Unchained - DEX in the City: With the Stablecoin Yield Compromise, Can the Clarity Act Get Passed?

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Seven lawsuits blame OpenAI for enabling a mass shooting. Could the same legal theory come for DeFi? Thanks to our sponsor! Coinbase One Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan coinbase.com/unchained Seven families just sued OpenAI in federal court, arguing ChatGPT was a defective product that helped plan a mass shooting. OpenAI's own safety team flagged the risk eight months earlier and did nothing. The legal theory being tested here, that software developers can be held liable for foreseeable misuse of their tools, is the same theory that has been circling DeFi for years.  Meanwhile, April ended as the most hacked month in crypto history, with over $600 million stolen in roughly 30 exploits, most of them linked to North Korea and its weapons programs. DeFi United, a $300M relief coalition led by Aave, emerged as the industry's response.  KK, Vy, and Jessi unpack what it means when the 'code is law' defense starts to crack, why basic operational security is still not standard practice, and how close the Clarity Act actually is to crossing the finish line. Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare. Previously held senior legal roles across DeFi and centralized exchanges. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TuongVy Le⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Veda Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi all and welcome to Decks in the City where the wallets are cold and the takes are hot. We have a great show for you, but before we continue, here's a word from our sponsors. You know what I'd do with a share of $1 million? Honestly, I'd probably buy a one-way ticket to an island, bring a good book, and invest the rest. And if I were sitting VIP at the World Football Final this summer, I'd be dancing in my seat the whole time. And both are possible this Coinbase 1 member month. Hit a 14-day streak to split $1 million in Bitcoin, and the first to finish gets a VIP trip to the World Football Final. Make at least a $25 trade, stake, deposit, or spend on your Coinbase 1 card.

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Plus, you still get 20% off the first year of Coinbase 1 annual plans, and a $50 Bitcoin bonus when you spend $100 on a new Coinbase 1 card in the first. 30 days. Don't miss your share of $1 million at coinbase.com slash unchained. Again, that's coinbase.com slash un- And we're back. Before we get going, remember, as always, we're lawyers, but we're not your lawyers. So nothing you hear on decks in the city is legal or financial advice, and it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship for the fine print at unchainedripto.com. So first we have Jesse, Web3 prosecutor-turned Web3 protector at Ribbett Capital. and V from the SEC to Web 3,

and I'm your host, Catherine KK, fluent in tradfi, and conversant in deep tech over at Starkware. We have a jam-packed schedule today, including a report on consensus vibes, as V and I are down in very, very sweaty Miami, loving every second of it, of course. But we want to start with our AI topic of the day because it's a very, very important topic.

We want to talk about, open AI, AI generally and liability, and how that liability, meaning who's going to get sued, who's responsible for a hot mess in AI, how is this all going to shake out, and how is that going to affect crypto? So, Jesse, why don't you kick us off? Well, I really missed you guys. And while y'all have been partying in the heat in Miami, I have been sort of glued to what's happening in AI and the Elon Musk Sam Waltman trial, which has been really crazy. and just giving us like meme gold. But to me, the actual legal AI story that everyone should be paying attention to is something related to the seven complaints that were filed just down the street in California from this like hot shot trial that's going on in the news.

And these seven other complaints, which I'm going to walk you all through a little bit, it's to me shining this bright like pay attention to me lights at crypto. So I'm going to help you all pay attention to it. So what are the seven complaints about? So it's actually pretty sad. So in February this year, an 18-year-old in British Columbia in a place called Tumblr Ridge, so you may have heard Tumblr Ridge cases, killed eight people, six children. And the complaints say that the shooter before the murders had been brainstorming the attack with Chat Chupit. And eight months before the shooting, Open AI's own safety team actually flagged the shooter's conversations and urged Open AIs leave. leadership to call law enforcement. Did they call them? No. Instead, they deactivated the shooter's account. Okay. So the shooter allegedly made a second account after the deactivation and Chachupu-D kept engaging with her. The complaints were saying that they were talking about the shooting, the violence, they helped her plan how to commit and murder people. So I'm not going to sensationalize the rest. You could read about it or not because it's pretty disgusting, but you

understand where it goes. And so last week, the families of the victims of the shooting sued Open AI and Sam Altman in federal court. The shooter has died associated with everything that she had done. And so they're like, we need to hold someone liable. And they're saying that you guys are liable, Sam Altman, Open AI, because ChatGPT was a defective product, right? So they're going after the product liability phase of it. And legally, this is different than a lot of the Open AI and other AI. cases that we've seen and that we've talked about here because it's not chatbot said something bad. It's the plaintiffs are telling a much more dangerous story for open AI and software liability saying you built the product, you operated the product in some way. You monitor it, monitor it,

monitor it. Hard word to say today. At your own team saw the danger or vulnerability and they didn't do enough. And this is where the legal nerddom in me is making me pay attention to this case, at first glance, it might be like, let's just sort of watch from the sideline, because for years, tech companies have had a pretty powerful defense that courts leaned into, which essentially like, it's just software, it's not a product. And that might sound a little bit odd in the world that we live in now, but software and products have been treated differently historically, although that's been coming together and coalescing. But when you say it's software, not a product, you're saying it's just code. It's just a tool. Don't blame the infrastructure for what users do with it. And there's good reasons

for all the crypto reasons you can come up with in your head. But also if someone takes Google Maps to go shoot someone, you shouldn't blame Google Maps, right? Section 30, all the things we've talked about. But courts are now beginning to like stress test that a little bit. And it's building up to this crescendo. And there's been a number of courts building up this precedent, which like it could be an entire law school class. But essentially speech protections. are being separated from defective product cases. Then there's an AI chatbot case that's related to product liability theories. And then this one, you know, there's an air tag case going on right now where the court is

allowing foreseeable misuse of a tech product to be the basis of a claim, right? So courts are starting to look past the label and ask the practical question of like, who designed the system? Who knew the risk when they designed it? Could they have designed it differently to prevent the harm? And that's the doctrinal crack that's touching our world, right? So, DeVi's living behind this similar seal for so long. It's just code protocol.

But like, at what point is the developer responsible for the risks that could have been preventable? Yeah. This is, I mean, we'll touch on this later in the episode when we talk about the latest developments with the Clarity Act. But like, this issue also comes up with the Blockchain Regulatory Clarity Act. right, the BRCA part of clarity and like how exactly that language is going to end up. Like if you're developing like a protocol, like say like a privacy tool or something, right? Like is it enough to know that that tool could be used by illicit actors at the time that you develop it and launch it? Or does the law require? Should the law require more than that?

But like the precedent that you're seeing develop is, I think, very dangerous, potentially. It's dangerous. And it's also on the flip side, it's an avenue for victims to recover under products liability claims, right? And maybe that's the path forward in order to make software a safer place for people to transact and or engage in any way. because I don't I think it's a really important question of taking it out of crypto for a second like do we want to let AI be built in any sort of way with no accountability because people could just sort of use it to you know build weapons or build you know 3D gun printing you know things like that which we've seen sort of come up in the like software is code where is national security playing in here but maybe there's something to this product's liability concept and I I don't know if it's a good one or a bad one because, you know, product liability cases are very state level. And I don't know if it maps perfectly to software. But we're seeing it happen in the AI space a lot faster in some ways, but it's inevitably going to come. And I think some of the activity of some of the most recent hacks is showing us that plaintiff's lawyers are aware of this.

It's really interesting because I'm very torn about this. I know what you mean on the accountability point. you don't want people to build things that are dangerous, right? But then it's a really terrifying slippery slope to hold software accountable for any of this. And then you also wonder about the implications this has on all other areas of the law. Like products liability is a massive, massive area for lawyers. Lawyers have been kept busy for years and years in certain classes of products liability. And, you know, kind of a related category is what they call toxic tort where people sue

manufacturers of products that ultimately harm people. And a lot of this hinges on the question of did they know it was going to harm people? Like the baby powder cases that turned out to be, you know, cancerous or cigarettes or firearms or I guess cigarettes and firearms are actually a bad example because there's obvious issues there. But there's also a whole category of things that people built or made these things, not knowing that harm was going to be the direct or indirect result of the creation of those things. And I think, yeah. And I think there's liability to be a question there because you also have to determine

whether the person knew that harm was going to result from the creation of that. And the scary thing to me about when we're talking AI tech is a lot of these builders do not know and could not arguably know that it was going to be used or misused. used or it could grow and evolve. I mean, that's a generalization, but there's definitely cases like that. Yeah. And there's this interesting incentive layer, which, you know, we've talked about when it comes to clarity before on like if a DFI project or protocol decides to incorporate blockchain analytics or decides to like blacklist addresses, does that make them less decentralized? It's similar here, right? Like the open AI example isn't perfect when you compare it to DFI because

they had a safety team and they had, you know, like notifications to help sort of ensure that things like this didn't like promulgate throughout the space. But if we're asking Defi protocols before they launch to do security audits at the very least or make sure their smart contracts are safe, and let's say the audit comes back with like 90% of it's okay, but 10% of it needs a fix or whatever, something like that. And they decide not to do the fix because of a risk-based analysis and then something happens. Then there's evidence they knew something was wrong, but they made a business decision, right? So like, does that disincentivize them from doing anything at the beginning?

Yeah, because then they have that knowledge. Right. Whatever the results are, yeah. Plausible deniability is a dangerous thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, this topic, we could spend an entire episode talking about this in many ways. It's very, very, you know, just dystopian on all of this. Like, what can AI do?

How can it be misused? This is also the problem with any nascent space or emerging technology. It's going to be misused, right? But speaking of safety and security, this leads us beautifully into another topic that we need to cover. Like, we need to talk about it, guys. Like, good segue. There's a problem. Okay.

So April was now, officially, was, and thank goodness we're in May. Okay. Like, fresh start. Oh, my God. April was now the officially the most hacked month in crypto history. Okay, Defi Lama mentioned that the damage is in excess of 600 million in April, in April. And industry, other industry estimates have said there was roughly 28 to 30 separate exploits. So about one every single day. And you know that. I mean, if you're monitoring crypto or in crypto, you knew in It was like, hey, guys, no hack today. Great. And so that means this is, this is a huge jump, a huge jump from January, let alone a year ago. I mean, effectively, we're looking at a siege. And the more disturbing part of all of this is that it is a siege from a known nation state sanctioned actor. Obviously, the vast majority of these attacks are linked to DPRK, North Korea.

and now North Korea has a huge pot of funds to power their efforts. The other thing I want to say about this. I don't mean to interrupt, KK. I want to be explicit. Powering efforts means developing nuclear weapons. Correct. And that is like something that we should all pause and think about what that would mean. Sorry, I didn't interrupt, but just to give some more gravity to your great comments.

I'm glad you interrupted to make that point. Because I think people sometimes forget that the money that North Korea is gaining doesn't go to just doing more hacks. Like, yeah, some of that. But there are serious threats to human life as a result of these endeavors. And that is obviously terrifying. We need to take this seriously, okay? But here's the other troubling part. We could spend the entire episode talking about all of the tenants that, you know, Jesse and I have in our paper that we talk about all the time.

the things that that defy could do to increase security. But a lot of these hacks are social engineering. And they're crazy, sophisticated social engineering. We obviously do not have time to go through the 30 separate exploits, but just a few nuggets that I'm sure many people have read about. In one of these exploits, the hackers actually ended up investing in the protocol. And I think we all know that once you hit investor status, you hit a certain level of trust. there's relationship cultivation over a month's long period in a lot of these scenarios.

And V and I are at consensus right now. And my good friend Kathy Yoon made a really good point in a tweet where she was like, hey guys, you need to be conscious about not walking around and flashing your badge in your company everywhere. Obviously, there's the tendency to do that that's necessary for business development. But at the same time, this is also how social engineering starts. You know, the wrongdoer knows your name, knows your company, knows your location, can use that as the basis for a, hey, great to see you. Wait, don't you remember? Didn't we meet? Let's exchange telegrams. Oh, now you're a known contact. I mean, there's 72 different scenarios that we could explore on the basis of social engineering. And unlike underlying technical infrastructure that are known vulnerabilities like single key admin setups, social engineering is a lot harder to navigate. So, you know, I want to touch on Defi United, which is the response is. But before I do, V, Jesse, like any thoughts about this? Like, what the hell is going on?

Okay. So I think a lot of the incidents that we've been seeing happen, a lot of it could have been avoided with, like, by just implementing kind of common sense like operational security measures. It actually, to be honest, it blows my mind that Defi has been around for, I don't know, like five to seven years now. And we still don't have like industry standards over something as simple as if you're a signer on a multi-sig, use a dedicated device just for that. don't use it to do a ton of other work where you're like downloading malicious files that's on the same device as your key. Like something as basic as that. How are we not all doing that as an industry by now? Right.

And we find out about this stuff every time there's an attack. So I think a lot of this stuff is just like basic common sense that was not followed, basic, basic security measures that were not followed. That could have prevented a lot of the stuff that you thought. A question I have, especially for you guys, you know, you work at projects in the DFI space right now. Like, I agree with you, I couldn't have said it better myself. But we are here now, right? And so many things have been built. Many of them have been built correctly, but many have not.

And we have seen over and over again the contagion that occurs when there's a problem or a vulnerability with one project or one bridge or whatever. and what do we do now? Like, is it blow everything up and start over, but not blow everything up? That's probably like too close to home. Or is it we need to go in and fix things? Like, let's assume we can get everybody on the same page to do this, which is like the dream that I had last night while you guys were party in Miami. But for me, it's like, what is next?

Let's say everyone's like, okay, you're right. It's freaking time. Is it rebuild? Is it going and fix old infrastructure? Like we wanted to avoid doing a banks or in traditional finance? Like, where do we go from here? So that's actually, I'm so glad you asked that question, Jesse, because it brings me to Defi United. I feel incredibly mixed by this. So just for those who aren't familiar, Defy United, obviously we saw major hacks with drift and Kelp Dow. And the thing that people keep forgetting is these hackers are stealing money from human beings. from people. They're not necessarily stealing money from crypto CEOs. They're stealing money from

retail investors, including and protocols and crypto whales. So Defi AVE got hit really hard by, in particular, the Kelp Dow incident. So ABE basically coordinated a relief effort by a multitude of ecosystem participants. And in some ways, it was pretty cool. I mean, this is now raised more than $300 million. And you have major places, players like Avalanche, Avey, Consensus, Others, Etherfi, Tron, Lido. And, you know, these are- Even Solana. Stelana Foundation even donated. It's amazing. Like, these protocols are competitors, but everyone came together to, you know, coordinate this shared financial response, you know, to effectively

restore, you know, wrapped eats backing to drop back, to prop up the stolen funds and help the ecosystem. So part of me is like, this is a beautiful thing. Like, you know, it's beautiful to see everyone coming together to mitigate the damage, mitigate contagion, mitigate after effects. But I'm also like, is this a good idea? Meaning it's like someone on your street gets robbed and then all the neighbors get together and give the person money. Okay, good.

But shouldn't we also talk about improving the security on the street and catching the robbers? So I'm not sure if it's the right message. And the last thing I'll say is so when I heard about this, the first thing I thought about, and this shows me what it shows you what a history nerd I am was the panic of 1907. Like, I'm a little bit of a Wall Street historian nerd. And I don't know if everyone remembers this, meaning remembers this from history. So good old J.P. Morgan organized a massive syndicate of leading banks to give liquidity to struggling institutions. Like J.P. Morgan effectively acted as a central bank during this crisis because there was no central bank. So J.P. Morgan locked a bunch of senior executives from banks.

in a room in 1907 and said, you have to sign this pledge, like, committing a certain sum for this bailout. And, you know, it was, it was voluntary. But, again, like, the story is that he locked the doors of his famous Morgan Library. You can tour that today in New York and refuse to let the bankers leave until they had all agreed. So this has happened historically. But why? Why? Like, does this fix anything?

Does this really fix anything? Let's start with some positives that there's something being done, right? You know, instead of ranting into the abyss. So I'm torn about it as well because like, okay, let's help people. And I don't, I guess I wouldn't go so far back as the panic and like J.P. Morgan. A hundred and nineteen years ago. It's like there's mutual insurance right now. There's Lloyd Syndicate model.

Like Tradfai does similar things here. I guess the thing that concerns me. is the whole point of all this system and defy was to take centralized powerful intermediaries out of the mix, right? And with this coalition, and perhaps the government one day could call it a cartel, it's an organized effort to choose who wins, right? And which protocols get to survive and which hack is worth compensating. because as your numbers show, I don't think there's any way they could, like, compensate everybody. I mean, we all talk about it all the time, but, like, I help a lot of victims whose money is stolen by crypto and try and just help them get their money back. And they're not in a big hack news of the day, right?

It wasn't associated with hundreds of millions of dollars. Rather, they lost a few hundred thousand dollars. And that to them is devastating and perhaps life altering, right? And so why are those people not being helped? And so I think the analogy you gave KK of like the neighborhood is a good one, but it's also like three people get robbed. And the neighborhood coalition decides who gets the money, right? And maybe there's a way to do it so that everything gets spread out. And like the government right now has like a Victims of Terrorism Fund that you can apply for.

And so maybe there's a way to do it so that there's. There are certain rules about how you apply for the money and how you can demonstrate evidence. And then maybe there's something there. But I think like another way to tackle it is like if you talk to a finance and I'm not even picking on finance like any centralized exchange, just like many banks do, there are like millions frozen in assets right now based on suspicious activity. And they just sit there for years until someone helps to claim it or finance realizes that the risk of releasing it is important or whatever. And so maybe there's some angle there to

like get at all these frozen funds anyway. I'm just brainstorming out loud right now because to me having an idea is always good, but this is just like centralized decision makers of who survives in the market. I do think that like the reason like this effort happened was one because it was AVE, right? And Avey is so just like symbolically like it represents. like defy it's you know one of the oldest projects the biggest like defy protocol out there and i think the other thing too was like i think a lot of people were really sympathetic to abe because it wasn't actually avey that was hacked like but they you know they're obviously suffering like the biggest impact of this but i i think you know that was unique to this situation and like this probably

wouldn't have happened if it was just some other like random protocol which is disturbing because like again, that's a good and bad thing. Like, we want Alve to succeed. Like, one of the things I've always loved about crypto is, I mean, the the G.C. Crypto Bar, the general councils in crypto have always been incredibly collaborative and open and transparent. Because for the longest time, and we've all been in crypto for years, this was like this from day one.

It was like this through the Gensler administration. It's still like this. There is a sense of like, we're all in this together. Like, you know, there are existential threats. to this asset class, I don't ever want to see another L2 fail. I don't care if they're a competitor. You know, you want others to succeed because it's a little bit of kind of lifting each other up and you want the growth in and out of crypto.

So the togetherness, again, is a beautiful thing. The collaboration is a beautiful thing. But I think this really raises the question of like, how far does that go? And this can't just happen every time there's not. I mean, it's basically like a defy version of like a stratified bailout, like the kind that we criticize all the time. And yes, there is a difference between like using taxpayer money to bailout, you know, like financial institutions that FAA and something like this. But I mean, it is a bailout. Like I was having breakfast. Just like a panic of 19-07. Yes, exactly. Like that. I was having

breakfast with the defy lead at like a non-crypto fintech this morning. and he was like, his bosses have been following like this effort and the Kelpdow thing and everything. And they came to him and they were like, what's going on here? Like, I thought this was defy. I thought like, coer this law. I can know this can. Oh, how precious. But I was like, it's a good question.

I think honestly, all of us are wondering that too. Oh, my God. Okay. So speaking of breakfasts, I have to say, so B&I are at consensus right now. Don't do me too much FOMO in this up. We miss you. We miss you, Jesse. It's not the same.

I think one of the reasons a lot of lawyers go to consensus is there is a big legal and regulatory presence. But here I'll just say there's a big presence. This is a really, really, really well attended buzzy conference. I didn't get here until late yesterday on Tuesday. But I literally heard from multiple people that the line to get at check in yesterday it was something like two hours. Like, that's just how well attended it is. There are more events than ever before, and there were already a lot of events at consensus. There's also a sense that, you know,

as many people might be aware of, the big conference token that was supposed to take place in Dubai was canceled. So my, you know, I'm speculating that a number of individuals and entities decided to take their budget from token and put it into consensus. There's a lot of buzz. There's a lot of optimism, despite the fact that we seem to be in a bit of a crypto winter, like there's a high degree of energy. Like it feels a little bit like a bow market lately. And I think that's really interesting. And one of the reasons I'm curious about this vibe is I'm wondering if everybody's

kind of excited that clarity might get past all of a sudden. So I want to turn it over to B to give us the full clarity report. As a reminder, clarity is the comprehensive crypto market structure build and has been percolating for quite a while now. And I think all of us had been extraordinarily pessimistic about the passage of clarity. I have consistently given it about a 20% chance of passage. But there was some pretty significant developments lately. V. Phyllis Ed. Yeah. Wait. So do you think that's responsible for like the vibes? Well, I don't think solely, but I think it's. No, maybe there's something to that. I think it's contributing to it. And I mean, I'm sure you saw like a number of the crypto public companies,

like Circle Stock jumped 14% and it was attributed to the clarity buzz. I think everyone is really terrified about this scenario in three years if the Democrats take control and we don't have market structure. So the people who are really in the know understand how important clarity is. Yes. Yes. I think that's right that like a lot of people are coming to their senses on this. So yes, one of the biggest developments in the industry the past few days is that it looks like lawmakers may have like finally reached a compromise on the stable coin yield issue. That's been like one of the main things that's been holding up the Clarity Act for the last few months. So the reported

compromise between senators Tillis and also Brooks, who are the two senators who are sort of leading the effort to like reach a compromise, would still, it would still prohibit stable coin issuers from paying interest that looks like a traditional bank deposit. product, but it looks like the language does allow certain kinds of rewards that are tied to actual platform or network activity. And what's really interesting is that Coinbase has come out and basically signal that they're okay to move forward with it. I think they just now want to get to a market. Right. So that's really important because they had been one of the loudest opponents of a broad yield ban.

but of course the banks are still unhappy, right? So over the last few days, the banking lobby has come out like the ABA, the Consumer Bankards Association, the Bank Policy Institute, and others. They've all come out and argue that the bill still leaves major loopholes that would let crypto firms basically offer deposit-like products, but in an indirect way. Their concern is basically that, you know, maybe the issuer itself can't pay interest directly to customers, but what if Coinbase or another exchange creates like a membership program or a reward structure or a loyalty program or some sort of like arrangement with an affiliate

that has basically the same economic like function, right? So I think this is where the entire yield debate is headed now, right? So it's no longer like can stable coins pay yield? It's now like what counts as evasion, right? So because once you start writing anti-eavation language, which they'll have to do, I think things can get sort of blurry really fast, right? Like the question then would be, well, what actually counts this yield, right? Like, what would be like evasion? So with things like fee rebates or rewards or trading incentives or staking rewards, would all of those things like count, right? And even like, you know, the kinds of products that we do, which are these earn products where consumers deposit their funds into a vault that then deploys those funds into

defy protocols, could something like that be swept up, right, in this ban? So the banks are pushing the regulators to define all of this really broadly, right? So you guys may have seen like a slew of comment letters being filed to Treasury and the OCC the last week where like a lot of crypto companies are saying like the anti-evation language shouldn't be. written so broadly that it sweeps in all of this like real activity that generates yield, but it's not like a deposit like product. So yeah, I think the question now is how aggressive is the anti-evation framework going to become? It's something we're monitoring really closely. And I think it's going to be interesting to see like how that debate plays out and what like

Treasury and OCC end up doing also in addition to where the Clarity Act lands on this. It's funny because there's a lack of clarity with all of this. Like the funny thing is even if you settle on this compromise, I mean, there's already a lot of discussion about loopholes. Like, okay, when you go around, what can you do? These parameters are not going to be clear. Like, even if we get clarity passed, there's going to be years of interpretive guidance. There's likely going to be years of litigation surrounding this issue. Like, this is a big deal.

I think this is a big deal for growth of stable coins generally. growth of alternatives to banking. So this is definitely like, I think this aspect has in many ways more bearing and more influence on kind of the macro blockchain as a disruptor to market structure than anything else right now. I also, stakes are very high. I also just want to remind everybody, not you guys, because I know you know this, but this is just one issue in clarity. And in my mind, everyone has sort of like put blinders on for this issue because it was the thing that sort of, you know, took it off the rails last time. So I understand why. But like there are many other things that still need to be resolved. Decentralization like we talked about. Elicit finance, which, you know, I've yelled into the abyss about and ethics. No one has figured out the ethics question yet. And that could put the kibosh on this whole thing, right? And such a like high political.

politicize like really difficult emotional issue for me even too um that i i don't know if people are paying enough attention to that yet because they're sort of like well we don't want to deal with those things until we make sure that this is okay and maybe that's you know has the sausage of yeah me is made but i just want to remind everybody that like i love being hopeful and optimistic but i'm also like okay we're talking about clarity again like there's some progress but how much is this progress? Do you think ethics is going to end up being the like blocker here? Like I feel like we can get there on defy and on BRCA.

I do think ethics is going to be like. I'm going to hope that everyone's morals and ethics come together and define good rules here. I don't think it's that hard to come up with what that should look like. But whether there'll be enough political will, I think it's. is going to be the harder thing. Like the exact language has been the really difficult thing here in making the coalitions happy. But this is much more of a political issue,

which is it depends on what's happening with the midterms. It depends on what's happening with the Iranian war. Depends on what happens with gas prices. You know, so like it's who's going to stick their neck out on a political issue that might go against the current administration in this time. And what all the other wins say that have nothing to do with crypto? Totally. I'm still not super optimistic. Like these developments, I was going to ask you. No, I think these developments, I feel like with these latest developments, I went from maybe 20% a week ago to like now I feel like I'm at like 60% that it all happened this year.

What like where are you guys at? 20% to 40%. I felt like. Yeah. So increased, maybe. But I still think there's a lot of issues yet to be worked out. There's a lot of questions is does this have momentum? Does Congress? care enough about this? Will Congress be distracted appropriately so by geopolitical issues and considerations? So there's a lot of things that need to fall into place for this to happen. I mean, I hope I'm proved wrong. Like, get me, to be clear, I want clarity very badly. Yeah. What about you, Jesse? What are you at? I have been disappointed far too many times by politics and clarity this So I am always the optimist and I have had that optimism plummeted. I just haven't seen like real engagement on everything but stable coin interests. And I see that when I do have conversations about illicit finance with people in the help. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So we only have a few minutes left. We have a shorter episode than usual today because, hey, we are all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. If only we had, um, if only we had, um, limited time to criminal of the content in the craziness in crypto. But I have to say, we are ending

on such a high note because this week's crypto good news makes me so happy. Okay. I'm not going to lie to everybody. Sometimes we struggle to find crypto good news. And I make us do an AI one or something about puppies that's unrelated to tech. Robots are helping people in war. Okay, great, Jesse. That's good But this week, honestly, props a round of applause to Dogecoin and Moonpay. So House of Doge, which is apparently the name of the Doge Coins is the Doge Coin Foundation, their corporate arm, which is kind of amazing. House of Doge, Moonpey, and the Doge Coin Foundation have collectively contributed one million Doge to the American Kennel Club.

to help dogs, frankly. And the AKC, specifically that AKC Humane Fund, which is a charitable affiliate of the American Kennel Club and a 501C3 nonprofit, dedicated to protecting and improving the lives of dogs across the country. And my favorite part of this was probably Keith Grossman's statement. He's president of MoonPay.

He starts by saying, dogs have always brought out the best in us. Now, the little help from the Doge community, they are bringing out the best in crypto, Okay, you know what, Keith? You're right. Good for you. I love this. I love that we're seeing this interesting partnership to advance a charitable effort. We've said this before. We'll say it again, like crypto, we're borderless, we're global, but we need to be important members of our community. To the degree that we are creating good with the technology, we are also causing complications

here and then. So we need to be responsible and, you know, positive contributors to the world. So let's not lose sight of that. So amazing, amazing job. That's amazing. Yes. And for all of those who need a break from crypto Twitter anytime and they are not sponsoring us, just go to We Rate Dogs and watch the videos of Dogs being rated and maybe buy a sweatshirt that says, tell your dog I said hi, and donate to some of these dogs with crypto perhaps. Yes. Jesse and I both have dogs. We are huge dog lovers.

Bea is not a dog hater or anything. She's just not a dog mother, which is fine. But so this is obviously, as soon as we found a piece of crypto good news that also involved dogs, I think we were both a little overly excited. So cheers to that. Let's end on a high note. Next week, hopefully we will have no hacks to talk about. But we'll see you next week on Dex in the City.