Unchained - The Chopping Block: Can Crypto Clean Itself Up? Market Structure, Trust, and Regulation - Ep. 833

Episode Date: May 10, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and special guest Evgeny Gaevoy of Wintermute break down the biggest stories in crypto. This week: the $38M Move token dump exposes the shady side of market making, with shocking incentives that blurred the line between liquidity support and pure exit liquidity. We dig into what really happened, why major VCs looked the other way, and how the entire token launch playbook might be broken. Evgeny joins to give the market maker’s perspective — and to answer the question: how many more of these sh*t shows are still lurking beneath the surface? Show highlights 🔹 $38M Token Dump Exposed – How Movement Labs’ shady deal with Web3Port revealed the dark side of crypto market making. 🔹 Market Makers or Exit Liquidity? – Inside the incentive structure that let a market maker dump tokens and split profits with the foundation. 🔹 VCs Looked the Other Way – Why top investors backed Movement Labs despite red flags — and what it says about crypto due diligence. 🔹 Rushi Gets Fired – The Movement Labs CEO is out after weeks of denial. But was the rest of the team complicit too? 🔹 Wintermute’s Evgeny Speaks Out – The biggest market maker in crypto weighs in on shady deals, dump mechanics, and transparency failures. 🔹 Airdrops, Float Games, and Retail Rugging – We dissect how token launches get manipulated behind the scenes — and who really pays. 🔹 The Case for Disclosure – Why Haseeb argues crypto needs mandatory public disclosures for market making agreements — before regulators step in. 🔹 Self-Regulation or SEC Crackdown? – Can the industry grow up on its own… or are we begging for another wave of securities enforcement? 🔹 Crypto’s Trust Crisis – Without transparency, the entire token model risks collapse. This episode lays out how to fix it. ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ Evgeny Gaevoy, Founder and CEO at Wintermute Inside Movement’s Token-Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisers and Hidden Middlemen by Sam Kessler  🔗https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/04/30/inside-movement-s-token-dump-scandal-secret-contracts-shadow-advisors-and-hidden-middlemen  Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:19 Movement Labs Scandal: Inside the Market Maker Mess 06:26 How Crypto Market Making Really Works 10:54 Rigged from the Start? 17:25 Who Knew What? Movement Labs and the Industry Fallout 25:57 Why Crypto Needs a Market Maker Disclosure 34:45 Transparency vs. Manipulation 38:02 Do Market Makers Control Token Prices? 51:51 The Crypto Market Structure Bill: What’s at Stake 59:18 Can We Fix Crypto Before It Breaks? HostsDisclosuresLinks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yeah, this seems like a shit show. I wonder how many more shit shows there are under the surface right now where there's a crazy market maker doing a crazy thing and a team that didn't not have to negotiate it correctly. There's all these bad terms and all these bad incentives, and it's just a fiasco. And now that I think the world's a little bit more clued into, like, what are market makers and how they work,

hopefully we have more stories that come out about, like, what's actually happening under the surface because right now there's just so little transparency. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. 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.

D5.E3.8 is the ultimate pompous. DFIPOTOCES are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom, the DFIVAN, and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next to you've got Robert, the Cryptoonisour and Tsar of Super State. Good morning.

Joining us repeat guest, we have Yvgini, high-frequency hustler and head honcho at Wintermute. Hello. And I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're 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 chopping block at XYZ for more disclosures. So it's been a week full of interesting news, and we wanted to get you on Yvgini because you are, of course, the mastermind behind markets. You are controlling everything behind the scenes. We know all prices are decided in the winter mute morning huddles.

And so we wanted to understand what's going on in the markets and specifically around the story about movement. So we've talked a little bit about movement on previous shows. Movement is an L2. Well, it was I guess an L2 that's becoming an L1 or something, something, something. Anyway, the reason why it's so interesting largely is because it's been embroiled in a series of scandals. And those scandals are something that people have been whispering about behind the scenes,

but now everything seemingly has come to light. The story was broken by CoinDesk on November, or sorry, not November, a couple weeks ago, but the story began in November when a company that was affiliated with Movement Labs, which is the company that developed Movement, signed a deal with a group called Web3Port. Web3Port is a market maker, apparently kind of shady market maker, and this market making agreement involved this group, Web3Port, basically having an agreement that they were going to be able to liquidate their tokens that they received as part of the market making agreement. If the full diluted valuation of movement was above $5 billion.

And all the tokens that they sold, they were going to split the profits 50-50 with the foundation, basically meaning that this market maker, quote unquote, became an agent to dump the tokens if they were able to push the token price up. That's effectively what their incentives were. And this was a deal such that not just the market maker was making money, but the movement foundation itself would receive the proceeds, which obviously is extremely shady. They also received 5% of the total supply of tokens, which is a new one. is a massive amount of tokens relative to what the flow was. I think the flow was less than 10%.

So this resulted in a story we covered previously where they dumped $38 million of move tokens, and that resulted in Binance banning the account. Now, everybody involved in movement initially refuted and said that this is not true. This is all a lie. This is FUD. This is people coming after us and a bunch of anons trying to take us down. Eventually, once CoinDest reported on this and brought the receipts as well as all of the contracts that were involved with this. So apparently there's a lot of leaking going on from people affiliated with this. This has resulted now in Rushi, the co-founder as well as the CEO of Movement Labs, getting fired. Previously, it was claimed that he was supposedly placed on leave. He denied this. There's just nonstop denials coming from the team that all this is fake, all this

is fud. Now finally, it seems to be, the chapter seems to be closed now on movement. They're now getting a new team. There's now a new organization that was built called Movement Industries. It's all very confusing, but long story short, movement has been down only. There's been a lot of reckoning seemingly within the industry about how was this allowed to happen, given that this was backed by a lot of large VCs, and was a project that was getting a huge amount of attention in all of the, call it, marketing that they were very successfully doing and all the cloud they were throwing around, largely silencing a lot of the critics on crypto Twitter who were claiming that, hey, there was something weird going on underneath the hood.

So, if Gini, I don't know if you guys had any direct relationship with movement, but want you to help explain to us what is all this? How normal is this? What is weird about this relative to a normal market-making agreement? So help us understand in the context of market-making what happened here and how you understand this story. And before that, I just want to disclose that Robot Ventures is a very minor investor in movement, although we had no idea about any of the stuff for contracts or market making and we're not included.

Yeah, like I think I'll start with basically it's a very non-market. It was a very non-market agreement, right? I think Vassilor posted quite a few snippets of it and his telegrams threat. And he did pretty good overview as well and he kind of described how he was trying to fix it. But like your standard market making agreement, it always has those like KPIs, basically, uptime where you need to market-make spread with how much you put in the books, for example, basically all those kind of things on one hand. So that's kind of like obligations of liquidity providers, market-makers, whatever. And on the other hand, yeah, basically is a carrot.

So what do market makers get from it? And typically it's this call-option kind of structures where effectively at the end of the agreement, market-maker can return instead of the tokens, instead of the token loans, they can return the basically stable coins or dollars to the protocol at some strike price, which nowadays is, I would say, 25, 50, sometimes more percent above some T-WAP from after the launch. Basically, that's how it typically works. So this contract was very non-market in that it didn't have a call option. It didn't have like anything like this.

Basically, it had this really weird incentive to push the token up because once it crosses five billions, then basically the protocol and the market maker would split the proceeds between each other. Hold on. Let's take a step back because I think a lot of people listening to this, maybe they know what a marketmaker is or they've heard that market makers are important, but it's maybe just worth kind of setting some understanding for folks who aren't as close to this. What market makers do and how they're involved in the process of a token end up getting being listed, right? So normally, if you have a token, you just launch it on a decks or whatever, something like this, then all you really do is you're seeding an

AMM pool, right? But when you want to take your token onto an exchange, you want to launch on Coinbase or Binance or whatever, you don't just launch your token and then hope that people show up and trade it. These exchanges want there to be liquidity all the time. In order for there to be liquidity all the time, someone has to be willing to buy, someone has to be willing to sell, and usually the people who do this are market makers. And so a token is expected, a token issuer, is expected to strike a deal with a market like a Wintermute or one of these other large firms. And those market making agreements are some kind of agreement that this market maker will provide some kind of uptime, like you said,

spread. And in exchange, the market maker is getting paid because the market maker is going to do this for free. They're taking some risk as well as they're having to put up some money in order to do this. And one of the common ways in which this is done is by one, the project will often loan their tokens to the market maker. So the market maker has inventory. They have tokens to actually market make with. But they're going to do it. they also get paid in some way. So they could get paid cash. Sometimes they also get paid in this option structure such that if the token is successful, then the market maker gets to keep some of the tokens at a price that is fixed in advance, but is above where it is going to be initially listed

at. So if you gety, help me understand. Let's say you're a market maker, which obviously you are in many cases. Why isn't this the incentive for every market maker, right? You have an option structure. There's a strike price. Why isn't your incentive to manipulate the price up for everything? Yeah, I mean, you can say there is an incentive for anyone having, I know, like, I know, why is there no incentive for you guys to pump the price of your protocol companies, for example? Like, it's, like, there is definitely an incentive. Like, the question is, like, how big the incentive is in this case? Like, in our case, like, okay, we might get like half a percent of supply sometimes, like,

but usually it's slower. like nowadays it's significantly lower like it really depends on the market cap of the of the protocol but basically even if you i don't know if you're some kind of like a market manipulator kind of market maker you have this call option structure you still well you push the price up you still need to we still need the price to stay there until the expiry of the contract because like what's often in those contracts like at least with the ones that we do is basically if if you as a market maker don't show bits and offers programmatically, well, or whatever, basically the issue, the token issue can cancel out the whole contract.

And then suddenly you don't have a call option anymore, and suddenly you're sitting on, well, suddenly you pump the price, but now you kind of need to try to sell those tokens somehow, which probably will push the price down. So, like, this incentive really needs to be significant enough to, well, to pump the price, but also to be able to cash out. afterwards. And what was really interesting for me in this particular case with Web's report is that, okay, there was like a very clear incentive to sell above $5 billion. But there was also

this another saying which put a really clear incentive on the market, well, on Web's report is actually as a part of the deal, Web's report transfers them, I don't know, like as a 60 or 100 million, some like insane amount of money, which, for example, in our case, we would never do because it is just an insane amount of money. Like, even if protocol gives you 5% of token supply, like as a market maker, you make money from trading. Like this 60 million, you deploy it like in perpetual strategies or market maker strategies, the defy, like, whatever it does you do.

Like, it's, there is a real time, well, there is a real like cost of having this inventory on your hands. And basically, if you receive protocol tokens and in return, you give like insane amount like about $60 million as collateral I guess which which is what it was you have an extra incentive to basically push the price up and sell as many move tokens as possible to basically have those dollars back because otherwise you're just every day just losing money by not deploying those dollars into your strategies okay so there is a shady market making agreement here this is not how normal market making agreements are structured how how common is this How many market makers are there doing stuff like this?

How many projects are there that have these kinds of agreements? We, like, I didn't know Web's report existed until basically Binance kicked them out, like, a few months ago. Does that happen often where there's a new market maker you've like never heard of and they just cross your stream? Is it easy to create a market maker, shut it down, rebrand it? Like, what's the story there? Probably, but like there are so many of them that operate from Asia, for example, and we just don't see them, like, because they don't advertise themselves, like,

very openly. I don't know, Kelsey Avengers. Like nobody knew there existed before this whole scandal with Malay

blew up, right? But yeah, to me it's, it's quite interesting. Like, you want to, I want to think

I know pretty much everyone's like significant, but yeah, those guys still keep popping up and do stuff. But how common

would you say this is? Those kind of agreements. I think they must be very uncommon with proper, protocols. I think they, like, I wouldn't be surprised if, I don't know, all those different tokens that get listed on tier two, tier three exchanges only and never make it to, I know,

Binance or Coinbase. Yeah, I'm pretty sure like there is a lot of this stuff going on. Robert, what was your, what was your reaction seeing all this stuff break out? My reaction initially was the assumption that this is happening frequently, that the public doesn't always know how or what is happening behind the scenes and that there's probably more drama, you know, on a daily basis that's not reported on because it doesn't make it all the way up to the sort of coin desk level. And reading this, I was like, yeah, this seems like a shit show. I wonder how many more shit shows there are under the surface right now where there's a crazy

market maker doing a crazy thing and a team that didn't not have to negotiate it correctly. and there's all these bad terms and all these bad incentives, and it's just a fiasco. And now that I think the world's a little bit more clued into what are market makers and how they work, hopefully we have more stories that come out about what's actually happening under the surface because right now there's just so little transparency.

I would add the one thing, though, that I think it's very hard for market maker to do it outside, like without the protocol knowing. So like all the stories about protocols being, oh, like, we didn't know that how it works. I think most of the times they know. Yeah. I mean, this was clearly a case where they knew. Yeah.

You can see from the email chains that the foundation was like, what the hell is this? This is the most absurd agreement I've ever seen. And then, you know, a few days later it signed. Yeah. The quotes are really choice from this guy, YKPEC. It was also the founder of Web3 port claimed that Peck was his GCE. And then Peck was like, I've never met this. person, or like, we talked for two hours. I don't know why he would claim I'm his,

I'm his lawyer. Like, it's just like really funny, very, very choice quotes. And then obviously the whole relationship between Sam from like Zebek was sort of like this like shadow co-founder. And I was also looking like the rent tech is like headquartered in Bangladesh. So the whole thing is just very bizarre. And I'm more like, look, this isn't there obviously are there's this long tail of like really shitty projects, really shitty exchanges. And I'm not surprised to get themselves into trouble. Movement was weird where it was it was kind of not S tier, but it's not like random nobody VCs. You have robot ventures, for example. Like it's it's, you know, somewhat reputable kind of interesting product. Like there was enough there to feel like someone should have been

backstopping or at least like stepped in as as the chaperone and say, hey, this is not okay. This is not standard. I think you're kind of point around, hey, how often does this happen or teams don't know what they're doing. In some respects, it kind of reminds me of, you know, like venture investing pre-YC Safe when every VC would have their own sort of convertible note terms, it would be all sort of negotiated at Hawk. People would sneak really kind of, you know, vicious terms into their own, you know, individual investment contract, like having some crazy, you know, liquidation preference for like an early stage investment.

And I think the safe from YC sort of opened and sort of provided sunlight in this entire industry. And now everyone just has an open standard they can point to and just pick something off. the shelf that they know is going to work reasonably well. And I feel like market making, in my mind, is kind of a little bit still like that pre-safe era where, you know, if you know, you know, and you can generally get a good contract for yourself, but there isn't sort of like a safe equivalent. Yeah, there is, I mean, there are some services that people use, things like Coinwatch and there's others that allow them to help navigate the market making conversations

in large part because market makers are repeat players is all they do. Whereas a team that is going to launch a token, they only do it once. And the initial time that you aggregate your market makers and get something to go launch on a big exchange is the most important decision that you're going to make with respect to the liquidity of your token. So there are good market makers and bad market makers. It is sometimes difficult when you are going through referrals or you don't, you know, you're not really deeply networked in the crypto world to identify who's reputable and who's not. I mean, wintermeet, I believe is the single biggest market maker in crypto, if I'm not mistaken. And is that right of Guinea or you guys are top three or something?

Where are you guys? I mean, it depends how you look at things, I guess. Like if you're talking to token market making, yeah, probably. They're basically very diversified business ultimately. We have set of competitors in DFI, set of competitors, and centralized exchanges, set of competitors on PC set of competitors and token market making. But like, we are probably the only one that does it all, basically. That makes sense.

Yeah. So the names that you've heard of are very likely to be reputable, right? They're not dumping on exchanges. They're not doing all this weird market manipulation stuff. But the further afield you go, you find some weird random Asian or Middle Eastern market-making firm. There's a very good chance that I think it was Big Bird, Zero X-Aligned, what was it, X balloon lover, who pointed out that many of these market-making firms in name are basically ways of illegally cashing out founders. And they sort of say, oh, we're quote-to-quote market-making, but really what we're doing is we're taking tokens, we're dumping them and we're splitting the proceeds with you, which is exactly what Web3Ports deal was structured to be.

I mean, the thing that's most striking about this, aside from the mechanics of the market-making, which are themselves, you know, they do warrant discussion. But a lot of the focus has been on the team and on sort of what exactly led to founders, you know, the movement team, they were really praised for being. these young, really hard-charging, vibrant, ambitious founders. And the question that naturally gets raised is, you know, why would they do this? What causes founders to decide, you know what? Instead of playing it straight, I have a successful project. I have all this momentum. I have all these people excited about me.

Instead, I'm just going to dump my token and try to cash out early instead of actually shipping a product. And, of course, they were very roundly criticized for a long time for launching a token before they actually had a working chain, for potentially, you know, there's a lot of rumors circulating that they were relying a lot on contractors. They didn't really have that strong of a technical team. And they were just very, very focused on marketing over substance. And this has led to a lot of people raising these concerns that we've remarked on the show as well. Mostly rumors, right? Nobody had receipts of, okay, well, here's exactly what they did. But people

were saying, oh, they're manipulating the float, they're not doing theirdrop. They launched a token before they actually had a real product. And all of this kind of pointed towards there's something untoward going on with this thing. And I guess having chatted with a few people now in the postmortem to movement, a couple questions naturally come to mind. One, what does this make you think differently about how you are going to be looking at startups or founders going forward? And what does it tell you about the incentives of founders in this industry? Is it the case that there's a thousand rushes out there? Personally, I don't actually think there are. I think it's one of the reasons why there was so much attention and so much fud about movement. It was probably

the thing of which I saw the most stuff on my timeline that was unconfirmed people saying these things but without actually having hard concrete proof. I don't see that about a lot of other projects. Like movement, I think most people knew seeing everything that was being said that probably something was going to get uncovered sooner or later that was going to be the smoking gun about, yeah, movement is doing some shady shit. But, you know, there's, from my perspective, there's not like 500 of these. There might be somewhere on, you know, page three, you know, listed on Mexie or some other random exchange, but certainly not in, you know, the top 100. I don't know. What do you, what are your guys' thoughts on those questions? Yeah, I think dollar-weighted. This is kind of a

rare occurrence. This is why I think there's so much attention. But I was actually reading, and there was another coin telegraph article talking about market making agreements and they had some quote from some random like, you know, Web 3 advisory firm and he was complaining. And just for kicks before the show, I was like Googling this, this thing. And just I feel like people maybe underweight the just like volume of slop in the long tail and just like so many random shitty projects and people that you don't hear about and that aren't very valuable, but there's just like there's a lot of them out there. And I think to your point, like those are the people that are then going and getting these kind of tier three, tier four exchanges and market

makers. But yeah, to have something so high profile to be with it launched at like a three, four billion dollar FDV project experience this kind of thing. Yeah, it was you got at the five bill, I guess. is kind of crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's down, I think, like, 80 plus percent from where it initially launched. So, I mean, the chart for this thing has just been basically a straight line down. I don't know. If you know, what's your take on that question? Basically, how many tokens in top 100?

Yeah, and also, how does this inform your perspective when you look at the next token, right? The next token reaches out to you. You obviously don't want to work with the next movement. What should you be looking for? You know, what should we be looking for? I know, like, to me, like, definitely one part of the problem is, I'm personally, like, very allergic to those kind of like very fleshy, very marketing driven founders. But I know that it's definitely other way around and like in Silicon Valley or whatever.

Like traditional VCs love those kind of founders usually because like they bring energy and they're like, I know, they're super pushy and everything, which kind of like coincides a lot of times with them just being scamming people. And to me, like a big question, I guess my question back to you is like, how much do you see, like how big overall do you see for venture firms to basically identify and kind of like warn people about those kind of people and, yeah, being kind of like more selective and like more careful about those things because I don't know, top 100, yeah, I think they are definitely there's some protocols out there that are not great.

So, I mean, from my perspective, well, I want to hear Robert's perspective on this, but from my perspective, we passed on movement, but we didn't pass because we thought they were going to dump tokens on retail, you know, or like break their lockups and do all sorts of shady shit. I don't think there's any world in which you would look at a founder and say, ah, you're the kind of person who's going to break a lockup and dump on your... You try to screen for that, you know, just in your initial conversations, but it's hard to screen for it.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like, the reason why we didn't. invest was that we didn't think the tech was that interesting, right? We thought it was just a kind of derivative project. But when I met Rushi, I only met him once, maybe twice. And when I met him, I came away with the impression that I think a lot of the investors came away with, which is that very energetic, very charismatic, hard charging, very ambitious young guy. You know, it's now kind of a meme that there was this, I think it was it was blockworks that had a, you know, kind of a puff piece about movement. And it just kept saying, like, they're young and raised a lot of money.

It's kind of a meme that like that alone is time, you know. I know, I know. That alone is worthy of a pay-in to how amazing of a founder you are, that you're young and you raise money. And that's why you should be bullish. Listen, the entire Forbes 30 under 30 is like usually like a warning. No, that's like a great example of that, yeah. Yeah, extremely bearish.

So, Rob, okay, so having seen all this stuff play out, what's your learning? What's your takeaway? How do you reflect on the movement investment for you guys? Yeah, I mean, here's how I reflect on it. You know, I say this as very small investors who came in not at the beginning where we would like really get to know the team, but we came in at like the series A when it was like pretty developed.

I think that they should learn from this. I think that everyone involved has to use this as a growing up experience, both in terms of like business dealing, both in terms of, you know, transparency in terms of, you know, being, fair, you know, to the entire ecosystem. I just think that, you know, eventually everyone's going to bounce back from this stronger. Is it great for movement the project? No, right? Does it impact the technology that they're building?

No. And so, you know, I feel like this is one of these things where, you know, two years from now we might just very easily look back and say like, okay, you know, it's water under the bridge. They all figured this out and they moved past this and it was kind of stupid. and it is what it is. You're so optimistic. How do you think about the bet on Rushi specifically, right?

So, like, you guys at that stage, extremely founder-driven investment? Well, I mean, series A, it's less a founder-driven investment. So, like, when we invest in the pre-seat, for instance, it's all about the founder. You know, we're really not often, you know, saying, like, oh, well, you know, how scalable is the technology and this and that? It's like, it's a bet on the founder. It's a human bet. And it's like about looking them in the eyes. It's about understanding what their ambition is, why that's their ambition, and do I think that

they're going to pull it off? And it's the later stage you go, it's less and less and less about the founder. And it's more and more and more about traction. And that traction is technological traction. It's investor fundraising traction. It's all of these things. And the later stage you get, by the time you're like a series C or series D, it's zero to do with the founder, you know, because they've proven themselves.

And it's 100% to do with metrics, right? And so there's a gradient here. And this is one where we invested, you know, at the Series A, a couple rounds in. And for us, like, this was not a long diligence process. You know, they had a lead investor. The round was, you know, I fired for a call pretty much fully subscribed. And, you know, we wrote a small check. So, like, from our side, if it was earlier stage, I think we would have gotten to know the team a lot more closely.

So one of the things that we were chatting about, in a previous episode when we talked about the Web3 Port, when the initial thing happened with Web3Port, where they got suspended from finance, we talked about the idea of a disclosures regime for marketing agreements. And again, you and I chat about this a little bit in Dubai, but basically my proposal was that,

I think one way that a lot of this can be solved, not completely obviously, because there's always room for fraud and if someone's defrauding people outright and they're lying about these things, and okay, there's not much you can do to stop that. But with these marketing agreements, it is, you know, in traditional markets, you disclose who your market makers are. And you can't, you can't go public without having those disclosures. In crypto, the exchanges know who your

market makers are, right? Binance knows, Coinbase knows. You have to give them that information before they'll list you. But retail doesn't know. The public doesn't know. And to my mind, like the ideal disclosure regime is one where the delta between what exchanges know and what retail knows is basically zero. Right. When you are applying to an exchange to, to get listed, the public knows everything that the exchange knows. And basically, you don't have to tell the exchange anything that you're not already disclosing to the public. To me, that's where we should be going in the long run. We're very far from that right now. And I even went so far as to say that the terms of those market making agreements should be disclosed. And that was something

I think in Hester Persis speech, where she detailed what a disclosure's regime for crypto might look like. That's something that she even proposes that the terms of the market making agreement should be disclosed to the public. I'm, you know, we, Drew and I got in a big debate about whether or not this would happen and who would bear the cost and all this stuff. What is your thought about a regime like this? Is that something that you would vomit in your mouth and say absolutely no way? Do you think that would be good? Do you think it would be bad?

How do you think about that? I'm generally like myself, I'm very supportive of that in general because I think we have to get there. Like if basically we keep pretending and tokens are like not stocks, but they're so stocklike in their behavior. but like if you look at IPOs, for example, when a stock needs to do IPO, it needs to do such a gazillion different disclosures

about market makers, about who the investors are, like about all kinds of like risks and what's not. And yeah, Hester's speech was like literally about that, what has to be disclosed. And it's not been about having a parity of information between exchanges and retail. It's having a pair. It's retail basically having as much as,

as humanly possible to make decision whether to buy this stocking or not. And we definitely didn't have that. And I think market making agreements, basically is a very basic thing, like how big is a loan size and where the strike price is. It's like basically just essential because then as a retail guy, okay, you know, yeah, here we go. This is like market maker has incentive to sell above this price. So once we cross this price, maybe there will be some more.

selling pressure, for example. Maybe not. Maybe they'll just keep holding it. But at least like you're fully informed. And the really bad saying about our industry currently is we actually had at least one protocol that did those disclosures in the past. And that was WorldCoin last year or a year and a half ago. Like I don't remember. I don't remember where it was. But like WorldCoin actually did disclose the loans. It did disclose the market makers. Did disclose the strike prices. And they got all the shit in the world for this. Because people just. started criticizing them, why do you create the structure? Like, as if it doesn't happen with every single token, they're basically got lots of

shit for it. And yeah, I don't think they really enjoyed the experience. And more importantly, all founders come in after them. So, okay, we can disclose this stuff and be like good to our whatever investors. Or we can just like keep it quiet because we don't want to get all the shit. And that's currently where we are as industry as well, because not only. Not only there are no disclosures, but also like if you disclose, you get, yeah. So if it's voluntary, there's an equilibrium in which no one discloses, in essence.

And, you know, in a regime in which it's mandatory, which is, you know, as we've been talking about, you know, how registered securities work, everyone doesn't, right? So do you think that we have to have a requirement in order to sort of make that transition? or do you think there's any sort of like we'll call it self-regulatory steps that could be taken to actually get issuers to disclose market making? I thought about it a lot. Like generally we could like, I don't know, us G.SR. Selini, flow traders, whatever, like all us. It's like we could in Syria like get together and say, okay, like from now on, you know, like we're going to disclose it. And for us, well, basically for those market makers could disclose, I think it would be. be ultimately very beneficial.

I do think it would be beneficial because you kind of, I do believe we can push the market into this being a lot more normalized because, yeah, it's all about, it's all about creating those norms. And basically, all other market makers are kind of either forced to follow those norms or say, okay, we're just not going to do it. And protocols also are to follow those norms, so I'm not going to do it. But it's a pretty difficult coordination problem. So, yeah, if you don't have SAC forces the sonnas or like saying, you know, like,

it would be nice if you do it. Yes, it's just really hard. I tend to think there's three channels through which this could effectively get normalized. One channel is through the exchanges. That would be the easiest is if Coinbase, Binance, they basically decide if you want to get listed, you have to disclose. And that would just mean that everybody discloses because they want to get on Coinbase or Binance. You have to disclose before you even list, right?

So you can't, you know, wait until you agree. agree to the yes, we're going to list you, therefore now you have to disclose. You have to disclose in advance to even apply to get listed on Coinbase or Binance, in which case, okay, now everybody is going to disclose because they want to get onto Coinbase or Binance. That would be the easiest channel. The second, I think, would be through VCs, right? Because there's, again, a small number of high status VCs, and all those high status VCs could basically all agree. We're going to have a standard disclosures regime that we just push onto portfolio companies. They have to do these disclosures. It's like in a side letter or something. The

The third is through market makers themselves, right? So the high status market makers, the ones that aren't afraid of publicizing their market maker agreements, they could all decide we're going to collectively agree. And if you're working with a market maker who doesn't disclose, that's kind of shady. Now the problem with the market makers agreeing to do this is that if there's no forced disclosure of all of your market making agreements, then you could have one or two, you know, you have one non-shady market maker and then also have Web3 port, right? For all I know, that's what Rushi did, is that they probably didn't just have one marketmaker,

right? They probably had multiple, and one of them was basically the dumper. So you do need, I think, some uniformity in order to solve this problem, is that all the market makers are disclosed. And the exchange knows, right? Because the exchange sees who's trading the asset. They see who's providing liquidity. So you can never run it by an exchange without the exchange knowing. So if you're Binance, you're Coinbase, you're the primary liquidity venue for an asset, you ultimately are the primary enforcer. I think the last option is to wait for the SEC to do it, because I think the SEC is going to take way too long, and the disclosure regime is not going to be in the shape that we want.

And at the end of the day, I think it's better for the industry if we step up and also create the disclosure regime that makes sense for us, right? If you try to synchronize it to traditional securities, you get two problems. One is that you're going to get a lot of disclosures that are a huge waste of time that nobody cares about that are these kind of performative or more pure ministerial disclosures that don't really matter for any real purchaser. And then second is that you don't really get this kind of fine-tuning of what is the trade-off between the cost of disclosures and the value of the disclosures?

And I think as the industry, we're in a better position to be able to do that. And then lastly, I think there's a sense of like, oh, disclosures, does that mean you're basically agreeing the tokens are securities? And I think it's worth like exploding this thought early, which is. is that disclosures are good for everything. It's always good to do disclosures. It doesn't mean that you're a security or not a security. There's a lot of things that aren't securities that also disclose things about themselves. So at the end of the day, more disclosure is good. And we can just say that, no, this has nothing to do with the security. Not this is just how you get on exchanges.

You want to get a token on exchange? You have to do these disclosures. There's nothing to do with securities laws. And it doesn't imply any analogy between this thing being an unregistered security if you agree to do disclosures about it. That's my take. Clearly, when something gets listed, almost always there's a counterparty who is, you know, negotiate whether it's a foundation or whatever, somebody who even just has a lot of tokens and even if they're not directly affiliated with the project, almost always there's somebody who's on the other side with the exchange who may just be a quote-to-quote representative of the protocol, even the protocol's already fully decentralized. And whoever that person is who's lobbying to get this thing listed, let's just say that that

person, whether or not they're the quote-unquote issuer, is going to be the person making some of these disclosures to help the thing get listed and get liquidity. So I don't know. I'm of view that I think as an industry we have to grow up and we have to just get ahead of these things before we start to really lose trust with retail investors. Because these kinds of stories, ultimately what they do is they erode confidence in the whole token industrial complex. People look at something like movement. I mean, movement is just one token, right? But even one token that has this much attention and has this much force on social media, people see like, oh, that shit is happening? It's like the Kelsey Aventures thing, right? How many people would just

have said, you know what? I'm done. I'm not trading meme coins anymore. If they're this is the way that they're made. I don't know if I'm buying, if my next meme coin is also from Calcier Ventures or from, from, you know, Kelseyor Ventures Prime, how many of these firms are out there? How many of these tokens are like this? Right. With something like movement, it's not just, okay, some people lost money buying this token and they got dumped on. The problem is how, you know, how many tokens are out there? I really actually don't think it's that many. I think there's maybe, you know, two or three of them that are on page one that are like this. There's a lot on page three, a lot on page four, I'm sure. But if you're on a top tier exchange, yeah, the founders,

the ones that we back, they don't do shit like this. They're not getting rich, dumping their tokens on day one. Like, that's insane behavior. So, but the only way people are going to have confidence that's true is if there's a robust disclosure regime. And right now, you know, we're not really close to having that yet. It's not only the market-maker agreements that needs to be disclosed. Like, there are lots of other things, like basically what's disclosed again and stratify

like any significant transactions. Like if you're... Anything material to whether or not someone wants to buy or sell something, right? And like, we finally have this industry gotten to the point where some things are being disclosed to everyone. What's the token unlock schedule? That wasn't a thing a couple years ago. Everybody was like. Well, token on lock schedule, but also what is the cost basis of all investors, for example?

Sure, that's a great thing that I wish was disclosed across the board, right? So few projects disclose the cost basis of, you know, where people invest in. Yeah. No, there's a whole, there's a lot of wood to chop here in creating the right disclosure structure. But I also, the other thing I guess I want to say is this is one of these areas where I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good is that, you know, people bike shed and they can spend all this time arguing about all the little details of what's the exact right thing. But the problem of trust in the whole market, especially in all coins, is, I think it has at risk of metastasizing. And so I would strongly encourage anybody who's thinking about this seriously to try to move fast rather than trying to get it perfectly right. Because you can always iterate.

You know, you can always improve on things. And there's quite, it's very likely that whatever the industry arrives at, regulators are going to build on and add to or accrete to or formalize. But the best thing that you can do as an industry is to get there first and to show good faith, not just for regulators, but more importantly, for your own industry, right, just to gain confidence of investors. So let's switch gears a little bit here and just talk about market making generally because, you know, put the whole movement, labs thing aside, there's been a lot of fud lately about market makers. I'm, as a VC, I'm a little bit relieved because, you know, there was a moment that people thought VCs were the villains. Now people are pretty convinced that market makers are the villains. There's going to be a new villain in a couple weeks. I don't know. Everybody gets their turn. Everybody gets their turn. But right now, it's market makers. You guys have been getting a lot of heat

for the claim that you guys control token prices. There's been, you guys have been market makers and stuff like Meecoins. Of course, they're stand up every morning. So that's right. That's right. So. So. So. Help us understand, one, how true is this? And how can we be convinced that you guys are not controlling token prices, right? Like, how much control do market makers really have over how these markets go? And what do you say to the people who say, you know, look, the moment that Wintermute shows up and starts market making something, it only goes down.

That I think I've seen like 500 threads claiming that, aha, here's where Winter Mute started and here's where the token is now. Winter Mute, you've destroyed another one. Well, the finance say it was like, I think nine months ago, it was last round. So it was like, okay, here is like the graph and here's like a intermed graph. So yeah, now they are market makers and now it will go up. So the most basic saying is just very like all this like kind of kind of thought. It's very cycle specific.

So like if it's a bull market, people believe that market makers are pushing prices up. If it's a bear market, people believe that market makes push prices down. It actually, we were definitely villain two months ago. It's actually the fad is like really, really low now. Like, I don't know. I think people are searching for the new one, for the new target. I'm not, I'm definitely getting like way, way less hate compared to like two months ago on Twitter and just in general. But back to your question, I think it's part of it is definitely a cycle.

So, I mean, most of this thought quite obviously coincided with. basically Trump presidency not result in a super mega cycle, but something as a around. I don't know. As of this hour on Thursday, May 8th, it seems like the super cycle's back. So yeah, like maybe the internet is back as well, doing it as around now. So like maybe we'll see more laugh now. Who knows? But so thank you for deciding in your stand-up to make prices go up today. We really appreciate it. Yeah, we appreciate that. But like on one hand, it's that. It's just basically people trying to make sense of the world around them. And it's instead of trying to understand how the market structure works, how the float works,

like how generally many things are correlated with each other in financial world and tokens as well, it's kind of easy to find somebody to blame. That's like the most basic thing. But I don't know, to me, kind of like the saddest thing about this is just like how little people think about this and how little people understand because there were a bunch of threats being written about. I don't even understand fully how it works still because it's just it's literally flat earth kind of logic. But basically Binance sending us tokens and then we are selling those tokens to crush the prices so that Binance can profit on liquidations, something along those

lines, which basically knowing both our model and Binance model is kind of, well, it's pretty stupid because both us and Binance, we make a lot of money on retail investors because, well, Binance, I think more than us for sure, simply because like those are the guys that pay like they're in the highest features. They like pay a lot of fees. And for us, it's basically the best flow we can possibly have on screen. Basically it's, yeah, what's called uninformed flow. People just buy, sell, well, what, how we perceive it randomly, basically. And they don't really push the prices up or down, so they are like the best flow we can possibly have. Like, we want retail to stay not broke as much as possible. We don't really want retail to die. But, yeah, unfortunately,

like for the past, like in December, January, February, like, there were so many of those Cascadian liquidations that, yeah, retail is flushed out. Like, January was a good month for us, training wise. February, March, March and April, we're not so good months for us, training wise, because it's just not much happening. Like, everyone is. on side lines basically. So when retail activity dies down, that's when market making is less attractive. And right now you're saying you're not seeing a lot of retail flow going through all your venues. And it's not even linear. So it's if volume goes down 50%, we don't make 50% less. We would make way less than 50% less. Right. Because of the fact that you know,

retail is totally gone and vast majority of flow is informed flow. So okay, one, one, One question I've always had about market making in most assets classes, so if you're trading stocks or bonds or whatever, prices, you know, for retail, it's mean reverting, right? So there's a fundamental value to the asset, and it'll most likely go back to what the true value of the asset is after retail trades it. Whereas crypto prices are kind of path dependent, and they're very momentum driven and they're sort of auto-correlated, something that goes up tends to keep going up, something that goes down and tend to keep going down. Wouldn't that make market making against retail harder, given that these things are likely

to keep moving in the same direction that retail is pushing it? Not really. Ultimately, our model is we have a bunch of training venues. We have Binance and Coinbase and Defi and we have some OTC flow. We sell in one and we buy another one cheaper and we just do millions of those transactions every day. So trending from that perspective is not that bad. What's bad if like a big liquid fund of which we don't have that many comes and start

biased us buying some token and they can push the price really like against us and it's really hard to basically hatch in time so we'll just get run over so that happens and that's that's actually it's actually like the other side of token market making that like people saying okay you guys are making a killing on those call options we get run over on many many many many times on illiquid tokens that we have obligation to market make and it's actually it's not a lucrative business in a bear market at all. Like, we, like, when there is no retail interest and there is like token number 345 on Coin Gecko and you have to market make it, whatever, even half percent wide, which is not that white. Like, you get run over easily.

How many of your contracts do you lose money on percentage wise? So, like intuitively, something like 50 at least, 50 percent. But the ones you make money on, more than make up for the ones you lose money on. For us, it's a bit better because we have a more diverse fed business. So, like, for example, we do OTC. So being a marketmaker and a protocol really helps being a liquidity provider on over-the-counter as well. But, yeah, if you don't have any OTC flow, if you don't have anything,

it's almost like a venture business. You basically hope that this stuff will go up. But on one hand, it's a venture business, but also it's very cyclical venture business. They don't want to be a market maker when if you think that next six, nine months will be a bare market because it's cold. options will never be in the money. So you really want to, I don't know, speed up on this if you expect the bull market to commence like in six, nine months. Like that's a perfect timing. But don't you just, don't you just hedge those options like as a market maker? Like are, you're not like saying like,

oh, we hope it goes up. We're like, oh. But hatch with what? Like sell what? Sell what? I don't know. Sell spot. I mean, if you're the market maker for a project and you essentially have call options on it, you sell the project. No, that. But that's also an interesting one because like let's say you have a token trades at $1 and you have a call option at $2 for example. Okay, I can sell some and then let's say it goes to $1.80 at expiration. So we sold all the way up hedging some of it, some of this option delta, but then it expires not in the money and we end up losing on basically all the cells that we did because we actually

need to buy it back to deliver the loan back. So it's not very straightforward in, actually. Right, but there's a lot of market makers who do and understand option pricing and option hedging and know how to properly hedge and monetize the gamma of an option, right? Like, it's not rocket science. Like, yes, there's ways you can lose, but, you know, in general, if the option has value, you can monitor. It's easier.

It's easier the token is liquid. It's much less easy as the token is, I don't know, number 325. Yeah. Right. And most of your deals are with tokens that are not, you know, the most... Well, most of our deals, I don't know, vast majority of our business deals last nine months were meme coins. And that's just, yeah, completely random. Like this... Yeah, there's no value ahead to that. And also, yeah, like, if you don't have a call option, if you're a market maker for those,

like, they also got like a lot of, well, a lot of people saying that, okay, people are shorted in meme coins. Short and meme coins, Jesus, that's like the most scariest thing. possibly do. Because like, okay, if you short an L2, okay, maybe it will be like the best L2 and it will be like 2x of the next best L2. If you short Mimcore and it can go 1000x and become like next Shibb in or whatever. Like it's like you have no control over it whatsoever. Hmm. Right. Okay. So this whole call option structure, is this a thing in TradFi 2 or is this like a token crypto specific evolution? Like I think Robert can comment on it more like there are like structures sort of similar and treadfey around this but

at the same time not really yeah i think it tradfai a lot of the firms that are hiring market makers they're literally like paying them some fixed fee like oh we'll pay you 100 000 a year like for you to be a market maker in the stock and you have to get like three of them so you can get listed on the nasdaq and it's very service providery with like very basic economics and the market makers, they don't quote huge size, but there's enough liquidity there that whether you're looking to buy or sell the stock, you're somewhat happy. Yeah, basically to add to that, it's also a function because like the separation of roles is very different and threat five because you have like investment banks that like does it and then you have market makers. And then crypto,

it's like market makers kind of like also play this role of investment banker in a way. Because like investment bankers and in trade fires, they do get this, they're not called options things, like put option structures, which doesn't matter, but like they do have like option structures before the list. But then they basically, yeah, they let market makers do this stuff for not so much. So I guess the question, two questions then. Why do we think that the crypto markets evolved this way? I have to imagine it was started probably in 2017 when tokens were, they didn't have that much

cash, but they had crazy volatile equity. and like that just the volatility of these assets were so high that it really made sense to basically sell the volatility, which is really valuable to market makers in lieu of just selling cash and paying for a service provider. But maybe what we should expect is that as the market evolves, as token pricing becomes more efficient, as the volatility of these assets decrease, it starts to eventually just look more like tradified market making where, yeah, people don't want these weird exotic option structures.

What they just want is, look, pay me 100K a year or whatever it is to, marketmaker token. What do you think about that, about that theory? Like, it makes sense. Like, honestly, I'm quite surprised this option structure survived for so long on one hand. On the other hand, like, as a market maker, yeah, working with this protocol to get like $10,000 a month from them, like, it's not super lucrative. Like, it's not super interesting for most market makers. Like, nobody's going to bother with this. Like, I think another aspect of it is just like basically availability of supply, like in traditional markets, once the token is listed, it basically, like, even if you're not a market maker, like, if you're just like a random prop trade

firm, we can usually borrow those stock pretty much like on day one or two and basically trade it. There is no such borrow possibility in crypto because like all the supply is controlled or basically by a few market makers and whatever like maybe there was an adrop, maybe like some investors got like early investing. I don't know. The availability of supply is very low and nobody would land those tokens to anyone because it's just, I don't know, scary. Like uncollateralized lending is pretty scary in crypto.

So it's also about just market structure not being there. Like maybe if Binan said, okay, you know what? I don't know, like I'm just making it up. But let's say Binance comes up with a new model where as they say, okay, as a protocol, you don't need to have market makers. you need to give us 5% of your supply, and then we'll just, I don't know, auction it. Like, we'll just lend this supply to market makers on finance, whoever pays them, whoever pays more API per year, for example.

That would work like sort of similar to this. Like you would not be guaranteed that you have like super liquid markets, but you'll definitely guarantee that for protocols with like interest in volumes, there will be market makers who will borrow those supply and provide liquidity that way. Okay, well, so switching gears a little bit, and speaking of market structure, there's a new proposal for the market structure, the market infrastructure bill. And this market structure bill is a successor to what was previously called Fifth 21. And this bill is a total rewrite. It has a lot of things spiritually similar to the previous bill, but there's some very notable dissimilarities.

So in this bill, it says very clearly what a digital asset is and what a token, what makes a token a security or not a security. It gives oversight split between the CFTC and the SEC. CFTC is going to be responsible for the actual spot markets in crypto for tokens that aren't securities, and while the SEC is going to retain authority over capital raising and fraud enforcement. There's the ability for projects to raise up to $150 million a year in tokens, if they intend to decentralize. And instead of this previous, quote, unquote, decentralization test, there's now a quote unquote maturity test for what they call a mature blockchain protocol. But sure, blockchain protocol is one that is decentralized and or autonomous.

It requires that nobody controls more than 20% of the voting power. And the value is substantially derived from the programmatic functioning of the blockchain system. And the blockchain system is impartial. It's a little vague. I didn't totally understand what the boundaries of this are. And I think it's intended to be a little bit vague. But it's not really clear what it means for a team or a small group of people to have control over this thing. Of course, there are a lot of things in crypto that have multi-sigs, that have security counsel.

that have upgradability. It's not clear how this would intersect with what's called a mature blockchain protocol. They also kind of push back the regulation of defy. So defy is fairly narrowly defined. Now, this is the first draft. We don't really know how this is going to be evolved over time, and almost certainly there's going to be more input that goes into this thing. But I wanted to get first reactions to the broad outlines of this bill and what a market structure bill might end up looking like. Robert, why don't we start with you? I don't know how much time you spent with the bill, but what's your first take looking at this thing? Yeah, I haven't spent that much time with it simply because all bills evolve in the first draft

is never where it ends up. I mean, if you look at, you know, what's happening with the stable coin legislation, presently, you can see this, you know, in bright colors. I think it's going to evolve a lot. I think the definitions will change. I think, you know, some of the core structures will change. I think it's a long road between here and what gets signed into law. If this as written was signed into law, I think it would be great.

for everybody. I think whether you're a founder, whether you're a venture investor, whether you're a market maker, whether you're a investor, whether you're a retail, you'd be like, wow, this is a great upgrade and improvement to where we were pre-market structured legislation. So I think we're an incredible starting point. I think it's also going to change. I'm sure it'll get watered down in places. I'm sure it'll get negotiated. Right now, the Genius Act in the Senate is getting sliced and diced and compromised. All legislation goes through compromise. And this is the starting point. So what I love to see this starting point enacted as is, I sure would. Though I think we're not going to have compromise, I sure don't. How do you handicap the odds that this bill

even passes, right? I'm seeing now more skepticism about whether the market structure bill is going to work. Yeah, I mean, there's people who know this stuff a lot better than I do. I would say as a layman, I would put its odds of passing it probably 40 to 50 percent. That's period or that's like in this year? I think that's like period, right? Because I think we have, you know, about a year and a half until the next elections, which will reset the game board again. And so the window is probably for major legislation is probably about a year and a half. And a year and a half are not that different. And so if we're going to do it, it's going to happen in the near term. The stable coin legislation making its way through will be extremely illuminating for the odds of, for the odds of, market structure, right? If we're at the end of the road with stable coin legislation and like the Senate, you know, finds a version of the Genius Act that they love and then the House just generally accepts it, that will be bullish for market structure. If, you know, the House says, oh, we hate the Senate's version. We need to make our own things in here and blah, blah, blah,

and it gets stretched out. It's bearish for any crypto legislation. So if you want to know the outcome the market structure, let's start with stable. We've already seen Democrats starting to have some fairly large backlash driven in large part by the Trump family scripted their dealings. So that seems to be a very bad sign for the likelihood that we're going to get meaningful compromises on legislation anytime soon. Evgeny, do you spend much time with this bill and what are your thoughts and how this affects your world? Yeah, I haven't traded in much detail, but we definitely expect to provide feedback on this

on our side because just by virtue of us being so connected on like so many levels in crypto. I guess like my initial read is CFTC gets a lot more power compared to SEC. That's whether it's good or not like it's yeah, I'm still like trying to make my mind about this. I have to say that I really like SEC in its current iteration. So I guess like my intuition would be to give SEC in its current iteration more power if anything. But, yeah, I guess we'll wait to see. But we do have to look beyond to beyond four years from now. That's also true, yes.

Years from now. So it does strike me that it's very easy for the SEC to kind of full circle if we end up getting a more inimical. Well, yes and now. Like it depends what the law will actually say. Like if it just basically outlines the rules and like who is responsible for making sure that those rules are basically followed, Like, it doesn't really matter if, like, you have a Gensler again in, like, three years time.

I think it really, really, really matters. I think one thing that we've learned over the last four years is just the range in which you can be within the bounds of the law and still have a lot of leeway to basically do what you want. And we're seeing that even now, too, under the Trump administration. Okay, yeah, I'm like, yeah, but it's maybe it's a bit too optimistic. But, like, it still would be like, okay, Gensler again would be way less damaging with a proper. for law around him, basically. Less damaging, less damaging.

But the reality is, you know, almost everything in crypto is, is complicated, messy. There's a lot of, you know, like not everything gets colored within the lines and certainly not of any law that I've seen that can clearly demarcate which tokens are supposed to belong where. Tom, what's your take on the market infrastructure bill? Yeah, I mean, similarly, it feels like it's very early and haven't spent a bunch of time about it, but it kind of just reminds me of how difficult it is to write good crypto legislation where it's always too overly specific or it's not nearly specific enough. And you end up with some cludge of a solution that is not optimal.

And I mean, it's true for biggest lawmaking in general, but crypto being amorphous and changing all the time, just I feel like kind of accentuates that. No, I agree that I've also, you know, it's a very, very long bill and it's very likely to change. So I have not spent that much time with it other than reading the high level strokes. But my overall takeaway from looking at this and also knowing that, As Robert you mentioned, I think that's probably right, is that I've heard from a few people who are closer to the DC world that they're kind of giving it 50-50 odds now that a market infrastructure bill will pass at all. And that is going to be, what it really implies most of all is that if we only get a stable coin bill and no market structure bill, then that means it's kind of on us as an industry to self-regulate.

And to put ourselves in a position that we have norms that the next administration or the next set of rulemaking or next set of law, looks at what's already there and says, okay, that looks pretty good. Seems like your industry is solving its own problems. Seems like this thing has become trustworthy. And we don't have to go in and rewrite all the rules and come up with some really punitive regime. Yes and no. Yes and no. No.

Here's what I disagree with going. Give me the no. It doesn't have to be entirely in our court. You know, 40 years ago, the Gensler SEC could have, on its own accord, created rules from the industry through exemptive relief, through frameworks, through interpretations, through all of these different things. That never happened. That could happen under the Atkins SEC and, you know, it could happen under a CFTC, right? They don't need legislation to create frameworks for how different securities

or different assets or different items are traded. They already have the power to create frameworks. It doesn't have to come from the heavy hand of Congress. And so even if Congress doesn't act, It doesn't mean that I think it's on us and like we're orphaned and we're on an island. I don't think this is completely true, right? The SEC has said very clearly, look, we don't have the mandate from Congress, right? That's what Gensler originally said. And that's what the new SEC is saying is that Congress needs to act in order to give us the clarity to like start regulating all this shit.

Otherwise, who is the regulator? Both the SEC and CFC have said Congress has been very explicit. There's been arguments about bills, which means that nobody has clear authority. And if there's no clear authority, then like, look, a deferential SEC will say, we're not supposed to be making rules, right? You can make rules about what are clearly being. Yes, but they can make, they can go through rulemaking, right? Formal and informal.

I mean, they're already doing this, like, releasing a lot of statements on their, you know, interpretation of different items, right? You can get a lot of calls. Yeah, but it's almost entirely been rollbacks, right, of things that they were previously saying or doing. And a lot of these things that we're saying, these are speeches, right?

These are not rulemaking. So far, we haven't gotten a single rule from the SEC, despite the fact that. So the most basic ones that we had, like Bitcoin is not a security, right? Like, it's not like there was a law in Congress saying that Bitcoin is not security. Like it was a decision by SEC. But meme coins are not securities? That's meaty.

Right, right. So you can say, look, look, I don't think this is within my regulatory ambit, right? But you can't, but with the SEC, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. But my perception here is that the SEC is not going to say, okay, these things are not securities. And here's how they should work, right? You cannot do both. If they're not securities, they're not under the ambit of the SEC.

So if you're saying, you know, Ether, movement, right, let's say move, move, move tokens not a security, right? If you say move tokens not a security, then you're done. There's nothing more for you to say about it because you're not a non-security's regulator. So does the CFTC step in and say, okay, great, we're going to make the rules. And the rule is you have to disclose this, this, this, and this, right? I'm not seeing the CFTC stepping up to that charge. Maybe they will.

But right now, like, that's what both agencies are saying is that we're waiting on Congress. and the general deference to agencies has also been ended from the Loper Bright case and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. So the whole idea is that they're supposed to shut up and wait for Congress. And if Congress doesn't act, then that means Congress intentionally does not want legislation. That's what it implies, which means that this thing stays unregulated for longer. So that's why I really do think it falls on us as an industry to solve this problem, not just for the future regulatory regime that ends up getting comported to what. whatever we come up with, I think it's also just good for us.

It's good for us to have less movements. It's good for us to have more consumer confidence in when a token gets listed, is something I can actually trust that I'm not going to immediately get dumped on by some fucking shady market maker. Like winter mute. Okay. So to wrap up, to wrap up, if Guinea, I would really like to know, and I'm sure our audience would like to know, where do you expect crypto prices to go for the next month?

I know, look, I know it's all up to you and I don't know how much you're comfortable disclosing to us, but it would really help us out a lot if you could just tell us where you guys are going to move the prices. Yeah. Let me just flip a coin. You're going to flip a coin. That's how we do it every day. No, no, I mean, it's like I'm just really horrible predicting prices as evidence by my own. You set the prices?

Yeah, like, I'm like, yeah, why don't we do it? He just doesn't know what he's going to do. You don't know the dark border. He's unpredictable even to himself. Wow. That's, you know what? That's, that's very deep, very deep point about human nature. I would not be a long Ethereum.

Long Ethereum. Okay. All right. You heard it here first. Evgeny's going to set the Ethereum price to be hired tomorrow morning. So. I heard it here on the shopping block. Yeah.

If prices go down, we're going to bring you back and cost you. And you'll apologize to everybody. You'll apologize to all of us. Sounds like that. All right. Guinea, thanks for being on, shining light and all this stuff. See you next week, everybody.