Unchained - Should Crypto Tokens Come With Investor Rights? - Uneasy Money

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

BitMEX shut down without an angry tweet. Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder joins Kain and Taylor on why dead tokens never get that mercy. Plus, Kyle Samani's Multicoin blowup. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cape⁠⁠⁠⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at ⁠https://cape.co/unchained⁠ (use code: UNCHAINED). ======================================================== BitMEX shut down after 11 years and crypto Twitter answered with nostalgia. When a token project dies, the same audience spends weeks dragging it. Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, joins Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to work through why. Goldfeder argues crypto's grant-funded, revenue-optional era is over, and explains why Arbitrum licensed its stack so that partners like Robinhood Chain have to keep paying for it, while Base pays Optimism. They trace the DPRK crewhacking crews now rotating through bridge exploits, debate whether Uniswap's new permissioned pools point toward tokens that carry real investor rights, and ask Goldfeder whether he would trade Arbitrum's open token for a restricted one only a fraction of the world could hold. The conversation closes on Kyle Samani telling Solana builders that Multicoin, the firm he co-founded, is working against them, and what that says about how much of an ecosystem can rest on a single fund. Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert Guest: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steven Goldfeder - Co-Founder and CEO of Offchain Labs Timestamps 📣 00:47 Cape: Get 33% off six months at https://cape.co/unchained 🪦 01:47 Kain opens wondering whether crypto itself is quietly dying in 2026 📊 03:41 Steven on Arbitrum's project tracking and the 'massive consolidation' hitting L2s ⚔️ 10:03 The proxy war: Robinhood Chain and Base now fight instead of Arbitrum and Optimism 🪦 14:23 Why BitMEX's shutdown felt nostalgic while token deaths trigger real anger 🌉 26:21 Hacks of the week: the DPRK crew behind the AFX perp DEX bridge exploit 👽 32:51 Kain's take: bridges got safer until 'aliens landed' and started hacking again 🏛️ 40:32 Permissioned DeFi: Uniswap's compliance pools and Superstate's equity-like tokens 🎯 57:32 Would Steven trade Arbitrum's open token for a 5% investor-only model? 🥊 01:05:42 Kyle Samani's Multicoin tweet and Solana's VC fight over Hyperliquid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can hate freezing, you can hate controls, you can hate it all you want. That's totally fine. I totally get it. However, the flip side of that is that you also get basically no rights. If there are literally no controls, there's literally no nothing. You can't have either way. It's just a free-for-all. It's just PVP.

The second we start getting into more experimental and more whether or not it's fully permission or not, but actually having controls, then you unlock new capabilities where maybe you can actually have rights and upsides and, like, actual information on what you just bought with your money. Hey, everyone. I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to UnEasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make this show awesome. This episode is brought to you by Cape, America's Privacy First Mobile Carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location, and your data, actually stay yours.

Get 33% off six months at cape.co slash unchained. All right, hey guys, I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monaghan, and today we are joined by a very special guest, Steven Goldfebeter, co-founder and CEO of OffChane Labs, the team behind Arbitrum. Welcome, Stephen. Great to be here.

Yeah, thanks for jumping on the show. It should be a fun show. I always love your takes for me. catch up in person. So let's let's make sure we get some hot takes out of you before we wrap this up. All right. So first segment is 2026. Crypto's not dying, but like so many things are dying. Like maybe crypto is dying. I don't know.

It feels like early, early bear market. It feels like we always have the story where like people that just limped over the line during the bull market somehow they somehow survived and they're just like I'm tired man like it's it's over right and they just capitulate like within we're only like less than six months in this fair market right so it's not like we're two years deep um but it just feels like like there's like a there's like a window of uh it's socially acceptable now you've tried hard enough in the very market that you can just shut down and be like, okay, I'm done, right? Like a month in is like a little on the nose. Like, come on guys. Like just try, like try and scound around to get some money. Like the guys that are like capitulating at the peak of the block and you're like, come on guys. But then six months in, it's like, yeah, okay, they tried. But it just feels like there's been like 10 a week. I think, I think it too. It's, there's been enough cycles on the history

books at this point where I think people are more. willing to say like shut down and being enough and they were just like quietly yeah they still died by the way yeah tushay even even without an announcement they were still dead they just like it's lovely disappeared or didn't like you know what I mean well in the

arbitral ecosystem um you know like just probabilistically you guys have had like what like you must have had a thousand projects or something like that that have been on arbitram at this point like do you guys track them do you have like any sense of who's who's alive or yeah we have like a strong ecosystem team that's tracking projects obviously there's a lot so not every project but certainly a bunch and definitely i think you know seeing a massive consolidation everywhere um but also like you know i guess what i track probably more than that is like one level up is like arbitram versus is competitors as well, which we've seen like massive consolidation. I mean, I think I think it's

healthy. I think it's it's probably a good thing ultimately because there was so much capital in crypto and the idea was also I don't have to think about revenues just like put this thing out, make it open source, get people to use it, launch a token and that's going to save everyone. I think we're coming very, very much back to reality. Because a lot of like the, some of the projects we're seeing shut down, like at least some of the, ones maybe they haven't like that I'm talking to founders like hey but like things look really good for you guys like what what's going on it's like yeah we have users we just we just we don't make any money off so yeah um whereas back in the day having users was sufficient for the token price like your

users provide a token that was how they paid you exactly and that those times are like well well well gone and now like people like he's like words that used to be far and like revenue are actually now important and um you know ultimately I think it's healthy you know for those that will get you certified as healthy. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. So, so, so like, you know, there's, there's a number of, uh, kind of different categories even that I've been seeing where like, um, you know, you go, okay, well, you raised even ignoring token projects, right? Like, there, there are projects that raised like a year ago, 18 months ago, uh, And I think this is like one of the challenges with crypto is because it's so cyclical, you feel the need to really compete in a bull market in like unsustainable ways.

Right. And and so, you know, teams that raised what would in a normal like ecosystem be like a three year runway, right, in like a series A or something like that, like, you know, two to three years burn through all their cash in like a year. And they're like, ah, it didn't, you know, didn't happen. Like, what are, you know, what are we doing sort of thing? And, and so how do you guys in, in like, do you help founders with that sort of stuff? Like, do you, you know, do you, does your ecosystem team try and help them? Or are you seeing like mergers and consolidations? Like, how do you try and, like, keep the, the heart beating when people are like,

burn through cash, there's no capital available? Like, what are the options? there. Yeah, so definitely the ecosystem has funding options available. You know, grants, but like recently, I think we as many, as well as many others have moved towards more of a sustainable, like, investment model over grants. But ultimately, like, we'll like do whatever we can to help a founder succeed in arbitram, but like if the product isn't like good or isn't going to succeed, like, there's no like propping it up. And sometimes it's just a hard conversation, which is like, but let's think about what's going wrong and let's actually like, you know,

understand why aren't you being successful? Maybe it's just like the wrong place, the wrong time. Maybe there's something that's fixable. Maybe there's a pivot required. So we do a lot of strategic works, work with like builders and arbitram saying, how can you succeed? We'd obviously love everyone to succeed, but it's also like a very competitive market. You know, the big thing about arbitram, which we've said, I think this like differs arbitram from, you know, differentiates arbitram from some other altus is we don't really get involved at the app players. So you know you're not playing against us. But at this meaning, like we don't have, you know, we don't have, an arbitram dex or like, you know, tokenized assets that like our first party, like,

we're very much, you know, build good technology, build good infrastructure, level playing field. At the same time, so you're not playing against the house, which I think is a plus, but it's, you know, obviously still a very competitive ecosystem. You know, want to launch a dex or competing against uniswap and the large dexes, you know, et cetera, down to every protocol. So I don't think there's any, like, benefit in, like, propping up negative bad protocols. I think there's a lot of health position on the market. But also, like, as you said, like, you know, the bull market versus bear market dynamics are so different.

I think Arbitrum, but also every ecosystem, you look back on like previous grants and you're like, what were we doing that then? Like, what happened? Everyone's drunk on, you know, like, like, how do we give, you know, $5 million to like Pokemon on the blockchain or whatever thing is, right? These numbers, you're like, wow, those were good times. but ultimately, again, I think that none of that is sustainable. And like, no one was asking the hard questions back then, which is, for many words, where is the money coming from? Where is it going to?

I think we were always been more prudent on the grand side of others, which is you'll make bad bets in life. But like for every dollar that we give out, we should have a story of how $2 come back to the arbitram ecosystem. You don't have a story then your and your and your and your sort of growth story, which you've seen so many ecosystems is I'll give like a dollar now. I'll get this big logo. and somehow, even though I'm paying everyone today, somehow next year, everyone's going to start paying me because they're seeing all the big logos.

That's like been like the downfall of so many protocols. And I think we're just seeing a lot of these players just died. They have no more capital left. They don't have any game left. Whereas an arbitram, while there obviously were grants in the ecosystem, was much more focused on good products, sustainability. And as things tighten up, I think there's still a core, like a strong nucleus of really good products that will get through the other side.

And again, like I said before, this consolidation, we're seeing consolidation. I'd say around two things around solid distribution. That's like really, really big, whether it's Coinbase or Robin Hood, but like real distribution partners with real users and also solid technology. And sometimes these two things will complement each other well. You know, case in point is also working very close. I mean, let's let's talk about that for a second, right? So at the moment, there's like a proxy war going on, right? between, you know, my old friend's optimism and arbitram.

But it's not the chain themselves, right? It's these, like, giant behemoths that you guys have somehow, you know, rallied to your side. You've got your two champions that are, like, fighting it out, you know, battling it out in Robert Hood chain and base, right? Like, and probably a couple of others, but, like, realistically, those are the two, you know, that are talking about distribution, right, that have the distribution that are like, you know, taking the technology and saying, like,

we are going to make this our own home sort of thing, right? So, like, that was not on my bingo card five, four years ago when all of this started. I was kind of expecting that it would be arbitraim and optimism would be directly competing with each other. But now you guys are facilitating as much as you are actually on the front lines. Like, did that surprise you how that evolved that? that whole thing definitely yeah surprised me how like looking back five years ago did not think that things would evolve this way i don't think i would have thought at that point that robin hood would

be like have a chain yeah i think it's like ultimately very forward thinking and they're like you know leading the way of the amount of like even like inbound lead bd from like massive massive like wall street firms that they've gotten since then and continue to get is like so i think they're they're onto something and there's a trend here but like ultimately no i didn't see that is coming. But I also think when it comes to, you know, the proxy war, as you said, the next level down on that is we've architected our business very, very differently. And we, you know, got a lot, a lot of lack for this early on, particularly when it comes to things like licensing and the lock in and the ecosystem, right? A core difference between,

you know, our strategy and say optimism strategy is, you know, do these people actually have to pay you, Right. In Coinbase's case, in base's case, they were faced with the following decision. Should we continue to pay OPE or should we just stop paying them? And that was like the decision, right? Because there was no... Well, this is, you know, communism sometimes comes back to bite you, you know, if you try to establish a communist regime. Particularly when there are a big capital interest, yes, that are like, you know, yeah, uh, leaching off off of that.

Well, if you invite, you know, but, of capitalist into your communist utopia, like there might be some consequences to that. Exactly. So that's, yeah. And that's, so that's, I think, number one thing, which is like a very different. Then that all goes down to the licensing model and the business model, which, you know, I think we built a sustainable bond. It wasn't like back in that old age, which I just mentioned, where the thought was,

give everything away. Don't worry about revenue. Token is going to solve everything. This was very, like, you know, controversial, like, oh, the, you know, Uniswax. First, like this license, the business source license. BSD, yeah. I think today it's actually something that's helped us very much to actually have a sustainable ecosystem where, you know, the large behemans, you know, actually need to engage with us.

And can't just say, hey, I'm going to take that software and go and run it on myself and cut these guys out. And I think that that's been, you know, very helpful. The other thing for us is, you know, we've still done this dual strategy where Arbiton 1 is still doing, you know, quite well as a chain, particularly in DFI has a lot of adoption on the chain. and we don't plan to see that. So while we're facilitating these proxy wars, as you will, and we're a very close partner with Robin Hood and Robin Hood's chain success is, like,

top of my list that I, like, want to ensure that, but also equally top of my list is Arbishop one success as well. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. I think, you know, it would be a very high-risk strategy to sort of completely rely on proxies to drive the ecosystem, right? Exactly. to make sure that, you know, you've got your own, your own sustained ecosystem that you have

full control over it. Because this is the challenge, right? Proxies sometimes don't do what you want. They have their own agenda and you're like, ah, we're good, good friends. And then all of a sudden, we're not, right? So definitely. Yeah. So I think back to this, the great die off, right? You know, one interesting thing is, I think people in the timeline see a startup dying, right? And there are kind of two very different takes depending on what flavor of startup that is, right? If it's a startup that has launched a token, then it is not amazing, right? Like the sentiment on the timeline is very bad, very bad. You know, people, people on the timeline lost money holding that token.

The token's now likely going to go to zero, et cetera, et cetera. If it's a startup that raised venture capital didn't launch a token, you know, had a different business model, it tends to be a different perspective, right? Like it's like, oh, well, I didn't lose money, right? Maybe I'm mad I should have got an air drop or something like that. Like there might be a little bit of that. But like typically it's just like, eh, that, you know, and the difference in reaction to token-based startups and traditional startups shutting down, like never ceases to amaze me.

But I think this one was particularly crazy. So Bitmex shuts down. Never did a token. Almost all the OGs traded. on there. Like if you were, if you're a trader, you were all there, even if you weren't a trader. Like I remember I gave, I gave all when when we were launching perps, I gave our whole team, I think like one BTC or something. It was like so long ago. It was like I gave them all a Bitcoin and I was like, go and trade on Bimax, lose your money so you understand what it is like

to trade on perks, right? Because a lot of them hadn't traded perps. This is this is so long ago, right? And so, you know, that was the first time. And some of them then obviously became addicted to the perps and we're trading on Bitmex all the time and not writing code, which was a bit negative EVB. But the thing that was quite interesting to me seeing the shutdown was no one was angry. It was like nostalgic. People were like, whereas if there had been a Bitmex token, if there was like a mex token or something, it would have been like histrionics. So, like, is that just like the nature of people losing money? They get really angry about it.

Like, what's your take on that? Like, why is there such a difference in reaction when it's a tokenized startup versus, you know, a startup? So many, like, almost everyone used Bitmex. It's sad that they're shutting down, but people aren't angry about it. I think part of it is like, like, I thought Bitmex shut down a few years ago. Maybe that's my bad, but they had like the whole deal with Yeah

Like you know Arthur got in trouble and the ankle bracelet Yeah and it was a few days It wasn't just as DC There was a few different like avenues They were coming after them And then

I think they restructure There were deals, etc And I I kind of Thought like I knew that it still existed But I kind of thought it was mostly on paper to like because you can't just like shut down overnight

or it's kind of a bitch to shut down like literally overnight. Yeah. I just never really thought about it until this. So yeah, maybe that's maybe that's one reason is that everyone sort of thought that it was like this is just like the final. The final. This is the funeral.

Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think also though that it is one of the projects that the nostalgia is quite real. And so it's probably, I think, like, some of the, like, we've been, there's been this trickle of, like, various shutdowns that have mixed reactions and stuff.

And this one was, like, the one that was just fully nostalgic. So you're sort of, it's sort of capturing the feelings from the, like a cathartic thing. Yeah. Yeah. For the general bear market, you know, not just bitmax necessarily. I would say most similarly reminds me the reaction of. Zapper recently. It was like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I loved that. That was awesome. Like, no one was, no, there was no, no, there was no token. No one was invested. Black people had to. I was invested.

Oh. Thank you very much. I was invested. I don't care. Yeah. Like, we don't care about money. Um, and it was like nostalgia, but I think that Taylor's part of people had already moved on.

It was like, just like, that's like the, uh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it's like, you know, again, Again, if you have a token, then you look at like token projects, right? And the other thing may be that exacerbates this, and I'm not sure to go back to like the earlier conversation about, you know, if you're a token project, so much of what you're trying to do is attention based.

And, you know, if people buy the token, that is actually almost works in lieu of having revenue or sustainability or whatever. And so if a bunch of people like you and they hold the token and they buy the token, then that's your lifeblood. And so token projects tend to be these like, you know, oftentimes like things that either go long-term zombie, right? Or like they burn through all their cash and then you just, they kind of disappear. They grind to zero. And then eventually they shut down or like the labs entity shuts down when there's like nothing left. And to your point, like people were like, oh, I felt that they were dead. I didn't.

So it's like, but, but, you know, the, I think like whenever there's a tokenized project that announces a shutdown, it seems like the reaction is always so much worse. Like, people are so angry. They like start dredging up all the mistakes that were made. Like, I didn't see anyone being like, oh, you know, Arthur should have done this if he'd done that. But like when you think about it in terms of, you know, like startup kind of trajectories, like, it's wild that Bitmex and of course there's reg issues and what have you, right? Like there's no question. But like, you know, Bitmex started a time where you didn't have KYC. That was the first thing, right?

It was like no, it was no KYC power. It was more than that. Or less than that even. It was like. But like being powered. free for all. But like being powered by Bitcoin was been in 2014 of like

sufficiently decentralized. Right? Like you got a you got a database and all these things. But like people are depositing Bitcoin. So that's totally fine. Like that's a wild thought. Like if you turned up today and you're like,

hey, um, especially curve with a troll box. Yeah, with a troll box. But like if I turn up today and I was like, all right guys like here's my casino and like uh you know it's a data base running in my basement um but like deposit bitcoin i think like nader al naji tried this right he was he was like uh big cloud it's fully decentralized you pay with bitcoin it was like no bro that was like a generation ago you can't

get away with that anymore like arthur got away with that but that's not going to fly in in 2022 or whatever whatever it was yeah um so so yeah i mean like it doesn't it doesn't time. It was a different time, but it just feels so, so weird to me that a project, and this is like startup reality, right? Like, you know, I see, I see people get so angry about token projects when they fail, right? And then you look at Bitmax and go, well, Bitmex failed. They were so early, so right, did everything right, and yet somehow some confluence of things happened. that they failed. And it's a bunch of reasons and stuff,

but like startups are really hard. Most startups fail. Even the ones that, you know, if you went back to 2015 and said, like, what are the startups that will be like the kings of crypto in,

in 2030? Everyone would have said Bitmex. Everyone would have been like, Bitmex will be top 10, you know, and, and Binance didn't exist. Binance didn't exist, yeah.

Binance didn't exist. And everyone was like Bipzig. I mean, if you were in Ethereum, it was... It was Polo. Yeah. Coinbase. Coinbase cracking for like the U.S.

Viot, right? Yeah. And then what? BitTrex. BitFenax. Bit Max. Polo. We're so good.

I was the polo guy for a long time. I was a polo. I was polo. 100%. I still miss my polo. And like, yeah. And so, so, you know, you look at, you look at that and go like,

okay, you know, of like most of those didn't make. it. Yeah. Like they were early, they had everything going for them, making tons of money, and like somehow they made like some series of decisions and got out competed or, you know, things happened. Like startups are really hard. Even in an industry with so much money, with so much momentum, so many tail wins. And yet, you know, these things, these things do fail. So yeah, I think like it's quite, it's just always interesting to me to see. the difference in reaction to

start up failure when someone on the timeline has lost money. That it's like so personal. And it's like how dare you fail? How could you fail me? I had so much writing on this. And it's just like, all right, man. Startups fail.

So. Yeah, I mean it's hard. I think there is something though that like with the token ones, people do feel like they have the right to be. comment on why they failed like viciously

and I don't I don't exactly know why because it's not like you could actually do anything right like the influence as a token holder the influence you have over a token project versus bitmax is essentially the same yeah so why but why do you feel so much more empowered to be like well token project this is why you failed

this is why you fell yeah no one's like doing like you know Monday morning quarterbacking of I mean, I'm sure there's a couple. I didn't see them on the timeline. There's always going to be some gib shit. It's not the same. It's not the same visceral. It's like, uh, like someone lost money, but it wasn't me. That's, it's interesting now. It's not like, you know, diabolical the way that, uh, it feels like if it's token project. Um, and yet, like token projects, you know, are so much less sustainable than Bitmex was, right?

Like, that's the irony is like, bro, like, you bought a token that had no connection to anything or revenues or anything. And you're like shocked and appalled that like it didn't make it. Like, you know, and and yet Bitmex, the thing that like absolutely or Poloniacs or whatever, like that absolutely should have made it didn't make it. And it's just, yeah, it's like maybe like a little bit of, I don't know, there's something there. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet. It's your carrier. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have been breached again and again, and sim swaps are still one of the easiest ways for attackers to drain accounts.

That's where Cape comes in, America's Privacy First Mobile Carrier. Same premium service, but Cape rotates the identifier on your SIM every 24 hours, deletes your call-and-text metadata after a day, and protects against SIM swaps with a 24-word recovery phrase that only he, you control. You also get two middle to end encrypted secondary numbers for banking and signups, so you stop handing your real number to every app that asks. Go to cape.co slash unchained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months. Okay, hacks of the week. We are back. All right, Tay, I'm going to head over to you. What's going on here? What's happening? I actually, I would like, oh, shoot, the hacks of the week.

Okay, so I think the biggest one we had, man, we had so many bridges. And it's not even last week, I think, to be four or five. But in the past month, there have been many. And I don't know if it's an AI thing at this point or if it's like, it has to be. The same reason why that headline on our segments made no sense of the same reason. The same guy that is hacking and taking all of our money is also writing our headlines. And they're really good at one of those things and bad at the other. It's quite bizarre.

The spikiness of these agents. Like, who predicted that they would be amazing? Yeah. And the most interesting thing about the bridgehawks specifically, for me at least, has been, this used to be a thing. Like, 2022. It was like, nobody trusted bridges. And then somehow we like overcame that.

We should not have. We shouldn't have. Bridges were always of risk, right? Like, and I mean, you know, you guys have one of the most systemically, like, high value bridges in the universe on the Arbitrub, right? Like, you know, I feel like I feel a little bit like Larry. Yeah. Well, I mean, the whole like roll up design was made to like actually have, at least from like Ethereum to Arbitrum,

this concept of a native bridge that you don't have to rely on, you know, at least active signers and multi-sig. But then this Jeff guy showed up and was like, hey, you got a nice looking bridge there. and build his own bridge next to it. And he's like, you're allowed to see this one. Like, this is going to do a lot of traffic, but I don't want you to inspect it. Obviously, on the network, there's a lot of different bridge.

In fact, I think the largest, and this is a distinction that people don't understand. So one of the larger hacks of the week, I guess, was an independent hyperledger like Arvich and Bridge. but and I think the initial headline was like like someone posted this like Arbitron Bridges hacked and now it's like oh yeah that was scary that was scary activated on blockade get your clanker in check guys you're straight out of the ecosystem

please Tom you took like 10 years off Stephen's life for there we have no idea so we obviously and obviously we don't want any bridge to be hacked but um you know we take But if there's a bridge that's going to be hacked, do you want to do someone else's? Like, let's be real, right? Like, not yours, right?

Like, well, we take obviously personal responsibility, of course, over the Arbitain Bridge. So we activated very quickly. We confirmed that it wasn't the Arbiteram Bridge. We figured out whose bridge it was. We have an active chat with them. So we alerted them, offered to help in whatever way we could,

although there wasn't much to be done at that point. The hacker was pretty swift in swapping, swapping to Heath and bridging about Ethereum. But that headline, yeah, definitely I would say it called me some gray hair, but at this point it's almost all over. Yeah. Well, yeah, we tried to cope a narrative pretty quickly

because the last thing you want is people to like misunderstand this and then start panicking. Of course. Yeah, panic and induced all kinds of secondary, you know, consequences, tertiary consequences, right? So, yeah. So we were, by the way,

So what happened? We were also panicked because our internal feed called it a hyper liquid style bridge. Yeah. And so Okay.

But obviously when you're like looking at your phone on the run and it's like one of the hack alerts like you don't really see like the dash style part of it. And you're just like oh God. And then I see. Let's not too hyphenated style. This is an Ethereum consensus style bug.

Like no man. Like it's not. Like, what are you talking about? Like, don't say that. Clankers. But then I checked Twitter and everyone's like, the Arpichum Bridge. It's been hacked. And I was like, and you're like, oh, good.

You're like, oh, wow, okay, great. No problem. Provide. So it ended up being, so it ended up being the bridge for this Perpstack's AFX. It was like the bridge that they, it was like the outflow specifically were coming from this bridge. This perpstacks, AFX has like, exactly. for like a month and a half. I think we've attributed this one, actually, at this point.

This one's the same guys that did layer zero. Wow. Like exactly the same guys. So, your per step. Five compromised hall validator signing keys? Five? Yeah. Well, you know, you can have more than one key per server.

Right. But yeah, I mean, it is a hyperlipid style range situation. So, which is very, I think hyperlicket now has. style. Style. Style. Um, we also saw them like on hyper, the hyper unit bridge though. So I got to learn a lot about bridges because I was like, ooh, who are they targeting next?

But yeah, basically if you, I mean, if you're encrypted, you're going to be targeted. This is the big DPRK guys, the same guys that got helped down and stuff. Right. They're quite good at what they do. Even if you have them on separate servers, they can still get them. but they've been doing this since Rohn these are the same guys that hacked Rohn in right

yeah they're very good at getting on these servers and then being like I don't know your keys it is I don't know but it's been when this hack combined with all the other bridge hacks has just been

just so top of mind for me why the technology has not changed that much the off-sec has not changed that much why did we get to this period where it kind of felt like the bridges were like safe. Like we weren't seeing bridge hockey every single way.

I'll tell you why. I'll tell you exactly why. We started off and we were retarded. And we did a bunch of really dumb things because we didn't know what we're doing. Bad things happened. We realized there were consequences. We put humans up against other humans. And we're like, all right, we're going to get the best humans.

There's a lot of money at stake here. Let's make sure that we like really think about this. And we were able to like, you know, find an equilibrium. where like the best humans were able to keep the other best humans at bay for a period of like two, three years. And then like fucking aliens landed and they're really good at hacking shit. And we haven't yet marshalled our alien army. We're working on it. Like you can see it happening in real time.

There's a bunch of things that people are working on. Like, you know, Codex just, just open source their like security, CLI, whatever. we now have like you know k3 and and quen code a 3.8 that are actually allowed to do cyber security stuff which is a blessing and the curse but like we i think this this you know it took us a year or maybe i mean maybe stephen you have a better sense of the timeline of this but like it took a year or two for us to like stop fumbling hard on bridges right like did you got like you know as an l2 bridge, you know, the bridges all over the fucking place in Arbitrum land, right? So like, how did you guys kind of enforce some discipline and rigor across the ecosystem for Arbitrum?

Like, was there some program that you did to, like, upskill people? Like, how did you guys actually on your side, right? Like, start to stem the bleeding on that back of the day? So the first thing we did was obviously hard in the native bridge and, uh, a lot, invested a lot there. But also, like, educated folks on how to use the native bridge correctly, for example. And you'd think this is probably counterintuitive, but like initially, actually, many of the large exchanges were doing like immediate sequencer only confirmed withdrawals. And we also get a campaign that you should wait until it lands, you know, gets all one finality or just have like some like tolerance of like, okay, I'll keep like, you know, a million dollars

at bay. But if like a really large withdrawal comes in, like whatever your like threshold, is just have that explicit. We did a campaign around this, so both hardening and education. And I think there was definitely a lot of consolidation around like a few of the larger bridges. So they are all over the place, but definitely like, you know, they're the same tech, the same underlying tech that's being deployed, right?

Yeah. And we take less of an active role. I mean, we'll do whatever we can. We'll advise people. We take obviously less of an active role in actually auditing the third party bridges on the platform. But like, you know, we do have like, when we engage with teams, the team is going to say, hey, you know, can we get your endorsement? We don't audit their code, but we try to check out, are these like legitimate people? We don't obviously want, you know, do due diligence

to make sure that we're not promoting scams. Not that it's like full proof or 100%, but like, you know, we just do like kind of second level diligence. Like, did these people look like they're taking the right steps? Right. So we may not like have our auditors audit the fullness of their code, but we'll ask them the right questions. And of course, it's an open platform. We don't control that. But we can try to influence things to the extent that we can, you know, using our influence and association.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because, like, there was a long period of time in early, early Ethereum days, right? Even early crypto days. But it was still kind of prevalent. People would roll their own crypto, right? Like, they would do their own weird crypto schemes because they thought they were really smart and, you know, smart engineers love our problems. They use like tertiary.

Remember, do you remember this? Yeah, I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, they're like, no, no, no. Like, we're going to do our own crypto thing. Like, don't worry about it. It's fine.

And people had that beaten out of them. Right. They were like, you can't roll your own crypto. Don't do it. If you do it, like, we know you're retarded. Like, that is such a signal that you have no idea what you're doing if you try and roll your own crypto. And so it got kind of beaten out of the market that, like, you don't roll your

crypto. So, like, you have to use, like, a proper library that's, like, been vetted. Although, you know, again, like, libraries, you know, they've been around for 20 years now get cracked, so whatever. All bets are off. But there was a period of time in the early L2 proliferation era, right, where there was not yet this sentiment of, like, you can build your own bridge. Now, the irony of this is that, like, if I said to.

my like local municipality. I'm going to build my own bridge. They would not allow that. You can't build your own bridge. No one would think that was a good idea. I'm like, oh, no, this is Kane's bridge. It's going to be amazing. Like, don't even worry about it.

I've got the best engineers. It's going to be cool. Like, it's in the name. Like, it literally didn't exist a month ago. Now it's got $25 million a billion. A billion car at the day, like just like driving. over over this bridge, right? And I'm like, it's fine. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

But it took a little while for people to be like, actually, please, don't build your own bridge. I know it sounds like an easy thing to do and you think you're really smart. But like, to your point, Stephen, like, we have some bridge technology, like use that. You can still own the stuff, right? Like, you know, and I think centralized exchanges also did a lot of this, right? like they would they would you know like kind of set up their own infra like we saw a lot of like early centralized exchange hacks were around this kind of like the connection to a new chain risk right where where you know they would do stuff like not care about finality they're like

oh we know we're doing we got smart engineers if the other thing is and there have been sorry i just going to say there have been a couple hacks where it was actually it wasn't like a compromise or infra compromise, but it was the, it was like a specific sort of like logic vulnerability or spoof on one specific chain that allowed. We've seen a couple on like Cosmos to Eath, the Cosmos Eith, whatever. I said the other thing is I think it's just like a human nature thing is like people have very, very short term memories and the longer you go without like an incident, the more risky, both like a good. But also like user is like, we'll ask like if you're questions. Like, I'm in the business, like, at least, you know, for a long time, I consider

myself to be a business of like selling security, right? Because often, like, people would come, like, why build them as L2? Just build on this other, like, you know, back on the day's side chain or whatever that has like one validator. And you'd say, no, no, no, it's like really important because if something goes wrong, like, you're going to care about this. You're going to care about the fact that it's decentralized, you know, et cetera, like the list of things. But like, in good times, no one like hears about security care, which they just say, like, give me the future is give me the lowest fees and give me that. And then it's like, you know, often it tastes like an FDX event. We'll go, whoa, oh, this is what could go wrong. Okay, I understand the need

of security. So there's always, I feel like this like unfortunate cycle where like we forget, we drift off more reminded. I mean, FTCS feels like two months, right? Like, let's not use centralized exchanges. Actually, they're pretty useful. Let's go back to finance. All right. Let's go our next segment, permission defy. So Uniswap put the compliance check inside of their pool contract. So these are permission pools launched by Uniswap Labs with securitized, Superstate, and Dowgo. And they basically allow issuers of tokenized funds to restrict trading to approved investors while still getting the benefit of B4. So Leshner, we should probably get Leshner on the show at some point.

That'll be fun. The CEO of Superstate said, until now, compliance with tokenized securities lived at the app layer, a gate standing in front of the market. Permission pools move those rules into the pool itself. That's the piece of plumbing tokenization has been missing. So I think the kind of innovation here is not needing a, centralized party to some extent.

Like there's obviously an oracle-like scheme, right? But now the oracle is embedded in the pool. And so, you know, the pool itself is checking whether or not someone has the pass that's required to be able to trade here. I guess people don't like this stuff because, like, they just don't like things. It has the word compliance in it? Yeah, compliance. and what happened?

Yeah, we all hate these things. These things are evil or whatever. Yeah. Well, so, you know, I think the interesting thing about Super State, right, is, you know, Robert has been trying to kind of thread this needle of have tokens be valuable, which is kind of a wild approach to the world. But I think he's learned some lessons in his career, right? And like I think the the core thesis of of super state, and this is like, you know, infra that is needed in order for this to work, right, is let's not have these assets called tokens that have no rights, no obligations, no, you know, ties to revenue or anything like that, right?

let's replace the bad parts of those things, right, which is like no investor rights, no anything, just trust me, bro, you know, incentive alignment or whatever, with an asset that does actually have some or all of the properties of an equity, right? The challenge with that is law, the law, right? Like the good thing about tokens is do whatever you want, because they're like this illegal thing, not, you know, not not financial illegal advice on that one. But but so, you know, this is this really interesting tradeoff space, right? Where it's like, if you want a thing that actually has value in the real world, right? It can't be this like, you know,

extra legal thing flowing around that like is not attached to anything. But that, has consequences, which means some people may not be able to trade it, right? Like, if, you know, if, uh, if you allow anyone to trade it, then you run into issues, etc. So like, you kind of need this infra. Um, but I think people, uh, just look at that, especially like, you know, like the rural, um, kind of hardcore, uh, like decentralization maxis, um, look at it and go, this is not worth the trade off. Like, okay, but this is, This is a separate, let's call it a separate product, right? They're calling it permission pools and it's uniswop tech plus permissioned stuff, right?

Yeah. So it's not like they're adding, it's not like they're permissioning every single uniswap, B1, 2, 3,4, right? It's like, it's just a very, it's just a, this product in the series of products, it now has permissioned optionality. or is supposed to be used case. Like practically, right? Let's imagine we had a time machine. We go back to whatever it was 2019 or something like that, 2020 when you guys are starting operatrum, Stephen, right?

And I'm Leshener from the future, right? And I'm like, all right, guys, like, here's what I want you to do. Instead of issuing a token. And, you know, again, a chain is slightly different here, I think, because chains can actually have value, you know, without necessarily having investor rights attached to them because they have core functionality. So chains are probably the only exception to this rule. But there's an argument that even chains should consider this.

And I say, okay, you have two paths. You can issue this token that only works for the chain but has no legal rights and doesn't get any revenue from activity or any of these things. right or because you also have equity in like an entity that's in the real world right what if rather than having this split you just issue one thing which is this equity like instrument right and we're going to bake into the chain some compliance checks and stuff to make sure that only certain people can own the token etc in 2019 2020 you would have been like get the fuck out of my else man like what are you talking about seriously there was more value on the table for a permit mission list though, right?

Yeah, of course. Like, like, am I, am I, like, like, the technology didn't exist. But let's imagine that this guy comes from the future and says like, hey, I've built the technology. You're like, you're like, whatever. Go back and do the lending thing then. Like stop this nonsense. I mean, I mean, Arbishop was like very unique in the sense that like,

getting about all the economics and the revenue and the flow of actual value. Like, you know, when we discussed, you mentioned, you mentioned Kelp Dow and, and, and the hack there. And obviously there was the Arbitrary Security Council action there. Like, it was by design that there was this external entity, right, that's like, you know, broadly elected. And it wasn't like me that had the power to do that. And the token is that ultimately like facilitates that, right, via a regular governance vote when you're doing like a more like the time upgrade, you have more time for. The token holders electing the Security Council, which itself is a distributed entity that can make this decision. I think that was like a good proof that it actually works well.

And I know that like arbitration is very unique. But the point is like separate from economics and any like value there like and this is where we differ from like Uniswap. Uniswap has immutable contracts. So like, you know, it's more of a question of weird. You can just like deploy something and be like, hey, Yolo, right? Like we're done. Something that you're going to upgrade and you actually want to have the power sometimes

to do really fast upgrades in emergency situations. Like you need wide distribution. And I think, you know, a token is a very good instrument for that. But nothing that you guys have would preclude you having this like pseudo equity token, right? Like if instead of this being the arbitram token, which is a distinct instrument from off chain labs equity, right? If they were the same thing, first of all, you'd be in jail. So let's just, you know, let's not forget that part, right? because 2020 was pretty dark.

But if you had done that, right, like there's an argument that you say, well, no, like, what this does is clarify what this instrument is. It doesn't stop you from having a security council. Like, we have boards in the real world. We have, you know, entities that are responsible for doing things. Like, all you would get is more clarity about the relationship of this token to future revenue, et cetera, et cetera. And again, like, Arbitrum's a bad example.

because it's a chain. I think if you were, you know, compound or like, you know, or AVE or something like that, this would be, this would be maybe less controversial. Yeah. I think there's no question about it. Like a lot of the like token designs that were like popularized were very much a function of the against their era. A lot of the like advice on the relationship between.

In a good way, right? Like, because he was such a good guy, right? Yeah. To ever do it. The best to ever do it. The best to ever do it. A lot of the relationship, LAPCorp and like, you know,

token holder and like foundations or DAWs, like was guided by, you know, how do we, how do we stay compliant and innovate during this era? And I think a lot of that is being revisited now in clarity, you know, both literally and figuratively, I guess,

exactly what we want here. And there are a lot of, you know, world where there is more clarity and more paths to do things that are more innovative. and, like, you know, give people different rights. I think that people didn't do that because it wasn't like,

oh, I don't want that. It was, I don't know if that's legal. I don't know how to. Yeah, we didn't have the technology. We didn't know, you know, how. The risks were far outweighed. You know, there was a, there was like an incentive, like incompatibility, right?

Where, like, no individual entity was going to take that risk. Yeah, I know I wanted to use the exact same formula that anyone else is used. So you know, like, even if the SEC at the time isn't like saying like, this is blessed, you know that like, okay, this is sort of the paved path that everyone else is using. I think that's just sort of, you know, that's not the place that you want to innovate on in 2020. Right. I'm going to do exactly what everyone else is doing. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't be the slowest guy when the bear is coming off to you. Yeah. And well, so then interestingly, Radium did the same thing, right? So, so, you know, I know, I know Lesher well, and he's been pitching me super state for, for a long time. and I'm an investor. So, you know, I've thought this was a very interesting kind of angle, right? This idea of like reduce the uncertainty of these instruments by like making them more equity like,

you know, having clear disclosures, et cetera, et cetera. Because, you know, back in the day, we were like, oh, no, that's okay. We'll invent our own disclosure regime and it'll be totally fine. And that didn't work out as shockingly as well as. we might have hoped. But it does feel like the, the like, you know, crypto anarchist in me is like, there's a bit of a capitulation where like adopting, you know, the evil empire's technology to like make our stuff better. But it still is somewhat of a hybrid, right? Because, you know, you're going to have potentially tokens that are, you know, have investor rights attached to them, but therefore have

obligations in terms of who can own them and trade them. And, and, you know, that, from an innovation perspective, I guess, like, will be a very good test for the ecosystem of, like, do people prefer these, right? If everyone hates them, then they won't get adopted. To your point, Stephen, right? Like, you know, you couldn't raise money if you were like, hey, we're raising money, but also we're going to take on Gary Gensler. No one, that's not fundable, right?

Like, he'll be like, sorry, bro. Like, I'm not giving you my money to go and take. on the SEC, right? Like, just do the fucking thing that everyone else is doing and just keep your head down and go and, like, build the thing that we want you to build, right? Like, but, you know, if, if, if people start to actually adopt these things, we will get, like, a natural experiment of, like, does the market prefer, you know, a thing, even if the distribution, because I think it's probably worth maybe clarifying this, right?

Like, anyone in the world can own the arbitram token. Yeah. Like, as long as they're not Iranian or North Korean or whatever, right? Like, there's probably like a few. But like, let's call it 95, 8% of the world, right? Can own the arbitrage from token, can participate in governance, can get elected to the security council, et cetera, et cetera. Like, it is the most open, like... In theory, yeah.

In theory, right? In theory. I mean, like, in theory, like, anyone can own this token and anyone, like, in theory, even like the the council is like open to anyone in reality though there are uh various like that's called them controls although that's the controls that you know influence the like how the things are together and what realistically can happen i think that it's in most of crypto historically the controls very much are fluid and live more at the the social layer, right?

Of course. Where it's like Twitter being like, you can just interrupt. Jump in. Don't hold off. You can just jump in. I think, yeah, I think definitely like in theory and but also in practice, like anyone like any non-sanctioned entity can go ahead and buy the arbitration token.

Obviously, there are the larger token holders that will have a larger say. But like we for example out off chain don't allow ourselves or our employees to direct you vote with their tokens because we don't want to, you know, we want to like new space for the community, for delegates to actually take place. I would say the hardest place. I don't think this is just for Arbitrum generally, is in making this work and practice and something which we've,

you know, I think it's done pretty well on, but it's a battle is actually get to the place where people are engaged and the smart people actually want to vote. And they're not just saying, because what was this, there was this thing recently where, I remember where like,

E&S. E&S. It was where it's own voted and no one paid attention and they just took all the money. I don't remember. Oh, they were like 10 of them. Oh, yeah. Barnebridge. Yeah. Yeah. So like that's the problem where sometimes these people are paying attention. And I think one of the mistakes that we

made early on in the Arborosome ecosystem is like when we over-emphasized decentralization to the point where we like there's a difference between like decentralization. It's been there. Don't worry about it. It's fine. There's a decentralized. The route of power versus like operational logistics. Like the Dow should not be voting what ground of

toilet paper to use at the arbitram. The Dowman's going to say no toilet paper. People are going to the Dowell and saying, can I get like $5,000 for this conference? And then you get, where you get is apathy where the smart investors like, I can't handle this sort of volume. I don't want to, that's not my problem, man. Five grand is too. Yeah, yeah.

You have these professional delegates that are like, oh, I'll, I'll answer this. So what we did was we got rid of these professional delegate programs. we put in a set of procedures where votes go live now on Thursday, right? So, like, there's not like just like you know when to look when you also go live. And we also like put in via a vote, but put in charge of certain operations, like the arbitral opt out, you are the operative. You are the operating companies. We don't need to bring decisions like toilet paper.

By the way, if there's like a revolt and it was a terrible ground of toilet paper, you can come back and like take away and like it. Turn it in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So good times we want to vote on that. Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people like organically, synthetics was like this.

You know, we had, we had a delegation, but, you know, we had a council that it's like, not everyone wants to vote for everything. So you're going to delegate. And we probably went further in terms of like how much power was delegated to the council. But then we had other checks where like you could vote them off instantaneously, right? Like if someone really did something wrong, then like you just, you know, dissolve the council and whatever. But sorry, just back to this question of like, so at the moment. let's say 97% of the world is allowed to own the arbitram token.

They can own as much as they can buy. There's no limits. No disclosures. It's a, you know, it's a one of the most, like when you think about that, right? Like, you know, sitting here in 2026, one of the most amazing things that we've ever pulled off in finances that, like, we have this, like, thing that just is everywhere, accessible to everyone, etc. the alternate the the this you know alternate timeline where leshena comes back in his his time machine and pitches you on the arbitram super state token that is actually off chain labs equity but tokenized and has these restrictions let's say five percent of the world is allowed to own it right um

like functionally if we if we take our ideology away for a second like functionally, the only difference that I can see here, right, is that even though 97% of people, and this is, I think, is the pitch of Superstated and the pitch of Lesnar, right? Even though 97% of people can own the arbitram token, there's a small segment of people, let's call it 5% or 10% or whatever, that are sophisticated that don't want to. they actually like well I prefer to own off-chain labs equity because at least then I have investor rights and I can call Stephen and say like stop doing dumb shit or whatever they think that they're going to do right and and this is the trade-off that we've made like implicitly like the implicit

trade-off is like there's a there's a category of people that probably don't want to own this instrument because it has no rights and they are sophisticated and they're like this feels dumb when I can just go invest in the equity and that feels normal, even if it is literally just, as you were saying earlier, Stephen, like, do the thing that everyone's doing. Like, if you are the Harvard endowment, like, go and buy equity in a thing, if you're excited about it, don't buy the magic beans that the guy's selling, right? And so, you know, there's a group of, like, institutional investors, et cetera, as much penetration as we've gotten with tokens and you can own tokens or whatever. And I know you guys sold tokens to some very large, you know, sophisticated investors, right? So, so you've been able to,

like, bridge this gap, but not all of them, not all the time, like, you know, different, different markets, whatever. How do we feel about that tradeoff? Like, you as a founder, how would you feel if you were living in that alternate reality where only 5% of people could own the arbitralcone token versus now, where it's 97%? Are you okay with that tradeoff where, like, there's just a group of people that are sophisticated and go, eh, I don't like this. And would you make that trade? I don't think so. I think we need a better token regime where we get clarity, you know, I want

cake and eat it too. So you have, you know, 87 and we can have that sort of, you know, more clarity of what you can do. But like, again, for me, and maybe this is like unique to Arbitrim or a few projects, it's much more about the actually like, you know, actually going back in time because, you know, in that era, I can tell you when we raised our seed round, So for 2017, 2018, there were a few investors that said, like, hey, we'll only do it if you, like, do a token. And back then, I'm like, I don't think Arbitram needs a token.

I'm not doing a token. So, like, we like literally turned down investors that that said that at the time. Fast forward. We only, and at the time, by the way, Arbitram was like the deploying, like, the vision of Arbitram was like these like short-lived chains. Like, oh, I want to put the price up to me on the L2. So I spin up a chain. I wouldn't call it chain. I spin up an arbitralym instance.

We get our validators. You play chess. We shut it down. Remember. And like this notion of like a long live chain. And then it's like, okay,

but then you have these mutable contracts. You need to have. And that's really where the token, it really didn't come from, in our case, a place of like, um, you know,

obviously eventually all the revenues were sent to the token. So that came afterwards. But like it didn't, it didn't come out after that. I'm from that. It came from a point of like need for governance. And the thing I said before around like, we want this to actually be decentralized distributed control.

And so for me, like the 97 is important because like the question is on the five is like, how many people, where are these, you know, where are these five domiciled and how easy would it be to compel the five to do something, you know, whereas the 97, hopefully is much, much more difficult. They're in New York. Let's be real. The five are in New York, right? So like maybe one's in L.A.

visiting like watching the Lakers or something. But yeah, yeah. So, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. I just think it's going to be very interesting to see this cycle.

For sure, this is going to happen. For the first time, we were going to see tokens that are like pseudo equity. I think I think Super State is going to like kind of break out and we'll see some big projects make this decision. So we will get to see this experiment in real time. The interesting thing for, Yeah, sorry. I was going to say, what's, what's the, what's the, what's the take on the, on the timeline?

Is there any, like, actual tangible? Most, most, no. Okay. Most, I think, I think most people that see this, the annoyances with, like, Uniswap, right? Especially because Uniswop is, like, to your point, Stephen, the immutable one, right? Like, the one that's, like the most. God, they're, they're, like, free. And, and, but, you know, they've been doing stuff for a while, BSD license.

They invented that. people hated that. You know, so Uniswop has been doing non-communist things for a while, right? And people don't like it. So, so. Okay, but most,

most of the visceral hate on the timeline right now is like, it's permission. And even if they tell us we hate this and they're going to freeze all the tokens and, okay. And my only,

I don't know, my response to that is like, you can hate freezing, you can hate controls, you can hate it all you want. That's totally fine. I totally get it. However, the flip side of that is that you also get basically no rights, right?

If there are literally no controls, there's literally no nothing. You can't have either way. It's just a free-for-all. It's just PVP. The second we start getting into more experimental and more, whether or not it's fully permission or not, but actually having controls, then you unlock new capabilities where maybe you can actually have rights and upsides. and like actual information on what the fuck you just bought with your money.

But Stephen, you said clarity. Like, do you think clarity is actually going to give you a super state like thing in a classical token? I don't. So I think clarity will open the doors for us to really have these like, you know, deep conversations of rulemaking and foul on legislation of like, okay, there's a framework. This stuff is like legal, like understood. and, you know, how much can, you know, a single entity own, like, these are things that are, that are discussed there, which I think are really important. What does decentralization look like and mean?

And so I don't know, like, specifically clarity itself will answer this question, but I think if we move into this regime of like, okay, we're taking this on. We're like regulating this. We know, like, the rights of a defi user. We know, like what, and I think that's going to be, I think, very important to getting, you know, the answers to, to these questions. interesting interesting so yeah i think it's like more of a platform for us to kind of build build on then like instant clarity

i would say so yeah i don't i mean i think we'll be probably even if clarity passes tomorrow i think it'll probably be a year or two till we actually have the effects of that um you know really entering the market probably it's a signal that we're taking this seriously and you wonder why we just do whatever the fuck we want right like i don't have a year man i'm not of time for that shit. Like, we're just going to launch something. Just going to launch something. I don't care.

So, all right, let's wrap it up because we're a little bit over. One last segment, though, because we haven't mentioned Kyle Simani on the show yet. Kyle is back. We're contractually obligated to do it. So Kyle versus Multi-Coyne. So Kyle Simani told Salonabstallano builders that the firm he co-founded is working against them. So this was one of the most amazing tweets of the bear pockets so far, in my opinion. I have been, by the way, I've been waiting for this take.

I did not think he was actually going to say it. I think like as the drama was like kind of, it was simmering. It was simmering. And I kind of felt like there was something like this. I didn't, I had not, I had obviously not called that this is like what he was feeling or whatever. But obviously there's a disagreement. But my God, like, I hate Kyle, but I also love him for actually coming out and fucking saying it. Like, this is the gas bear market drama.

Oh, my God. I know. I love it. So, so the, I think we just flash it up. But if you're building in the Salonat ecosystem, you should understand that multi-coin is working against everything you're building. Like, you don't want Kyle fighting against you. Like, it's just negative EV. Like, you just don't want, he's too crazy.

He's too cracked. like as much as I find kind of like hilarious and ridiculous and and have had my beefs with him like you know he also took 50 grand off me because I'm an idiot right and I was like he bet me some dumb Ethereum thing

like he just has a way of he has a way of thigh uping people into things like I would never bet anyone else except for him 50 grand that Ethereum would be like a trillion dollar whatever the hell I thought it was going to do right like only hell would I do that with right So, yeah, you just don't want to be on the other side of Kyle.

But so I think the core of the issue here is that Multicoin now supports hyperliquid. They bought a bunch of hype. And the hype went up a lot. I don't know what their cost average entry is, but they're up a lot. And, you know, Tushar is obviously doing victory laps in whatever shared channel they still have if they have one. And Kyle is as salty as I've ever seen him about anything. And yeah, it's just wild. I mean, this ought to be a big thing.

Because this is like, this is probably maybe if not the thing, but it's got to be one of the things that led to Kyle leaving. Oh, I think it's the, I think it was the thing. Like, I think he was like, you will, you will invest in hype of my dead body and they were like, goodbye. Yeah. And his thesis is that because doing so basically will, is a conflict with their deep slana. Yeah. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah, go, Stephen. Just, this is a lesson where I tried. Fonzalana learned a long time ago where, like, FtX era, where the dependence on like, a particular investor to like be like doesn't always end up well. So I actually think like from I mean from multi-coins perspective, like they can invest what they want from Salon. If I'm a Salana user and think that there's any single VC out there that oh my God, if they buy someone else's token, that's like back.

It's over. Like how's a problem I think in the ecosystem? And I think a lot of people actually thought that Solana was dead after FTX because they thought they had, you know, were way over propped on by a single. And I know to Salana's credit, they showed that they were not and they were resilient and they were able to bounce back. But like, I don't know. If I'm a salana holder, which I'm not, I think we have bigger problems. I'm concerned about what a single VC is also invested in a competing project.

You know, it is a very Thelana thing though, right? Like they had, you know, SBF was like too big to fail for them. And then they're like, all right, that didn't work out well. How about Kyle Simani? like they didn't really learn their lesson they're like uh we need a new guy to be the king of this place right um and and you know it's it's funny because like there is something very salonahy about that right like they the trenches and salana um are like much more culturally uh homogenous if you will um than then say ethereum right like ethereum we could never we can't even agree if we want batallic to rule us right like you know like the the salada trenches are like you know we love toli we all agree on that and also we need some guy to give us money so like how about let's elect Kyle to be that guy so yeah it's interesting to see like you know Kyle still has a lot of money um the thing that I was kind of

surprised by is that he didn't just instantly go like I'm launching some money ventures like that has to be coming that has to be coming like that's why I wonder if this is really about if him leaving multi-coin was really about hyperliquid or if it was like another because yeah, why hasn't he launched his you know? Like I feel like there's something.

My prediction is he will. My prediction is he will. He will. All right. Yeah. Maybe he's just seeking a break like me. But he keeps getting drag back in. He just getting dragged back in.

No, please stop. So I can take a real vacation. You know, be employer enough enough. All right. Thank you so much, Stephen, for joining us. It's a great show. Thanks for joining us, audience as well on this episode, Money Team of Money. Remember what happens on chain never stays on chain.

We will be back next week. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at UnchainCrypto.com slash uneasy money.