Unchained - The Chopping Block: Debanking Drama, Crowdsales, and the Future of Crypto Regulation - Ep. 762

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this episode, the crew dives deep into the FDIC’s alleged vendetta against crypto, whistleblower revelations, and the evolving dynamics of token distribution on platforms like Echo. Plus, we analyze the rise of crowdsales, explore the intersection of policy and crypto innovation, and reflect on our 2024 podcast stats with some friendly competition.  Show highlights 🔹 FDIC Scandal Unveiled: The panel discusses the whistleblower claims against the FDIC, allegations of a vendetta against the crypto industry, and the fallout from newly unredacted FOIA documents. 🔹 Echo Crowdsale Platform: A deep dive into Echo’s rise as a preferred crowdsale platform, its competition with CoinList, and its innovative token distribution model. 🔹 Regulators Under Scrutiny: Insights into systemic issues within regulatory agencies like the FDIC and parallels drawn with other organizations like the FTC. 🔹 VC Sentiment and Crowdsales: The crew explores the tension between venture capitalists and crowdsale platforms, examining fairness, community building, and strategic distribution. 🔹 KOL Rounds vs. Community Fairness: A comparison of KOL rounds and Echo’s syndicate model in balancing fairness and hype in token distribution. 🔹 Token Distribution Dynamics: Analysis of how platforms like Echo incentivize participation and create new avenues for community engagement. 🔹 2024 Podcast Stats Recap: Fun insights into which hosts spoke the most, used the most filler words, and referenced Ethereum, Solana, or Bitcoin the most in 2024. 🔹 Predictions in Review: Early check-ins on 2025 predictions and how trends like DeSci and crowdsales are already shaping the year. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It appears that the FDIC was basically just acting with a vendetta against the crypto industry, trying to hide that fact and has really violated a lot of the core principles of what a regulator should be. And I'm just really excited for the story to continue to come out. You know, Sunshine cures a lot of things. It's a great disinfectant. And hopefully over the next couple of years, Sunshine shows what was actually occurring so that the FDIC can rebuild trust with not just the crypto industry, but the banking industry and with, you know, voters across America because it looks like a yet another agency that's gone off the rails.

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quang. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. I like that eat is the ultimate pump. Defy protocols 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 insiders for perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next to we got Robert, the Crypto connoisseur and Tsar of Superstate. Good morning. Next to we've got Tarun, the gigabrain and grand pooh-bah at Gauntlet. Aloha. And finally, I'm Haseeb the head hype man at Drive and Fly. 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. Lecy Chopping Block that X, X, Y, Z for more disclosures.

The boys, it's been another week. We're now firmly into 2025. Who are? Yeah, it is so far, actually, it looks like markets have taken a bit of a dip. I think we're up on the year. We're up on the week is what you mean by the year. Yeah, so far this year, we're up. That's true.

That's true. But there's been, I think, a lot of weirdness around politics and Trump and inflation concerns. And I don't know, it looks like it's going to be a really weird few years. But one of the things that we are seeing by and large across the industry is this kind of truth and reconciliation thing happening from the previous administration. So we saw it previously, I think we reported a little bit on it, about seeing what happened with respect to Operation Shoeck Point 2.0, a lot of the debanking drama that has been raised by Mark Andreessen.

The same thing happening with the Libra and David Marcus coming out and talking about these letters that senators were sending out to some of the Libra partners to get them to not participate in the Libra Foundation. And the latest we've seen is that, so you might remember, Coinbase, after Operation Showpoint 2.0 and the FDIC being, you know, supposedly having shut down a lot of banks that were interacting with crypto or discouraging them from interacting with crypto, Coinbase issued a bunch of FOIA requests. So FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act, which is basically a way that you can, essentially a citizen subpoena of a government organization to ask them to produce records about their internal

activities. And so Coinbase issued a bunch of FOIA requests to FDIC. And FDIC, of course, is the primary banking regulator. And FDIC was objecting to these FOIA requests saying that, no, no, we can't unredact a lot of these documents that Coinbase is asking for because they're, you know, there's sacred communications between a regulator and their regulator and their regulator, and that's going to impair our ability to do this. And it's going to give them a bunch of detail, it's going to expose a bunch of private details about their business operations. And so they were just kind of hemming and hauling and dragging their feet. And in the court case about these FOIA requests, a judge overturned the objections of the FDIC and said, no, no, no, no, no, this is excessive.

You have to unredact these things. And so these documents did get unredacted. And we now have been able to see the FOIA requests that the FDAC was fighting to the nail to not allow to be unredacted. And in these FOIA requests, what we see very clearly is the FDIC telling all these banks do not do any crypto banking, do not offer any crypto products. They don't even offer Bitcoin buy and sell. Do not offer any kind of stable coin, you know, on-rep, off-rap type stuff until further notice. We will tell you when we change our minds about the, you know, safety properties of these things, but don't touch them. And the FDIC's claims in court that, like, oh, no, no, these things are absolutely critical. We can't expose these. It's going to, you know,

threaten the businesses of the companies that we interact with. Clearly was, overly broad, not in good faith, which is exactly what a judge decided when deciding to unredact these things. And basically, it looks like FDIC was mostly just hiding the fact that they were doing this, which is exactly what people were speculating with Operation Showpoint 2.0 that the FDIC was doing. Now, there's also been a whistleblower an account on Twitter called FDIC exposed that has claimed that this was systematic within the FDIC and that it came from FDIC leadership to intentionally not only push back against the FOIA requests. Second, to actually start investigating, quote, unquote,

I don't know what investigating means, but investigating some of the Twitter opposition to the FDIC, including Paul Grewell, the chief legal officer of Coinbase, including Nick Carter, as well as many other people who've been online, you know, sort of according to the FDIC, spreading misinformation about the FDIC. And lastly, the FDIC supposedly was, even in responding to FOIA requests, they were intentionally mislabeling records and skipping searches and coaching staff to avoid creating these foiable materials. Now, this is an anonymous whistleblower. We do not know if this person is real, but they gave a lot of specific names about people

within the FDIC who supposedly were involved in issuing these instructions. So this looks to be the beginnings of quite a scandal in the outgoing, probably a lot of the outgoing team from the FDIC and claims that Trump should come in and fire a lot of these people as being part of the systemic debanking operation against crypto. So that was a lot. I'll pause there and let's get some reactions from everybody here. Robert, why don't we start with you? Well, the one thing I'll start with is that I've been following this story and getting a lot of my information from a Twitter handle, FDIC underscore exposed, that's been cataloging and summarizing everything that's occurring. you know, it's probably in some way associated with the crypto industry, you know, participant or source.

I mean, it seems very crypto-focused, obviously. But it's cataloging this information and it's a great follow. The thing that struck me just across the board is that, you know, it appears that the FDIC was basically just acting with a vendetta against the crypto industry, was trying to hide that fact. and has really violated a lot of the core principles of what a regulator should be. And I'm just really excited for the story to continue to come out. You know, sunshine cures a lot of things. It's a great disinfectant. And hopefully over the next couple of years, you know, sunshine shows what was actually occurring.

So the FTIC can rebuild trust with not just the crypto industry, but the banking industry and with, you know, voters across America because it looks like a yet. another agency that's gone off the rails. It is funny. Obviously, it's not sort of exact overlap, but Google, I think, is in trouble right now with the FTC for actually employing similar principles of like being overly broad with labeling things as attorney-client privilege so that they don't come up in discovery or subpoenas. And, you know, a lot of the same tactics that the FDIC themselves are using, sorry, FTC versus FDIC, but it's like, you know, it's one thing to go after a public company and you expect the higher bar for your own regulators.

Yeah, I think this veneer that regulators are, you know, especially stalwart, upstanding people who should just be trusted by default. That veneer seems to be getting shaved away with every single one of these things that we find out. I mean, obviously in the crypto industry, we are the subject of a lot of regulatory aggression. And as a result, we kind of see this more than many other industries would. I think most industries kind of assume they're like, well, my regulator is probably doing the right thing.

America is a high trust society with strong institutions. Probably their honest actors just doing good stuff. But it only really takes one or two people with a vendetta or with a strong conviction that, hey, we should do this thing. After seeing this happen with all the stuff that came out about Fauci and the COVID response to now seeing the stuff with the FDIC and the SEC and so many of these agencies now, I've just started to get it a better understanding of. of how much they bend the rules just as much as the people

that they're investigating to. So it's not that companies are perfect actors and regulators are bad. It's that more or less everybody seems to be playing the same game, which is, yeah, you sort of can't trust them by default. And you need some, as you said, Robert, some sunlight is just affected. I think the point that Bollagy made,

which appeared to get picked up by Elon, I actually really liked and really resonates with me right now, which is this idea of, you know, this truth and reconciliation, process or the sort of Twitter files being done by a large language model. And if you could just take everything in the database of the FDIC and just run it through, you know, Gemini. And, you know, probably, you know, I don't know, it's obviously a ton and a ton of data. Gemina. But well, it's got like a few million context window. No, I know. But I know, but like, I mean, I was a little.

What about there you go? That's why. You know, okay, okay, fine, Grock. Let's put it in GROC. But the idea is that, you know, an LLM could just basically say, like, look, let me summarize for you everything weird that happened. And here are the links to, like, the actual documents where the weird stuff happened. And once the administration turns over, right, and the people who are there defending the previous administration are more or less out. And let's say you inoculate them and you say, look, you know, we're going to see. You can't be prosecuted. The seep is trying to get everyone who works at the government accountability office fired and replaced by a level. I mean, this is not my idea. This is Bologi's idea. And now it appears to be something that Trump is at least open to. I think this would be such a great norm to establish in, you know, American public office is that this is just what happens. Every four years, an LLM goes through and comes through every single piece of internal communication and just describe for the American people, here's what actually happened at this regulator. Well, journalists would love this. I think it is a really utopian idea that we will get closer to every year. I think it's still

seems in 2025 a bit of a stretch to assume that all of the data is standardized, let alone online. What doesn't have to be? If it's an LLM, it doesn't have to be standardized. But it's not even like machine accessible for the most part. Like I expect that a lot of these regulators don't have every file in a centralized database with all of their activity. You know, you're probably right that if this were implemented, probably the new thing

would be file drawers and like people writing down notes on people. Phone calls. Phone calls. Phone calls. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which we know also was part of the claims against the FDIC. It was that they were calling people, they were doing a lot of it over phone calls and we're not putting it into writing. I think there's enough in writing. Yeah, the really fun anecdote I saw was that if, you know, they were instructing people to hide things from FOIA by doing it inside of Microsoft Teams calls because they weren't archived. Oh, I see. I see. Right. Which is basically just fine.

calls, right? I mean, it's just, you know, but I think it was also the chat logs, right? Oh, the chat logs. Oh, interesting. I also saw some people. They're like getting on it. Hold on. Hold on. I want to visualize this. You're getting on a team's call with your regulator and you're just staring at each other quietly while typing into the chat log. I assume. Don't think crypto. Delete all the crypto accounts. No, I assume it was like intra-agency. Like, oh, like, let's have these like conversations that there's no record of and like pass files back and forth and do all these things. Hmm. I see. Yeah, that's pretty whack. I've also seen people toying with the idea of, because obviously some of the files that came out were still partially redacted around specific names of people or entities and busy to twing with using the elm to try to unredact the redacted parts where you can sort of, you know, brute force, hey, like what characters with what kerning would fit in here and like, you know, try to find something that would be suitable.

So I've seen some people like do some very elementary stuff, but I would also love to see that. thing when it's working on that. It feels very valuable. Yeah, I mean, at this point, doesn't really matter. Like, we kind of know the story, right, which is that they basically did this to everyone. Sure. More generally speaking, it's a cool application. Tarun, I know that you feel deeply incensed by drama within regulators in the banking industry. Tell us, tell us your, let the people hear. I'm going to just say one sentence, which is I had never really heard of FDIC exposed until just now, and I just followed it while Robert mentioned it, or you mentioned it. Okay.

I've ever mentioned it. So that's the extent of my knowledge on this topic. Very good. Very good. Okay. I guess the one thing I think that's kind of weird to me, I will say, is like, historically aren't like the banking regulators like kind of supposed to usually just like kind of boring.

Whereas like the SEC and CFTC are like the flashier ones. And like I feel like there is this role reversal here in some ways. Like that SEC is kind of turning demure right now or being clipped, I guess. and the FDIC is just like, it looks almost crazier. Yeah, well, there was a banking crisis. So I imagine, yes, FDIC is particularly hot right now. Well, and the head did the head get fired for sexual harassment? Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, FDIC exposed also, I went back to their old tweets. And there was something about the guy Martin Grunberg, whatever his name is. He was like, yeah, no, apparently according to internal documents at FDIC, so he had this habit of like putting his hand in his pants. And his response of like why it's okay that I put my hand in my pants is that like, well, there's no rule against putting my hand in my pants. It just makes me feel comfortable. In front of other staffers. I think just like all just like at a random time. It's just like a tick that he had. He just put his hand in his pants. Anyway, I don't know. This is kind of off topic, but just part of the complex of what the fuck is going on in government, guys?

Like, how has this guy become the head of the FDIC? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, to be clear, not that Trump appointments are particularly inspiring, but just in general, you know, like, I don't know. It feels like this is kind of both sides issue. Yeah. The only thing I'll add is, you know, when I first started working in a professional context,

it was in the banking sector in 2007. And at that era, during like the great financial crisis, the banking regulators were the hot, you know, corner of government. I mean, there was nothing more important and nothing more exciting than the FDIC and the Fed and Treasury, like, as a combination, trying to save the U.S. from the brink of ruin. And so, you know, the FDIC did have like a major spotlight on it about, you know, 17 years ago. I can't believe it's that long at this point. But, you know, it has gotten more boring over time, as it should. I mean, the FDIC should not be an exciting corner of government.

Makes sense. Okay, well, I'm sure we'll hear more about the rollout and the response from the government and Congress to what has now been released about the FDIC. So we'll keep abreast of this. But overall, it seems like mostly vindication that the crypto industry was right. And that almost everything we thought was happening was exactly what was happening. And also, we've got to get Paul on again to take a victory lap. Yeah, actually.

For sure. Yeah. Very, very well deserved. and yeah, also big ups, of course, to Paul Growwell for driving a lot of the response here. Okay, so there's been some other news in the corner of the crowd sale market, primarily coming from Echo. So we've talked a little bit at Echo before on the show. Echo is a new crowd sale platform launched by Kobe, who's a big crypto influencer. And Echo has been getting a lot of attention because many of the biggest sales, of course,

Mega-Eath being probably the most prominent one that's happened recently, have been going through Echo. And Kobe, man of the people, he has tweeted out that, quote unquote, he's seeing a lot of hostility from venture funds that, one, restrict founders from selling on Echo. And two, stop founder sales except for late stage high FDV launch sales. So they don't want the founders to be selling lower than the VC rounds. And this tweet that he said of like, you know, he's seeing some venture funds didn't name which ones. And, you know, obviously it's a little vague who exactly he's referring to. But that has triggered this kind of wave of anti-VC sentiment and the sense that, oh, are the crowd sale platforms zero sum with VCs or are they intrinsically anti-VC or are VCs anti-c or are

VCs anti-c crowdsales? So thankfully, we've got a bunch of VCs here on this podcast. So VCs, what do you guys say? I know, what is it? How lucky are we? I know. As VCs, what do you guys say to founders who are potentially launching on Echo and what do you think of these VCs that are saying, hey, you know, don't launch on Echo or don't give Echo

people a lower price than us, et cetera. Well, I'll start and I'll frame this as myself wearing two hats, both being a VC as well as being a founder. I think there's a lot of really good reasons why a project would want to sell equity or tokens to a widely dispersed group of accredited investors at prices below where they might have sold to a venture capital firm and why everybody might be happy in that scenario. I think the first reaction that a lot of VCs have is like, you know, anything below what I paid is a down round and like, no way, like take this idea off the table. It's unfair to me. It's unfair to the company. Like downround, anything is bad. But, you know, these echo deals are not major fundraising events for the most part. They are much

smaller allocations and smaller fundraising events that are not primarily about maximizing capital to the company. They're about maximizing distribution and building excitement amongst what generally amounts to be, like, I don't want to call it KOLs, but much more in the no group than retail. And so. Oh, Robert, do you say KOL or do you say influencer? I don't even know anymore. Whatever it is, influencer. But I think there's a lot of good that can come from having, you know, 500 people each invest $1,000 versus, you know, only looking at the context of one venture fund investing $25 million. And so I encourage it, you know, of our companies in the robot ventures portfolio.

I think, you know, to other founders listening, I think, you know, it's a great idea. If done correctly, you just have to consider, you know, the total context and picture around how you're fundraising and why. Okay. Well, Tarun, as the world famous DCVC, how do you feel like your DC projects using Echo? Yeah, I kind of am in the camp with Robert. I think generally, and to some extent, I would argue Kobe was possibly inspired a little bit for echo by this proliferation of these KOL rounds that were sort of like very preferential

terms like 2020, 2022, 23. I thought you were going to say inspired by AngelList because it's basically Angelist for crypto, but that's a separate. Hey, hey, hey, Neval's not here. So, like, we don't have to be able to debate. But I would say these KOL rounds were viewed as like pretty unfair to a lot of participants in these communities, right? Like, they're participants in these communities, like before the project.

is launched, you're like sit in Discord and do all these tasks and whatever, make memes, you know, that type of stuff. And they wouldn't get access to these KOL rounds. I'd get like a small air drop. And then, you know, the KOL rounds were like just these like Twitter influencer people who got these kind of preferential prices. And so I think there was kind of this view that it was like kind of unfair that you had this two tier system. Whereas, you know, maybe if everyone got to buy in who was buying this sort of crowd version at the same price was more fair. But it's still not that. It's still not that, though, because, like, the people who are in discord doing a task, you know, are not accredited investors. They're not, like, able to participate in these,

private investment routes. Well, to be clear, and Kobe, I think, clarified this is that you need to be an accredited investor only in certain geographies. So in the U.S., in Canada and I don't know, UK or something, you have to be accredited. But outside of those GOs, you actually don't have to be accredited. Oh, I take back what I said. Yeah. So, so anyway, my point is, just more like I think it just wants to bridge the gap between those two. That's that's that's more where it's coming from. I mean, I think it's great. When I heard that this thing about like VCs blocking people, I was like, is this a made up thing as marketing? Because like, I don't understand if you're a VC, you think it's a sigh up. This is in fact the best way to get like new

participants and have them all feel good about your project versus this thing where you have two-tier system and then everyone goes and shits on the VCs. So like it feels very short-sighted to whoever did it. In fact, I can't think of a single larger or sort of well-known VC who would have been like no, absolutely no echo. So like I'm more curious who did it and also I'm willing to take the conspiracy theory side that this is this is very good marketing from Echo. Tom, what's your take? Robert brought up this sort of like is Echo just like angelist point, which was kind of debated earlier this week. Raghav, who's the CEO of Coinlist,

had this thread about, hey, how to explain a difference between Coinlist and Echo to a founder who was named by doing a crowd sale and basically saying, hey, you know, Echo is not a real token sale. It's syndicates. It's very limited. You know, I had to get a token for many years. And then him and Kobe were kind of going back and forth

and beefing a little bit. So it feels like in some ways, And Kobe's playing the sort of current Twitter drama quite well. But I think the most interesting part about Echo is, I mean, the syndicate thing is whatever. I agree, it's very angelist-like in that way, you know, crypto or non-cry. But it's, I think, also the fact that they've been able to actually charge carry. I mean, you know, angelist SPVs also do charge carry. But it's more that the fact that the market is supporting them for this.

And I think in some respects, it is better, right? It is better. So, can you just explain for the audience? Like, what does that mean that these things are charging carry? How is that different from Coinlist? Echo gets a percentage of profits from an investment. So they only make money if the actual investment does well. So I think for Echo is generally like 10%.

So let's say, you know, you invest at, you know, $10 million valuation and it ends up exiting at a, you know, $20 million valuation. Cool. Echo gets, you know, 10% of that P&L. If you exit below 10, then they get nothing. and they actually lose money because of the set-up fees. And so in contrast to a platform like Coinless, which is just encouraging the project themselves a fee for doing the sale,

it does seem like it's better incentive alignment for Echo, for the team, for whoever is bringing the deal onto the platform. So they actually are incentivized to bring good deals versus incentivized to do volume. But I mean, I will be curious to see if they can actually get to a point of broader distribution. I mean, this is obviously a more of a broader U.S. regulatory issue. but I think, you know, if you look at some of the more recent Echo sales, I mean, they sell so about pretty much instantly, which I don't think has been true for a lot of other, you know, crown funding or, you know, sort of pre-sales that I've seen maybe in the past year.

So I think something about the quality and something about this sort of like, you know, self-referential kind of kind of quality to Echo seems to be working. Yeah, there's clearly some positive selection effects that are happening is that, you know, the best projects right now are choosing Echo because Echo's got the vibes, got the eyeballs. It's kind of got this branding halo around it. It does seem true that Echo, you know, relative to Coinless, it's like, okay, with CoinList, people are directly buying tokens. Whereas with Echo, you're like buying shares in SPV and, you know, SPV stands for a single-purpose

vehicle. I don't know, whatever. It's like a little more convoluted exactly how, sorry, special purpose vehicle. So it's a little more convoluted how you're actually getting your tokens and like who you're entrusting to be the intermediary between. They're going to figure it out later. Maybe, maybe, but I think also they've potentially chosen a path. In-kind distributions, which is also, I think, quite clever.

So you actually do get the tokens if you want them versus- Yeah, like if you didn't do that, it would be fucking crazy, right? If they didn't do that, it's like, you're not even distributing tokens. You're just, people are just making money for free. Or some sponsor decides when to sell the tokens, liquidate them, and give you the proceeds, you know? Yeah, in which case, it's just you're betting on the token making money and you're not going to be a holder, in which case, why would you do that? So, like, yeah, okay. So all that being said, I think maybe that would be more aligned.

Maybe that would be more aligned if you can't get the tokens and sell them and you're like, you know, stuck holding them. Do you just get the proceeds? No, no, yeah. In like, you know, a long future. But you can't use the tokens, right? Isn't the whole idea like consumption of the tokens? Is it, though? Like if it's a layer one, if it's a layer one or if it's like some protocol that requires token usage or you're trying to decentralize the token ownership, like these are all things that people want from Echo is like, oh,

people will get my token and then use my product. Obviously, not everybody does. And so there's a little bit of fantasy behind some of it. But if it's literally just like, okay, here's a hedge fund or like, you know, an SPV that you're buying financial upside in this token, then really people are just trying to make money. They don't really care about, necessarily care about the community underlying. I would posit that everybody on Echo right now is trying to make money.

That's kind of the thing. They are. The question is yes and, right? They might also want to be part of the long-term community or be a long-term community or be a long-term holder. But if you're, if literally like you're not getting the tokens, then well, I also think I also think the interesting thing about Echo versus CoinList and maybe CoinList has this, I, but I've never seen it is like they did kind of cop do the AngelList syndicate thing. And I don't think there's syndicates on Coinlist, right? Like angel only angel, I could be wrong.

Yeah. Angel list is syndicates. Coinless is just direct token. Yeah. I think like somehow mixing the two of them also seems good because they basically got people to hype up their own groups and be like, look, and enter my, join my whatever group because we have some amount of some asset. Right. Like, there's some social aspect to investing. Like, it does really feel like one of these like social investing things, you would see like social stock investing things like investment club group type of things, which is like, I think for these private investments in crypto has never really been a thing as much.

It's always been like individuals. I remember Syndicate, the, like, there was a protocol called Syndicate that was literally trying to do exactly this, but it didn't work. I think the timing was also wrong for when they launched. Yeah, we invested. Oh, you guys were investors. Yeah. They now do infrastructure. They pivoted.

No, they're alive. They just, they now do. Well, I mean, on the original idea. Like, why do you think that didn't work when Echo did work? I think it was too early. Yeah, I think it was timing. Honestly. I was like, the other thing, the other thing, if I recall, they were doing like these.

lending clubs or something where there was no carry. So because of that, like they, like, Echo just kind of bit the bullet and said, we're just going to do syndicates. It's going to be expensive. There's going to be high fixed costs. There's a lot of legal and regulatory overhead to what we're going to do. But we're just going to do it because it creates this incentive alignment that people want to chill their own syndicates, right? Whereas with syndicate, it really is like a kind of, we're all peers, we're all doing deals together. Nobody's making any carry. And so there's really nobody who's like the sponsor of the deal who's economically incentivized to like get people to buy the thing that they're buying alongside them. So because because I believe that was a

regulatory carve out, right? If you if you charge no carry, then you didn't have to have accredited investors or something like this. I believe that was, I believe that was what syndicate was doing. Anyway, it's been a while since I might be misremembering. But it's also, I think, I mean, really, I think the limiting factor for these platforms is deal flow, right? They just classically suffer from adverse selection. You generally get the crappiest projects. How do you solve that, you have smart people who have some upside to bring on good projects, whereas, you know, previously was, okay, the platform itself tries to bring it on. And it's like, you know, who's going to random crowdfunding site XYZ to like, you know, sell a bunch of equity.

It's generally not the top tier. Yeah, I think it's also echo was really coming of age right when the election happened. And so like this meta shift that's happened around crowd sales happened because of Trump, like unequivocally happened because of Trump. And so pointless kind of being an older platform, not really having the same RIS. as Kobe and not having the same distribution. Echo has now really kind of, you know, Echo's been around for a little bit, but just wasn't getting a lot of eyeballs,

wasn't getting a lot of tension, didn't have a lot of deal flow. Now it's just exploding. And that's kind of perfect timing for them. I think there's also an aspect that reminds me a little bit of like NFT communities. It's like, it's a little more gated than syndicate was.

Syndicate was like pretty, like a lot of the syndicate groups that initially were like open access. and like anyone could join and there was like not these constraints and somehow I think there's this like who wants to be the hottest person thing at on Echo where like it really is like this leaderboard competition thing

and people are trying jockeying for position to get into certain groups and that dynamic I think wasn't also was not quite as strong for something syndicate where people were had this like social competition and so I just think there's a many confluence of things

obviously Kobe is like one of the greatest marketers in crypto period right like so there's a lot of other stuff that went in but I think the interesting thing of the syndicate team built all this software all the software and then now just like kind of works on that separately like they like build this infrastructure to do this and then now they just run the infrastructure for other people so interesting yeah I think the other thing is that like why you know if you think about angelous syndicates, for example. Why aren't angelous syndicates as insane as echo sales? And I think the answer is that normal companies do not desire this thing, that crypto companies desire, which is getting in a bunch of retail, KOL influencer, cool people on Twitter to own a piece of their stock

so badly that they're willing to give the massive discounts, right? Like, you, I mean, in normal venture, people do want that, but they won't, it's not worth it to them. to give discounts, just for having like some celebrity investor on the cap table. Like they have to be a real fucking celebrity, you know? Like maybe, okay, Elon Musk wants to invest and he's willing to announce that he's on your cap table. Then, okay, great, I'll give you a sweetheart deal. And maybe even the rest of my cap table is okay with that.

But just getting thousands of people to own my shares, actually, I want the opposite of that. I don't want thousand people on my cap table. Crypto is kind of unique in this way. And maybe that's part of the insight of why Echo works so well is that syndicate, like the syndicate structure of having these sponsors plus the, just you're having a cajillion people on your cap table uniquely well suited for crypto in a way that it wouldn't be for just traditional tech companies. So going back to the original claim that Kobe was making, just to

give our perspective as VC's, or at least Dragonfly's perspective as VC, I would say that, like, for the most part, I'm actually very happy when projects are able to get strategic investors onto the token table. And I'm totally happy to give them discounts, right? Even if they're paying less than we are, even if they're investing at the same time that we are. I don't really care, right? Like, I think a lot of VCs get stuck this idea of fairness.

They're like, oh, I took a risk on you. And so therefore it's only fair that I get the same price. And it's just like, I don't know. It's like, who gives a shit? Like, the only thing that really should matter for you is how likely is this project to succeed? And if getting these marginal tokens to this person makes it more likely to succeed, then of course you should do it.

Like, why would you ever not have that be your number? North Star. So for things like Echo, it seems really obvious at this point that Echo is a big part of how you distribute tokens, get MindShare, build community, so you should do it. And if it means that you bring people in at the last VC round, or even you bring people below the last VC round, you know, like when people were doing KOL rounds and that was the thing, I was like, yeah, sure, whatever, if you think it's the right thing to do, go do it. So I think any VC who's saying that is very either short-sighted or just honestly stupid. That's why I almost don't believe that, like, like this person exists.

Like they have to be so against their own self-interest. I believe in the very, exactly, very high capacity for stupidity in this industry. Yeah, I bet at least one VC was like privately telling a company not to do this. And like the company went to Kobe and was like, what should we do? Our VC says not to do this. And, you know, this kernel of drama has been taken to crypto Twitter. Right, right. Yeah, I think you're right.

It could be like a game of telephone where somebody was like, you know, we want to sell 10% of the token supply on Echo. And the VC's like, don't do that. That's way too much. Don't do that. And then they were like, oh, and tell Kobe this. And Kobe's like, oh, VCs are telling people not to launch on Echo. So I don't know. I'd be curious what that original conversation was.

But I also wouldn't put it past that some VCs are just stupid. Or some VCs also just don't know what happened with Echo. They don't understand the meta-shift. So maybe they just literally have not been paying attention to Twitter. there are a lot of VCs. Has ECHO translated its docks to Korean and Chinese, and if not, then maybe that's also. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe that's what it is.

Yeah. But this idea about like, oh, I don't want somebody else to get a better price than me, to me, that's just like, it's just facile. It's just stupid. It's like, okay, you don't understand what investing's about. Right. I mean, a lot of VCs are not as good as dragonfly and robot ventures and don't understand what ventures about.

Totally agree. That's what I'm saying. Robert, I always had to take Obama medal. meme. Yeah. Here you go, Haseev. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let's throw that meme on the screen for everybody who's confused of what we're talking about. Cool. Okay, so moving on to really big news. So one thing I'm sure everybody has heard about now is that the chopping block ran some end-of-year numbers about our overall stats in 2024 and everybody's talking about it, everybody meaning particularly the four of us.

AI generated. AI tabulated, not generated. So we did double check these, so we know these are correct. So some stats on the chopping block in 2024 that you didn't know that you needed to know. So first up, blabbiest hosts who spoke the most words on the chopping block last year. So we'll go in reverse order. Wait, wait, wait, before we say it, moment of silence, guess audience. This is going to be a hard one.

It's real hard to guess. Yeah, this is tough. Turns out number one was me. Surprising. Number two was Tarun. Tarun was number two. So I had 130,000 words. Tarun had 66,000 words.

That's like half. Actually, hold on, 66,600 words, Mark of the Devil. Wow. Appropriate. And then. How to sneak that one in. Did you plan that? Did you plan that?

I feel like you might have been tracking his word count just to get it right in at the end of the year. And then Robert number three at 35,700. And Tom, last place at 30,000. Tom, what's going on, man? Do we need to talk about this? New Year's resolution? I'm more of a quality of a quantity guy. I saw it. Oh. I was looking at the Qaeda VC apps dashboard and or GM from our team called it out that I have, what, 9. something percent smart followers, which is extremely high. And so, you know, I'm kind of like the Velvet Underground, but for VCs, it's, you know, very. very small and niche, but very influential. So I'd like to keep that track record going.

There you go. Just the Velvet Underground or the Velvet Underground and Nico. You know what? Nico can come too. That's cool. Cool. Wow. Okay.

All right. So Tom, news resolution. Let's get you, let's get you swapping with Robert. All right. I'm going to swap. Okay. Okay. You swap with Tarun.

Turun's in last place. Oh, no. Turin becomes a host. Yeah. And then I go to last place. I guess that we just run it like a train. We did a six. Okay.

That's going to be hard. Okay. Good. All right. So next up, we have total filler words in 2024. This is, Tom, I, I, okay. You are number one. I know, you are number one for filler words at 551.

I am second at 404. We did not normalize this for total word spoken. So second, third is to run at 274. Actually, they have been normalized. Oh, they have. Oh, I'm sorry. They've been normalized. Oh, shit.

Oh, never mind. So I'm doing terribly. Okay. So, wow. Okay. Okay. Actually, that is better for you, Tom. I thought this is not normalized, which I'm like, holy shit, Tom.

How are you being that many? I was in Oz. Okay, sorry, these are normalized. No, no, no. These are normalized incorrectly. It says here, a disclaimer. The counts for filler words have been normalized based on an average total of 65,000 words. That's not how you normalize.

That's not how you normalize. Correct. This is like, it shows the intern. This is incorrectly normalized. Intern. Divided by 64,000. I know it should be like per thousand. Correct.

It should be per thousand words or something. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So if you do this correctly, I should actually be normalized down and Tom should be normalized up. Yeah. No.

Okay. All right. No, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because Tom spoke half of $30,000. Yeah. I spoke double $30,000. Yeah, exactly. So Tarun is the only one who's normalized correctly. So anyway, Turum, you're at 274. Robert, you're at 242.

Anyway, all right. Sorry, the mental math is a little too hard here. But we'll, you know what? We'll revisit this. Tom says, the AI's fucked it up. The AI's fucked it up. as usual. Can't trust Gemini. All right. So Google, please sponsor us. You know how many people said you know. So we get a lot

of YouTube comments, people saying, you guys say you know way too often. Stop saying you know. And so we'll get a ranking for who said you know the most often on the chopping block. Number one, gold medal for you knows on the chopping block is Robert. You know it. You know it, you know it. This is also normalized for 65. thousand words. True, true. So you are half of that. So you should be about 500,

which still makes you number one. Congratulations. Congratulations. Still number one. Actually, Tom is proportionate. Tom is proportionate. No, because Tom is, Tom should be kind of half as well.

Yeah, but he was. Yeah, so Tom should be about 400. So you're about 500. He's about 400. Tarun is about correct at 274. I should be chopped in half, so I'm about 204. So I have roughly the lowest, you knows. So this data science normalization is really hard.

It is, it's good. It keeps us sharp. All right. So next is who is the Bitcoin maxi? Okay. Let's take a moment of silence for you to guess who the Bitcoin maxi is, audience. Yeah. Who do you think has been talking the most about Bitcoin on the show?

It turns out the- Hint, ripple. Ripple. Why ripple? Because, you know, Robert. Oh, oh, I see, I see, I see. Yes. Okay. So the number one Bitcoin maxi on the show for using Bitcoin the word Bitcoin the most is number one is Robert for a total of roughly 100 instances of saying, talking about Bitcoin. Tom is second. No, no, Tom is second. Tom is not. Tom is not second. Tarun is second at 30. Hold on. No, you're second. No, I'm second. Sorry. I'm second. There are different sizes too. You just follow the size. No, no, no. I'm normalizing. I'm de normalizing. I'm denormalizing. Did you just say all the brown guys? are the same and you randomly picked one?

Is that what you just did? No, no, no. You are 39 because you don't have to get denormalized. The audience is going to hate us repeatedly talking about. This whole segment sucks. Let's just. You know what? All right.

Sorry. All right. All right. You know what? We will come back to this. We will come back to this. This one, we don't need to normalize. I will give this one, which is Ethereum versus Solana usage.

Who said Ethereum versus Solana the most over 2024? So who's the most Ethereum? heavy, who is the most salina heavy? So for the most Ethereum heavy, we have Tom. So Tom had, it looks like about, I don't know, it's the opposite, Tom. No, sorry, opposite, opposite. This is a crazy infographic. Tom talked the most about Salana. Talk about Tom is a Salon Maxi. Tom is a Salon Maxi. As we all know,

Tom is the biggest Salon Maxi on the show for, I don't know, roughly like 65% Salana. Then Tarun talked a lot about Salana. He's probably call it, I don't know, 60% Salana. Then me, I was close to even. I was maybe about 55% Ethereum for Salana. And then Robert

Dead last, biggest eat bowl. He was probably on the order of about XRP bowl. XRP and XRP bowl. Luckily that's not in the dataset, Tarun. These are surprisingly balanced. I thought there'd be more variance or there's a bigger skew. I mean, these are all kind of in the same ballpark,

which is, which is surprising to me. This might just be intern math too. We don't know. Well, this one, this one, you can't fuck up. This one, because it's on a per person basis. Yeah, but you know, I would. Okay. All right. All right, all right, all right. The intern is more of a word cell than a math guy. We'll, we'll try to take a different approach to the numbers next year. But we thought you might enjoy that to help contextualize your hosts and how biased we are in our in our bags yes i like bitcoin and ethereum and they like and ripple okay i don't know why everyone keeps on saying that i like ripple i mean i because you went on this tweet rampage about how how you you spent the weekend in xrp the xrp trenches it's true honestly i respect i respect

your lack of chain racism uh which i believe we coined on the show i believe we coined that you coined that on the show. Thank you. And so as a as a chain anti-racist, I respect that you love Ripple and that you want to invest in everything in the Ripple ecosystem. I think it's. So I have a question for you guys. Have any of your predictions for 2025 changed in the last week or two since we did that?

Well, I will say I've already been vindicated about D-Sai ripping. I think so far I'm one of three for my, for my predictions this year. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Don't remind me. Don't remind me. Well, I'm going to claim victory. I think that's a Gigi.

Well, actually, do you sign market caps down like 33% today? Well, I mean, on a gigantic base. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, but also on a gigantic base. But, yeah, how are you guys predictions coming along so far? Anything happened on your predictions? I'll be honest. I don't remember my predictions. So I'm just going to ride this one out until the end of 2025.

and then we can revisit and see how I did. Okay. I believe you said that XRP was going to $10. I think you didn't get up. Garling House had dinner with Trump yesterday, according to Twitter. Okay. All right. Incoming.

Very good. Tom, how are your predictions doing? I'm feeling good. You know, we were one weekend. I actually just saw Anson was on Twitter talking about one of my predictions. I didn't explicitly, but talking about a big money game going viral in 2025. So I don't know. It feels like, you know, the wave is forming.

We'll see. I'm feeling good about my move ecosystem stuff. Everyone on Twitter is talking about how the long, sweet, short, hype trade did well for two weeks. Because of Anthem was kind of showing the long hype, short, sweet trade, which turned out to be the wrong. Let's check back at the end of the year and see how the turn. Yeah. We still got the whole year. This is going to be a weekly segment now.

There's a weekly segment every week. going to come back and talk about the Ansome sui pipe pair trade. Cool. Okay. Well, I think that is it. It's been relatively slow news week. But we'll be back next week with some more. Hopefully a guest.

Special guest. Yeah, hopefully a guest. Very special guest. So thanks everybody for tuning in and be all next week.