Unchained - The Chopping Block: Aave Civil War + Flow Hack + Coinbase Super-App - Ep. 993

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

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. This episode opens with the Aave DAO civil war: a CoWSwap integration that allegedly routed swap fees to Aave Labs/Avara instead of the DAO, igniting “stealth privatization” claims, a “poison pill” push to seize Aave IP/brand, and a bigger fight over who really owns Aave.com and the protocol’s front door. Next, the crew unpacks the Flow hack (a $3.9M mint exploit) and the wild rollback talk that followed — plus why forks and bridges make rollbacks dangerous, turning bridges into accidental custodians and breaking old security assumptions. Finally, they break down Coinbase’s System Update and the “Everything Exchange” strategy — stocks, tokenization, perps, prediction markets, stablecoin rails — and whether this approach can win against Robinhood. DAO wars, chain chaos, and super-app ambition — let’s get into it. Show highlights 🔹 Aave DAO civil war erupts — CoWSwap fees reportedly route to Aave Labs/Avara, not the DAO, fueling “stealth privatization” claims. 🔹 “Poison pill” proposal — DAO demands Aave IP/brand and Aave.com control, turning governance into a DevCo vs DAO showdown. 🔹 No foundation, messy ownership — Aave’s pre-foundation setup exposes off-chain IP risk, jurisdiction questions, and untested legal theory. 🔹 Christmas vote drama — 41% abstain signals a redo; OG/Asia backlash pits “property rights” vs “commons” narratives. 🔹 Flow hacked for $3.9M — chain pause + rollback idea sparks outrage (and wouldn’t even stop the attacker). 🔹 Rollbacks meet bridges — forked history can wipe innocent bridgers; bridges become custodians when chains reorg or rewind. 🔹 Interconnected chains break security — old models crumble, and small chains “die twice” when bridges/oracles unplug. 🔹 Coinbase goes “Everything Exchange” — stocks/ETFs, tokenization, perps, prediction markets; can Coinbase beat Robinhood’s funnel? Hosts: ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner [MIA], CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Links: Aave Cowswap Integration- Tokenholder Questions (aave discussion)  https://governance.aave.com/t/aave-cowswap-integration-tokenholder-questions/23530?u=ignas  Aave Will Win: 2026 Master Plan by Stani Kulechov https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/2001036446098919461  Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:51 Aave Civil War Erupts 06:37 CoWSwap Fees Spark Aave IP Debate 10:20 Can a DAO Own IP? 15:25 Aave’s Pre-Foundation Legal Quirk 28:20 Flow Hacked: $3.9M Mint Attack 33:50 Small Chains Die When Bridges Leave 34:33 App Chains Boom Is Over 36:32 The Hidden $20M L1 Tax 43:29 Coinbase System Update: Everything Exchange 57:43 Coinbase vs Robinhood: Build vs Buy Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think there's something that strikes a nerve in like people who have been in crypto a while versus people who are newer and there's like some disconnect that that is also hidden this. That is a good point. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed to trading firms who are very involved. I like that E is the ultimate problem.

DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the three of us get together and give the industry insight of perspective on the critical topics of the day. So quick-chintros, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Robert is enjoying his new year like a normal person, but the three of us psychos are here to record a podcast for you guys. Joining us, we have, of course, Tarun, the Gia Brain, Grand Puba of Gauntlet. Yo. And I am Asib, the head hyperactors. man at Dragonfly. We are early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block

at XYZ for more disclosures. So I've been actually off the grid for quite a while. I haven't been as tuned in into what's happening in Crypto Land, True, and you were just saying that same thing true for you. You've been touching grass. Similar. I'm in a rural place in the middle of nowhere in Australia, so. Ah, okay, very good. And Robert, now is even farther flung than any of us. He had no internet access. So he was enjoying the New Year, bringing in the New Year in style.

But it's been another week of dramas for us to jump into with respect to what's happening in crypto. Although price action has been pretty muted, there hasn't been a lot happening on the macro front. There's always interesting things happening in Dowland. So we wanted to cover a little bit what's going on in Ave in what's being dubbed the Dow Civil War. So, Tarun, I'm assuming that you're probably the closest to this, given that Gauntlet is a service provider to the Dow.

But let me kind of set- Was. Was. Oh, that's right. That's right. Was a service provider. So let me set a little bit of backdrop to what's going on within the Civil War. So, of course, Avey is the largest on-chain lending protocol today, very, very successful protocol. And they have a token called AVE.

Now, there's also a company called Avey Labs, I believe also known as Ava. This is a company that's founded by Stani Kulichov, who's the founder of AVE, has been on the show. And the Dow and the company own different things. So the AVE-DOW controls the smart contracts, the risk parameters, the managers of the treasury, and it also faces the service providers who directly work with the Dow. Now, the labs, the company, this company controls the front end. So AVE.com and the domain is owned by the company. The brand, all the brand assets, the IP is owned by the company.

them. They manage the GitHub. They manage the socials and all the kind of actual infrastructure to run the front end indexing, all that kind of stuff. So up until now, it's been a pretty calm and friendly connection between the Dow and the company, but they recently diverged in their interests. So what happened was at the beginning of December, they added a new integration. So the front end of Ave allows you to do swaps. And previously, they had an integration with pariswap, which is a dex aggregator, and they swapped it to cowswap. And with CalSwap, what somebody discovered about a week later is that when CalSwap generates fees, those fees do not go to the Ave Dow, they go to Ave Labs. And those fees, it's a little bit unclear how much it is,

but it's something like, you know, on the order of $10 million a year that would go to Avey Labs. So this was discovered, got socialized, people got really upset. Mark Zeller, who was known as the kind of the protectorate of the overall Dow ecosystem. Mark Zeller called this a stealth privatization. People got really, really upset. And this kind of ties a little bit to what we were talking about last week with Axelar, where Axelor got acquired and it was like, oh, there's all this drama about Devco versus the foundation.

This, I think, is a more clear zero-sum conflict between the Devco and the foundation. And so some proposals were performed on the Dow, basically demanding that the Dow receive the assets, like all the IP, from the Devco. So one of them was called a poison pill proposal, which demanded to seize all AVE related IP, code, and the brand, and force AVE Labs to become a Dow-owned subsidiary as those clawback all revenue that was earned using the AVE brand.

Now, Stani, who owns Avey Labs, he defended Avey Labs and said, look, we've been a great steward of the protocol. The protocol has ultimately succeeded and become this dominant player because of the work of Ave Labs. Like, we should find a way to move forward productively with both because ultimately AVE is going to win if we work forward together. If you guys try to destroy Avey Labs, Ave, the protocol is going to be in a worse position for it. If we were doing poorly, there's more argument to like, hey, say, hey, Avey Labs get in line, but really, like, you know, this obviously has been a productive relationship. So there was a snapshot vote that took place on December 25th, on Christmas Day, which was called out for being

maybe timed in such a way that it was not going to encourage a lot of voting. And there were some arguments about, oh, was this rushed and it does not follow the normal voting process in terms of, you know, proposals going through the snapshot discussions. So on the December 25th vote, the nays won, the nays being do not absorb the AVE labs into the Avey Dow, you know, kind of keep the status quo as is. However, 41% of the vote voted to abstain. So voting to abstain is basically you show up in the vote, but you say, I'm not voting. And actually, the people who are on the opposite side, the Dow advocates, asked people to vote abstain in support of saying this proposal has been rushed.

We want to do another proposal later when everybody has a time to debate and actually decide what is a good moving forward proposal. So 41% voted for to abstain, 55% voted nay, and a very small percent voted yayes, which would be actually taking the assets from the Dow. So there's going to be another vote soon. But this has been widely seen as probably the biggest flashpoint within Dow governance about the conflict between a Devco and a foundation. So I'll stop there. Tarun, you're probably the closest to the AVE Dow and all the machinations that have gone on in

that ecosystem. What's your take on this whole Dow Civil War? I'm thankfully not close now. I think that's the beauty of it. By way of background, I think Mark Zell in particular hates gauntlet and has gotten to very public fights with you guys before over some of your past feelings. I would say I would say I do think this is sort of why a lot of the newer DFI protocols have gone different directions.

but I guess this was like kind of always an undercurrent for a while, to be honest. Like even back in 2022, 2023, I think like the friction between and BGD who sort of view themselves as the main stewards of the Dow and Avara were like sort of latent. They weren't like, you know, you gave this description just now where you're like, everything was great and all of a sudden it was bad. but like any long-standing fight in a complicated relationship where people are friends and enemies and back and forth, it was brewing for a while, I would say. And I think there was kind of this feeling, and you can see it in some of the comments.

So, like, this is not me saying, I'm not saying any opinions because having been in enough Tao fights, I'm kind of, I prefer being on the sidelines and the bleacher. But the, you know, you can see a lot of people say like, hey, sort of there was this appearance that like AVE Labs kind of stepped away from Avey the protocol for a while, especially when they kind of changed their name. They were running lens protocol. They were doing all this other stuff. And then kind of came back later to do V4, whereas like V3 and the stewarding was kind of done by the Dow providers. And so there's, I think this, this. Animus goes back a lot longer than just like, hey, we want the IP now.

I think the cow swap thing is kind of weird to me because it's sort of, I remember when the Paradex integrated. So like before basically Avey had the swapping feature, which was using Paradex, which is the small decks aggregator that realistically was like kind of probably would not exist at all if Avey wasn't routing order flow to them. they're really tiny. So eventually, obviously, the prices just got bad, so they had to pick a new one. And so I don't really know how these front-end wars end.

I do think an interesting parallel is, of course, the Uniswap one where they just had the unification vote, and now the Dow and company are sort of the same. But for many years, Uniswop Labs, the company would constantly get the same type of criticism, right? like, oh, uniswop X, like the fees go to the company, not to the protocol, so the LPs are getting rugged. And I think the funny thing is, like, this entire set of, like, uniswap and Avey sort of switching sides on this has made a lot of the Anons who love commenting and being kind of assholes on the internet about this stuff.

Very confused because, like, a lot of them are like, I've hated Uniswap for so many years. They've been robbing the LPs. And like, now they're like, and a lot of them are like, Ava is the best run Dow in history. And like, I've just observed their Twitter presence has become completely confused as to what side they support anymore. And so I think these things are kind of complicated. I don't know what it means for a Dow to own IP off chain fully, to be honest. Like, I don't really understand how you would reconcile this? Don't the Dow's usually own the IP?

Like, they usually own the trademark and like the. Like, for the foundations, usually that's what happens, right? The Fountain, no, no, no, foundation, yes. Foundation, yes. But the foundation is supporting to the Dow. Isn't that usually how foundation charters are set up? Yeah, but it's like, what jurisdiction are you going to make the IP claim in, like, do you want to make in BVI?

Do you not want to make it? So, Avae doesn't have a foundation. Yeah, there's no foundation. There's no foundation. I see. Oh, I see. Yeah. So it's, it's, remember, they're kind of, and I mean this in the good way, right?

They're a cockroach, right? Like, they, ICOed in 2017. So they kind of have a different story than all of these people who are foundation labs. It's, like, more structured because, like, at that. And so, like, there's a lot of idiosyncrasies that come from that that are not so obvious. But I do think there's sort of this weird thing where, like, no one has really tested a lot of this stuff. Legally, like, um, I, I don't know why I'm blanking on his real name, but his Twitter name Lex Knoad, the lawyer. Gabriel, Gabe, Gabe.

Gabriel, Gabe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. We had him on the show. So I feel bad. That's right. Brain fart. But I think he had some, he has some interesting points about the idea of like, I, no one has really challenged a lot of this stuff.

And like, it's not totally clear what happens. Like, you can make different suppositions, but it's not, I don't know what it means for the IP to be, used in an aggressive lawsuit by someone who has valuable IP. Because I kind of think a lot of the foundations don't have IP and a brand that's anywhere near as valuable as Ave. So, like, we haven't tested something as big, in my opinion. I mean, maybe the L1s kind of do the L1 foundation. But honestly, I think Avey just, like, has a better brand than them and probably more people

know about them. I mean, Ethereum IP is owned by the Ethereum Foundation, right? And isn't the Bitcoin? Yeah. Wasn't that true for Bitcoin at some point? I don't know about Bitcoin, but I think Maker, I remember, also had, like, a trust that owned the IP

that then, like, was, like, the trustee basically had to obey, like, the votes of the Dow holder. So it's, like, sort of another roundabout way to, like, have the Dow owned IP. But I actually have kind of a different take on this. I think this is actually different from the Uniswap drama. And that the Uniswap drama, I think,

was very clearly a sort of bright line of, like, where is value going to, accrue, is it going to go into the labs entity or into the foundation or into the Dow? And I think it stung especially because there was this whole multi-year debate over, you know, when is there going to be a fee switch for uni, you know, when, when do uni holders get paid? And then it was like, oh, actually in the interim, the lab seems actually going to eat first. And then maybe at some point uni holders get paid. And it's clearly cannibalistic with LPs and token holders, right? Like charging an incremental fee on top of your existing swap, clearly that.

that hurts, you know, the price in execution and unique competitive. So it's like, clearly there's a fixed pie and you're trying to divvy it up and that's, you know, painful. This is like a actually totally different use case and workstream than like core AVE lending. Like I think if AVE labs were skimming bips from yield that should be going to lenders or borrowers or to the Dow, I would totally empathize. But this is like, like, why does the Dow have a right to what this website is, you know, earning from swap fees.

Like the Dow is not, the protocol has nothing to do with swap fees. It's not a dex. So the argument, the argument is that like the Ave.com brand should be owned by the Dow. And it's by virtue of being the Ave.com brand that they're getting this flow.

If they instead were like, avarra.com, then I don't think anybody would complain. They're like, okay, they're making money on swap fees. I mean, that feels a bit pained,

I guess. Like, sure, you could, you could maybe make that argument. But it's not like, oh, these are fees that are not going to the Dow. Like the alternative is they just shut down the fees

and then no one gets the fees. And or they shut down the feature and then no one gets those fees. So in my mind, it's like a totally different work stream than, you know, the actual core protocol. So I mean, I hear you on the IP monetization, but that doesn't even seem like what they're talking about.

They're talking about the cow swap fees. Like I don't think Nave IP itself. So I think this is a very good thought experiment. It's a very good thought experiment because I think if it was avarra.com, nobody would complain, right? And I think it's probably even true that if avar.com were the main way that people went to Ave, I think people would be less inclined to complain.

They'd have a much stronger case to stand on, right? It's uniquely because it is AVE.com, and that is where everybody goes. And in most cases, what most people expect from a Dow is that these assets are owned by a foundation that is basically a not-for-profit that's purely subordinate to the Dow and the token holders, right? And Ave has this weird quirk. It was built a long time ago. this is pre-foundation era, the legal structuring that everyone kind of imagines

is the way that this is supposed to work. It's just not the way that it works in Ave. In Ave, there is no legal entity, I guess, or maybe there's some small legal entity that's kind of a backbone for the Dow. But for the most part, the Devco owns a huge amount of the assets that normally would be owned by a foundation.

And that creates a subversion of expectations from what most people would expect to be the way that this works is that maybe the Devco is licensing this from the Dow, but no, that's not the case. The Dow has no claim over the IP. The Dow does not own the name Ave. Avey Labs owns the name Ave. Avae Labs has all the rights

through all the cash flows from the copyright and so on. And if they choose to give some of that money to the Avey Dow, they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and in violation potentially of their fiduciary responsibility, right, if they have their own shareholders.

So I can see why this is a weird setup. Now, I think that's a very good point that you made Tarun, that this is not the way the Dow's look today. Almost any modern Dow is structured totally differently than this, where the IP actually is owned by a foundation that is a not-for-profit. And if there is an attempt to build a profitable, like a for-profit company, like I'm going to build a mobile wallet. I'm going to build a whatever, some other thing, like an all-in-one defy neobank that has a swap function as well as, you know, routes you to Ave and blah, blah, blah,

I think everybody would be like, yeah, cool, great. Try to build a profitable business on top of this protocol, but the protocol itself owns the back end as well as the front door, right? The weird thing about it is the fact that it owns Ave.com and that they're monetizing people's access to Avey.com. And that was the same constraint. I had the same issue that I had with Uniswap. Because so much of the volumes Uniswap was going into the front end, if they just created Uniswap X, I'm actually okay with UniswapX and not going to Unitokin. And I'm also okay with Uniswap wallet, not going to Unitok. token. Like if they were making money off the uniswap wallet, fine. You know, they built a mobile

app that's hard. It's not obvious to me why token holders should have a claim on the revenue that's made by a mobile app. But uniswop.com is unique because it is the front door. And it is what everybody associates with the brand equity of unitoken and blah, you know, Uniswap, whatever, to the extent that people expected that's what they were buying. That's what they should get. That seems like the right answer to me. And so I think Avara should be free. Look, it's weird because of the fact that everybody knowingly came into this situation, right? That's what makes a situation unique, is that if you've been in Ave Dao for a while, obviously, I don't spend a lot of time looking at Ave politics. If you've been in Ave politics for a while, you know this.

You know that Avey Labs owns the IP, they own the code, they have the copyright, they have the domain. So if you bought AVE, you bought it knowing this, right? Hopefully, presumably. And so maybe the best argument here among all of this is not that, like, hey, you know, Ave Lab should get punished or Avey Dow should get punished or whatever. The best argument here is that we need better disclosures. Because at the end of the day, it's okay if you buy a token and the front end is owned by some other company. As long as you know that, you can price that in.

If you don't know that and your expectations are subverted, that's bad. But information is the solved to that problem. You know what I mean? Because for most Dow's today, this is just not a problem. Yeah. Was this not disclosed before? Or like, I guess I, where is, was the realization? I think it was disclosed.

I think, like, people knew this if you were deep in Ave world, but it's not standardized. Where would you go to find this? You know, like, you'd have to go digging to go learn all of this if you're just, like, learning about Ave. I think having, like, you know, if you imagine like the Blockworks Disclosures regime, right? The Blockbrook's disclosures, very clearly, this is like one of those disclosures, which is who owns the IP, where's it owned? Break down the, like, org chart and what's owned by each entity.

that would very easily be like if that gets standardized, everybody who goes to the blockworks disclosure, they learn this. You know what I mean? And that feels to me like a solve. Yeah. I just, I don't know, the IP thing feels like a little bit of a red herring.

It's like, I think actually what is they see people making money on chain through something defyish and they're like, we should be entitled to that. Like I think if they were making money through like Amazon affiliate links on the website, I don't think they give a shit. Or like alternatively, what if they just did like a redirect from Ave.com to Avar.com.

You go to Avey. come your browser. It goes to a var. It's all a var branded. I think it would still be throwing a fit. So I like, I don't know. I think this is, people want this to be isomorphic to the uniswap situation when I just don't think it is at all. They're not, they're not selling Abe merge. I, look, I agree they're different, but I think the sentiments in Dow's are not necessarily like trying to analyze the payment and like the payoff function here, as much as they're analyzing like fairness, right? There's this feeling of fairness that seems to be what people care about, which is very

different from who's, you know, the money comes in. How does it get split? Right. Like, and I think that's where the stuff is always like messy and, by the way, so when I was talking about how there's like a history of multiple things that have happened, I think the Dow and Avey Lab, Zavara, like, have had a lot of fights. And again, I have no opinion on which side. I'm not trying.

I don't, I have had, I've already been enough of these, but I don't, I don't want to be at all involved. I'm just trying to say facts that are in the forum and you can go read other people's deliberations on this. But there was, AVE launched this RWA, AVE Labs launch, see, this is where it's already hard. You forget to say which entity. Avey Labs, Avara, launched this RWA platform called Horizon. and Horizon was sort of like had a way of connecting to AVE and like had a bit of kind of there was some version of shared liquidity there and the initial post for Horizon said hey we're going to launch another token for Horizon like RWA like kind of like a plume style RWA L2 token although it's on L2 but a token in that way and we're going to give the Avey Dow some fraction of it. And that

caused a huge uproar, right? Because the Avey Dow is like, well, like, the only reason you can do and build this product is because of us. And like, it doesn't. And that one, I'm a lot more sympathetic to the Avara view because it's like, it's hard to get, you have to deal with

regulate NDA and these off chain. You have to do all this other. So it's not like purely the like there is a lot of excess value that's coming from the company. So I'm not sure the token like the token part is Is that that everyone wants an air drop? That feels like the right answer, right?

Which is like, okay, yes, there's a huge amount of off-chain component to build something like Horizon. It's not something that Dow can just say, well, clearly, you made this, no, I made this, you know, give me the whole thing. There's a negotiation. And part of that negotiation is like people getting upset and governance posts and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, you know, you can't avoid that as part of the negotiation.

But like, yeah, there's some splitting of value. Maybe the initial bid wasn't enough, but eventually they find some agreement of like, okay, you built it, you should get most of it, but we get some of it. That feels like the right answer. Like that's, like, how else should it work? Yeah, I think my point, though, is like the Dow views a lot of these things antagonistically. And in some cases, I think, like, the Dow is probably correct. Some cases, labs is probably correct.

I don't know what the, where the end point will be. I mean, maybe it's not pleasant, but that sounds like the right answer, which is that people get mad, then they find an agreement. and then they're all happy and like that at the end. Is there like an agreement here? That's what I, so sorry. I like Haseeb have tried to take. No, my understanding, so again, I might be speaking with very low context,

but my understanding is that they are delaying because of this vote that did not pass, the large amount of abstain votes are signaling that there's going to be another vote with a more concrete proposal that maybe squares a circle a little bit and is something that Avara slash Rave Labs might be willing to, agree to. I found this whole thing a little bit odd because they didn't really understand for the Dow demanding these assets. It's like, give us the IP and all this other stuff in exchange for nothing. Well, I think the Dow said they're going to sue Avi Labs. And so they're opening themselves up to a, yeah, I mean, is that a valid lawsuit? How is the law? What is that?

I don't know. What is America? It's probably not America. Well, actually, do you remember, Do you remember this happened in 2021? There was actually, there's an example of this. It's like all the DAOs of the same era all have this like problem of like they were a little too early so like they didn't get to learn any lessons. But like the Curve Dow tried to sue someone for copying Curve because Curve had a non-permissive license. Do you remember this? Then it turned out to be too complicated.

That's like what I don't know what the status of that. Not not the loss of this is even more absurd. This is even more absurd because it's. been so many years that AVE Labs has owned the IP that they're now going to sue them like seven years later and claim that actually that IP belongs to a Dow. Yeah, no, no, no. The only reason I'm bringing this up is a Dow trying to sue was actually logistically very complicated.

If you read that form post, you'll see. I don't doubt it. Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Okay, well, I don't think that's where this is going to end up. But, like, it is interesting. What are your predictions? What are your predictions?

Since it's like the end of the year, What's your prediction for this situation? Look, I think like the leverage the Dow has is not obviously legal recourse. I think the Dow probably has no legal recourse because they don't own the IP. So no possible way they can have a real claim there. The answer is that like the recourse is headaches and yelling and fighting and the doubt and like Avey token going down. Like it's sort of like way quitting. People vote with their wallets.

Yeah, they vote with their wallets. So I think like the fact that people are so animated by this. means that they are holding the token hostage, basically, and you have to negotiate with us, or we're just going to keep forcing this token to dump. By the way, one thing I do remember... Like, actually the right answer. One thing I do remember observing

before I went on my little Twitter vipasana, I don't know what you want to call it, is there... I was comparing a lot of the Chinese language translated, of course, so tweets to the English tweets. And I feel like people in Asia were more angry. about this issue than people in the West, which I was a little surprised.

They were like, these long, I was getting, all these like kind of early Ethereum people who I never see tweet. I haven't seen tweet in years. Suddenly were like tweeting people who I probably followed in 2017 or 2016 or 2015 or something, like a long time ago. And then they kind of tweeted in Defy Summer,

didn't tweet, maybe tweet around FTX, didn't tweet, and then kind of, and a lot of them, we're writing these long diatribes about how like the Dow should really own the IP and stuff. And I thought that was an interesting. Obviously it's an unscientific thing.

And it was like maybe five or six sort of OG Chinese community people. But I think there's something that strikes a nerve in like people who have been in crypto a while versus people who are newer. And there's like some disconnect that that is also hidden. That is that is a good point. This is definitely like an OG's. No, no. I think it's like a Confucius. society kind of thing.

There's parental fealty and, you know, the child should be supporting the foundation. Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah, I'm not sure, but the, they're also, if the translations are good, they're also much more eloquent than, I think, the Western writing. The Western writing is, like, very aggressive and short and, like, curve.

And these are, like, long. It looks really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're, they're actually quite a bit more eloquent. I, I enjoyed reading the Asian. I wish I had a more scientific version of this, but I would love to know this. Well, like, yeah, but what's the other side, right?

Like the other side is like, no, no, no, Avarra has property rights. We should protect the property rights of Avara, which is kind of Tom's point, which is very not Chinese. Like, it's not, it's like not, that's not the vibe of China. Maybe, maybe I'm reading too much into it,

but I just had, common prosperity. These are people who don't. Common prosperity. Yeah. It's just interesting. These are people who don't tweet much, but like have been around for a while.

You know, that's sort of, that's sort of why I thought it was interesting. Well, I'm sure we will check back in with the next saga in this Avey Dow Civil War. But you can't do a chopin book episode without covering Dow drama. I feel like that's what we're here for. What do people want? Evergreen.

Yeah, that's right. So speaking of 2021 type problems, for those of you who remember flow blockchain built by Dapper Labs, this was O-O-O-G, O-O-O-O-G, like GameFi blockchain, back when that was still a thing that people were excited about. And Flow was hacked for $3.9 million. It was some kind of exploit where they explored the execution layer of Flow, allowing them to mint flow tokens.

The attacker then took those flow tokens, took them off chain, bridge them, and then went to sell them, ran off, and made a bunch of money, bridged them to Bitcoin or something. So in response to this, apparently, Flow was planning to...

They paused the blockchain, as you do, and they decided that they were going to roll back the blockchain to the point before the attack took place. Now, this is a crazy thing to do because the attacker already got away. So, like, they already have the money, right? Like, there's a, they, like, you're not actually solving the problem if the hackers stole the money and sold it and took it off chain.

The second thing is, apparently they did not talk to any of the bridges or exchanges about this rollback. And so for the bridges, the interesting thing is that, so they were, you know, they were They were talking in Discord that they were going to do this, and it created this big kerfuffle on Twitter of people pointing out, like, hey, you realize that if you do this, anybody who bridged money into flow in the time since this attack, their money will get stolen.

They will get wiped out. And basically, they're transferring their money to the hacker implicitly for bridging in money to, like, try to go in and arb these pools that are all mispriced and all this other stuff. So thankfully, they decided not to do this after the huge outcry that took place on Twitter, they're doing something a little bit more reasonable if they're going to restart the chain in some kind of read-only mode and then like, you know, gradually remediate some of the individual bugs that led to this attack. But it created all this excitement around this idea that like, hey,

this is the craziest proposal for a remediation to a hack that I think we've seen in a long time. It didn't happen. So we're thankfully talking about kind of counterfactuals. But Tarun, you mentioned before the show that you were very intrigued by this story. What was your reaction to the flow kind of head fake rollback? So I think an interesting aspect of all of this stuff is the fact that the promise that L2s have made, right, that I get forced inclusion, like the sequencer sensors me, I can go to main net, recent my transaction get re-entered. There's always this kind of Faustian bargain in this type of forced inclusion thing.

in that I'm not really guaranteed that I get the same economic value for my transaction when I reinforce it, right? It might get reordered. It might get added later. An Oracle update might have come in before. I'm liquidated. There's lots of things that can happen. But we sort of kind of, at an Ethereum, people kind of were like, forced inclusion is good enough, right? That's sort of the, I'm sure there will be people who want to fight about that. But I think that's like, that's what roll-ups claim. On the other hand, in L1s, you're always like, hey, I have forkability. I can, I can, we can, the validators can fork and it's fine.

But you also have the same problem when you have a lot of interconnectedness between blockchains, right? You have bridges where the bridges on one chain expect X units of asset. And on the other chain, after the replay, you might have less or more than X units of asset based on how the replay or fork goes. and I think the interesting thing and an interesting thing that I observe

from Alex at D-Bridge, which is a intent-based bridge that exists, is that in some sense bridges become custodians during Forks because they they kind of own this liability of like the mismatch between these chains and they in some ways

go from like kind of low risk to their validators like it's only the duration of the bridging that the validators hold most of the risk, sometimes they hold some tail risk, to, like, they're completely holding the risk, almost like a custodian. Like, now they have to, like, reconcile everything. And so I think the interesting thing is, like,

all of these security models we had in 2016, 2017, which are, like, forkability and forced inclusion. And to some extent, this is to see your post from, like, 2019 about, like, the USC forking kind of rule. All of this stuff goes out the window when you're much more interconnected. Like when blockchains are interconnected, it suddenly completely changes the security models for these things. Because you have to make sure that all the other chains are connected to are able to stay synchronized. And in Flores case, they're kind of a small chain.

They don't have much volume. And so it's like no one wants to take the risk for it in the same way that like, hey, the USDC on Ethereum, everyone is just going to follow the circle fork type of, right? there's like and so this is almost like the inverse of that your post from i think 2019 and i think there's something kind of curious about that i wonder if that's almost like a an evolutionary thing for chains like chains will die because like they can't convince the bridges to hold the custodial risk that they're like not important enough or something but i mean it's pretty clear like random thoughts yeah i mean this is obviously like actually going through a

fork of this kind, especially like a chain pause of this duration is a pretty extraordinary event. And like, and the fact that Flo pause the chain because of like a $4 million exploit also tells you like, look, this is a, this is a chain that's on his last legs, unsurprisingly. I mean, I haven't heard anything about Flo other than this attack in a long time. And what the attacker minted was the native token. And I think the token crashed like 50% upon this attack, I guess, because the, you know, the attacker tried to sell four million. dollars of it and it just crashes the price by 50%

which tells you, yeah, this is kind of a dead chain. I think that's, I think what you describe is true and in a way it like kind of it sort of speaks to like, this is one of the things that I talked about in my end of year predictions which is that in 2024 I thought that 2025 was going to see this proliferation of app chains. We were going to see more things like hyperliquid.

You know, we've seen things like lighter and edge X that have their own chains. But we haven't actually seen that big of an explosion of new chains. And I suspect that we're actually going to start seeing the reverse is that this actually becomes less and less frequent because of the fact that there's just so much surface area that you have to deal with. Right?

Like if you're an application, like, you know, NBA Topshots used to be the flagship game on Flow. And if you're NBA Topshots, and like, you know, NBA Topshots now is like kind of in the toilet, but let's say back when it was working, you don't want to have to deal with this. You're going to be like, oh, we need to like pause all state transitions for some number, some time and coordinate with bridges and like figure out all this stuff.

Like you don't want to deal with any of that shit. You're just like, look, just put me on Solana, put me on Ethereum, put me on, you know, mega-eath, whatever. I just want like, you know, good throughput and like high usability and access to customers. That's all I care about. And I never want to be asked anything about infrastructure ever again. I think that's likely where we're going, especially as the, you know, we've seen gas fees be very low on the year.

We've seen a lot of scalability improvements to almost everything. That should imply that actually. on a relative basis, it becomes more attractive to just launch on some other chain as opposed to own your own infra. And the fact that a lot of the premium of being your own chain is going away, right? Like this whole idea that like,

oh, there's the L1 premium, the L2 premium. Now that all that stuff feels like it's really faded, then the right answer for most applications is just pick a stable chain that you don't have to worry about, you know, like if you built on flow, my condolences, but it's just like, you know, Why do I have to deal with this?

You know, I don't, I don't want to have to be stuck because my chain got hacked for like two million and now they're going to be closed for the week. I mean, another, a kind of more, this is more like a theoretical interest question that I've had and like I started writing a paper on this a long time ago and then I kind of moved on to other things was like, is there a sense in which there's like a carrying capacity for chains? Like given some liquidity constraints, given some liquidity constraints, given some usage constraints, how much maximum inflation the market tolerates. Can you get something that's a little bit like Coast theorem where it's like, hey, there's like

a size for the theory of the firm, which is like, hey, firms generally are this size based on like how much they get in revenue versus how much they have in costs and how much they can share those costs across employees? There's a question of chains have the same thing. Like can they, can they, is there like a caring capacity? And I think in this world where arguably like, Solana hyperliquid, and to some extent, specialized roll-ups like lighter, have shown that maybe you don't really need this amalgamation of 500 chains. We're actually seeing like the kind of

coast theorem acting on these chains, and we're going to like see the space of chains called, you know, we haven't ever had like M&A or Vulture investing or debt restructuring. But in some sense, this is kind of what's. happening to like L1s that are not generating enough revenue or usage? Like that's at least like my gut feeling is like that's kind of what this stuff is indicating is like we're moving to a world where we're going to be culling chains. Yeah. It's funny because like the theoretical construct of L1s is that they have de minimis

cost to run. Right. And that's part of their argument why L1s never die is you go back, you look up some like 2016 L1 and it's still there. trading. It's probably still live. There's probably still nodes that are processing transactions on it, although no one's doing anything. There's maybe, you know, there's like some weather bot that's posting weather into, you know, the call data. You know, there's always like something happening with these ghost chains that nobody is using. And the theory of that was always that, well,

because there's no cost, right? Like it's just, you've got some box somewhere in AWS that's running a node and, you know, as long as proof of stake, the end. I think, you know, it's funny because, like, that used to be true for proof of work as well. Is that like, you know, if you remember like Ravencoin and feather coin and all these like proof of work chains that just like existed because they existed and like it's hard to really understand why like who's paying money to mind this like how where is the demand coming from those are all gone I feel like those you can make an argument poor one out for the green SPVs real ones no you can make an argument that like those actually will go away right there is it there is an economic argument why those should go to zero

for proof of sake where like it's like all just you know accounting on a ledger and network packets going through the internet there's no reason why you can't just run it for a few bucks a month and like you have a network but there is a cost of oracles bridges

etc right exactly yeah exactly like all the info of a modern chain with like indexers and block explorers and bridges and like all you know all this other stuff and like they have to upgrade and like somebody has to have custodian integrations and all the stuff that actually like the reason why people always complain like

why do l1s raise so much money and you know to be clear l1s probably raised too much money but why do they need to raise like at least 20 million like that's probably how much it costs to just do all that shit everything i just described all that stuff probably cost at least 20 million and then on top of that you got actually do marketing and dbd and hire a team and like all those other stuff but just the fixed costs of all the info you need is probably on the order of about $20 million. So actually, little ones have become more expensive over time. And that probably argues to run for, I mean, there's the go-sell ones that don't have any of these things, right?

Like, I don't know how many bridges flow has or like how many custodian integrations. My guess is like probably nothing. Two? I mean, D-Bridge and layer zero, at least, I know at least those two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, probably those are the two, right? But like, increasingly, there will just. just be decommissioning of bridges to these chains that nobody's using.

And that's probably the world we're going to within the next, call it two to three years. I don't think it happens immediately because if you're layer zero, it sounds good to say that we have 500 chains that we connect to. And so on some level, like, there's probably just like, oh, we speak every protocol. You know, it's great. You can bridge to anything. But I think that's the answer. So you're saying, like, you know, when the bridges and oracles leave you, it's like you're

one of those, like, mining towns in the West in California that are, like, abandoned that, like, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Well, it's like, you know, you die two deaths. One death is when quite mycapulous you and the last death is when the last bridge disconnects from you. Yeah, they truly are just floating in ether. Yeah, they built the new highway, knowing that one's coming to flow anymore. I'm like, what kind of psycho person is looking for exploits in flow, by the way, over a holiday of all times. You know, there's... On Christmas?

On Christmas? Wait, what do you? A lot of dark... I think, I think the exploit searching stuff is just like five million times easier right now than it was like a year ago. I think you, people are literally like, point me to an RPC, send me the repo, and then send Claude or chat GPU on it. I think you're underestimating how I feel like the...

Do you think this was like a... I discovered exploit, like that feels pretty bad. No, but I think it was AI translated. Take a known exploit, translate it to that. Yeah, like that stuff is much more valuable, I think, than people are giving credit for. And for these, like, lower liquidity networks, I think that those can be much more effective than on, like, places that are expensive to attack.

Yeah. No, but it is true. Attacking on Christmas is pretty dastardly. That's Grinch-level behavior. But it is a historical thing. I mean, I don't know, Tom, if you remember the, uh, the, uh, the, the, the Oracle, Christmas Oracle manipulation in 2019. There was like this, uh, was it on Maker? There was like, there was like this crazy Oracle manipulation and then you saw all these liquidations on Christmas.

This was like before Defi was very big. I remember there's a group chat that you started where everyone was on Christmas, the most active because of this. I totally don't remember this. I believe you, but, you know, six years is a lifetime in Christmas. I know, I know, I know. I just don't like... I'm just referencing things in the last decade. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's a thing. It's a thing for state craft as well as for blockchain craft. Okay, so last story we're going to run through is Coinbase announced this broad set of updates that they called System Update, which is a big event they threw in San Francisco, invited a bunch of people. a huge live stream, and they announced that they were becoming the everything exchange. So just to give you a quick run-through of everything they announced, first, stocks and tokenization.

They're adding stocks and ETFs to the main app, zero commission trading, 24 by 5, laying the groundwork for tokenized stocks, which they're also going to be offering through a platform called Coinbase tokenize, which I guess is going to be a competitor to securitize both for tokenizing stocks as well as for white-label stable coins. They're launching prediction markets. you can trade real world events via Kalshi alongside Cryptos and stocks. You can trade a minimum of $1. They're adding futures and perks into the main Coinbase app.

Salana Dex trading via the Jupiter integration. They've got a new Coinbase business all-in-one offering for payments for S&Bs, kind of a Stripe slash bridge competitor as well. Coinbase advisor, some kind of AI advisor thingy that they're building into the app, as well as a global launch of the base app, which was previously geogated and some payments, stablecoin related stuff. So they've got whole suite of new announcements. Curious get you guys take.

Is Coinbase now the Everything app? What do you guys think this new set of features is likely to get received? I mean, I think they're probably receiving a lot of pressure from Robin Hood and these other sort of more traditional financial players that are trying to get pretty aggressively into crypto and doing pretty well. And people obviously love to meme the like, you know, coin hood ratio, which has been kind of, you know, looking pretty painful as of late. I thought the interesting thing was that I think that they announced equity's perps,

which is like, I feel like pretty big for a, you know, I mean, it's obviously offshore, but like I think I'm just amazed by how quickly this has become like a mainstream topic. Really in like the past year, you've seen all the perp taxes and now central exchanges launching perps on like single name U.S. equities, which was, you know, not really a thing even like two, three years ago. Hmm. So the perps are only international, yeah?

Correct. Okay, yeah. And yeah, traders outside the U.S. can get 24-7 capital. efficient exposure to U.S. stocks through the coin-based interface. But like, surely the stocks and ETFs, that's within the United States. Yeah, that's within the United States. The tokenized ones. Yeah, the spot. Yeah, the tokenized stocks. Yeah, yeah. They've already rolled that out. Does anyone know how the volumes are doing? Not, not looked. I'm assuming not big. Yeah. So, okay, what is your prognosis then? What is your prognosis for coin hood ratio going forward? I think it's going to be

tough, honestly. I think just like the overall tam for people who want to trade stocks is much, much larger and it's much more convenient to then just go into your traditional brokerage and trade crypto. The question I think is actually more what are the actual compelling features that are crypto-native that only Coinbase can do that then people are then going to stick around and also, yeah, I'll trade some stocks as long as I'm on Coinbase. And I felt like that was actually the interesting thing they were doing around like, hey, you can do on-chain lending and on-chain borrowing and access defy and do all this other kind of cool stuff. I mean, I think even the equity's purpose is like a good example of that, at least for for international people.

But the other stuff, it's like, it doesn't really strike because you're going to get net new users. Maybe some crypto people will stick around and trade stocks. But I just think that's like, you're starting with a smaller funnel. Okay, but do you believe the story, right? So like Robin Hood went from stock trading adjacent to crypto trading and they've been fairly successful at that. do you believe the story for Coinbase that like they can go out it from the other direction and arrive at the same end state? I think it's it's just tough. It's like you think of all the people who are in Robin Hood who want to trade stocks and

then some of them will go off and trade crypto. And that's, I mean, obviously it's big for Robin Hood, right? It's like 30, 40% of their revenue. For Coinbase, you're starting with a smaller funnel, which is everyone who wants to trade crypto on Coinbase and then maybe a smaller percentage of those also want to go trade stocks. I just think it's, it's, you know, you end up with a smaller outcome because, like, the, you know, sort of initial factor is smaller. So maybe, like, they'll be able to, I think, if anything, it's like, maybe they should position it differently and then, like, try to go after it as, like, a more traditional brokerage than has this, like, interesting crypto component to it.

But, like, I don't know why someone is going to, who wants to trade stocks is going to get today and open Coinbase versus, like, yeah, maybe people who are already Coinbase users or crypto people will open Coinbase to go, go trade some stocks as long as they're there. Yeah, I mean, look, I do, I think Tom's probably largely described the market-driven version of this, which seems reasonable. I think there's a sense in which I'm not sure what this concept of everything app looks like in the long run, because there's one version that you could play out, which is if, if like we had fully full kind of imagine like the clarity act was like, gave crypto people everything they wanted. The craziest version of this is that your local bank app will let you trade tokenized stocks directly from your bank app. It will be like, here's your balance. Here's some tokenized stocks.

Like, Revolute style. Like imagine like everything is in one app. NeoBank plus brokerage plus whatever, right? I don't understand. Why would your bank need to tokenize stocks for you to trade them? Can you just? No, no, no, no. Your bank offers you to trade.

You know, like your bank. your bank offers you brokerage services already, but like very limited, right? But the point is, in a tokenized stock world, anyone can offer all these products from any front end. It's like very different. It feels like a lot different than like, I need to be like. Is that true? Wait, why is that true? That doesn't sound true at all.

I mean, that's the way I feel like you see the non-U.S. neobank stuff going where like they're just offering everything, right? And so, and you look to see that with Robin Hood, too, right? they're trying to add all these banking features. Like, Robbins is trying to almost go the other way. Like, start with the brokerage out of the day. So, yeah, I don't know exactly how to think about the strategy because I don't really know the net new marginal buyer of tokenized stocks. Like, I don't know how to classify them.

Like, are they people who've never used a kind of free stock app? And the other thing that's interesting to me is it's so much more competitive and the fees are basically zero, which is like very different than a crypto exchange economics, especially your coin base. I don't understand. It's like a very different market. And like I don't know how to think about the marginal tokenized equity buyer. Now tokenized perp buyer, I think is willing to pay higher fees, right? Like there is extra risk premium that they need to be paying for. But the tokenized stocks, I don't know. And like, well, so, okay, so here's the counterpoint. Here's the counterpoint. Is that like that, like, whoever is trading stocks,

on Coinbase has got to be the juiciest flow in all of mankind, right? Because like, why are you, like, who is like, you know what? I trade crypto here, so I'm going to trade stocks here too. But are there more people in the world than the set of current Coinbase users

who that, who fall in that code? That's the thing. Ultimately, you're cross-selling stock trading to a set of users who have negative alpha in trading stocks, right? that is valuable in and of itself. It's just, you know, it's like, you know, if Airbnb starts offering like, okay, I know you're going to vacation,

we'll also sell you, you know, a car, and you can do a car rental through Airbnb, right? Something like that. It's not that, like, people are going to go to Airbnb for car rentals. It just, you know, basically takes another piece of somebody who has a very high willingness to pay and is right at the point of a transaction, right? So they're like, look, I'm a crypto person. I love crypto. Cryptos go sideways, low volatility.

I'm missing on the AI boom. I'll go trade here. This person is very juicy flow. You know, this, like, you will be able to monitor this floor really well. Yeah, I think, I think, this is upselling. This is not tan expansion. And you're in. Correct, correct.

Like, flip that and it sounds absurd, right? Like, you go to your car rental place and they're like, do you also want to like hotel? Like, obviously fucking not. Like, if I'm renting for her. And so. They literally do. They literally do offer your hotel. They do all do that.

They do all do that. I know. I know they do. My point is that is a, that is a much, like, it is absurd to think that you would do that. Like, it sounds much more reasonable to think, yeah, I'm on Airbnb. Sure, I'll go, like, rent a car versus, yeah, I'm on Hertz. I'm going to go book a hotel. And that was my point around Robin Hood. It's sort of like, yeah, that's a much bigger, you know, more normal. It's a bigger aperture. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why I think the upside for like this

token of stocks products is actually people where a crypto exchange is their first form of financial services. So maybe people who are international or people who are getting paid in stable coins. And then functionally, this exchange is sort of becoming my. you know, bank or financial service provider. And then, sure, I'll go buy some stocks them as well. Yeah, yeah. That's why I think that the neo-bank to tokenize stocks thing is kind of a more attractive funnel, right?

It's like that new user. That's, I had not considered that. I was imagining more like, okay, the Gen Z user who they're like, look, I don't trust stocks. I don't believe in stock or whatever, but I believe in crypto. Like somebody who's very, very young and they think of crypto is the primary financial gateway for them, that this is the way that they migrate. into the world of stocks and they sort of like, you know, keep it all in one app, right?

That sounds like what I'm describing of like, okay, you're at checkout and like, okay, why don't you also rent a car? What you're describing, I think, is interesting and sounds more like Tam expansion, which is the set of people who are using stable coins, they want to off ramp, they're going to use Coinbase to off ramp, keep the money there, why not just, you know, this is now your brokerage account. That is actually interesting. And I think that it tells a story about Tam expansion that makes.

is less what I was imagining in terms of like a domestic kind of Gen Z crypto-pilled market. I do think that in general, a phenomenon that I increasingly have noticed, and I also think this about prediction markets, is that people mostly like to keep the meal, like the food separate on their plate. They actually don't like to mix them up together. So it's sort of like, you know, people like to have the app for this and the app for that, and they actually don't really want to mix them together. So it's like, I like having my crypto. It's the same reason why, you know, PayPal and Schwab and all of these financial, like fidelity, that have huge reach, probably more users than Coinbase, they all added a button to buy

crypto. But people don't click the button there. When they want to buy crypto, they're like, oh, I know I go to the crypto. I don't want to, like, put my crypto in, like, my bank app. I kind of want to put my crypto in, like, my separate crypto app. And they don't really care about the fees. They just like to keep all the food separate on their plate. And so crypto goes here, you know, more responsible investments go here.

even if you have the button in one app, I don't want it all in the same app. I think that's like a general phenomenon. I think this is more of like a product and incentives issue. Like I think Robin Hood being the counter examples of that where it's like Robinhood is, you know, a significant percentage of crypto and they're also a percentage of the crypto market or like even looking at ETFs, right? Like, you know, that is people going into their Schwab account and buying crypto. I think the problem is like actually buying crypto inside of like Venmo or cash or or

Cash actually does decently well. But, you know, PayPal, it's always like, okay, it's, it's slowly being rolled out over many years, and it's kind of crap, and you can't actually buy, like, a lot of the things that you want, and it's kind of tucked away in some shit menu. And so it's like, I don't know, I think you're, you're right that, like, hey, maybe people who are, you know, using PayPal aren't the most excited crypto buyers. But I also think it is, like, there are examples of apps that aren't crypto apps doing a good job of sort of cross-selling to, you know, crypt out to their users. I think there's really just one example, which is Robin Hood.

And maybe to some extent, cash app. But, like, Robin Hood is kind of the exception that proves the rule. You know what's funny is I was in Australia somewhere, and I saw a bus where there's an ad, which was an app for investing for children, like ages five plus. And I feel like there's this weird thing where, like, Robin Hood's success has bred this like insane number especially outside the US of like investing apps for younger people and that's why I'm not sure where that yeah it's a five plus it's like that has an ad on a bus

I cannot imagine like you know children's TV advertising investments to kids what is yeah what is five plus okay that's insane yeah wow and so I think there's actually I would have, if I had an investing app, I would have full ported into cartoon network when I was six years old. I understand. I have, I have no clue if that's a good investment or not, actually. No, it's not. Probably not that great. Television did not do well over the last 20 years.

I'll say that much. That's true. Yeah. Anyway. But, yeah, like, I think there's something sort of weird about the, the, that market. So, like, I totally get the, improve your. margins, like upsell everything possible, right? That makes a ton of sense. I just am not sure if any of these things are like net new users. Like that, it's not so clear to me. There's like a lot of things

and some of them in theory could be new users. But it's like not obvious to me. The stablecoin depositors, I think, is the strongest version of the story. Right. Like come for the, come for the tool, which is stablecoin off ramping, stay for the whole portfolio. Like now we now we have you locked in for your financial portfolio here. I think that's a lot of, that's a much... They are competing with everyone now, right? It's like Moon Pay Securitia. Like, we go down the list.

Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Well, good for them, though. I feel like that's, I mean, it's, you know, sucks for our bags because these are a lot of the startups that we funded that are doing each new... No, no, I think it's interesting that Robin Hill and Coinbase have...

Coinbase and Robbins have very different philosophies, right? I feel like, minus the Robin Hood buying mine. X and like Ledger X where this sort of an exception. I feel like they try to operate as like a light company like asset light. Like they don't build all their own infrastructure from scratch. They'll use partners, providers, etc. Whereas Coinbase is like, we're making everything from scratch. Like we're making your own cloud stable claims of service thing.

We're making your own right. And the question to me is you have these two opposite things. One that's like virtualized. Like they use a lot of partners outsource a lot of the technical stuff really own the ux really own the user acquisition and the other one that's like we want to own the entire vertical stack get institutions whatever but is there a point in the middle of those two kind of axes and like that's sort of what i don't know and then i kind of feel like this all of these coins this products are trying to push it toward the middle but i don't know what that if that if any of

them do that that's like what i have no conception of that's and maybe i'm simplifying it or i'm sure there's going to be people who are listening who work at either place who will message me and be like, we do, we own a lot of our own stuff. We also, I'm not trying to, it's a broad strokes generalization. Literally the prediction market is powered by Colchie. And so, you know, there's like, I'm sure they have other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a broadstroke generation, but there's a lot of infrastructure that.

But I do think you're right. I do think you're right. I think like in Silicon Valley, there's often a characterization of big tech companies of like who, like which segment is dominant, right? So, like, famously at Facebook, like product people were dominant at Facebook. At Airbnb, design people were dominant. And at Google, engineers are dominant. And each, like, you know, everybody has designers.

Everybody has product managers. Everybody has engineers. But somebody always has more power within each team, within the orgs and the decision making. And I think what you're pointing to is like a little bit of something like that, where I suspect that Robin Hood is probably more product-driven. and Coinbase is probably more engineering driven and more tech driven

and that manifests into a lot of decisions that flow downstream of that because like Brian was an engineer and like that that you know kind of flows downstream of like same thing you know with the Brian Chesky was a designer and so Airbnb is very design driven and I don't know about Facebook

but you know that's always been obviously the Google guys are very very brainiac engineers yeah I mean I sort of that's why I sort of wonder if like the next thing is especially if it's like AI powered investing type of stuff where you're not really thinking is like going to be a different modality than either of these two of like it might be the design one like in reality there might just be like a that's what I mean there's like it feels like there's something all of these people are getting at but it's like slightly outside of the

directions they're taking or at least that's my gut feeling I don't have any like concrete thoughts other than that okay well we're we're up on time so we've got to wrap, but we'll be back next week with our proper end of year review, as well as the best of, or 2025. Until then, we will see you all next week. Thanks, everybody.