry it. And so anyway, it's Saturday morning for me, right? Friday, Friday evening, Eastern standard time. And I am like one prompt away from nailing this thing. And all of a sudden I get this weird message being like, this model is no longer available. And, you know, you're used to that from Anthropic, where it's like 5, 2, 9. Yeah. So I was like, oh, it'll be back. Yeah, I was like, it'll be back in five minutes. It'll be fine. And then instantly Twitter, like, starts blowing up with like, this announcement where there was this fight And. And, yeah, like, David Sachs coming out being like, fable is mythos with guardrails. Which is true. It is. If those guardrails fail, then you've exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities. A highly credible trusted partner came forward with a jailbreak. The admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or deploy the model. Dario refused. The admin issued the export control. Admin did this reluctantly. So, yeah, like, this feels.
- [47:40]
Luca
It's.
- [47:40]
Kane
It's a weird one, right? Because it's so good. It's so good.
- [47:46]
Taylor Monahan
But also, the government just, like, rugged the hell out of it. Like, they really, like. I'm sorry. Like, what the.
- [47:54]
Kane
Yeah, that's what blew my mind, the idea that they would just be like, sorry, no.
- [47:59]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, we're just. We're gonna export control you and, like, oh, okay. Like, Napa. Like, goodbye. It's just wild to me. So that was my first thing, was like, wait. The government literally just rugged, like, anthropic is, like, a huge private company, right? And the government's just like, yeah, imagine if they're public.
- [48:20]
Kane
Imagine the stock price on that one. That would have been a good trade.
- [48:24]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. The second thing that.
- [48:26]
Kane
You see that. You see that error message come up, and you're like, yeah, everything.
- [48:32]
Taylor Monahan
The second thing that stood out to me, though, was like, how. I'm sorry, how the fuck did we end up in this situation? Why is Dario talking to the government after.
- [48:45]
Kane
I think a lot of people have
- [48:46]
Taylor Monahan
that question, like, two months ago, and clearly, you guys cannot communicate. I'm sorry. Clearly Dario and not the guy. Yeah, they are on different.
- [48:55]
Kane
Different guys. They're different. They're a whole different. Okay, I like why you wouldn't send Vitalik in. Imagine you sent Vitalik in to talk to, like, David Sachs. They'd be like, shut. Appearing. Shut everything down. Nuke the thing. We can't allow this to exist. It's just like, there are different wavelengths.
- [49:17]
Taylor Monahan
You just cannot. You cannot. And it's not. It's not because Dario is stupid. It's not because. And there's, like, another's, like, security researchers. There's a security researcher with, like, pink hair that everyone was, like, up in arms about. And, like, look, this is not about skill or talent. It is about. You need to communicate with people who are not skilled or talented. They work for the government. They are lifelong politicians. They wear suits. Okay. Don't send the pink hair, girl. It.
- [49:47]
Kane
Smart guy. Zach's a smart guy. He's not, like, a weird government guy, right?
- [49:51]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah.
- [49:52]
Kane
But, you know, you can tell from his tweet that he's stuck in the middle.
- [49:57]
Taylor Monahan
He's dealing with government, right?
- [49:59]
Kane
Like, he. Like, so, you know, someone trying to taper it, right?
- [50:03]
Taylor Monahan
He's trying to, like.
- [50:04]
Kane
He's trying to, like, let.
- [50:05]
Taylor Monahan
On this side and on this side.
- [50:08]
Kane
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [50:10]
Taylor Monahan
So I just can't. I don't know. I just cannot believe they let Dario talk to the government again after this was, like. After the whole thing happened, whatever.
- [50:20]
Luca
It was, like, the top build.
- [50:23]
Taylor Monahan
They, like, lost the contract or whatever, or didn't want the contract. Whatever it was, you know, it's like, like. And it's. It's just. In my opinion, it's like, most of it is a communication thing. There's probably some underlying actual root technology concerns. Like, of course there are. But I think at the end of the day, like, in my head, this will happen, right? The government, regardless of how it happened, these government. These top government dogs, right? Got word that there's a jailbreak, okay? It doesn't actually matter whether that jailbreak is legitimate or not. It literally does not matter if Dario
- [51:02]
Kane
gets on the phone, right? Like.
- [51:03]
Taylor Monahan
Like, wait, because here's what happens next, right? Dario gets on the phone with them, and he says. And we know that he said this because they said it in the freaking blog the next day. Okay?
- [51:15]
Kane
I know, I know.
- [51:16]
Taylor Monahan
There is no way to perfectly prevent jailbreaks. You say that to the admin. They're going to be like, what if
- [51:23]
Kane
they shut down all of our models? Like, bro, what are you doing, man? Like, come on. Like, you. Like, it's.
- [51:31]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, okay, I agree. It's crazy. The government probably overstepped. I mean, definitely overstep. Let's be real. They definitely overreact.
- [51:39]
Porter Stoll
The government.
- [51:39]
Kane
The government got tricked. Like, imagine Luca, right? You're there, and. And, you know, I don't know who's, like, a ZK competitor, like, still exists. Like, Scroll. I don't know why I keep bringing up Scroll.
- [51:52]
Taylor Monahan
What is. Are you buying Scroll?
- [51:54]
Kane
I'm not buying Scroll. It's not me trying to shield scroll, but, like, imagine scroll comes out, right? And says, abstract is too dangerous to be used. They send a message to, like, the government, right? Like, are you, like, Luca, are you the guy that, like, gets on the call and you're like, no, no, no. This is. Is all a misunderstanding. Or do you have someone who's, like, your crisis comms guy? We lost you. You're. You're muted.
- [52:23]
Porter Stoll
No, I'm.
- [52:24]
Kane
I'm right brand. I'm the perfect guy for that, right? But I AI geek, right?
- [52:28]
Luca
Like, super AI geek is like left is a different part of the brain. So like, that's different.
- [52:33]
Kane
So scroll comes out, tells David Sachs that abstract is a threat to society and the government. And you kind of know that it is a little bit right. What are you saying? What do you say to David Sacks? Like, how do you, how do you tamp this down? And I steel man it.
- [52:53]
Luca
And I basically say, like, look, if we don't have access to this, somebody else will. The Chinese are going to open source that. I just keep bringing up China as much as I can.
- [53:04]
Taylor Monahan
That's exactly what you do. And you bring up a thousand ways why you're mitigating this and this isn't a risk. But you don't say like, you don't say like, no way. No, no, you say, we spent the last two months, okay, we spent the last two months straight working with 100 plus partners. Okay? We are, we, we changed our data retention policies and we are monitoring those closely. At the first sign of a jailbreak, we're not only rugging that access for that specific party, but we're doing a full investigation and locking down that jailbreak method. Three, like, we have a whole reporting system, right, where anyone can report these jailbreaks to us. And we're patching them, as you know, we're validating them, patching them. And then you show the data and you say, and to date, we have no evidence of a jailbreak being used to do like an offensive cyber operation. None. Zero. And we know this because we have the data, so stop being worried.
- [54:02]
Kane
Meanwhile, Zario is like, talking about like, the epistemology, epistemology of like, safety. Like, yeah, can anything truly be safe?
- [54:13]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. And what, like, it wasn't a universal.
- [54:16]
Kane
How can we know?
- [54:18]
Taylor Monahan
Like, show us the support because. Oh, and then they go, oh. And it's not a universe. You're not giving these guys any faith. They want, they want to be told that it's under control, that you have it under control and that you're, yeah,
- [54:33]
Kane
really respect their opinion and you're going to make it.
- [54:36]
Taylor Monahan
You're going to make it and you're taking it seriously. And that, by the way, and this is like something that crypto has done in the past before, right? That you want the government to know that you are in the best position to solve the issue and make sure that like, the impact is limited because the government actually, ironically enough, the government actually knows that they are not in the best position. They have like these very, like, they Have a toolbox with some tools in it. One of them is export controls, one of them is sanctions. Right. They know that these are very blunt instruments and are not ideal and have a lot of downsides. The time that they rip these tools out and whack you over the head with them is literally when they're like, okay, we, we have. Well, honestly, first things like expert controls and sanctions. It's when you literally tell them to their fricking face that you cannot do anything and that this is going to happen. Which is seems like what Dario literally said.
- [55:33]
Kane
It's out of our hands. It's out of like, we have no control over this. Like, it's over for us.
- [55:39]
Taylor Monahan
We can't prevent a jailbreak. Like, of course the frickin Treasury Secretary sue is going to be like, goodbye. Like, I'm sorry, but like, what the hell are you thinking? Go hire. I'm sorry, Fire some ex suits will work for the Trump admin. Okay? Go back four years. There's a whole bunch of them, have some NSA on the resume. They put them in who live in D.C. already. You're not flying. Why the hell are you flying? I'm sorry? Why are you flying people to dc? How do you not have people that live in dc? How do you not have people? What the. Dude, what are you doing? This is not your freaking multi billion dollar company about to go public,
- [56:22]
Porter Stoll
Dude.
- [56:22]
Kane
Tay, no one, no one who works for Anthropic wants to live in dc.
- [56:27]
Luca
I don't know.
- [56:28]
Taylor Monahan
What, you hire people?
- [56:30]
Kane
No.
- [56:31]
Taylor Monahan
And you have Dario talk to the dc.
- [56:33]
Kane
We only hire smart people and smart people only want to live in ss, so that's not going to work for us.
- [56:38]
Taylor Monahan
So anyway, so now fable is banned also. I had no idea until this morning. Dario is at G7 with all the other international leaders, including Trump.
- [56:51]
Kane
I know, Crazy. I know.
- [56:57]
Taylor Monahan
And they probably get him next to Macron and then Sam is sitting next to Trump.
- [57:04]
Kane
Yeah, it's, it's quite funny. Like, yeah, I don't know. I, like, I, I, I just think that this is the first kind of fracture in this whole thing that we've seen, right? Where like, and, and this is too early is my view right now. I'm like, I'm a AI accelerationist, right? This is too early. We've like really fumbled this hard, right? We should have been able to avoid this for a little bit longer now. The government has done this thing. There's always, in any situation, the person who makes the first move is always going to have some hesitation. The government is going to. They don't know what the reaction will be if they make a big move like this. But now they know they can make a big move like this and almost nothing happens. So they're going to be far more inclined in the future to make a big move like this and go, eh, we're just going to, you know, ban this thing. That said, it depends on where the model's coming from, right? Like if the model's coming out of xai, maybe, maybe they'll have a little bit better chance, I don't know. Certainly OpenAI is doing a better job of know, winning the government hearts and minds. But like the, the cat's out of the bag on this, right? Like the government now knows that it can shut down models if they don't like them for whatever reason. And really the market didn't react. No one really reacted. The public doesn't care, you know. And this is, this is a little bit like what happened to crypto, right? Government started like blowing the brains out of crypto founders and realized actually no one cares. Like people don't care. Like it's actually fine. Like no one cares if you just like guys, right? And, and you know, because when you're inside a bubble like that, like you think that the world is like so. And AI is obviously a bit different because it has such impact, but it hasn't yet, realistically, right? Like they're big companies but they haven't changed the world yet. They haven't had like this crazy like impact that, you know, everyone assumes that they will. That's still, you know, several years away or whatever. So we're still in the early phase of this. And now this is like the first.
- [59:37]
Taylor Monahan
They've already done like, they've already like brought out like the most biggest blunt tool and whacked it.
- [59:43]
Kane
I'm like, that's exactly.
- [59:44]
Taylor Monahan
It's like, okay, so we are on this road. Like we actually are.
- [59:47]
Kane
And I think that where like now the government is involved in like really models can exist. That's it, right? Like the government is involved in what models can exist.
- [59:59]
Taylor Monahan
And, and you cannot go back.
- [60:02]
Kane
Status quo. You can't go back. Can't go back. So you know, you can imagine if your other like lab, right? If you're open, A.I. you're like, Ah, it's like, what are you doing? Like anyway, speaking of governments, the government of Europe. The government of Europe has decided that they don't like finance. They're losing their Mika license or something or their bid for a meal license. I Don't know why Binance is trying to get a Mika license. That feels weird
- [60:36]
Taylor Monahan
because that's for, like, all of eu. It's not just, who cares?
- [60:41]
Kane
Doesn't matter. Yeah, who cares about Europe?
- [60:46]
Taylor Monahan
Like, I mean, you're absolutely insane. I will say with the. The funny. The freaking funniest thing that I saw with the fable stuff was people saying, like, we need less. We need less reliance on the US for AI. Obviously, Europe needs to stop now. Like, let's go, Europe. And I was like, guys, what are you talking about? Europe would have banned this, like, two years ago. Y', all, like, yeah, you guys are like, banning, like, meat and stuff because of the climate impact. And now you're saying that you're gonna suddenly do a 180 and, like, have data hunters that, like, model.
- [61:24]
Kane
That's not happening. Yeah, so I, like. I don't know.
- [61:28]
Luca
It's.
- [61:28]
Kane
It's kind of funny, like I said in the chat, right? Like, this bull. Like, I'm the most bearish on. On. I, like, I'm the most bearish person on Europe. I just think the whole of Europe is just an absolute shit show, right? Like, I. And I see in Europe Dao governance, like, writ large, right? Like this, like, you know, weird incentive incompatibility with, like, everything they're doing and the people making decisions are detached from the thing and it's all like, lowest common denominator thinking. And like, the whole place is just absolute. And so I was like, yeah, this is bullish for Binance, right? Like, you don't want a me. Don't even. Never get in the sandbox. Government comes to you and says, hey, I've got a sandbox for you. Like, just never get in there. It's always a trap. But. Yeah, so. So wait, but what does it mean?
- [62:22]
Taylor Monahan
What, they can't serve people or just certain.
- [62:24]
Kane
Doesn't means anything. Like, genuinely. Yeah, I mean, people have VCNs. Europe will find a way. Like, it's not like they've got some, what, European exchanges. Every exchange that was European rugged stole all their users money shut down. Like, what. What major European exchanges do we have left?
- [62:45]
Luca
Revolution.
- [62:45]
Kane
I mean, yeah, but like, like crypto exchanges, like really, like, real crypto exchanges,
- [62:52]
Taylor Monahan
like, it's just not. There's just. It's not competitive at all. And then it's just a pain in the butt. Like.
- [62:58]
Kane
Yeah, yeah, it's.
- [63:00]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. And I mean, AI is the same. Like, it just.
- [63:03]
Kane
It's.
- [63:04]
Taylor Monahan
You cannot. It just. You cannot have that environment and then expect, like real progress and innovation. And people to be able to do things. Like, it's always safety. Safety.
- [63:15]
Kane
Yeah, it's like, you know, I mean, I, I find this frustrating about Australia because Australia is very nanny state is right. You know, and the, the vibe, like startup founders in Australia talk about this all the time, right? Like you land in like LA or you land in New York, right? And like instantly you feel the vibe shift, right? Like now you can argue and I think if you're a European leader, you would argue this is bad, right? But the fact that in the US there is such a thin line between like death and success, like, the line is so thin, like there's no safety net. You're like, you're, you got to fucking survive on your own, right? It's a much more market driven place, right? Like, you know, it's, it's much more meritocratic. Whatever. In Australia we have like, you know, you can't re. Nothing can really happen to you. The government like will step in and just like solve whatever the problem is that you have. Like give you free housing, like, give you free money. Like they'll just step in and be like, no, no, no, like we're not allowing people to fail, right? The US is like, no people could fail. That's fine, it's okay. And the, the, you know, consequence of that is that people are like, well, if you can fail, you can also succeed, right? And therefore we're going to go out and try and do this, right? Whereas if you try and compress the outcomes, say no one can fail, there's a trade there for no one to fail. That means that people can succeed less hard, right? And obviously, you know, in the US there's, there's people turning up thing, you know, take all of Elon's money, whatever, distribute it to like.
- [64:57]
Taylor Monahan
No, no, that's not, that's a terrible idea. Like, yeah, terrible idea.
- [65:02]
Kane
So, so like Europe is like that writ large. But then throw in like DAO governance where you have these like independent parties with like kind of, you know, competing goals and like a centralized thing that's trying to like mediate between all of those things instead of just allowing you to be market driven. It's just like the dumbest, dumbest thing.
- [65:26]
Taylor Monahan
Well, and it's, it starts to screw up the market because you still, they're still trying to have a market, right? Like in their heads, in people's heads. Like you can create an AI company in Europe, like and it can definitely be the US ones.
- [65:38]
Kane
It's just like the most laughable thing, like no, you can't create an AI and you know, you know how you know you can't? Because there isn't one. Like, you have empirical evidence, right. Like you have empirical evidence of why that won't happen. And it's not like money or lack of people or lack of whatever. Right. It's a bad market.
- [66:01]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. And the incentives aren't there. And also like, you're not allowed to do things. You're just not. You have to go ask permission everywhere, all the time. And then, and then, because I do, I, I, you know, it varies between the different regions. Right. But like one, the taxes are insane. But then there's also like, there's a few that have like really crazy wealth tax.
- [66:25]
Kane
Yeah.
- [66:25]
Taylor Monahan
Which blows my mind.
- [66:27]
Kane
I know. It's crazy. Zero. We're gonna like, we don't want people, they, they find it distasteful and they like someone. It's. And it's weird. It's weird, right? Like maybe this is like some holdover from like aristocrats or something like that where they're like, they don't want people to be like too successful. They're trying to like compress outcomes. Right. Oh, and this is all like this. There's a very straightforward trade here. You can have highly variable outcomes or you can compress them. If you compress them, you're gonna have a bad time. That's the trade. But they think that they can get away with compressing outcomes and it's going to be fine and everyone is just going to be lifted up out of property and it's going to be amazing. And there's no impact, there's no downside to that. And like, it's just empirically very obviously not true. You can look at, you know, what they, what those guys actually produce.
- [67:20]
Porter Stoll
Right.
- [67:21]
Kane
As a giant like one fifth of the world or whatever. Right. Anyway, so, so our final segment. So strategy after selling a third of a bitcoin and ruining the market was like, haha, just kidding. We're going to buy a th. 1500 Bitcoin back. They sold 32 Bitcoin, which I still blows my mind. I, I still don't. I still, I haven't seen a good take on why that was a good idea. So they sold, sold 32 bitcoin on June 1st and then bought back 1587 bitcoin two weeks later. Why Luca, why, why, why Test. Test the market. But like,
- [68:15]
Taylor Monahan
yeah, how much was 32 bitcoin worth?
- [68:19]
Luca
How soon?
- [68:20]
Taylor Monahan
It was a million.
- [68:21]
Kane
Yeah. Oh, one.
- [68:22]
Luca
Two million.
- [68:24]
Porter Stoll
Yeah.
- [68:25]
Luca
Two million a Million test the market. Test the market. Meaning like gauge the reaction of like what would happen if they were sellers. Start planning the sea that they are sellers.
- [68:39]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess.
- [68:42]
Kane
Well, they.
- [68:43]
Taylor Monahan
But then they. You can't put the cap 100 million.
- [68:47]
Kane
I know, it's crazy.
- [68:49]
Taylor Monahan
And get 100.
- [68:52]
Kane
Problem is that this is just like, was very off then, you know. Also you had a sailor on stage being like, I never said I wouldn't sell my bitcoin. I told you not to sell your bitcoin. That was wild. Video.
- [69:11]
Taylor Monahan
I saw the video. I feel like he was, he was a bit trolly. He was like a.
- [69:16]
Kane
Like I 100%. I love that though.
- [69:18]
Porter Stoll
That's amazing.
- [69:19]
Taylor Monahan
I was laughing like he's one. He.
- [69:21]
Kane
I get that. Yeah, I get that.
- [69:23]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah. I mean, if it is, I mean, well, and I don't know, I'm always skeptical of the stories where it's like the whole market went down because one person did this one thing or whatever, right? I 100%. If.
- [69:34]
Kane
If in fairness, the one person has too much bitcoin, I mean we have allowed this guy to get too much bitcoin and now he is too big to fail.
- [69:44]
Taylor Monahan
So maybe you guys should listen to him, okay? Like if, if he truly sold 2.5 million in Bitcoin and crashed the market, like maybe stop yelling at him and look in the freaking mirror.
- [69:57]
Kane
Buy some bitcoin yourself or something.
- [69:59]
Taylor Monahan
Like, because like there's. That's a structural like problem and that's a very social one as well, right? Because it wasn't literally. It was not literally. Him selling like 32 bitcoin is not going to move the market.
- [70:12]
Kane
He sold 32. He sold 32 Bitcoin and then everyone else sold like 32 million Bitcoin, right? Like that was the problem.
- [70:20]
Taylor Monahan
All those people need to look in the mirror and be like, why have we put our faith in this nut who trolls us?
- [70:28]
Kane
But this is the problem with things that are not real. Like when something is purely based on belief, right? And you put too much belief into one guy and you believe that he is going to prop you up and then that belief is questioned, right? There's no fundamentals for us to go back to and be like, no, it's fine. That strategy is selling bitcoin because the bitcoin fundamentals have never been greater. Look at all of the revenue that we are generating, right? Like this is the fundamental. Like it's. It's such a belief based system that we believe it will go up and it'll it'll be a store of value, whatever. But, like, if one guy has too much of it and we think he might dump on us, there's nothing to stop. Like, it is the rational move, right? Like, if I said to Luca, I've got, you know, I've managed to accumulate 50% of the supply of pangu, right? Have you been buying it? You didn't realize, But I own 50% of it, right? And I'm like, but actually, I might sell some just to see what happens. Like, you know, let's. Let's test the market, see how liquid it is, right? Like, a normal person, a rational person who's holding Pengu would be like, well, I'm getting out of the way. This guy. This guy holds 50% of the pengu supply, and he's just, like, testing the market like, he's a lunatic, clearly, right? Like. Like, how did he get it? What is he doing with it? Why is he here? And why is he trolling us? Of course you're going to be like, I'm just going to sell it to get out of the way. I don't want to be on the other side of this trade if someone going to potentially dump 50% of the supply of a thing, right? So, yeah, of course people panic soul. Of course they did.
- [72:23]
Taylor Monahan
But, like, I mean, yes, of course they did. At the same time, how did this entire ecosystem let this guy own them so deeply? Like, this is bitcoin, guys.
- [72:33]
Kane
He came up with the best way of buying them. He's like, so I'm gonna take someone else's money and I'm gonna buy all the bitcoin.
- [72:40]
Taylor Monahan
I mean, that's. I mean, yeah, but. And it's not wrong, but, like, that's. That's the risk, right? When you put 100% of your faith in this one guy's buying method, when he sells, you get rugged. So maybe don't do that. Like, maybe spread it out a little bit.
- [72:59]
Kane
We need more sailors. Maybe, like two guys, and then they can disagree with each other. And like, yeah, that'd be awesome.
- [73:07]
Taylor Monahan
Yeah.
- [73:07]
Kane
All right, let's wrap it up here. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember, what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. We will be back next week. Until then, do your own research before aping it. Hey, guys. 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 it. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com uneasymoney. Sam.