Unchained - How Aave Labs and the DAO Should Split Ownership of the Brand - Uneasy Money

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Thank you to our sponsors, Multichain Advisors and Mantle! Aave DAO on Christmas Day lost the vote to take control of Aave brand assets, but the fight is likely not over. In this Uneasy Money episode Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) founder Marc Zeller takes hosts Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan inside the fight over one of DeFi's biggest names, teasing a “phase two” of the fight. Plus, why is Infinex's ICO getting so much flak and are claims of insider trading on Polymarket misguided? Hosts: Kain Warwick Taylor Monahan Guests: Marc Zeller, Founder of the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) Links: Uneasy Money: Why Token Holders Have No Rights & Why Every DAO ‘Has Failed’ Aave Labs Proposes Off-Protocol Revenue Sharing With Token Holders Aave’s Rushed Governance Vote Draws Backlash Infinex Changes INX Token Sale Terms After Low Demand MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience? Polymarket Introduces Taker Fees in 15-Minute Markets Polymarket Resolves Issues After Polygon Network Disruption How to Trade Prediction Markets Without an Opinion on the Event Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Says Blockchain Trilemma ‘Has Been Solved’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's these people that are doing, that are getting some wrong in the society, and then they complain to the society itself and say, hey, that should not be allowed because I'm very sad. That's usually what's a low income from. The point of insider trading laws is not to stop the fairness in the market. It is to stop someone expropriating information that they got from a privileged position, stealing from the company that you got the information from. Not, it's a lot about the people that are trading against you on the NASDAQ, right?

When people call the Maduro bet insider trading, one, show me any, anything that shows that information was insider, right? There's a lot of threads on Twitter right now, and let me tell you, especially the, like, look on chain dudes who are like, I'm a sleuth, look at me. They're wrong. Welcome to uneasy money, because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co-examination. host Taylor Monaghan, security at Benemask. And today we have a very special guest, Mark Zeller, founder of the Ave Chan Initiative, ACI, a provider for the Ave Dao. One quick thing before we start,

nothing new here 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 of our disclosures at unchained crypto.com slash uneasy money. Multi-chain advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create $50 plus billion in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multi-chain adv.com. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conicsonterio.ca. Mantel is launching the global hackathon 2025 to accelerate the future of real world assets with a $150,000

prize pool, backing from a $4 billion treasury, and direct access to buy It's 7 million plus users. This is the ultimate ecosystem for builders. Hey, guys. So before we get started, Mark, you had one of the most banger tweets of the year so far.

We're only a week in. Your tweet about Macron after the Maduro expultration, I guess. We don't have the technology to pull up tweets. but if I remember correctly, it was something along the lines of, you know, this is such a terrible situation. I hope that nothing happens to my beloved president who lives at Peru, wherever the presidential palace is in Paris. So, yeah, that was that, I laughed out loud at that one. That was very, very impressive. In France, we have two parts of our culture that are extremely important, being a very pissed on our politician,

and we love the good sarcasm, and I think it was a good mix of those that resonate with some people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely it landed. So really awesome to have you here, because our main topic today is going to be Abe's governance war, and the question of who really controls Avey,

but also probably more broadly, who really controls any protocol? Are they controlled? You know, what are the mechanisms? So basically here's the recap, I think. And, you know, Tay, you've brushed up on this a little bit. So, you know, jump in if anything's off here. But a few weeks ago, maybe we'll zoom out even more, right? AVE, I would say, for most defy enthusiasts, is the top, if not, you know, the top three absolute worst case examples of good governance in Defi, Dow governance, not having misaligned incentives, despite the fact that there is a Labs and a Dow and, you know, there are some, you know, potential points of friction.

And I think it's worth mentioning Stani's a good friend of mine. And I think part of that is that, you know, Stanie has kind of consistently showed up and, you know, try to do the right thing for AVE. But then you also have people like Mark who are, you know, extreme, like maybe the most aligned with AVE, the protocol in Avey the Dow, right? And it creates a really good tension and, you know, checks and balances for, how a DAO should operate. And there's a lot of people who have kind of given up hope on DAO's. Tay, you may not be one. Don't like at me.

And so, you know, I think, like, for a lot of us, we look at ABE. We've got AVE bags, first of all. We see AVE governance as, like, one of the shining lights of, you know, maybe this Dow thing can actually work. And that's kind of been the historical backdrop of all of this stuff, right? And then a few weeks, and this is not the first time. There's been tension. Of course, you know, it's a doubt.

There's going to be tension. But then a few weeks ago, AVE Labs switched its front-end swap integration from power swap to cow swap, which, you know, fairly on controversial. But then they routed what is effectively eight figures, low eight figures of fee revenue that used to go into the Dow Treasury to the Avey Labs. six, I guess, right? And there was no discussion or vote on this or whatever. And the community was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're taking our money and, you know,

kind of privatizing these fees, right? And then I think the next point was this kind of view of, like, who is owed those fees? This question of like, well, this is a front end and, you know, it's not the protocol, etc. And so, you know, maybe it's fine if we just do this, right? But there is like a, I think, a principled view in the world that, you know, if you are a Dow, that things should go through the Dow, that there should be governance around it. And so this kind of escalated, right? A snapshot proposal was drafted by Aube's former CTO. And this was submitted to transfer ABE's brand assets, domains and IP to Dow control.

But. Well, and hold on. So that thread, that, that governance forum thread, that is in my opinion, my view, right? That is in part was sort of kicking off the governance around literally the domains and the brand and stuff, right? But it was actually a reality serving as a, as a central. place for everyone to discuss this broader issue and then there were these little spin-off things which is why what happened next was I think caught everyone off guard because this wasn't necessarily your typical we're going to do a proposal we're going to do a snapshot we're going to that

you know through the normal governance things this was like the place for everyone to sort of like get caught up on on the the conversation the drama etc um yeah think what is important if we have to do the recap of the situation is that it all started by a token holder. So a token holder and also a very large independent delegate of the Avedo basically found out that Avalab redirected the fee. It's basically like if you have an Apple store and you sell the iPhone, the Apple gets the money on the iPhone that are sold. But overnight there's an executive at Apple that say, well, every app, that every user that pays some money to use an app on the Apple store, the fee goes to us.

And the token holder was not very happy. So the communities say, well, maybe we should have a discussion to have a revenue share, this kind of stuff, and make sure you need your control and redirection of fee cannot happen. And the reaction of Abelab at that point was like, well, we do the front end, that's all project. We don't have any fix to discuss with UK. And that's when the discussion basically escalated to,

okay, let's put the fee on the side for one moment and discuss who can do what in the AV ecosystem using the AV brand and who actually own the AVB brands. And that's where the proposal from Ernesto, former CTO of Ave Labs that spin out to create busy labs and is no the core maintainer of the AVGOD-based for the DAO as a service provider. is created to say, okay, maybe the DAO should have legal entity and own those brand assets

and then delegate that back to Aval Labs. So we are sure that those strategic assets cannot be monetized uniterally to one party or redirect it completely to other purpose that would not serve the AVPorticole or the other token authors. And that's where I think the conversation got interesting because the SWATFID itself, Earth is not so important. It's less than 10% of the other global revenue. Obviously, it's important that most revenue goes back to the token holders, but I think the real meat of this conversation is about ownership of those assets. Yeah. And, you know, we joke about like, IP ownership and, you know, who owns a brand and Dow structures, right, all the time. I remember back in the day when we were

deprecating Haven and moving to synthetics. We got a call with the lawyers and I was like, guys, this is taking so long. Like, why can't we shut it down? And they're like, we don't have anywhere to put, if you don't have an entity, you've got to put the Haven brand somewhere. And I was like, what, like, no. Just like, I don't, like, just put it in, you know, put it on the chain or something. I don't know.

I was like, I don't know what to tell you guys. And so, so there's. is, I think, you know, an interesting nuance in this as well of like, okay, how do you even wrap IP and brand assets, et cetera, into a legal wrapper and then put that on chain? You make it an NFT that says AVE, like what, you know, there's the AVE brand. Let's agree that is new in the ecosystem. There's been a bunch of implementation of all the DAO's and all the ecosystem. So Lido has ligamentity. Morphor as a French

non-profit association, the brand, the assets, all this kind of stuff. So it's not really a problem. It's a technical problem. It's a little problem, but it's something that can be solved literally over the night.

Yeah, it's, it's fairly easy to solve it. It's just, it is, I think, somewhat interesting, right, that like, we have these intangible assets, right? IP, brand, et cetera. and in order for Adel to own them, they kind of have to be inside this legal wrapper. It's like one of the weird meat space things that like bridges across, you know, both, both a Dow. And yeah, no one's turned them into an NFI yet.

I don't know. Maybe he had. No, there would be a good option. But at the end of the day, I think ownership and safeguard is important when you do a business. and especially when that business, the Dow and the protocol, is a billion-dollar business and hundreds of numbers of the dollar per year of business. And what you want to prevent when you have this kind of business

is to have unity or control that can redirect the revenue or redirect the brand or redirect the project. And I'm actually old enough to remember maybe they know I don't submit to that. But you remember when my Etero wallet, Twitter account became my crypto. Oh, I remember. The situation was very different because,

obviously, I'm a big microchipro. And we used the project and most of the team fully tailored. So the situation is quite different. But at the end of the day, one very important, brand asset got changed overnight in terms of control. And maybe that's a situation the Avedo wants to prevent in the future.

If Stani wants to create myAve.com and change the brand asset, because he has the front end, the domains, and deposit on another code base and another code he owned 100% where the token holders are new control, that's something we want to prevent. I know Stani and I work with him for nearly a decade now. I know he's very avianline and he has his own alignment as well and it's also so a bit of game theory

of where you put the right Nashick equilibrium to make sure that everyone have their own incentive but you need to have a framework that is safe for every actor's best interest and I feel the best Nasekiri Brehne is to say, okay, there's going to be a neutral legal rapper that is the DAO that will own the asset that will protect them.

And then there's going to be mandates back to Avelas, back to Stanley, to say, okay, you can continue to do exactly what you do right now. But ultimate ownership belongs to the DAO, so if there's something that breaks the trust between the token holders and the labs for any kind of reason in the future, there's a of the asymmetric relationship. Yeah, there's recourse, right? You have some level of recourse, right? But...

Well, and it also, it sets expectations. And in reality, like the mu my crypto split and this situation, they're not. They're very different in basically every way, except for, like, the core root of everything, which is that we were all working on something that was valuable to other people, that other people's livelihoods, like our team but also like everyone that was using our product was relying on. Thank goodness.

We did not. It was by the way, everyone. Everyone. The entire. Like it was systemically risky for all of like Ethereum for this. Yes. Yeah. And we were, we were wildly aware of this.

But we were also when we had first started it, we were, it was just like this open. So GitHub repo. We had no company. There was no company, guys. There was none whatsoever. Like it wasn't. a doubt was like no it was literally just a repo that we threw together right um and so then fast forward that the combination of the value and the risk on the table combined with the lack of clarity

that we even had with ourselves and that evolves over time and as the stakes get higher and you know people's lives intersect with work intersect with like wait how do we end up here right and then all of a sudden you're sitting there and you're like wow we have because we never got, we never established clarity on even the basics. Now, it's like every little thing just sort of amplifies and compounds that initial uncertainty. Yeah. It was fine in the early days, right? When it was, well, sitting in a room. We're friends. And by the only, there was two of us and we were committing directly to master on GitHub. Like, it was fine. Everything was fine. But, you know, once we got to, once we got past ICO era, I mean, really even past the Dell, like, that was not fine anymore. And so, you know, in that situation, like our, uh, our processes and our security involved, but the company structure, like Ethereum has never been good on.

No. We don't do companies here. We have to learn it on our own. But I think it's great to learn from the past as well. And it's all a sign of maturity. It's like, there's a very good naïve thing when you are a builder and you start building things from scratch. But as things evolve and it gets more and more serious and then you have some value and you have actual revenue, then you cannot just sit down and say, okay, everything's going to be a right and we all going to be friends forever. It's part of becoming an adult, you know, to say. We need like a Claude slash command. near a robust Dow.

Just like, just get the clarity, right? And that's part of some of the stuff. Well, so one of things that I think is most sort of disappointing about the timeline for AVE and stuff is like, in a certain sense, everyone had just got this clarity, right? The SEC finally, it was like, actually, JK, LOL, sorry for ruining your last for years. And then like immediately, it's like, it's just like middle certainty and then. But there's something to that, right? I don't think it's, I don't think it's a coincidence. Like, there was no way while the SEC was circling with their, you know, goon squad, right?

That Ave Labs is going to be like, hey, why don't we just take some revenue from the Dow and divert it to our private company? That was never going to happen. As soon as the SEC capitulates, then it's like, oh, well, actually. And this is the problem, right? Like, without that clarity, without the right structure in place, you can't trust that in three years, five years, ten years. And I think, you know, your point mark is really important. This is a billion, multi-billion dollar project, right? This is not like, you know, two people sitting in a room, you know, hacking some stuff together anymore.

Like, this is systemically important to Ethereum, to crypto. And if you don't have certainty around. governance around how the thing will operate, then that's just like a drag on the value of the entity because no one can look at it and go, well, I know what's going to happen in this scenario. It's like, anything could happen. And so, you know, even if you ignore governance and all of that stuff, just from a purely financial standpoint, uncertainty is bad. Like, remove the uncertainty, have clarity. Like, it's good for everyone if everyone knows how things will work. Yeah, I perfectly agree on that.

And I think it's also important for the valuation model of the asset because as an investor, if you get a claim of the proxy of revenue of the protocol itself, that's a very thin margin business. Because the way Ave works and the way Ave makes money as a protocol is by the collection of reserve factor, mainly that's the main revenue source, are paid by the borrower. So part of the borrower interest paid goes back to the Tao and the protocol.

And that's a very ATM margin. Ave makes a lot of money because Ave is extremely big. But at the end of the day, everybody that builds somewhere, and I think one of the reasons you launch in Finnex is also that when you have a protocol or when you build a fat app like you are building right now and you are closer to the user,

that's where the real margin can be made. Agree. And the closer you are to the user, the more you can monetize. And if there's no ownership on the distribution channels and the project side of things to the DAO, then there's a very hard limiter on the valuation model of the asset. Because you have the high-merging part of the business that is controlled by a third party entity that has no obligation legally or even to own. redirect that revenue. And that's why ownership is important because at the end of the day,

nobody is against standing making one, obviously, because we are very aligned because usually when he makes money because a big part of this portfolio is AVE, I also make money because a big part of my portfolio is also AVE. And that's the same thing for the people that all the assets and this kind of stuff. And that is linked to the AVE success as a protocol. And so nobody is against Ave Labs doing their work. They are doing a fantastic process or in nearly a decade now. What we want is clarity about the structure and to say, okay, if you do things and you use the Ave brands, well, the Ave Dao should get their fair share.

And we seriously guess that from a position that is more on an eagle standpoint and less that symmetric where you decide overnight, okay, you guys will get 10% or in one year, oh, I changed my mind. No, it's zero. No, I'm more friendly to you. It's going to be 40% this kind of stuff. We don't want this kind of relationship. We want something to do with something stable that create trust and bring clarity to everyone in goal.

And so, you know, clarity, right? Like the AVE holders rejected this brand transfer. It got voted down in spite of the fact that it was on like Christmas Day or whatever. And AVE Labs is now saying, okay, we will share the off protocol revenue with AVEHolt. But again, I think it's less about, all right, fine, guys, we'll give you this because this didn't go well. And more about now saying, well, we'd prefer if it's not discretionary, right? We'd prefer if you are obligated to do this thing. Because what happens in 10 years' time if, you know, the Ave front end is making a billion dollars a year in front end revenue for some reason, right?

Then, you know. Or what happens if, like the question is. for me, right? And it's very hypothetical, right? But what if the front end starts doing something that actually works against the doubt? Like, actually against the doubt. No, that would never happen. And there is, there are a lot of incentives that make it unlikely to happen. But like, that is like a scary future state of things. And again, I don't think this is going to happen. But right, I think everyone is looking at this and saying like, oh, they redirected the revenue. But they could, when you control the front and you can do a lot.

They could fork, just to be clear, they could fork, this is like, we, we can't live in fantasy land, right? They could fork the protocol if they have the main entry point to the protocol. And I don't think anyone is saying that this will happen. But what happens if, you know, something happens to Stani? And some person inside of Alvarez turns up and goes, Stani was a nice guy, but like, honestly, like, fuck the Dow stuff, right? And we're going to fork it and we're going to take 100% of the revenue.

And sure, you might say, well, people aren't going to follow that, but some people will. And so, you know, that is a... The good level of ownership of this brand asset is that if tomorrow's tenure wants to do AveyLabts.com and do his own front and his own protocol, you should get 100% of the revenue on that. Sure. The issue is doing this kind of thing on Avey.com. Because the Dow and the protocol and Stani as well and labs, everyone worked very hard and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives.

in development, in research, in risk parameters, all this kind of stuff, to build the muscle memory that if you want to do on-chain and then you type AVE.com on your browser, and then you end up on that. And that's what has value. And what is important is to make sure that more likely scenario, let's say, Havelab raised from AKITES and do an IPO in five years, in 10 years. And I wish them the best. I wish them for that to happen and to be a billion dollars company on itself.

What happens if there's an administration concealed that decide that, well, Stani, you are a great CEO. Thank you for your vision and thank you for being a founder. But now the big boys are in place. I'm black rock and I will sit up your share. Goodbye. Is your share goodbye? And then decide to implement many things that are not so decentralized anymore. are not so aligned with the token anymore.

Daggaas. So are you aligned with Dow governance? Maybe not naturally, or maybe they are, but the thing is that these kind of things happen in techs and in startup every single day for the past decades. And if we have no recourse and if we have no ownership of this kind of asset from the Dow, we cannot prevent that.

And that's not serious for a billion-dollar protocol. Yeah. It's, yeah, you have no recourse and that drives the uncertainty. It also just drives, I think there's this thing where, you know, on the one hand, the Dow governance can be very inefficient and drama filled. But it also just like naturally lends itself to everyone assuming that they're talking their bags and like assuming this malicious intent, even when there is none. It's been really prevalent with this specific drama where everyone's like, you're just talking your bags. blah blah. I'm like, these are like, I don't know, I find that super insulting because, you know, all of the players involved are actually looking out for AVE, like above all. It's just like in the

details of what AVE is. But, you know, you can imagine that the conversation and the governance and everything would just be, it would be easier, there'd be more clarity and people could focus on building and delivering new value if they weren't, uh, they weren't expending all this energy arguing about whose bags like who is aligned wear and who's trying to get the best for the bags and whatever you know like ultimately the goal is to build and to deliver value and to to iterate and to do all of these things um and and these sorts of things just like they just get in the way like we have to get past these barriers so i have one question for mark before we wrap up the abbe uh conversation so

Avey started as Edeland and it was okay, wasn't going amazingly well, right? And then Stani turned up and said, what if we changed the name to Avey, which is Finnish for Ghost? So Stanie, as I can only assume the president of Finland, has some claim over the Finnish language, right? And he was like, hey, we'll change it to Avey. And then from there, it kind of went parabolic, right? So you could pretty much point at the proximate cause of all of the success of AVE as the rebrand to AVE. What if you just pay Stani some money? Like you're giving $5 million for the name and maybe we can settle it all like that? I think there's zero opposition to that in the Dow site.

The issue and I think the situation is created because LAPS didn't want to negotiate. Basically, what the good is that they went to the forum and they flipped the negotiation table saying, we own everything, we own the asset, and that was basically the first message. Then it was more constructive approach that was very welcome. And if we are at the last update, basically what happened five days ago, is that Stanley went back to the forum and say, okay, guys, the communication was not so great. We're going to work with you guys to do the revenue and they are discussed. IP, this kind of stuff.

So at the end of the day, I don't want to unpaganize anybody and pain anybody in the situation as the villain. People love binary stuff, but I think it's clear from our conversation that everyone involving this debate is looking for the best of the RPA protocol itself. So we most likely are going to end up with what we call a phase two. So the proposition was phase one. We should have a mandate as the DAO to seek ownership of this brand asset. And phase two was, okay, how do we do fix?

And the idea was like phase one is short term, give a mandate, give a signal from the DAO to have allowed to say, okay, we want this to happen. And phase two is this is all it's going to happen and all it's going to be implemented. And we are working constructively to build phase two. and I think Habelaps is no in a position to discuss these kind of things. And I'm very optimistic for the future of life. Yeah, yeah. I think you'll get there.

And I think, you know, even two, three weeks ago when Ken and I were discussing this, we had faith that it would, everyone would get through, but we were going to enjoy the dumbest. It's working. We have the historical market data on that. So earlier this year in February, if I remember correctly, Stanley went to the forum and said, hey, we're going to do Horizon.

He's going to be a wheelward asset, and there's going to be a second token. And I was not very happy with that, and the token holder as well, and say, well, it's not going to be a second token. And obviously, you can have a redness share. We love the idea of having real world asset, and we think Horizon is a great idea.

But the second token, yeah, it's not going to be an option. And there's no second token on that. And I think everybody, at the end of the day, it's simple game theory. Every actor will look for their best personal interest. But what we need to do is to make sure the Nash Acquiry Brehom is somewhere that benefits everybody. So no single party, not the Dow, not me, the ICI, not BGD, the core developers, not labs, the maintainer of the Fontaine and the brand have too much power. and we end up in the situation that is a more, less asymmetric,

it's better for the protocol itself. And I think Harvey has an historical way, as historical proof to say, okay, we find good solution and that's for the best of Avi. Yeah. I have a question about, so in the ideal, I guess ideal world, right? You have the protocol, you have the Dow, and then you have these other entities sort of around

that are doing really good tangible work that is like for the benefit of the protocol not necessarily the benefit of like the Dow but for the protocol the Dow is also sort of one of those right the Dow is also supposed to be serving the protocol and the token holders in the future right

the front end is I think more important than defy has ever really made it out to be that is literally the thing that has the relationship with the users. Every time someone stands up and claims that a user can go interact with the contracts raw, like I just laugh. I'm sorry, that's not how the world works, guys. But I'm curious if you guys are thinking about, like, ideally there's actually some sort

of baked in incentives or rewards or something for the front ends, right? the people that have that relationship with the user so that they can build their thing, they can do so in a way that's like a sustainable business, right? They can serve the users and give them, say, access to Avey and let them like unlock that value. And doing that, they're incentivized to do that, right? Like, again, they can have a really sustainable business doing that. I think that's sort of what I guess the crux of the age. issue is here though, right? It's like Sonny is saying like we have the front end like we should

get the rewards for that because we are the one that has the relationship with the user. And that's not wrong. Like you do in my opinion, if you want to have great front ends and great experiences for users, you have to reward those those things, right? Because they need to be able to be aligned to serve the users and the protocol on the other end. And they need to have the resources. It's hard, right? Like it's a hard. It's a hard. thing to, especially because the founder of the protocol is also the guy building the front end because it turns out that people don't just turn up and throw front ends for you like we thought they might. All right, Mark, I'll let you wrap up ABA and then we'll move on to the next topic.

Yeah, so to wrap up, there's two different things. So you have the front ends and you want to incentivize builders to build on top of it. And what we did in 2020 was a referral program and I think we should bring that back. So we incentivize people building on top of AVE, and we redirect parts of the protocol review to those builders. And I think, no, we are mature, and especially after these events, to bring back this sort of things,

to invite every builders to build upon Ava, front-end, but also other kind of application because of the protocol iseloids. The second conversation, and that's the most important one, is the domain. Because no matter where you are, the reason Stani had this reaction initially is that he knows that if he builds Avelaps.com

it's not going to have the same traffic. Like everybody loves Stani and I'm part of his supporter despite what people want to believe. But I don't think there will be as much traffic on Avalabs.com compared to AVE.com. And what's...

Van Neson. What's your turn? Oh, another random Finnish word.com. So that's the situation. And I think the domain should remain to the Tao and operated by the Tao. And if the Tao should build a domain itself, there's a large treasury on the Tao

and there's a lot of competitive bidders up there. But I think the best one up there to do that is have a lot. They just need to have a proper and clear relationship with the Tao on how to a break that, and where the review share is defined from a position of a, You should pump the doubt. That's what we'll be about this topic. Multi-Chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like PIF, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole.

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So the other day, you were like, oh, you know, you kind of became the main character for like, I don't even know what that will. I've forgotten what that even was about, why people were, um, were rusing it. I don't know what I did two weeks ago or three weeks ago when you said that. But someone pointed out on the timeline a couple days ago that like Infinex somehow has become the main character last week. It's an interesting dynamic. We can get into like why is everyone so obsessed with Infinex and the ICO. But so I, you know, I've said this many times. I'm a longstanding fan of ICOs.

I think ICOs are a much better way of raising. capital. I think they're a much better way of distributing tokens. We stopped doing ICOs because of reasons. We stopped doing ICOs and started doing air drops, which just created like the most perverse bad incentives. And so, you know, when when we launched Infinex, we're like, okay, let's do a token sale. This is in 2024. But it was still, you know, a little on the edge, right? And so we did this NFT sale. And in fairness, at the time, it took about a month for us to kind of get everyone to understand what we're trying to do. Because many people were like NFTs, like what?

Like, why are you doing this? It doesn't make sense. And eventually they got it. And so then, you know, we're about to do TG and we're about to release an actual token, an ERC20 token. And so I was like, okay, before we do that, there's a new sonar meta. You know, someone, Kobe has turned up and said, I'm going to help fix capital formation this cycle, right? Built, echo, built sonar.

And I'm like, this is good. We should use this. We should support it. We should go out and make it work. But the parameters we chose were, frankly, garbage from the perspective of everyone on the timeline. They hated the fact that it was locked up. They didn't like the FTV, even though the FTV was lower. than what the FDV was a year ago for the NFT sale.

But yeah, everyone hated it. And then on top of that, we had a really low cap because we were like, let's make it as easy as possible for small participants to get in and not get blown out by Wales. So it was like 200 to 2.5K. And everyone hated it. Everyone was unsatisfied by it.

And so then we're like, okay, let's change the terms, which everyone also hates when terms change. because we're autistic and we don't like the rules changing on us. And so, yeah, we're now in this weird situation where, like, I think we had raised like 500 grand, 600 grand in three days. We changed the terms. It's now 2 million. You know, the momentum is not amazing. And I still think it will close.

I think people are waiting to the last day. There's not really a huge advantage to going early. But it's just my takeaway from all. of this, right, is the timeline is like so cynical, so burnt out, so cooked. Like, they feel like so much money has been extracted

from them that someone turning up being like, hey, I'm going to sell you tokens cheaply. Like, there's just no belief whatsoever that that's not max extraction. And it's really hard to overcome that sentiment right now. You know, the trenches are really cooked.

Yeah, no, the timeline is actually super bizarre on this one. They also love calling you names. Poor enough narcissistic, disingenuous. Kane is the worst person on Earth. And I'm like, wait, are we upset at the terms? Or do we just not like Kane? I can't decide. I think, you know, the funny thing is, right, that like, this is not the first time that I've been the subject of, like, Max Fudd, right?

Like there was a period of time, you guys might remember when synthetics switched from chain link to Pith. Which, by the way, I was the person holding back that for years, right? And all of the engineers were like, we need to use Pith. Chain link doesn't work for us, et cetera. And I resisted and resisted and finally capitulated. And as soon as I capitulated, the Link Marines came out and they were like, you're the worst founder ever. your camera, like, it was, and I was like, bro, I was the one defending you guys for a long time. So it's not the first time that people have decided they don't like me.

And look, like a little bit in fairness to you, Mark, a little bit like you, I can be a bit of a dick on the timeline. You know, I can be a bit aggressive. I think everyone in this room is, they're the same truth. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. What do people want, though? Because I thought that we were bringing out ICO for fairness and stuff. And that...

And lock tokens. That's it. And so... If I may, from an external perspective, I feel part of the reason. And I think I would like to get your input and feedback on that based on experience is that I think linking the early days of Infinex with Cato bring audience. And that's good for this kind of protocol, and especially application on this sense,

because that brings air reports and that brings your attention and audience. And you want audience when you are close to the users. But also, I think most Cato audience is garbage. That's my personal opinion on it. And I think Cato did a lot of wrong in the ecosystem and in the discourse. I hate the fucking Yappas and I hate the reply boats and all these kinds of things that was bringing within 4-5. And I think if you look at the real situation, there's no real big reason to complain. But I think part of the audience that is inside the Infidex ecosystem that came from Cato is not very value-hard and most likely part.

of the reason why they're so many vocal people, vocal minority that is so aggressive. Look, I think it's interesting. Yesterday, I had a long thread where someone who works for synthetics, right? Like someone I respect who works for synthetics. It was very easy to kind of be like, these are all like people value extracting. They're just mad because they didn't get your money for posting AI slop or whatever. And I think that there are some examples of that.

But I woke up yesterday and Tom Mitchell Hill had written this thread where he's like, guys, this has gone like too far now, right? Like, okay, there's some reasonable arguments for like why Infinex has done some not amazing things. But in the middle of that thread, he said, I've got friends who participated in this and they got rugged. And I read that and I was like, huh. Because in my mind, I've been sort of, you know,

I've, we said to people like, look, you know, we got overrun by bots. We got overrun by like bot farms, AI slop, you know, people trying to just max extract, right? And so we said, look, we're going to cut this off. And there's going to be some people who miss out. And they're going to feel sad about it. But the, the alternative is that all of the money gets extracted by like these, you know, bot farms, right? If we, if we don't do anything, it's just that's the terminal state. And if someone doesn't stop this, then it's going to be terrible, right?

The flip side is that there were actual people who spent, you know, maybe weeks or months posting. And yeah, they might have used AI a little bit or whatever, but they were on the timeline posting by Infinex. And they got rugged by this rich, asshole plutocrat. And I can see why they'd be like, fuck that guy. Like, you know, like, give me my money. I did the thing. It doesn't feel fair. And so for those people, the ones, because like, it makes no sense to me.

If you're a bot farm, like Eugen, there was a lot of fun around Eugen, right? And a lot of it was manufactured because people were really upset the ones who were max extracting the farmers. And so they created this like over. But there was also a cohort of real people who genuinely had put money in for a long time, didn't get the yield they expected, were really upset. And over time, those people stayed around. and they were still mad and they were still upset about it

because they didn't forget about it, right? And at some point, after six months you go, this is probably not a bot farm that's still on the timeline fudding Infinex. Like, these are probably real people who are still mad because they feel like they did the work and they didn't get paid. And, you know, if you were a trencher grinding, expecting to make, you know, a couple grand for, you know, a few months work

and you got nothing out of it, I can see that, right? And so this post was a bit of a wake-up call for me to be like, yeah, okay, we might not love Infofi. It might not be amazing. But someone set up a game. Kaito set up this game. People turned up and played the game. And then they got rugged.

And they're reasonably mad about it. And I think that's actually a fair point, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. And it does, I don't know. It just sucks whenever, like, and this is just so common in crypto. It's like, the, The initial goals with these, right, was like, it was like founded and like goodness, right?

It's like, yo, like you don't have to have a bazillion dollars in order to get it on this project. Like if you are a supporter of the project, they're going to reward you. And the way that we are going to figure out, you know, what the reward is based on, is based on your support. And the support is going to be measured in things like talking about it, supporting it, being part of the community, also, you know, we have contributions, right, with all these super metrics. Mm.

And then all of it just got freaking destroyed. Overrun. It gets overrun. Completely overrun. But I think, you know, Mark, you have a strong view of this, right? Like, crypto is adversarial. If the game theory is bad, the game will be lost, right?

Like, that's why, like, I was blaming not the players, but I was blaming the game. I think VE4F5 is a net negative for the ecosystem. And that's why I did not participate in this kind of thing. But I will be interested by your opinion. What do you think went wrong for you guys that went well for mega-heets? Because if I remember Mega-Eat, they also did the NFT cell with the fluffy stuff. And they also did like some eco-cell with a low-cap.

I think it was like $3,000 or maximum per participant in this kind of stuff. And I have the feeling from an external perspective that things went pretty well for them. So what is your opinion that change? I think two things. They were the first ones to get a dashboard. We were the third ones. And somewhere in that window, it went from, Keito is this kind of curated group of people.

And then it went parabolic. Kaito opened it up to anyone. There was no filtering anymore. And that's when the Bok farms and, you know, your AI slop just, you know, went parabolic. And so Mega-Eath was able to, like, get in early enough and get out and kind of get out of the way of it. And me, you know, I see a fight and I run towards it, not away from it.

And I was like, this infify stuff, if we don't change it, like from the inside, I was like, this is going to destroy the timeline. It's going to, you know, it's like absolutely net negative for everyone involved. Even the people who are playing the game, we need to change this game. And so I kind of put my foot down and said, we're not going to play the game this. way. We're going to stop it and we're going to do something else. But there were people who were already in the game. And they're like, hang on a second. I've been playing the game for two months and now you're saying this is a bad game and I shouldn't play it. And they were angry about it. And I was like,

sorry, bro, like game theory. And they were like, fuck your game. They're giving me my money. I don't care about. Like your game theory. Yeah. I'm like, if we reward people, you know, you can imagine you've got this guy, right, who's like, you know, sitting, you know, in his mansion who's like, hey, sorry, guys, like, the game theory is bad. You can't get the thousand bucks that I promised you. Like, that's how you get a revolution. They come and, bur. Like, seriously.

Like, and fair enough, right? Like, I'm surprised that I don't have people outside my house picketing. I think if Australia was a little bit closer to the rest of the world, people probably would have won't over here. And like holding up signs, like, fuck this guy, right? So like, and I get it, right? I genuinely get it. But I'm also retarded and I felt self-righteous. And, you know, this goes, let's go back to the AVE conversation, right?

There's two people on both sides. They both think that they're right. They both are trying to do what they think is the right thing. And it's easy to become entrenched and dig yourself in and go, no, no, no, I'm right. The way the Kyto played this was wrong. and anyone who was harmed by me trying to fix it is just collateral damage, bro. Like, sorry, I don't know what to tell you, right? But that's not a very sympathetic view in hindsight, right?

Like, that's not going to win you a lot of friends from the people who are playing the game. And so I was like, hey, okay, yesterday I was like, I'm sorry. Like, we mishandled this. And so to your question mark, like, the best thing that I could have done for Infinex was just pay out the bots. Let it happen. let someone else fight the battle and let someone else get wrecked by it. But I'm an idiot. So I decided to fight the battle and we paid the consequences.

So let's move on. We've got a couple more topics. And this kind of ties in interestingly, right? I was not to say, there's an amazing transition here if we have a brain. So prediction markets and insider trading. Now, I am from the. the crypto anarchist wing of the prediction market

community. And you know, like, I'm not quite at assassination markets, although, you know, there were some Oji people that believe that that was a good idea. But, but, like, my, my very strong

view is that the goal of prediction markets, it's not, it was not supposed to be a fucking sports betting platform. Like, we have sports setting. It exists. We've got that technology. Like, we are supposed to be creating markets where anyone with any information, all of that information is channeled into a single venue and we learn about the world. We learn about what we think the weather will be. And if someone has some amazing

magical weather prediction system, they can express their belief in their accuracy of their weather prediction system and they can get us better information. about whether whether there will be. And that's useful to the world because knowing what the weather is is really helpful. And so prediction market. And it offsets the fact that right now, which is the keto problem, right? Right now anyone can just go and say it's the thing that they want for free, for literally free. And if there's a financial reward for that, they will flood everything.

Right. And that actually degrades the conversation, degrades the value of the information. makes everything untrustworthy. And so by basically backing these statements with actual money, you can actually make the information more reliable. That's that full entire point. But part of the tacit kind of rules of this, right, if we believe it, if we're a prediction market purist,

is that anyone with any information must be able, it must be hyper-efficient, there must be no gates to it, anyone with any information must be able to participate in these markets because otherwise the information is imperfect. And we're back to where we got it. Now, there's a whole bunch of places where you could say, yeah, but like reputational this is a bad idea, right? So we tell our staff you're not allowed to trade on polymarket.

Yeah. And by the way, we do, we have, we have very strict guidelines, policies, all sorts of things, right? that are that are baked into employment contracts but are also you know just like best practices right we have these for PR things we have these for legal things we have all right uh insider trading is a really basic one at any company like it is it is what it is right evolving those for to take into account prediction markets very easy very very easy yeah now but again just to be clear, right? Like, my, my view is that someone, uh, participating in a prediction market, right? If, if, if, you know, at the end of the day, especially if it's an uncertain outcome, let's say

that someone, um, knew how they were going to vote, right? Someone at Andreessen knows how Andreessen's going to vote on the AVE proposal. And I don't think they hold ABE, right? This is a very hypothetical scenario, right? Um, it is valuable for everyone. to know that information as soon as possible. If Andresen is sitting there waiting until the last minute and they're going to rug the vote, right? And someone from Andreessen knows how they're going to vote and they go and like, first of all, not securities.

It's not even in my view insider trading for them to do that. But it is net positive for everyone to have the information and someone should go and do that. They should express that view if they know what's going to happen because we will have more perfect information about the world and we can make better predictions. and do better things. That is aggressive, like, I'm not going to lie, but reputationalally, it is absolutely not a good idea for Andresen to have their employees running around betting on prediction markets as to like what is the next round that Andreessen's going to close. Because, because you're looking at it from two different perspectives, right?

The first is that the more information and the faster that information gets to the prediction market, the better off, like the more fair it gets because then everyone has sort of like the same information and they can assign a monetary value to it and therefore they can trust it more or less, et cetera. On the other hand, there's a bro sitting in an office somewhere who just made 50K and you didn't, right? And so there is still a core on fairness to this. And especially when it comes to things where there are already controls in place to disseminate the information at a very specific time to allow that fairness. Right. So like, again, like if we go back to the open sea situation, right, with Nate, like, he was sitting in this position where he was. deciding what projects were going to go on the front page, right? And then he went and bought those things because he knows that he's going to put it on the front page and then the price

is going to go up. Okay. But, but, but if he had been, and again, this is like very on the edge here, but if instead of going and buying the thing, right, now, whether an NFT is a security or whatever, if instead of buying an NFT, he'd gone on to a prediction market and there was a prediction market for like what will the NFT thing be and this is like not a contrived example like I'll give you a very specific example if

let's say Nate knew next Wednesday he's going to put pudgy penguins on the front page of open seat and so he expresses and votes on it he could get hit by a bus he could get fire things could happen like he is not God he doesn't know that

that's going to happen right in expressing a view through a prediction market of based on information that I know about the world, my prediction is this, he has no control over whether that thing will actually happen in the sense that like all kinds of things, they could decide they're not going to do projects on the front page anymore. So there is still, there is still a measure of like imperfect information and, and, you know, there is. But I still think that he, him get, it feels unfair that he would get that money because he's in the position to make the decision. But then also there is now an incentive for someone else to put the bet and then pay Nate to put that

on the front page or whatever, right? Like you can just keep going down the rabbit hole. And ultimately, the goal needs to be more fairness, right? More people and more opportunities and there's less of these privileged situations. And that's actually what prediction markets are attempting to solve, right? Is I get rid of the privileged situations. Um, By disseminating the information as quickly as possible. Don't remove information asymmetry as quickly as possible. At some point, like if you wind it all the way back, there is some information asymmetry at some point.

But most of the time in these markets, especially now, right, like they're not that liquid. So, you know, he would have made less money probably buying, like shares in a polymarket market than he made from buying the NFTs, right? because there has to be someone to counter trade him. And this is the other thing, right? Like by buying the NFT, he's taking money away from someone else who was holding that NFT.

And like, I get that fairness. But if you are... That's why the insider trading is usually illegal. 100%. It is, right? And, you know, he went to jail. But if you are playing on polling market, and this is the thing that I think is really important, like, if you don't understand this dynamic or you don't have a strong view

of what a prediction market is for and you think that you're just doing it. like, you know, sports betting, then like, I'm sorry, but you're a fucking idiot. Like, I don't care what you say. Like, if you're participating in a prediction market and you're like, no, no, no, like someone can't know information that I don't know. That is literally the entire point. That is literally the entire point. I think we need to separate from, we need a new classification for what like this is.

Because the main issue that I have with the conversation is that everyone's just calling everything insider trading. No, no. Insider trading is when a person in an actual privileged position actually acts on actually confidential information, like actual work product. But also, importantly, in the U.S., the point of insider trading laws is not to stop the fairness in the market. it is to stop someone expropriating information that they got from a privileged position and making you're stealing from the company that you got the information from not yeah it's not about the people that are trading against you on the nasdaq right like no no it's not the issue the shareholders exactly right you're taking money away from the entity itself and so you know uh like in this case it gets really interesting you're not

So, you know, a few hours before the U.S., so like, first of all, U.S. government's not even a company, right, but a few hours before, the U.S. announced the capture of Maduro. Betting activity spiked, right? And a newly accrued account, bet, I think, about 30 grand, that Maduro would exit and made 400 grand in profit. So the timing was concerning, right, because of insider information. But this is not a secure. It's about the head of state of Venezuela being abducted. This is not insider trading, right? It's not. And that's the thing is that when people call the Maduro bet insider trading, one,

show me anything that shows that information was insider, right? There's a lot of threads on Twitter right now. And let me tell you, especially the like look on chain dudes who are like, I'm a sleuth. Look at me. They're wrong. Like, there are a lot of really bad traces out there specifically around this one. Okay. Number two, we're not talking about a company. We're literally talking about like, like the accusations are against the intelligence community of the United States government. That is a big accusation to make. You are saying that someone whose entire job and livelihood and career, right, it is like really criminal if they disseminate information. They're saying it's barren, right? Like, everything... I mean, they're saying... They said, yeah.

And they said it was like a world financial guy, but like, I looked on Tane for two seconds, and I was like, someone knows who it is, but it's not this bro that's tweeting about it right now. They're just making stuff up. There was one where they were like, we correlated the Binance deposits and withdrawals. And I was like, do you guys have any idea how much volume is on Binance? You're telling me that these $220 deposits are associated... That's your proof that is the world financial guy. Like, I'm sorry.

Shut off. Get off of my timeline. Yeah. It's a wild accusation. Okay. And I think that, like, in a lot of other situations with these insider trading things, it's a much more interesting conversation. I think that if we actually want to be productive and have a solid path forward,

like the tweeters absolutely need to stop accusing people in the U.S. government of insider trading a polling market. Like, it was absurd. But even if they were, the market, the market where the money was made was not the NASDAQ. It was polymarket. It is a prediction market. If you are counter trading that and you have no information, you are a retard. I'm sorry, but like you shouldn't be trading that market.

There are people who have information asymmetry. If you're like, I have some thoughts about Maduro and whether or not he is going to be in power next January and you're just some like club sitting in your basement what are you doing that is not like you're like at that point you're you are just gambling and someone who has more information is going to take your money and instead of crying about it on the timeline you should really think about your life choices you should not be afraid of the market that you have no information about that's not people are free to do whatever they want with their money can come of course you don't know like if you want to

I think there's three layers here. I'm very aligned with UK on the fact that even in economic theory, like the faster information is delivered to the market, the better it is. And I think no one disagree with that. The second layer is the law itself. And insider trading is illegal. Most jurisdiction, I cannot name one jurisdiction where you can just do whatever you want in this kind of.

for the yes. And the intent of the law is to make sure the counterparty are not, there's fairness to the counterparty. So when you are doing inter-trading, as you said, you are stealing your own company and you are also stealing from the counterparty of the market that don't have your information. That's something that is very clear about the law

and it's about securities and these kind of things. but I think the third layers is on the prediction market itself. And do we consider, like, to me, the parallel with Nate from OpenC is very clear. Instead of trading the asset itself, if, as you said, he traded on some prediction market, is Pugin going to be listed before January, this kind of things. I think the damage is completely different. Because on one side, you are in same dirt that buy and dump and retain on assets. directly because you have information and that information lead to people buying that asset

and then you sell to other people on the market at a premium in order to generate a profit. On the second situation, you are bringing information to the market and people can trade accordingly. And if you see a position like that as a market participant, you take that information and you react. And you can decide to buy the asset or not on the markets and play the market's rules as you want. And I think it's a fairly different situation. But the thing is that there's fairness, there's philosophy, and there's the fucking law. And usually we have to follow that a fucking law, even if we don't agree with it, even if the pure theoretical alignments will say otherwise, the law is the law.

And if you are an employee and you are doing this kind of stuff and your company wants to pay you, they have the full right to do so. And they have the right to implement their own policy. In the U.S. government, they could put you in jail. Yeah, no, I mean, Like, guys, disseminating like military secrets Before and major military operation is insanely criminal

And that's the funniest thing It's like, oh yeah, and someone is One of these bros is like, let me go 830K on Polly Market real quick Sorry, like, just stop It's wild So, it's wild You think, Mark, I really appreciate your perspective

about like, and I just want to emphasize this, right? There is a relationship between employees and companies, and those are policies. Those are part of your employment contract. That does not necessarily mean that like every single person on earth needs to abide by that, right? Like everything is going to be different. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind, right? It is what it is. And for some companies, depending on the situation, depending on the employees, depending on, you know,

there's a lot of companies these days that don't even have employees. It's just a, you know, it's like a Dow, right? If they don't want to enforce these strong policies because there's no risk to their business, there's no loss to their business, that's fine. That's on them. It'll be really interesting to see how the nation state laws that apply to all the citizens and all the companies within that jurisdiction, how those evolve. I don't think it's as simple as, and I think that we need to get away from this idea

of insider trading. It's just, it's just coke. It's cope from people who are trading on polymarket who shouldn't be and then they lose and they get sad. Like that, genuinely that

that's the thing, right? But you know, if all low comes from that, usually, yeah. There's a lot of people that are doing, that are getting some wrong in the society and then they complain to the society itself and say, hey, that should not be allowed

because I'm very sad. That's usually what a law comes from. It's where the law comes from. It literally is. You know, to your point, there's a tension here between like financial theory and the law, right? Like if we turn up and, you know, someone did, right? Richie Torres said, all right, we're going to, we're going to introduce this like integrity in financial prediction markets act, right?

And, you know, it's possible that you create laws that make prediction markets bad and less useful, right? Like you can have the unintended consequences of like by creating this law where you can't trade if you have information, we have actually defeated the entire. Like ruined it. Yeah. And made it more privileged almost, right? Because now people are operating on assumptions that aren't necessarily true. It's a yeah, that's a whole different world. In my opinion, Polymarket. needs to be deeply researching this and understanding this and understanding the user perspectives and eliminating the gap. They can't get a polygon. Come on.

Like, if you heard them to do deep philosophical research about like. No, they need to close the gap of understanding. That's on them, in my opinion, right? They have the relationship with the user.

When their users have misunderstandings and are sad, they should make them not sad. Yeah, fair. And the way that you do that is mostly, well, I mean, you can bribe them after the fact and make them less hurt or whatever. But I think, you know, to your point, why are people under this assumption in the first place? And it's because so many people are on these platforms thinking that it's like sports betting. They think it's gambling site. Right.

They beat their buddy on like the Raiders to score of 14 points. And that's only going to get worse unless polymarket or coli. go and, instead of doubling down on the sports betting comparisons, you know, actually sort of lay the stage and reposition this in people's minds as a fundamentally different venue. Because it is. The puzzle is, though, that that's boring. And sports betting makes a lot of money. And so you're going to have this, like, you know, really perverse incentive to blur the lines

between go and bet on a baseball game and Maduro's capture. Right. I don't see if any much that makes most of their money on sport betting currently. I think the largest map that ever was the Trump prediction. Yeah. Well, yeah, the election was big. But right now, at least, most of the volume is in these short-term sports betting things. And also you're seeing, it's just a huge conversation right now.

But also in sports, there are criminal, but there are also contractual agreements. There are very, very, very defined rules on how the players, on the managers, and what can be done with information, who can do it. And every once in a while, someone decides that they're going to sell out and it's going to make the game unfair. And that is, one, I mean, the leagues themselves, right, are the primary enforcer of those laws. And it's the most detrimental to them. So they should be, right? Like the incentives are there, right? If you have coaches and players that are rigging games, people will lose interest in your multi-billion dollar.

And so it's on them to correct those incentives, right? And that's why leagues correct those incentives. There are laws in most states that also play a role here. But it's because the fairness of the game is more important than the fairness of the gambling markets. Right? But the gamblers are gambling on the fact. Like they're all, they must operate under the assumption that the game is being fair. If the game is rigged, the gamblers get screwed, but also the players get screwed.

Also the league get screwed. Also, the fans get screwed. The people that aren't gambling money that are there for the love of the game get screwed. And so that's why you have then the laws and the policies comes in place to correct those perverse incentives to make sure that it's of sufficient fairness. right and then everyone's happy and i think that a similar thing is going to have to happen here right this isn't like as simple as insider trading it's where are the incentives what ultimately is fair for everyone including the participants right not just like some stock over here that's completely separate from polymarket like how do you you know what are the baseline rules and the assumptions let's define

those let's define what happens if someone breaks those rules right let's enforce them straight to jail straight to Poli Rokadale their own jail that they set up for people to manipulate so we've got one final topic to cover

before we wrap up I know we're a little bit over so let's try and keep it quick but I we would be remiss without mentioning Kyle Samani we missed out on on Kyle Samani last week

because we didn't have a show we would have been talking about the fact that he Tabuta's Scleaner with my 25K Ethereum. Oh my God. Do you pay him?

Yeah, I paid him, yeah. Okay. Nice. Kane lost a bet a year and a half ago to Kyle. And he came to collect like two weeks ago. I like, honestly, it's the most classic Kyle thing. Like within, but before the bet was even over, it was like four hours before the end of the year. He's like, where's my money?

I was like, have you been thinking about this every day? Like, it was. It was like 400 days later. Yeah. Well, I still find commandable that you honor your vote because reputation is always important. And you did the bet and it went wrong and you paid. And I feel that's completely compatible that you follow through. Yeah, I wasn't larping.

Like, I thought Eith was going to go to 25K. I was very sure of it. Very optimistic. That's why I'm cursed when it comes to buying E. So do you like me next time? bets on polygon value because labor was much more profitable and

actually Mark Brown paid me so I got the 50s Oh, nine. Who was not? With the Polygon CEO, Mark Barry Byron. Yes, yeah, and he paid you.

He paid me. It's very commendable from him. And we decide to okay, let's move on from it and and the stuff walking on the old stuff. Yeah, nice. So Vitalik posted this thing about ZKTLS, right,

saying the blockchain trilemma is solved. You know, we're going to be in this new era of like abundance of block space. And first of all, I was like, bro already in that era. Gway is like 0.001. We have enough block space, but sure. but I think he also came out and said, you know, what is the purpose of Ethereum? What is the purpose of, you know, what he created and what we are building? And resilience was like this term that he used, right?

Like minimizing the risk of failure, not optimizing for like the average cases. I think it's a way of saying defy without saying defy is my assumption. And it's about, you know, users retaining control. so that they can't be deep platforms so that, you know, there's no platform risk, there's no government risk, there's no, you know, risk of capture, all of these things that, you know, seem quaint in 2026. But, you know, Vitalik's out there kind of reinforcing that this is the entire point of the blockchain. And if you don't have these things, then you can't have things like AVE. No one would build AVE on top of a thing that they didn't trust was going to be able to, you know,

be resistant to capture. And then Kyle turned up. Like, I'm one of the, that's actually what we did. I'm one of the reason. There's no idea on Solada, because that's not the same philosophy. Yeah, or not avie on some shitty blockchain

that can turn the flip off any time or just don't produce any block for any kind of reason or of like the validator, like, decide to censor you overnight because they don't like you. All these kind of things are extremely important. And that's why some names, networks and some blockchain are having and some network don't have it. And I think myself, I've been very adamant on that.

And my philosophy is very clear for the past decade of this ecosystem. And the Avedo is very aligned with this and the token order has followed too so far on this kind of stuff. And so Kyle came in over the top and was like, shut up, Battalick. he's stupid. Like the what like you know

basically it was and and you know Kyle is is very tactical right he knows how to just get in and like oh he got me

he got in there right okay so here is his tweet he goes so Vitalik writes this whole big post philosophical it's about builders and users

and resiliency and Kyle goes so what Vitalik is explicitly telling us is the EF is not building for what users want. They're building what Vitalik wants.

What the fuck is that? I think building for the master of playing the idiot for his own motive and an object is like he is a genius

are playing them to push his message and he's not to read out. So good. So just have to call the bluff and say, oh, come on, Kai. Nobody believes you, not. It was a wild one. My hot take, though, is that, like, there must be some forcing function. Some people, you know, within the ecosystem,

must be a forcing function for these principles, or the principles will die, right? And so the fact that Vitalik, who made the thing is still out there advocating, for the core principles of why he made it is super bullish. He could be, you know, living on an island somewhere, right? Like, and, you know, he's still, he's still, you know, out there advocating. Like, this is why we have founders. And yes, it's a blockchain and that it's not a company, right? But this is why we have founder-led entities in the world

because the founder is the one who understands deeply why they did the thing and they don't want it to be co-opted and, you know, into something that it wasn't supposed to be. So, like, I saw that and I kind of laughed. I was like, all right, well played Kyle. But also, like, in this case, and, you know, it's funny, right? Because I've been very critical of the EF for, you know, certain things, right? Like, not supporting certain things, you know, and there's this argument of credible neutrality. And, you know, at the end of the day, this is why you shouldn't let me run the EF because I'm going to pick the things that I like and not pick the things that I don't like, right? And like, you know, the EF, you can sit there and

criticize them, but by maintaining that kind of credible neutrality, they make it accessible for everyone. Yeah, and that's the core. I think the issue of the, the, the, the, the, the before was they went too far in crazy blog notoriety. And I think a lot of people say, come on guys, you have application that works, you have actual users and you don't fucking talk about it.

You keep like saying, hey, let's run some nodes in Nairobi, which is a great thing, why not? But maybe you should talk about the application that actually do a great job at promoting your technology and the user that are using technology every day. And

I think the EF no is a in a more consensus and better position where they actually talk about the real grace talking about it but they are not going as far as all the ecosystem to basically what our business will do or this kind of stuff to say okay we are con base this is the base network we have code based venture and if you are a con base venture and if you are a company central funded business we're going to talk more about you and put you in the in the front row position which is to me a bit of the extreme and that should not happen in the creative or natural network because infrastructure should

be neutral. So there's a spectrum here between we don't support anyone and we pick the winners and the other builders can co-factor themselves. There's a middle ground and I think Ethereum is in a good situation right now. Yeah. Agreed. And I think that I've been critical of the E-Cath for some of the things that they've done, but I've never disagreed with the core philosophy that the foundation this idea that the foundation should be smaller over time and that they should basically make room and empower people to build. And in order to do that,

like fundamentally, how do you create like an optimal environment for people to build applications, right? Part of it is not picking and choosing. And we've seen this really a lot on base. But we've also seen it on salon. There's a reason that all of the salon apps are basically the same. It's like that's what people,

feel like empowered to build there. Ethereum is different. And I think that it's some, there's something to be said about the fact that, uh, like you came, right, Al-A-2, like everyone built on Ethereum, even though Vitalik didn't like DeFi. He was like, doing it.

And I was like, shut up. I'm going to do it. I don't care. Right? Like, that would have never happened on Solano or base, right? If Jesse does not, if Jesse does not personally freaking tweet you, you're not going to make it. Meanwhile on Ethereum, a lot, of things that Vitalik actively was like, this doesn't exist in my worldview, made it.

That's a good, that is a good, that is a good solid platform in my opinion. And I think the reason is because that core ethos was credible neutrality, right? And so there's a tension there of like, don't go out and start king making, which Vitalik never did, right? And, and, you know, even why Vitalik stopped investing in things. He's like, people, every time I invest in something, people use it to be like, Vitalik said I'm the best. Look at me. Yes, a lot against this.

Very hard. Like, it's why privacy. It's why Torninofash exists, right? Literally in day one was because Vitalik wanted to be able to spread his money without people, like, creating an entire billion dollar industry around. There's like one bat that he made. All right, guys. This has been amazing.

Thank you so much for joining us, Mark. That was really helpful and appreciate your insights into the ABE ecosystem and everything else. So yeah, we'll have to have you on again some of the time. So that's it for our first episode of Uneasy Money from 2026. Thank you for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. We'll see you next week.