Unchained - James Wynn’s Fall, Ethereum’s Rise, and the Death of the Foundation Era – The Chopping Block - Ep. 846

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this episode, the crew tackles a triple-header of crypto’s growing pains: the bizarre saga of James Wynn—a memecoin gambler whose billion-dollar positions on Hyperliquid ended in public ruin; the Ethereum Foundation’s surprise rebrand into “Protocol” and its sudden embrace of hierarchy; and a bold manifesto from Miles Jennings calling for the end of crypto foundations as we know them. Is radical transparency a feature or a trap? Is Ethereum finally prioritizing execution over vibes? And are foundations just offshore theater—or necessary guardians of decentralization? The gang debates all this and more in a conversation that asks: who’s really in control of crypto—and should they be? Show highlights 🔹 James Wynn: From $1B to $16 – The infamous Hyperliquid trader wipes out, then begs for donations… and opens new positions days later 🔹 Liquidation Theater – Was Wynn’s downfall market manipulation, a psyop, or just crypto doing what it always does? 🔹 Hyperliquid Transparency Debate – CZ, Jump, and Hyperliquid clash over whether radical openness helps or harms 🔹 Stop-Hunting Season – Tarun explains why onchain liquidation is more deterministic—but not necessarily more malicious 🔹 Ethereum Foundation Rebrands – Meet “Protocol”: a new structure, a new strategy, and maybe… a new hierarchy 🔹 The End of Purge & Surge – Is Ethereum finally abandoning the meme roadmap and focusing on shipping? 🔹 Tim Beiko’s New Role – A surprising centralization of coordination—and why the ETH community seems to like it 🔹 DUCS vs. DUNA – The crew proposes a new Ethereum acronym—and debates Miles Jennings’ push to end the foundation model 🔹 Are Foundations Just Offshore Theater? – Haseeb argues it’s time to kill the Cayman entity and rethink DAO legal structures 🔹 The Legal Marketing Wars – Tarun and Tom debate whether crypto’s governance evolution is genuine—or just “intellectual shilling” ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  The end of the foundation era in crypto by Miles Jenningshttps://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/end-foundation-era-crypto/ Announcing Protocol by Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/06/02/announcing-protocol Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:12 The Saga of James Wynn 06:20 Market Manipulation vs. Transparency 17:37 57, Tarun’s Favorite Number 20:12 EF's “Protocol” 33:45 DUCS! Decentralization, UX, Censorship Resistance, and Scaling 36:55 The End of the Foundation Era 45:04 The Role of Legal Structures in Crypto 52:49 Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're an industry that has constantly been on the back foot with respect to legal. So the idea that, like, well, we've obviously figured out the Holy Grail, which is the foundation model, is crazy. But you have to get lawyers to say yes to that. Right. Like each one of these companies that goes to CSX, they're already incorporated. They have lawyers. But the reason I think, again, is like the market signal of safes and safts is that people fucking use them. And end of the day, they didn't have to shift the equilibrium.

They did not even have to do that much marketing. The saft from zero to usage. Amazingly fast. Token Warrants, same thing. And so I think if you... Token ones were not amazingly fast. It took a while. Compared to...

How long have you been hearing about Duna's? I've been hearing about Duna's for like two and a half years. I've been hearing about so many DOWs saying they're going to convert and then don't do it. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two fond. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unimmedged trading firms who are very involved.

I like that eat is the ultimate pomp. Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping broccoli. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto recipes of the day. So first up, we got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes.

Hello, everyone. Next you got Robert, the Cryptoconisurer and Tsar of Super State. Happy Tuesday. It's not Tuesday when this gets released, so you want to read this. Happy Wednesday or Thursday. Thursday. Let's do it. Happy Thursday, but it is a podcast.

so you never know when people are listening. Daroon, the Gio Brain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And finally, I'm perceived the head hype man at Dry and Fly. We're early-stage investors in crypto. We want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even cooking advice. Please see Chopping Block.

That, XYZ for more disclosures. So, Robert, do you want to give the backstory of the chopping broccoli? No, but one of our listeners jokingly refers to this show is the chopping broccoli. And so that's the whole backstory. really less interesting than you might think. No, we're embracing that for the show. We actually intentionally picked out all the topics to be cooking themed. So see if you can notice throughout this episode.

I'm completely lying. That's not true. Okay, so last episode, we ended talking about the saga of James Wynn. So just quick recap. James Winn is a UK-based meme coin trader who has been accused of being a weird meme coin pumping nutpy type of person in the past. He's very big moon pig shill. and he's been absolutely engaged in insane wild leverage trading on hyperliquid.

Big enough trades that is basically moving the entire Bitcoin market and has been captivating everybody on crypto Twitter. So previously he put on positions that a notional value of over a billion dollars on the price of Bitcoin with over 40x leverage. And, or not over exactly 40x leverage, his PNL peaked at over $80 million. And basically, he's now, as of this week, completely wiped out. He was left with only $16 in his account. He has claimed that this is because of shady market maker-based manipulation of people

coming and hunting his liquidation points. So now because he's trading on hyperliquid, and this has led to a broader conversation about transparency and exchanges and, of course, the fact that hyperliquid, because it's a decentralized exchange, or not because of it, but one of the properties of hyperliquid as a decentralized exchange, is that you can see all of the information that would normally only be available to the operators of the centralized exchange, such as everyone. one's positions, everyone's liquidation points, as opposed to just seeing the overall picture of the order book.

So his claim is that there have been all these big whales who have been hunting his liquidation points and forcing him to get liquidated. So the moment he puts on a trade, people go in and try to knock him out, essentially. And so he's been complaining about this, calling these, quote-unquote, market-making cabals, and asking for people to protect his liquidation points to prevent him from getting liquidated intentionally by these market-maker cabals. He then later started asking for donations after he was completely like a million dollars. Yes, he was big.

After he lost, well, notional, yes, after he lost all of his money that he was using to engage in leverage trading. He asked for donations, made about $20,000 in donations, then deposited them to hyperliquid, then claimed that he was being targeted again, despite the fact that he now had almost no money, but that they were coming for his shorts. And then he claimed to give his final goodbye, saying that I've decided to give Perp trading a break. Many people have been speculating, including Ivgeny, who was previously on the show, as well as Arthur Hayes previously in the show, that perhaps James Wynne was a sciop, that he wasn't a real person, and that this is some kind of hyperliquid PR stunt.

I don't think that's likely, but people are really engaged in a lot of speculation about what exactly is going on in this very chaotic saga of the rise and fall of James Wynn. So on the backs of that, and a lot of the attention that's been brought onto hyperliquid, we've seen hyperliquid pump to all-time highs and incredible amounts of trading volume over $244 billion of trading volume in the month of May amidst the James Wynne saga. So guys, reactions, the rise and fall of James Wynn. Robert, I know you said previously that he was your hero and that you hoped that hyperliquid that would have some kind of really messy horrible liquidation gone wrong as a result of this thing. Did not happen. Hyperliquid seems to have

weathered the storm perfectly. What's your reaction? My reaction is rip to one of the interesting ones out there. He was certainly one of the highest thrill-seeking and risk-seeking traders we've seen in quite some time. Honestly, since Doe Kwan and 3-AC, I don't think we've seen someone who's so careless with money at such a large scale. And obviously, he was a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean compared to 3-AC and Terra. But it's been a while since we've seen someone so carefree. throwing around nine figures and ten figures. And it was wonderful entertainment for the week or so that we had James Wynn in our lives. I'm sad to see him gone. I don't think he can bounce back from

this, frankly. He is definitely a problem gambler. He definitely has some serious issues that he has to resolve. But he definitely stress tested hyperliquid. He definitely created some new conversations around manipulation of markets and hunting shorts and transparency and all this, which I think is honestly nonsense. And I think the net result of James Wynn is going to be one in which people don't try to replicate what he did. And it'll be a long time before we see another James Wynn trading a billion dollars of Bitcoin long and short, long and short, on a radically transparent dex. Why do you say that you're skeptical of this, you know, people hunting? By the way, by the way, you guys are, you guys, this entire conversation is kind of moot because I'm, James Wynn has opened new positions in the last four hours.

Of how much size? Do you know, not hundreds of million, but like, not a million. But like, Mr. I never doing perps again is definitely. Yeah, he's a problem gambler. He's taking every $10,000 he could find putting it back in. It's like, it's like, yeah, it's like he's definitely like seat cushion searching, but like he's still opening bets. So you're treating, you said rest in peace. He's not resting.

Fine. Yeah. In reality, there are a lot of James wins out there. That's where exchanges make their money. That's why they offer 40x, 50x, 100x leverage is for crazy people. And like most people who are like this, they don't advertise their positions. They don't post like, hey, I just entered 100X long on Binance or whatever. They're just doing it.

And most of the time, they're just getting horrendously liquidated. Can we play a fun intermission game? right now, what is the most leverage you've ever used trading a crypto product on a Dex, on a centralized exchange through whatever? Like, what is the highest you've personally cranked up the leverage knob on any trade? I've never traded with leverage. Never? Really?

Never. Yeah. What about in life? You never get levered up? Yeah. Levered long life. That's a, you know what? I'm very, I'm extremely long life.

I'll say that. That's how we live. I feel like you're like a 5x, 10x guy. No, no, no, no. I'm all about risk management. I'm more of like a 3x kind of guy. Whatever the U.S. government says is allowed in a traditional brokerage, that's what I'm, that's what I subscribe to because they know best.

But I, it is feel, I mean, obviously there's no crying in the casino, as we all know. But it's not the first time, like, even if you're trading size on a Centralized Exchange, people are still going to try to, like, punt your stops. And we've seen this before when famous ad, are, you know, closely being liquidated on lending protocols. They also get hunted. And so there's always sort of, I don't know, it isn't like a new phenomenon, but it is funny to me that like how mainstream this topic now is, even though this has always been true,

like even CZ was talking about the need for like a perp dark pool or dark pool perks. And so I don't know, maybe this is, this will be the catalyst for true D5 privacy. I kind of doubt it. But yeah, yeah. I mean, it has been going on a long time. I mean, Arthur used to joke about this in, like, the Bitmax trollbox, like, way back in the day about hunting the stops of the plebs. So, so I think, and I was trying to explain this to, like, a ZK founder. There's no way of, like, preventing hunting, right?

Like, in anything that has partial liquidations, I can, like, look at the OI and, like, the collateral, which are public and impute, at least probabilistically, you know, how much someone was liquidated, what their threshold was. Now, I won't be able to do it perfectly. They'll be able to get enough information to figure out statistical strategies to hunt. I think, like, that in and of itself was probably, like, the real reason I think, like, the CZ kind of thing is, like, missing the point is, like, you can still hunt people on Binance. It's just that you have to take more risk to do it versus, like, it's close to deterministic on chain, but my max leverage ratio is like.

There's a pretty, that's clearly a difference, though, right? It's obviously one of degree, but the degree is probably pretty significant. If you know with certainty that you can take this person out with enough money, then, yeah, there's a lot of people who are just depopened enough that they will forcibly engage in liquidation. There is. That's true. But I also think if I'm trading on Binance and I'm in the same co-located exchange and I can see all the orders first, I basically have the same ability as the Puran chain.

Like it's closer to deterministic. Like my probability is really now about latency. and I'm not saying that it's like, hey, I'm just trying to say like, I don't think centralized exchanges are some like perfect paragon of, hey, this never happens there either. That's the thing I don't like about this discourse because it's like pretending that that's true, but it's not, there's not like a binary yes or no to this question. And I think somehow everyone's own bags are incorporating them to shill that it's a binary thing. And they're on the virtuous side of the spectrum. and the other one is like the evil villain. And my...

So I agree with you, it's not binary. It's not binary. But there is a continuum. No, no, no. But you read the arguments they're making. They're trying to claim it as binary. Like, CZ's arguments are very much like one or the other. He's like, private decks is the only way to replicate how good centralized exchanges are.

It's not true. Okay. So there's been a big back and forth, especially in the wake of James Wynn's claims of, hey, you know, he's getting his stops hunted. Is you had, you had Jeff from Hyperliquid come out and engage with very, very, very, long essay that he wrote up, basically describing why he felt that actually a quote-unquote transparent exchange to the extent that hyperliquid is, where it's not only that you can see the order book, you can see all the traders, you can see all their deposits, you can all see

their positions, but not only that you know exactly who they are, and people are playing iterated games because they have a fee tier and someone is going to stay in the same account, they're not very inclined to rotate different accounts. And his claim is that this is actually good for most people who matter. It's bad for high-frequency takers. Those people are are getting hurt. But for makers and for retail, and even for whales, his claim is that this is actually better. And it's better because it allows people to, if they're toxic flow, I mean, they're informed, they know something that the market maker doesn't. It allows them to get filled more readily by market makers because those market makers know this. They can basically look at

this person on chain and they're like, oh, it's that guy. And that guy is an idiot. You know, that's James Wynn. He doesn't know anything. He's just going along Bitcoin because he's a wild gambler. So I'm very happy to provide him liquidity, but if it's, you know, jump or somebody else, I'm like, okay, well, this person is maybe knows something I don't, and I don't want to be on the other side of this trade. So his claim is that this is net good. This new market structure where you can see everything is good. And CZ was on the other side of this.

CZ wrote a mini essay, where CZ's claim was, this is not good. And I think it was also Anand, who's one of the founders of paradigm as well as Paradex. And he was saying, like, look, this is not the way that anybody in traditional financial finance, paradigm markets, paradigm markets, the options trading venue. His view is that, look, nobody in traditional finance, nobody at a hedge fund, nobody who's actually doing, moving real size in markets thinks that that's true. You can see that in their behavior, that they go to dark pools, they go to OTC desk, they don't want to show their size, and they'd go through a lot of effort to hide their positions and hide who they are when they're engaging in large trades, whether

or not, people know that they're informed actors. So there's this big debate now about like, is the hyperliquid structure of everyone can see everything? Is this actually good? Because it allows this kind of crisis discrimination. I feel like this is just rehashing the 2020 AMM versus centralized exchange spot exchange debates where everyone was constant, like the Dan Robinson versus SBF. I feel like this is just people who weren't paying attention then rehashing the same arguments. And there's, it's a dialectic. There's there's a spectrum. you get certain utilities to one, you have certain disutilities the other, and you as a user gets somewhere in the middle. The rest, who the fuck cares?

Everyone's talking to their book. Yes, the centralized exchanges are saying their model is best, and the decentralized ones are saying their model is best. Yeah, I think that's all. You got to just understand that there's a spectrum of decisions you can make, the spectrum of users who do better or worse on each of these exchange, and those users will gravitate to those places, and there's probably not really one that's better. That's it. That's a fundamental truth. Now, everyone talking their own book obviously wants to tell you the other one is the evil villain, but it's not true.

It's like they both have places in society. Tom, do you agree with this take? I mean, I think I agree with this. I think they kind of point to the contrast of like ETFs where ETF flows are basically extremely well forecast when there's going to be a rebalance and when there's going to be like new cells or flows. And yet that ultimately doesn't really affect the performance of an ETF, like depending on. And, you know, also, obviously, market makers like knowing the fact that, hey, like, this particular sponsor is the one that's going to be executing this. So, I don't know.

I kind of agree with Tarun that, like, in the grand scheme of things, it's, it ultimately there's going to be inflil leakage some way or another. Like, I mean, I also see your points around maybe it does, it is a little bit worse to know that, you know, someone's specific liquidation point or someone's specific account value versus some probabilistic estimate of it. But, like, ultimately, I don't know if it, a, of a, you know, really makes that big of a difference. I think it makes a bigger difference than to ruin your, you and Tom are giving a credit for. I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't make it. I'm not saying it doesn't make a

difference. I'm just saying it's just preferencing certain users versus others, but there's always, it's a zero something. Like there's always each. Right, right. But I think it's pretty clear that like you don't want to be encouraging people who are hunting stops, right? That is the one thing that's probably not economically useful in a market. Everyone was always just like Arthur is hunting stops on Bitmex. This is like the same thing. It's the difference. Right, right. And obviously they're like they're accusing him of something that is considered market

manipulation. Different probability estimates. I agree. But like I don't think you, every microstructure will have some amount of this. And the question is, is there some perfect one? And the reality of the answer is no.

No, the question is not is a perfect. I think this PTF argument that Jeff makes a lot is, is kind of assuming the end state and ignoring the path. Because the path of ETFs was that you had super huge fucking slippage. in the early days of like iShare's ETFs. Those things were not tracking at all. Those things looked like these 3X short ETFs, inverse ETS,

which are just diabolically bad at tracking error for a bunch of reasons. Like fee reasons, there's not enough borrow, dot, dot, dot, right? Locate is hard. And what happened over time is the ETF market learned to become efficient. And the underwriters started outsourcing all their execution to these brokers. And so it became this game between the kind of two different types of HFTP people. And then that made the market equilibrium price go down. And all I'm saying is like you choose a market structure that attracts certain participants

and you get some equilibrium. And like, yes, there's some difference in probability of certain types of things being sniped versus not. But there's no way of, oh, I've eliminated everything in my one model. And like, I think the way that everyone talks about is as if there is this thing that like one secret trick that eliminates all X, Y, or Z is a bullshit answer. it's marketing it's not real it's not mathematical reality no i was going to say back to the mathematical reality we we cut you off to room before when you were about to say your maximum leverage that you've used

yes yeah i got cut off like twice i was trying to say it 5.7x 5.7 wow okay you're definitely is there a reason why it's 5.7 i love the number of 57 for many different reasons but i was not going to take 57. Is 57 prime? It's not prime, but there's this very famous mathematician who thought it was a prime and wasted many months of his life trying to prove some property of some abstracting because someone asked him to do it with 57. So I think it's just like a funny thing of like if you get too lost in the weeds of abstraction, you forget basic stuff and then you can't do anything in the future. Yeah, it's a multiple. Like 57 is a moral lesson of that for it.

It's called the Growth in Deke Prime. He didn't realize that he could just find some divisible. 19 times three? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, this guy is like the king of algebraic geometry and did not believe in anything that you could compute something for. It's like it's a certain, certain philosophy and like the more extreme end of abstract

math. And so someone after a talk he gave was like, can you just do this with like a real prime number and show me that it works, like give me like a full explicit example and compute something. And he was like, okay, let me pick a prime, 57. And then he spent an hour trying to do it. And obviously the thing didn't work because it wasn't prime. But he didn't think that it wasn't prime. He just kept going. And I think that's a kind of lesson. A lesson you can often see even in just using LLMs where like, you know, you give them the wrong input. They just keep going forever on. What was the name of this mathematician? Alexander Grothendie. He died on a

island off the part of France because he was a little bit like the unabomber and just didn't believe society was good and and yeah whatever this is a groan-deck is the one who turned down the fields metal right no no no no that's that's a point correcture conjecture guy who's in russia who's russian growth and deeks french well that was today's mary harleman that's the okay anyway sorry sorry for boring our users or no no look this is all part of This is what brings people to our show. This is exactly what everyone who's tuning in for James Wynn is here for. They're all here for the mathematical trivia.

All right. Well, so, okay, moving away from math, let's talk about the Ethereum Foundation. So news coming out of the Ethereum Foundation and the notorious Ethereum Pivot is the Ethereum Foundation has now done a full-on rebrand of the Protocol R&D team. So originally it was called the, what was it called, like the protocol and development team or something? Now it's just called Protocol, capital P. It sounds like some kind of tech publication.

So protocol is now being rebuilt with a new reframing and leadership. There are three strategic goals. Scaling the L1, scaling blobs, or scaling blobs slash L2, and improving the UX. Scaling the L1, they've assigned leaders or co-leaders to each of these three strategic initiatives. Scaling L1 is going to be Tim Beiko and Ansgar Dietrich. Scaling blobs slash L2 is going to be Alex Stokes and Francesco. Dommato and then improving the U.X is Barnaby Mono and Josh Rudolph, and Dancrad is going to be overseeing the entire initiative as a sort of, I don't know, L1s are or something, protocols are.

Several EF engineers were also let go in the process of this restructuring. And overall, it seems that there was a lot of excitement around this new rebrand as being this crystallization of what people in the Ethereum world have been clamoring for, which is a refocus on scaling the L1. Any thoughts, reactions on the announcement of protocol? Tarun, given you're the closest to the F, what was your take on this? I mean, I feel like I've been hearing this for months. So I guess, like, good to see it happen, but I feel like people have been talking about

at conferences for a while. It feels like it was already kind of down a while ago, and this was more a public announcement. I think it's, like, good, obviously, to structure. And I think Dan Krad has been, you know, if you've followed his writing compared to, say, Justin Drake, much more realistic. about progress and what Ethereum needs to do than I think kind of the historical leaders in eth research

but that being said you know obviously execution is the thing that matters and we just have to see them actually do all these updates you know I think they're promising some big things like 10x by end of year which for Ethereum would be astonishingly fast that actually happened so Well, so Tarun, so a while back, this is probably a month ago, you had a podcast on Unchained with Max Resnick that got a lot of heat.

And I don't think you had a chance to talk about on the show, but the two of you were very dismissive of Ethereum's ability to respond to sort of rise to the moment and actually be able to scale in response to the challenge. Max was extremely dismissive. I was taking the dialectic of like, do you think Ethereum will ever be like Solana? Because like he was trying to make the point that like, look. at Salon, really efficient organization. And, like, you think those people can never convert, right?

Like, that was his, and I was just trying to, like, rope him back to the center to be like, you just moved there. And maybe there's a dependency. Yeah. Yeah. The way I would describe it is that Max was like, Ethereum is absolute fucking steaming hot garbage. And you were like, so why do you think that is? Why do you think it is steaming hot garbage?

I would say it's really started in 2020 when the garbage started to steam. That was the vibe I felt. I was trying to pull him back to the center. I felt and I think most of the shit I got was just for doing that podcast. It was like I was actually shocked how many people really. I totally get that, you know, Max can be, has been like rude and whatever. And a lot of people like hold that against him in the Eastland especially because I think, you know, there are some incidents that probably were not the best. but he has generally been right, right?

Like a lot of the changes they did were kind of in response to stuff, you pointed out. I totally agree. But there is this psychological trauma in the Ethereum community around Max, which has reminded me to not do any more such podcast for my own mental health. Damn. Did you lose friends over that podcast? I got a lot of strongly worded. like fuck yous that which which i was like all right i i was trying to stay in the middle and like

somehow just got like painted with the tar brush of from the left and the right or where were the f u's coming oh no not definitely not a salana side this again they were like what that wait hold on why is it your salana left and right wait where did that come from salana's right ethereum's left did you not see that commercial no i'm kidding yeah i do um i mean i would be more curious to learn more about just kind of day to day, like, how does, how do these teams set goals and goals themselves and how do you create accountability and incentives to do the right thing and what are those right things? Like, I think to Solana's credit, it operates more like how I consider a Silicon Valley product team to operate, which is you have a North OKR and you have KPI's

that sort of feed into it. And for them, it's everyone knows it, right? It's increased bandwidth, with reduced latency. Like, you all know it, even though you're not on the Solana product team. And so when you think about what is our goal as a team, which I, as an individual, sort of have as my compass, like you sort of are always dialed into, is this actually moving one of those things? Scale the L1 feels very ambiguous and kind of nebulous. Like, okay, well, what dimension?

Like, what metric are we tracking to scale that? Like, how do you sort of weigh those sort of operational everyday wins versus maybe some long-term thing. And like R&D, I think, is a very different type of product function than like standard sort of product engineering. So yeah, I just don't like it seems like a move in the right direction, but I just don't know what the actual incentives are and how they're tracking these things. And like you want all of your teams and your community to also feel that that drumbeat and I don't know what that drumbeat is right now. It does seem like they're finding that drumbeat. I get the impression that Tamash has really kind of shifted the vibe within the Ethereum Foundation to say,

hey, these are the three things, UX, L2s, and scale the L1. And Dankrat being at the helm of this does feel like it's reinforcing, given the fact that Dankrat has been probably the furthest out in being the most aggressive and calling for extremely ambitious scaling goals. So I feel like that seems like it's being heard loud and clear. And like when I look at the comments to a lot of these posts, they seem to be reinforcing. that? Yeah, it's definitely better than what it was before. I think the trap I'm worried about, which I think a lot of teams fall into, is they reward and incentivize shipping. And shipping in isolation is useless, right? You ship to achieve some goal. You get to serious local minima. Yes.

If you do too much. Thank you. And so the question is like for the math version of what I was saying. Yes. How do you get out of being stuck in a spurious local minima? And I don't know. I don't know what the answer is for the Ethereum team. But again, it's a step in the right direction. But it's like, okay, unless we know and everyone in Ethereum knows, like, what is their IDRL? I don't know. So what they're missing is an acronym is what you're saying. Yes, that's, that's, that's all they were missing the whole time. They just need a little acronym. They need a number of, you mean surge and purge and whatever weren't good enough. No acronym. No acronym is not the same. Rhyming is just not the same. Fair, fair, very, very. I like the purge.

the surge and all the different names of the missions. But did you know what they meant? Vaguely. Yeah, vaguely. That's the problem. Nobody knew what they... No one knew what they meant. The surge was our surge activity.

Surge? Yeah, what was the surge? Robert, can you read it what the surge was? More. More. More. More everything. Honestly, I don't even...

I don't even remember there were like too many steps in each of them, like the sub-steps. You remember the diagram of the whole... whole thing. I do remember the diagram. It was just too confusing. The verge had something to do with vertical trees. That's, that's the only one I remember. Yes. Yeah. I just like, there were too many things grouped together where I'm like, these things don't seem the same yet they're in the same bubble. Okay. And I just like it was, I kind of gave up on using the names. Well, I will be excited for them to just ship more. I know you guys are talking about local minima and all this stuff of like shipping too much. But the number one critique is that they don't

ship enough or they don't ship quickly enough. It's like the number one critique. So I don't think they're going to get to a point where it's like, whoa, you're moving too fast, you're doing too much. I think it's going to actually wind up in a sort of nice equilibrium because it will swing the. Yeah, shipping anything would be great. I think again, shipping as the destination or the goal or like even in the surge and purge. The product was the thing they were celebrating, which is stupid. Like you don't celebrate the product. You celebrate solving, some problem or moving some metric. And like that was never even discussed anytime.

So I would add one thing, which is like there is a tacit acknowledgement in this reshaping of pure decentralized organizational structures being somewhat failed, right? Because historically, if you look at the theorem development, it was like you have a fork that packages many, many different updates at the same time, right? Maybe it's a storage update and it's an execution update. It's a bandwidth update. it's a like client verifiability update, whatever.

And you were only allowed to release updates if it updated it in this kind of almost like the big beautiful bill style thing, whereas like you have to like stuff everyone's like personal incentive project in it in order for it to get into the fork. You know what I mean for like it'd be big enough for the fork. It's very waterfally. Yeah. And because of that, you didn't have separate teams shipping on their own cadence. And this current setup, which is hierarchical, which breaks this.

of pure decentralization development view, effectively says, yes, we are agreeing that maybe actually it makes sense to have updates or forks for just some subsets of these, and some of them are going to ship faster, so I'm going to ship slower. And I think that is... Hold on, on.

Has the EF actually committed to faster forking frequency? Well, they've committed to them being different. Like, it's not omnibus anymore. Like, you don't have to fork for, like, and put everything at once. And they thought they were saying they're going to do hard forks more frequently. I thought Tomash said somewhere that they were going to actually increase frequency of fork. Okay.

I've not seen that. If that's true, that that's great. I agree with you. That very much is this sort of more Silicon Valley, modern engineering style of iterated shipping and kind of moving faster. It does in some way counter a lot of what people look for in Ethereum. Is this like extreme focus on. That's kind of what I was saying. Like even the org structure, you look at the protocols thing, is like very different.

than kind of classical Ethereum. Even though, like, is always true in every society, there's always a hierarchy somewhere, right? It might not be described as one, but there may be informal ones, and the informal ones can sometimes have a lot of issues, which I think is, like, what this is kind of also acknowledging. Okay, so I feel like to summarize everything that we've said together,

Ethereum needs an acronym. Anybody want to put one forward? How are we going to get this into an acronym? Some of that rolls off the tongue? I'll leave this to Turun. Tarun, what do you got? Scale the L-1, scale blobs, improve U-X. What would that be?

That'd be... Super Surge. S-L-S-B-I-U? I want the acronym to be like duck, D-U-C-K. You want to be duck. The D can be decentralization, and now we have to back-fit

acronyms things to the CK. K? We're going to hear K in there? Okay, you can just do D-U-C-D-U-K. I think like Ethereum, one thing I love about Ethereum is everything has to have a logo and like colors, right?

Like, and like the forks all have creative names and stuff. And like, I don't think this acronym would be Ethereum if it didn't have like a visual component as well. IBRL doesn't really have a visual component, right? It's like, it's a very like direct and I think Ethereum can distinguish itself by having acronyms with visual

accessories. How about a mascot? Should we also have a mascot in there? Well, that's what I'm saying. Duck is perfect. Duck is awesome. Duck is,

Duck would work. I think duck. I've never seen someone would work forwards from the mascot to the actual, like, usually it's the other way around. I have, I have worked in academic research where like everyone's game is like to make their paper have,

maybe not now. Now there's like too much of, this that people stopped it became uncool but like 15 years ago people would what's the thing with bills too people would just like work backwards from the acronym they wanted and they would like change the fucking result or the algorithm they were writing a paper about just so they could fit the acronym okay so the question is how can we make it there and more duck like so that it fits with this okay I got it I don't know why duck was the first thing they came to me but I'm like it's like kind of a it has a D and a U and decentralization at UX are the two things are focused on.

All right. Let's figure out the third one. All right. Censorship resistance. Oh, there you go. DUC. Decentralization UX censorship resistance. Okay.

There's nothing about scaling, though. We need some scaling in there. Ducks. Ducks. Ducks. Easy. S is easy. Okay.

All right. Let's see if we can make this catch fire. I don't know. This is a Fetch. This is a mean girl's fetch type thing. I don't know if we're going to succeed. But hey, in my mind, duck. I think it is the one piece that's missing.

It's the one piece that's missing is we need a cute mascot. We need an acronym. And we need something that people can just repost over and over again in response to every... What if you made it Scud and you had a little missile? And that was the character for the mission. In a world where one can spend $1 million on drones to destroy billions of dollars of equipment,

I don't know if Ethereum wants that. Yeah, it's true. We need a... It's a smiling missile. Yeah. It's a scud. Yeah. No, we just hard pivot from the rainbows and the unicorns, and we just go full on missiles.

You got out-based the Solana. That makes sense. No, I mean, yeah, go one layer deeper. All right. Okay, well, speaking of decentralization, there was a big article that came out. They got a lot of people talking from Miles Jennings, who's the head of policy, I believe at A6 and Z crypto. And Miles put out a piece calling for the end of the foundation era.

So for those of you who are not in the weeds of crypto protocol structuring, maybe you don't know what this is talking about, but here's the high level. Today, when you have an L1 or any kind of protocol, generally what you'll do is you'll start a company and you'll go raise money from VCs like people like us. And when you raise that money, you actually don't raise that money into the thing that actually launches the token.

You raise that money into usually a company that is a for-profit entity that might be in the U.S., might be, you know, wherever it is that you are hiring people and running your company. And so this is often called the Devco for the developer company or development company. But what ends up happening is when you launch the token, you go overseas to one of these tax havens like to the Cayman Islands or Panama or whatever, and you create a foundation there, a nonprofit. And this foundation is actually what is going to be issuing the token. It's what's going to be receiving the tokens in the token issuance.

It's going to be responsible for all the marketing and distribution and blah, blah, blah, largely as this kind of regulatory and tax hack that's developed over the last several years to try to prove that like, hey, even though there are people who are people who are, working on this protocol and continuing to be in service of all the things that are necessary for it to grow and to be broadly useful, it's no longer tied to the development work of the original team, which is, you know, the development corporation in the U.S. or in, you know, whatever jurisdiction is being built that is largely serving as a contractor to this foundation. Okay. So this is the Devco foundation setup, which has existed, I don't know, forever. Compound had a function. Not forever. Post-ICO, right? No, there was no, no, no, no, before ICO, 2016, right?

Well, no, yeah, Ethereum had, obviously, Ethereum has a foundation. Yeah, yeah, 2016, 2016 or 15? I'm just trying to... It's been a decade. It's almost a decade. We're so old, chopping. So it's a very, very old structure that, you know, originally was kind of just people thought, like,

hey, maybe this will work. And especially after the Gensler SEC, it just became de facto, this is what you do. Every single company in crypto got the same legal advice, which is, if you're going to launch a token, use this structure. So Miles Jennings has basically described what everybody in crypto kind of knows.

which is that these foundations, although they might be legally understandable why people are doing this, they suck. They're just so horrible and bad because they basically mean that if you actually want to run a foundation or launch a foundation, what you have to do is you have to go get, you know, if these things are, for example, in the Cayman Islands, you can't be an American and run a Cayman Foundation. You have to go find Cayman-based directors who will be responsible for that foundation. They will run the foundation charter. And you hope that these are going to to be good stewards of the thing. And that foundation has to work with the Devco, which has with the founders. And they have to like negotiate back and forth. And people often get into

spats with the foundation where the foundation wants to do something else. And they get really risk ofverse because they're run by professional directors instead of being run by founders or technology people. So it's all led to huge amounts of slowdowns and inefficiencies and all sorts of issues. And there have been some famous stories of foundation coups, quote, unquote, where you have these Cayman directors who just run away with the money or they'll pay them themselves, huge salaries. So Malz Jennings is basically saying, look, this is all the shit show. Everybody kind of knows it. And we really would like to just have companies, just running, basically being run by founders. And the new regime that's coming in through this new proposed

market structure bill will propose a totally different decentralization test, which is more about these markers of control as opposed to about your corporate structuring. We're not going care in the future about who, you know, do you have a foundation or not or your U.S. company or not, all we care about is these, these, uh, uh, uh, low side of control. If these, if you show that you do not do not have control, then this thing is decentralized and therefore it's not going to be a unregistered security. So he is calling now for moving away from the foundation model and moving more towards companies and as well towards this, this structure known as a Duna, which is this Wyoming based Dow structure thing that, that was recently created in Wyoming.

I don't think there's been a lot of these so far, but it is right now the only real U.S. structure that looks like the kind of thing you would want a Dow to be if you're going to have a wholesale replacement for the foundation structure where you basically are, this is a company that is responsive entirely to the needs of a Dow. So that was all a mouthful, but hopefully should give you some picture of what people are talking about when they're talking about the end of the foundation. I want to quick go around the horn and starting with you, Robert. What's your thoughts on this perspective on the death of the foundation? I think it's possibly long overdue. but also possibly immature, right?

And I say that because it's obvious that the foundation model is inefficient, right? You don't need multiple different vaguely competing groups with like redundant, weird complex structures to build a thing, right? Like it just seems like a waste of like time. Like I've spoken to a lot of founders who are like, oh, it's going to take us this many months and we have to do this. And then we have to find independent directors who know what we want, but also can operate. autonomously and like all of this stuff, right? So it just seems like a huge amount of extra steps to get to some place, right? But the world hasn't really seen or done it scale any other model. So to say that it's like the death of the foundation seems premature to me because it's not

like, oh, everybody look over here. This is the alternative that's working. Because like I don't think the Duna thing has like been tried. So it just seems premature to suggest an alternative because no one has really succeeded in alternate models yet. True, what's your take? People who didn't want to do the foundation model just moved to another country historically, right? Like a lot of people moved to Singapore, Dubai, whatever. They still do foundations.

Yes, but I mean, there are some that just like straight up did company, right? Yeah, no foundation. So, like, I'm just... I think if you're, almost always, if you're sufficiently big, you do a foundation, regardless of where you're domiciled. I guess, like, I honestly agree with the motivations in that like the foundation employees are always less motivated or whatever like it's like a different because it's like a different set of people they maybe are weren't

bought into the vision of the thing they might just be like hired whatever fine i agree i just think this wyoming thing is like a little bit also like kind of chilling your book yeah you made the structure so you want people to use it like i look nothing against i it's just like yeah i could imagine another structure in a different state under different jurisdiction that works also right Right. Like it's, there is no real other structure, right? This is like the only thing. Well, this is not a real structure either until it has tons of, you've proven, like to Robert's point, until it's proven. It's sort of like still like an academic paper to me. It's not like a real thing. And I think it's like a little bit carp before the horse to just be like, yes, it's already real.

But I also agree you kind of have to wheel these things into existence because there's some social aspect, which is why I think it's marketing to be like it's the, which honestly you need to get these things. off the ground. So there's no disparagement towards marketing, but there is shilling your book. Like, let's just be honest about that. To be clear, it's not literally their book because they don't make any money off people using dunas. No, no, but it's an intellectual shill. It's like, it's like iron academic paper. It's like, yeah. Intellectually showing your book. Okay. No, no, no. It's like getting citations, right? It's like there is a sense in which this is, this is a shill, but it's not a financial shill. It's like a influence slash. All right. He wants to be a legal influencer. create the new structure in the way that like what's his name marco who created the sask became an

influencer right like yeah now he's the head of a salana micro strategy competitor right like that's what being a legal in you think this was miles jennings what a crazy career trajectory yeah okay anyway but you get my point right it's like it's it's a it's a it's a clout slash importance in a certain community thing, right? It's not voluntary. I guess, I guess. Tom, you have a take? I mean, I think I largely agree. People don't love the foundation model. I would say, yeah, I mean, it's kind of the reason why everyone also incorporates in Delaware. It's like there's very well-established case law around corporate governance, taxation, like, same thing in the came, moving it to Wyoming. It's like, I don't know anything about, you know, Wyoming lies. It's like most lawyers don't either.

Our investor is going to be willing to invest into a Duna. I don't know. It's very much. a chicken and egg kind of problem. I also think everyone hates this current kind of foundation set up. I think it's part because offshore, this weird sort of separate group of people who are part of foundation. But I don't think actually in isolation there's anything wrong with a foundation and a for-profit entity for open source. I mean, I look at something like automatic and WordPress. There's also a WordPress foundation, right? There's nothing that's okay, actually. I think maybe good. Do you have something that's a nonprofit to sort of steward something that's truly open source, but maybe it shouldn't be obligatory is maybe more of the point here.

But I don't think this means that we're going to be done with foundations forever. That's a good point. I think there are very few things in crypto that are so done that they're ready for a foundation, right? I mean, I think Bitcoin is maybe one of the only things. And the Bitcoin Foundation was a principle of criminality, right? In terms of how many people on it went to jail? Oh, yes, sure.

And ironically, like it is sort of is the only example of foundation that is totally receded from any relevance to the underlying asset. Whereas, of course, the Ethereum foundation is we just talked about it as being very essential to the story of Ethereum. So I think there's, I would take the other side. So I understand the charge that you're levying against Miles here to room, but I actually do think that. It's not a charge. This is the same thing I do when I write. What's the point of giving talks at conferences? No, no, I get it.

I get it. Yes. It's intellectual shilling. I would describe that as intellectual entrepreneurship, which is that somebody's got to do the work of socializing, like how do we change the status quo? And I think there's just not a lot of people who actually, one, are talking about it,

and two, actually have the momentum or the ability to generate the momentum to shift anything. I'll take the other side of this actually is that I think there is a little bit of an illusion that the foundation structure is really battle-tested. Like when we say the foundation model tested, it's like, okay, well, Wyoming law, who the fuck knows? No one has done at Duna. I actually, I don't know if anyone has done a Duna, but certainly no big projects I'm aware of have done one.

Like the reality is that in what sense is the foundation model actually battle tested, right? What battles has it survived? We've never seen a tax investigation into any of these crypto companies. And so we actually don't know. Would it survive a tax investigation of saying, okay, well, you know, the money's over here, this thing's over here, they're paying them, blah, blah, blah. We actually don't know. second of the case of like, oh, well, if a foundation is doing it, it's not a security,

that obviously has failed, right? Fucking every single one of these assets have been securities, regardless of whether there are foundations. So in what sense is this foundation model, battle tested? What battles has it won that we're like, oh, great, this is why you should do a foundation. Now, maybe some lawyer is going to respond to me in a quote tweet and say, oh, you don't understand all these little tiny, whatever class action lawsuits we've gotten out of because we're in a foundation or a Cayman Foundation.

But I'd imagine a lot of there just because you're in a weird jurisdiction, not because you have actually survived some incredible legal battle. So I think it is like the cost that these protocols are paying for the incredible amount of inefficiency that they're incurring and the amount of cost and the amount of time wastage that happens because of coordinating across multiple companies and organizations that are run by basically bureaucrats who live in tax havens. Like I've experienced this. I've been parts of, I've been a part of protocols that basically got into really aggressive

battles with their foundations because originally everyone's on board, everything is great, and the two groups just diverge over time. And as a Silicon Valley oriented VC, the thing you learn over time is that pretty much always, if there's a dispute, the founder is probably on the right side. And I've never seen an example that went the other way, where the foundation was right and the founder was wrong. So usually we know the right answer. The community knows the right answers. Yeah, I guess I'm not trying to say the foundation model is the best, but this feels like a like I found a new best thing and then oh well

okay but if you could convince no one to do it and it hasn't happened and like it's not really the new thing yet to be clear I mean so this is this is my response to a lot of stuff like this which is that the US basically just changed like 10 minutes ago so there has been no time for anything to shift in a post-Gensler world like Gensler was out

in January so like January 19th it was the last day and we had no indication that's why I that's why again this is this post is marketing to convince the next Hayden Adams to do this. It is marketing. It is marketing. It's a dismissive way to describe something. But it is marketing.

It is fundamentally content marketing. I think maybe to turn to this point, I would like to see, and maybe this is in the works and there's not privy to it, some skin in the game, sort of the same way, okay, YC comes out the safe and now all the YC companies are using the safe and we're sort of attesting. Yeah, but this is how you do that, right? Like first you socialize it. Let me finish. Let me finish. I'm saying, wait, but if they have something, it's like, hey, every single new company that's going through CSX or startup school, you have to create a duna.

We're not going to back you. You're not going to be able to go through unless you use aduna for your corporate entity. Great. Now there's actual second in the game, incentive alignment. You know, they're kind of. I agree. Isn't that kind of fuck if you're, like, coercing your portfolio companies it is? Like, I think that's the one way.

No, you coerce your portfolio companies to all be Delaware C-Corps, right? Every single company. No, I don't. Okay, fine. You invest in a bunch of things that are Delaware C-Bes. investors generally require like when it's a company for it to be a C-Corp, not for it to be like some LLC or some partnership. If it is, you say, oh, that's super weird.

You have to conform to this venture model, right? Right. This is the way it works. So it's- Yeah, yeah. If you are, you think that the only way to do this as not marketing is for A66 and Z to say, we will not invest in you unless you create a duet.

No, no, no, no. I'm talking about like CSX or startup school where it's like pre-entity formation, if you're coming over here and you want to be in this program, when you're forming your entity, you have to use a juna. You can't get in unless you're using a Duna. Obviously, like if they're doing a series C, they can't be like, no more Delaware C corpse. That would be absurd. But, you know, the idea is, hey, at the top of the funnel, when you can actually have an impact. That seems very feasible in my mind. And I think the marketing is a way to soften the blow for the first founders. We're going to have to deal with all the regulatory, whatever

I think if you want to do that, so I don't know that I agree, it's not up to, what should I say, A6 and Z is such a big brand in the space that if they mandate something, they are more or less coercing a lot of people to do what it takes in order to get in.

If YC said, we are no longer investing in safes that have discounts, like no more discounts on safes like fucking ever, they're so big and so powerful that they're effectively coercing a bunch of people who don't have the power to say no to YC. I think if you are A6 and Z, that's the wrong way to do it.

The right way to do it is to socialize the idea to shift the Overton window, get a bunch of lawyers who are famously extremely risk-averse, and who every fucking lawyer I've ever talked to about, this is like, no, foundation model, it's so battle-tested. Dunas, they've never had it, da-da-da-da.

And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? What, like, how? All we do in cryptos get sued. Like, all we do is like fucking, like, we're an industry that has constantly been on the back foot with respect to legal. So the idea that, like,

well, we've obviously figured out the Holy Grail, which is the foundation, model is crazy, but you have to get lawyers to say yes to that. Right? Like each one of these companies that goes to CSX, they're already incorporated. Yeah, but the reason I think, again, is like the market signal of safes and safts is that people fucking use them.

And end of the day, they didn't have to shift the equilibrium. They did not even have to do that much marketing. The saft from zero to usage amazingly fast. Token warrants, same thing. And so I think if you just- The token ones were not amazingly fast. It took a while. Compared to, how long have you been hearing about Duna's?

I've been hearing about Duna's for like two and a half years. I've been hearing with so many Dau's saying they're going to convert and then don't do it. Because no one wants to deal with overhead. The Bort Innovation was pulled through the demand of all investors. All investors said, holy shit, this is generally better. Therefore, everyone should be using this. And it wasn't like leverage against the company. It was like, no, this is a better model to structure tokens.

And it won very quickly, just like save for. one versus like convertible notes very quickly once the market realized what they were. Right. So like to turn's point, warrants are a good structure and they literally went zero to one very fast because they were superior. Dunas have not gone zero to one even though the idea has been sort of socialized for some time. But the reason why the Duna has not won is because America was not the right place to do any of this until January. So like how could why would anybody ever do a Duna in 2019? Like, you'd be out of your fucking mind.

Everybody was doing all these gymnastics. Totally, totally, totally. So maybe the next step is there should be projects to do the Duna. To be clear, maybe Duna's have all sorts of problems. Haseeb is telling you, if you're a founder listening, Haseeb is telling you, he wants you. He's more likely to invest in you if you do a Duna.

Haseeb is explicitly saying this because of the, that is what, you know what, Dragonfly for now on, we will not invest. thing actually all invest in whatever. It just is just to see it only will only do the yeah. I see you got to pick your partner. I will vote no and I see if you don't do a do not. Dude Tom going in for the kill that was that was amazing. All the matters. Yeah there you go. Nice. Look I I the reason why I think I'm triggered by your reaction to this to ruin and a little bit Robert is this is kind of the same reaction that I've gotten

obviously in a totally different domain talking about marketing disclosures talking about changing the way that we do token vesting and like, you know, staking disclosures about whether tokens can be staked by investors is that there's just a, a just general distrust of this kind of like shifting the Overton window and assuming that like status quo is de facto okay. And there's so many things that we constantly complain about that are broken in crypto. And then somebody comes out with a proposal like, hey, he's the fucking, he's the head of policy at A6Z. He knows what he's talking about. I will counter your your examples of it.

Because those are material economic things where I can measure some notion of harm or gain very easily with those decisions. How can you measure the notion of harm or gain in market making? Because I know the historical bad incidents and I can use those as. Well, I know the historical bad incidents of foundations. Foundations are fucking terrible. Yes, but the problem is Do Not doesn't give you an obvious number of loss that could have been protected. There's no, there's no headline, hey, you would have, by spending this much money in the state of Wyoming, you will save this much. money in the future. There's no like simple sales pitch. Like the sales pitch is some fucking

5,000 word essay. That's not a good that the market doesn't like it. Do we even know the cost of foundations though? Like let me go back to this. Like see if you're like I know the cost. To me, they just cost a lot of money. Right. There's the dollar cost. But again, a duna or any other structure also cost money. I view the cost as a communication inefficiency and a development inefficiency and like a weird fragmentation of leadership as like a weird meta cost not like a dollar like oh it costs seven hundred two thousand dollars. We're just talking about the Ethereum Foundation having this fucking decentralized morass that they were stuck in and like oh it's great that it's hierarchical now.

Yeah, but other foundations had the hierarchy immediately. Like if I if you look at like all the sift tongues from 2017 like you're telling me that that that's an Ethereum specific thing. That's not like oh foundation forced you into that. I think, okay, fine. Just to be clear, I think Miles is very smart. I think Andreessen's great. I think my point was more around, you know, you're in the hot dog costume and you're

pointing around the room wondering like who did this. Like, you know, it's like you have the agency. You can make them do that. Like in your scenario, if you were a market maker and you're like, we need market maker disclosures. Like, great. Why don't you start? You can do it tomorrow versus, you know, being someone who's a participant, but like,

not really. I disagree. So if Guinea has been on the show. saying that market makers, he would love a market maker disclosure regime. But he's not going to be the only one to do it, right? He's like, I'm not going to discipline myself. Well, yeah, his point is like, look, if everybody mandates it or if all the big market makers come together and agree, then I'm happy to do it.

And I'm happy to even instigate it. But I will definitely not be the only one making disclosures because then no one's going to fucking work with me. Because nobody wants to be like, oh, I have one market making agreement is disclosed. Again, there's a clear economic thing to the market maker disclosure thing, whereas the Duna is like nebulous governance shit. You can't attribute one line item by line item to Robert's point. Oh, this is the cost benefit of it.

It just seems like, yes, it's cool. Robert has literally, he's the only person who has actually set up a foundation. So the line item, like Robert knows the line items. Yeah. No, I've never done a foundation. Which is a compound doesn't have a foundation? No. Oh, okay.

Sorry. I thought it did. No. Incorrect information. Okay. No, I've never done a foundation. because again it's uh-huh like it's a lot of stuff that was yeah i i just i just think like the benefits of duna are just like not really that clear to or they're kind of abstract and nebulous and

people are like what can i do what can i do quickly that to launch my token and it doesn't seem like it's which is to tom's point why you need to kind of force people to try it foundations aren't is a foundation a fast way to launch a token like what are you talking about dude you're an investor Crypto Protocol. Has anyone ever told you? It's so, oh, man, I set up my foundation. No, but it's fast. You've got on legal Zoom and you felt the docs.

It's fast from the perspective of founder because they can like find a lawyer at Goodwin or Fenwick or somewhere that is like, I will do this. Any founder I've ever spoken to about foundations. I think it's so much more standardized than a duna. Okay, go go find me. Yes, because nobody's done duna. So obviously it's not standardized. But this gets back to the point of like, you have a chicken and the egg problem.

If you cannot convince people to do it, you either have to force them, like Tom said, to get your example data points, or you have to have a clear value prop that is measured in dollars. And they do not have that. Did you read the post? Yes. Did you read the post? Yes.

I don't think it does not. No, it's written for fucking lawyers. It's not written for founders. You read that as a founder, like, great. So I'm going to innovate on corporate structure. And maybe my cost might be unboundedly high because, oh, I'm going to be the first chicken to get tested. Why would I do this?

Oh, it saves me X,000 dollars per month, per employee, per year, whatever. Okay, then it's, okay, I get it. But it's written purely to, like, be lawyer porn, which is why it's academic shilling. It's not actually real shilling. But still marketing. It's just a different type. What's real shilling? Real shilling is like your-

is when Dragonfly invests in a duna-based product. Yes, there you go. Talks about on Twitter and on the chopping block why this structure is superior. If you were doing a duna, I want to hear from you. Hit us up. I won't necessarily invest, but I want to know what the experience was like. And we'll bring it up next time on the show. I think we need a token to solve this collective action problem. I think that's really...

Dollar sign, do not. Dollar sign, do not. Dollar sign, do not. Dollar sign do not. I mean, it has a ticker. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Miles could make the token in a do... Oh, he hates meme coins. So we need a fine. This is not a meme coin. This is a consensus coin. We are building an ideological consensus around a new legal structure. So, okay. I love that this is the thing that we got most heated on was about legal structuring.

We will probably not come back on this because I imagine we lost all of our audience in this debate. No, we have so many lawyers. So many lawyers listen. I feel like they probably actually get... The lawyers are still tuned in. My point is, the lawyers you talk to

will always tell you, they get pitched all this Duna stuff. And then they have customers who are like, yeah, customers being founders. They're like, eh, too much. I don't want to think about it. And like, I think. To be clear, because families don't get an opinion about any of this. Okay.

Here's, okay, I'll give one last point and then, Troom, you can have the last word. I think this is ultimately how you shift consensus on anything, right? Nobody is going to do market making disclosures until somebody convinces you that doing market making disclosures is cool and that you're not going to be weird. Investors are not going to raise their eyebrows. Retail is not going to get freaked out if they see, like, all the things disclosed, right? The only way you're going to shift that is by somebody, doing the entrepreneurial work of building a different social consensus and making people even

think about this, right? This is not like, you know, the reason why we shifted from SAFTS to warrants was purely for tax reasons. And it's tax reasons to the investor. Again, economic benefit that is clear. Economic benefit that is not there. To the investor, to the investor, to the investor. But something that's beneficial to the project is much more inscrutable to the investor.

The investor has to really think hard and has to understand legal ramifications. They don't have to think hard at all to understand the difference between Saf and a warrant because it works for them either way. They don't need to understand the underlying legal reality. But for the difference between the Duna and a fucking foundation, they do. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on any of this. But as somebody's been investing in crypto for almost a decade, I have seen all of the pain that has been incurred by foundations. Maybe we hear from some guy who's done at Duna and they're like, guess what?

I had the exact same pain. It was just a different form of pain. In which case, great, that's worth learning. but like the foundation structure is so bad. It's so obviously stupid. It obviously goes against everything you would think of about how to create effective products or effective organizations that the sooner that we can replace it with something else,

the better if this is the way forward, fucking sign me up. All I have to say, I don't know what it is. Miles, good job on the marketing because you got us to waste 20 minutes. The shilling, the shilling.

It clearly worked as marketing, right? We talked about it. Now a bunch of people have never heard the fucking acronym Duna since we're on the acronym kick. Now have heard it. And I think this talking is basically trying to will into existence, which is fine. That's great.

That's great. I'm not, that's not what I'm disagreeing with. I'm just kind of saying like, yeah, but it isn't really on the foundation until I see that this thing works. And to Tom's point, the cold start problem hasn't been solved, right?

Like you've written a paper. You haven't like made the shipped. You know, like that's kind of what this thing. Maybe Duna should be the Ethereum acronym. You know, we change out the censorship for no censorship. Decentralized U.S. A is and scalability.

All of a sudden, everybody would be doing a Duna. No, no, no. The A should be acceleration because then they compete with. Acceleration is good. Actually, I like acceleration. That's a good one. Decentralized user network acceleration. All right.

So there's two options. either one, Duna is now the Ethereum acronym or to launch a Duna and tell us about it. So that's your, as the audience, that is your homework assignment.

If you launch a Duna that gets off the ground and you get to a, you hire more than five employees, we will have you as a guest on a chopping box. I don't, we get all of it. I do not agree to that.

I do not agree to that. But Tarun, but Tarun will interview you. Tarun will interview you. We got a wrap. Thanks, everybody. And we're back next week.