Unchained - The Chopping Block: Defi United’s “Bailout,” MegaETH’s KPI Vesting, and Prediction Market Chaos

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Is the era of protocol bailouts upon us? The Chopping Block crew and MegaETH's Shuyao Kong debate Defi United’s community-funded rescue, the KPI vesting experiment shaking up token launches, whether DeFi yields truly underprice risk, and the first major PolyMarket insider trading bust—all delivered with the usual insider banter you won’t hear anywhere else. Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, the squad is joined by MegaETH co-founder Shuyao Kong, fresh off their headline-making KPI-gated token launch. First, we dive into the whirlwind that is Defi United: a who’s-who of Ethereum OGs and protocols pledging hundreds of millions to fill bailout holes from the massive KelpDAO hack—voluntarily. Are we witnessing a new age of protocol do-gooder vibes or just kicking the moral hazard can down the road?  Then, we tear into the “are DeFi yields way too low” debate, prodded by Tom Dunleavy’s viral thread—should degens really be earning more for taking protocol risk, or are the markets just as weird as they seem? Shuyao gives us an under-the-hood look at MegaETH’s radical KPI vesting mechanics, why they made the token vesting play risky pre-TGE, and whether dynamic tokenomics could be the industry’s way forward (with plenty of banter about airdrop farming and governance theater along the way).  Finally, we spin through the saga of PolyMarket’s big DOJ insider trading bust: is “insider info” a feature or a bug in prediction markets? All that, history lessons, cynicism, and more—let’s get into it. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 Defi United’s “bailout”—how a crowd-sourced effort filled the KelpDAO hack hole and melted crypto Twitter   🔹 Are protocol donations precedent-setting, a warning shot, or just vibes maxing?   🔹 Inside debates about moral hazard, socialized losses, and why kumbaya only works once   🔹 Surprising names (and missing ones!) from the bailout contributor list: Consensys, Mantle, Lido, Arbitrum, Circle, more   🔹 Why airdrop farmers sending dust is the most on-brand thing for crypto   🔹 The “are DeFi yields too low?” debate and why the true risk-free rate may be a myth in DeFi   🔹 MegaETH’s “KPI vesting” tokenomics—how gating TGEs by actual ecosystem milestones might fix launch incentives   🔹 Insight on why pre-TGE KPI mechanics might actually be the future (and why most fail after launch)   🔹 PolyMarket’s first big insider trading bust—when is secret alpha “market info” and when is it treason?   🔹 Vintage history, cyber insurance analogies, and philosophical banter you can only get on TCB Hosts ⭐️ Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️ Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️ Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ Shuyao Kong, Co-founder at MegaETH Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You got to admit, the vibe shift in one week from, like, everyone pointing their lawyers at each other to this is like, that's pretty incredible. 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 to trading firms who are very involved. I like that eight is the ultimate policy. Defy protocols are the antidote to this problem.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks before us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the D5. day. So quick-inchot, is Tristan Tom, the D-Fi Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Charon, the Gia Brain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

Yo. Joining us today, we have Brother Bing, heiress of Hot Pot Dow. Welcome back. Nice intro. Mega GM, guys. Like matriarch of mega or something, you know? Yeah. No, no, no. It's a... No, we had it on the show previously, and it was

Brother Bing, so we're keeping Brother Bing. And I am a sieve that had a hype man at Dragonfly, where early stage investors in crypto or onto caveat, that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block. That XYZ for more disclosures. So, Brother Bing, before we get into what's happening in Mega-Eath land, we've got a story about common prosperity in Defi land.

Okay? So there's a new initiative, new initiative called Defi United. So we were talking last time about the massive hack that took place in crypto, particularly on this protocol called Kelpdow, which led to bad debt being created on Ave as well as other lending protocols on chain. So there was a lot of question about how is this going to be remediated? Who's going to put up the money to potentially create this bailout? Apparently everybody was lowering up and there wasn't a lot of clarity about how

depositors were going to get unfrozen. Well, we now have part of the answer is this initiative called DFI United. Now, DFI United is apparently entirely a charitable effort where many of the parties in DFI have pledged their ETH, essentially as a donation to make depositors whole and unfreeze all of the activity happening in Defi. So there was over

100K-Eth total that's been pledged. Right now, according to the Defi United homepage, about 300 million total dollars' worth of ETH has been pledged. Now, the biggest pledges have come from Consensus, Joe Lubin, and consensus have just pledged

30K ETH. Of course, AVE has pledged 25K. Mantle has 30K that they've structured as a loan, not as a donation. Stani from Ava has personally pledged 5K, ether 5, 5K, Lido 2.5K, Keltow has done 5K,

Gallum Foundation, which I don't know how they're affected by this. They have a huge treasury. They have one of the largest treasuries by just never selling. Well, by the 10th, why they're on the, like, why they felt compelled to donate here, but they were very early.

They donated 1,000 ETH. So a bunch of other people, apparently Circle Ventures is also in, in that they're buying Ave. So Circles buying Ave, Lair Zero, Athena, Inc, fracts, they've all committed unclear amounts. So basically, and they're now just taking donations from the public. And so just people in Defi have been sending, there's now, I believe, over 100,000 wallets have now contributed to Defi United.

So absolutely crazy outcome. I think people were expecting that some company or some set of companies are going to be contributing, but instead it looks like it's mostly been this kind of community crowdsource effort to unfreeze Defi. And the total amount here, the dollar amount, is greater than the hack. So now, arbitram is also being counted in here. The arbitrage from Dow was about 30,000 a eths that was frozen. This was not a contribution, but rather a sort of hackback that Arbiturum Dow did.

Now, one thing to be clear is that not all of these have passed governance. So these are proposals being made by these groups to contribute to Defi United. They need to be ratified by the token holders for many of these cases, but some of them already have been finalized as contributions. And there's been a lot of discussion about this. So nothing is done yet. But maybe in part as a result of this, you've now seen the Ave market unfrozen. So unfrozen, meaning that previously the rates were not allowed to float above, I think it was capped at 14%.

And at 14% the markets were not clearing. So people were not depositing enough capital to allow people to start withdrawing. That is now over. Rates are now at around 7 to 8%. The utilization of the pools are around 92%, meaning that there's enough liquidity that you can actually pull your money out if you want to. So things are looking like they're okay in Defi, at least for Maynet. I believe on some of the layer 2s, the liquidity isn't fully there yet, but at least on Maynett, things are clearing now. So there's been a lot of discussion about this. Some people saying,

this is amazing, you know, isn't it great that everybody came together and Defi came to save their own? No bailouts needed. Other people criticizing this and saying, hey, isn't this moral hazard? Isn't this just a bailout in another name? People maybe got pressured into contributing to this thing. And so now we have exactly what you don't want to have, which is people who lent against bad collateral or took risks that they shouldn't have been taking are not bearing the cost of those risks. So let's go around and say, good thing, bad thing, thoughts on the common prosperity moment. I'll start with you, Shiao. What do you think about Defi United? I can't imagine anyone who does not like it, to be very honest. I think people who criticize it or points in

out the ambiguity is a good intellectual exercise, but I can't imagine the debacle end any other way other than people pulling money in. In fact, I think the Ethereum Foundation should have chimed in. I'm very surprised that they did not. I even ask folks in the EF, and I was told the budget is not allowed, and part of me just thinking, this is like the best marketing, but expats you can ever get. So yeah, I think this is great. Reminds me a bit of the Dow hack. I don't know if you guys would agree. It's like very ambiguous, but you know what it's going to happen. Like there's a bit of a social consensus being played. So I'm really happy. I feel warm. I think Stani absolutely had a gigacad moment. I think he's a founder that I look up to, to be very honest. I think

people like Guy who had a very intelligent take on the whole situation was very inspiring. I saw this morning that consensus my formal boss drove put in 30K, I thought, okay, you know, this is what the OG founders should behave. So in general, feel very good about it, thought that was inevitable. Now, how do we deal with the consequence afterwards or whether there's legal action? I'm not certain. I think this thing is actually going to drag longer, but I do hope that the next time I go on chopping blog, we don't have to talk about it. All right. Tom, do you have any criticism you want to give to Defy United? I'm trying to think out of phrase.

I guess I'm trying to think how I would think about it. I think like the moral hazard argument I get like I understand why people maybe that's their gut intuition is like, hey, didn't you just privatize, you know, all the profits and now you want to socialize the losses. But in this case, like they're not really being socialized. I mean, it's independent people and organizations choosing to donate their own capital. It's like one bank donating to save a small community bank. It's like, yeah, they can do that.

It's not the taxpayer really bearing the brunt of that or something like that, which I don't know what the equivalent would be here. I'm surprised by some of these. Staking rewards. Staking rewards being diverted to cover. Yes, I guess that would be the equivalent. And so we're like very far away from that. I think some of these people, clearly some of these entities have a very strong vested interest, they are almost existential interest in seeing, you know, Avey and DFI continue to work. Some of them might a little bit more kind of surprised by because I was also imagining these being structured as a credit facility, which is kind of like what the mantle proposal is versus just straight up donation. I again, kind of like, I was actually went dead on like a tarp, you know,

rabbit hole before this episode because I was like, you know, it's been so long. And I was like, oh, yeah, how did that program work? And I was like, this is kind of like the tarp for, for defy, but not really because this is just free money. It's not actually alone necessarily. So look, the two universes, one in which people out of the goodest of their heart choose to donate and sort of, you know, make the system whole and one where they don't. I'm glad to be living in this one, but, you know, it is maybe just a bit perplexed to me. Maybe the answer is, like, you just need to show that you have a bazooka and you're not afraid to use it, a quote. I forget who was who the Fed share was, but, like, Greenspan.

I don't know. Obviously, in the world, this didn't get covered, and you had this, like, PVP versus of kelp versus layer zero versus Avey and their legal lawyers fighting was probably the worst outcome because, like, defy would be dead and would be in the court system for 20 years. because by the time you explain this to a jury, it's already 2030. I just feel like it's a complicated thing to kind of explain. And so obviously, this is like the best outcome, clearly. I do agree with the, there's something idiosyncratic about it in that suppose it was North Korea. And North Korea is like, ha, ha, great. This is a great attack place to attack.

Every time I attack, they just keep refilling. And so like having a little bit more, yeah, like the credit. facility thing is like repeatable. The like, okay, we're going to donate thing is like a little less repeatable. So, you know, Kim Jong-un, if you're listening, you should try to be a little benevolent. I know you're a girl dad,

so you can like bring that energy to the, like, the vibe energy of that to the, I don't know, have you seen all the memes of Kim Jong-un's girl dad and stuff? I think she's like, yeah, yeah. It's like, he's like, he becomes a little teddy bear. And like, that's like kind of what the memes are, right? He becomes like a nice guy. And I'm like, all right,

that hopefully he views this in that vibe versus like the like oh great they're refilling let me attack again you know like there is a little bit of that part i don't like about the crypto version of this versus the tradfai version is that it's like a repeated game and you keep refilling it's like you're kind of recreating the attack vector the honeypot in some ways because you're like you're kind of implicitly guaranteeing something so i'm not saying look again it's the best outcome But recapitalizing through selling tokens or a loan is no different in terms of refilling, right? Yeah, but I think the idea that like an attacker sees that and is like, I attacked, I took the money out, new money came in, I attack again. You know, like it kind of, it, the credit facility thing at least encourages the like the flow of the new capital in to not be immediate.

And so it's like, I attack again. I don't get back the same amount, right? I have to presumably it takes longer. And like that part is the part, I think just from, again, it's like, to Shiav's point, it's like mainly hypothetical, right? Like, it was existential if this didn't happen in some way, whether it's the company is doing it or, you know, how it was structured. But there is, yeah, I just, I think about this from North Korea's perspective. And I'm like, I have that, you know, the meme of the guy behind the tree. Like, that's like, that's kind of, it is kind of saying that.

That's like, so that, that all I'm saying is I hope everyone's security is ready for that. Okay. Interesting. I try not to think about things for North Korea's perspective, but I guess that also works. You kind of have to, right? In this case, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think North Korea is like paying back close attention to how Ave is recapitalizing. That I disagree. They're 100% paying attention to them. No, no, no. I'm saying the way in which they recapitalize, I don't think they care if it was donations or a loan or them going and selling tokens, right? So I tweeted when this happened, I've spent a lot of the last year criticizing the rainbows and unicorns in Ethereum. And this kind of feels like a rainbow and unicorn

vindication for Ethereum is like, okay, in 2026, I was not expecting voluntary donations to be the way that we get out of a kind of GFC for Ethereum. But that seems to be what happened. Now, that said, I am naturally skeptical and maybe this is like me being the asshole who doesn't believe, but I'm like, we know that Ave was trying to raise money. They were going around talking to people about lending facilities. And then this defy United thing emerged. And it does strike me that probably, like, I'd love to know the history. Hopefully, you know, Laura can write a book someday about how this happened. Because I do think that probably there's a more, there's a sharper story there of why this ended up being the outcome, as opposed to the obvious answer, which is

you sell tokens or you take loans, right? Like, taking donations is the weirdest way to unwind a financial shortfall, right? That's usually not how businesses or protocols that are worth billions of dollars would make up a hole, right? It's not what maker did. It's not what's happened in previous cases. Not what happened with Drift. They didn't take donations. There was a financial transaction that basically executed the recovery. So the question is, why did it happen this way? And I suspect there's something about lawyers. There's probably something about liability. There's like some, there's some deeper story here of why we ended up in a donation that is sized proportionally to how much each person, like,

was roughly liable, right? Like, so Avey gave more, Layer Zero gave this much, Kelp gave this much, like, how did they decide these numbers? I want to know what was the conversation between Stani and, you know, Brian at Layer Zero and whoever, whoever's at Kelp Tao about, like, how much are each of us doing? Why are we doing this as opposed to, you know, some kind of round? Was it that it would take too long? was it that there was so much legal liability.

What was the reason for this? Because this is weird. I don't feel like this is precedent setting. I know I said last time on the show, like whatever we do here, whatever the outcome is is precedent setting. I don't think this is precedent setting. I don't think people will do this again next time.

I think this is so weird, and it's unclear what the rules were. And like, why did these people give this much? And usually there's a negotiation, and there's like some kind of quid pro quo, and there's some understanding of liability where there's something. thing. But in this case, like, how did we arrive at this? What's the, what's the formula we

use next time about how you do the next one? You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm curious, Haseeb and you guys, what do you think about Salada and Avalanche and almost everyone and their mother want to chime in? I see that, some sort of loss. I forgot to mention that. Performative. Right. That happened today is that Salana Foundation announced that they were also, I think, extending alone, I believe. And then Avalanche announced they were also part of Defi United. No numbers given, no specificity, right? So, like, the numbers I read to you are numbers that were confirmed. Layer zero does not have a confirmed number, Athena not confirmed, FRAX not confirmed. So there's a bunch of people just like saying, I'm a part of this, but not saying how much or what

amount, or whether it's a loan or whether it's a donation. So there's a lot of opacity in this, and this $300 million number is combining all of these things in some way that's also not clear in how it's adding up all these numbers. Right. So like technically, even the largest contributor is arbitram. For arbitram, it's not a donation or a loan or anything. It's like literally a hackback that also still needs to pass governance. So anyway, all this is weird. And not to say it's bad, I'm not saying that this is not the right answer.

I think probably if I was in that room, I would have been like, wow. Looking this is a great idea and an excellent way to solve all these problems at once. You got to admit, the vibe shift in one week from like everyone pointing their lawyers at each other to this is like, that's pretty incredible. Clearly. Time wise. Time wise. Time line. Even even then timeline wise, it's kind of crazy.

Right. Because like there definitely was like a lot of, I mean, the first few days fog of war was like everyone writing stuff that was just like, this guy fucking did it. They're live fully alive. Our last episode was basically the Spider-Man meme, except we didn't know who was which Spider-Man.

And, you know, somehow now it's like, Kumbaya, that, like that is a crazy. There's no, I don't think, think anyone's ever gone like a week and that's happened. I think about like the history of like lending. You know, the first loans in known human history were in Mesopotamian. And those loans were like these cuneiform tablets. And there's this urban myth. I'm not sure if it's true, but the phrase cleaning the slate, like if I remove your liabilities or debt, comes from literally breaking the tablet and being like loans gone because like they have the clay tablet that like

had the loan written on it. And there's sort of a sense in which this feels like Hammurabiism. This is like the code of conduct of like break the line. And there's that sort, to me, the precedence actually ironically like this historical one more than the like modern day one, right? Modern day one's like, okay, we'll do some payment and kind shit and pretend that we didn't

mark it down. Right. It's like a dead jubilee. But it's like the debtors aren't the one wiping it. It's like random people coming in and being like. Yes, I agree. I agree. That part is weird. but I just like in my head I feel a little bit of this like thinking back to the

the original kind of like how people got rid of loans was like this kind of and it would be a ceremony where like the towns like whatever the city would like they would collectively break it wow I don't know maybe they maybe they can have a party for anthropology Tarun I didn't know I didn't know you had this in you I have a lot of things I have a lot of things when I'm slightly more awake and not okay I think Tarun going to back beyond Roman Empire is very bullish for crypto and general. No, no, I think it's actually the history of lending is worth reading about. History of debt is an amazing thing to learn about.

Okay, okay, beautiful. Well, I mean, the other thing I'll say is that the precedent-setting thing, right? Like, I think if this happens again, there will be no willing, like, there's no defy United 2.0. Like, if this happens again, people are like, fuck you, what did you do with the last 300 million I gave you? you can only do this once. I don't think if there's even a six months from now, a year from now,

if there's another blow up like this, nobody's being like, oh, great. I do have a weird question for you, though. Suppose Eath was $6,000 and this happened again. I don't know. People might do it. People might do it if they feel rich. Like I don't say never.

Don't say never. Don't say never. You've got the money. Yeah. You do it because Eats has $6,000. Why do you need our money to bail out your Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to give some hypothetical, like, in a bull market,

if something like this happened, I feel like you have the wormhole. Yeah, maybe so, maybe so. I think it's more just the, like, the kumbaya, I agree with it. The kumbaya's real. A lot of people talking about, like, wow, I haven't felt these vibes in so many years on Ethereum, you know, like, really this feeling like, wow, this is all this crazy experiment we're doing together. This is this little candle that we're protecting the flame, and it's on us to do it.

like that feeling a lot of people are like wow it feels really special like the OGs are back you know like sure you were saying with with um uncle Lubin stepping up to the play it's like wow it's just like 2000 it's like you know 2017 again but you only get you only get you only give do that once you know like this is not a solution generally for how you deal with these big complex chains of of protocols that get snarled up together like I don't know I kind of feel like okay well next time is it just going to be lawyers pointing guns at each other again because this won't be the last time this happens, like almost certainly, because defy's just too complex now.

So I don't know. I mean, maybe that's our dose of cynicism. Let's move on from that. Okay, okay. The other thing I will say is the public donations, the number of airdrop farmers depositing is pretty funny. Totally. The air drop farming is kind of funny.

Yes, it is actually the most crypto thing ever. So if you go look at the feed of transactions going into the Defi United Address, I told you there's 100,000 addresses. There's not 100,000 people sending meaningful amounts of money. There's a lot of people sending dust to this address because they think maybe there'll be an air drop. Maybe this will be a registry. Somebody's going to do an air drop.

So thank God, crypto, please never change. But, okay, so a second extension of this conversation, our good friend Tom Dunleavy, who was, I think we just talked about it recently when I'm talking about how Cryptovici is dead, he wrote a threat that went viral over the weekend about how what this proves, is that defy rates are too low. So, you know, before this time, you know, rates on lending protocols were like, you know,

four to six percent. And even now, they're clearing at like eight percent, seven, eight percent. If you look at what's happening on main net now, even though you can, you know, markets are clearing, but they're still not at, you know, absurdly high rates. And he kind of does some bond math and basically shows like, look, these are kind of behaving like triple C, basically these are junk bonds, right? And if these are junk bonds, you're not getting paid junk bond type risk or rates for this kind of risk, right? If you just add together the risk-free rate plus the risk of contagion plus the risk of oracles and composability cascades and strong contract exploits,

like really you should be paying closer to something like 12, 13% instead of the 4% to 6% that you've been being paid historically. So his argument is that defy is just structurally overpaying or sorry, under under, under, under, whatever the term is, claiming it way too low of a price, and the yield needs to be higher in order to be able to attract any kind of meaningful capital at this point. Got a lot of reactions, both agreeing and disagreeing. Just want to quickly go around the horn and get reactions here. Does that sound right to you? Is Defi structurally paying too little yield? Tom, why don't we start with you? I think he makes a good argument that, like, yes, the risk-adjusted return of like lending in something, maybe even, even like, like, a kind of lesser, smaller money market probably

doesn't make sense. Like, you're probably not getting appropriately compensated. But, you know, again, I do kind of take like an empiricist view, which is like, well, people are willing to do it. And, you know, you can make these arguments around, you know, savings accounts in the U.S. And, well, like, why doesn't everyone just sweep that into, you know, a money market fund and get paid, you know, short-term, you know, risk-free rate? And it's, you know, stored in a custodian.

But, like, people don't do that. people are lazy. Maybe people don't know. And I think like maybe capital is stuck. And I think there's, you could apply all the same arguments to defy, right? Like, okay, people forget that about old wallets or they want to constantly rotate to new assets. Or maybe they don't want to off ramp or they can't off ramp. Like there's many things that kind of explain this way. And so I think, you know, for his purposes, maybe he's correct that like for him, it's not really worth it. But like, clearly, you know, you look at what people are saying, what people doing. And like that that's kind of like the revealed preference here.

to know what's your take? I think like that turning everything into zero coupon bond is a little simplified for defy right? Like why are rates lower it's because like people are looping

like and have always effectively been right and it's just the form of looping has changed over time right? Like in 2017 December 2017 it was just like I have a bunch of eth I want to get some tiny amount of leverage on chain because I don't want to go to an exchange

and I'll do two X in a maker down right? and like, whatever. There's like kind of always been that hidden thing where like composability does allow you to, not even allow you, sort of forces you to model in pricing with leverage almost immediately versus pricing as a bond that there might be leverage. Like I borrowed from a bank to then go buy this bond,

but it's so kind of disconnected in a different way that it's like not an immediate thing that hits the pricing. So there's sort of a structural bias downwards to rates from, just like the looping effect, the composability effect of like looping is now easy to do. So I think like it's probably upper bound, upper estimate. That being said, I think like directionally is probably correct in in some ways of like, you know, the default risk like jump to zero risk is like never priced in correctly in crypto.

It's like basically impossible because you're kind of, it's like, it's like cyber insurance in 2010, 2011. Like when the cloud era started and like started really growing, there was this like two to three year period where like cyber insurers were just like going bankrupt left and right. Because there were a ton of hacks when people move from on prem to cloud and then or like people not even hacks. In some cases, just like, I left my database open because I didn't know that I needed to sandbox it or restrict it or whatever. Because they wrote the code initially internally and they did. And there was all this stuff in the cloud transition that happened, except you had like this five year. period where like cyber insurers, I think cyber insurers are probably the correct analogy to look at at where like they all blew up for many years until people figured out of the sandbox,

figured out how to correctly containerize things, figured out how to think about supply chain attacks, et cetera. So defy depositors are the new cyber insurers. Yeah, kind of. You're kind of pricing this default risk implicitly, right? Like, and they are probably underpricing it, just like cyber insurers who blew up 2010 to 2015, were underpriced. pricing it and then eventually the market corrected. And so I view it more like that than that it probably is directionally correct, but like will the market adjust to it? Well, so okay.

So my counterpoint, my counterpoint is true. I tweeted in response this over the weekend, which is that if you look, I mean, these lending markets have been operating now for about 10 years. And in that 10 years, there's been maybe like five days total that you couldn't withdraw. And none of them have ever taken haircuts, right? So like compound, Ave, Maker, never haircut in 10 years, despite insane volatility, hacks galore, fucking collateral going up and down like crazy, and still zero haircuts. So that does speak to like, it clearly these things are pretty creditworthy and very, very liquid.

No haircut, but my yield reset to zero are two different things, right? To the rest. Right, but you can always withdraw, right? It's like, it's like floating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the kind of Faustian bargain of defy Right is that everything is demand deposit Everything is about liquidity profile, right?

Like can I withdraw at any time? Is there sufficient liquidity? Right. And most products outside of crypto Don't offer you instant demand withdrawals, right? They always have some edge case where they're like, no, no, no, we're going to like breeze you for some reason. And that obviously is the thing everyone in crypto wants.

But that structurally is a different rates market, right? It's like you look at this private credit thing right now, right? Where they're like gating people, even though like 80% of the fund wants to leave. Like, yes, by doing that, they're probably are preserving the yield long term for the people who stay in. But like at this cost of liquidity, right? So like there's all, that's another reason for having kind of rates be biased downwards. But do I think like directionally you're not pricing in the cyber edge risk, like this AI risk and all, like especially all the stuff we've talked about last few weeks?

weeks. Probably like it's hard to disagree with that that the implied premium from that is like not priced in correctly. Specifically for cyber risk. What do you think the rate ought to be? I don't know. I want to give you an answer but you know I spend all this it's like ironic. I probably spend the most time analyzing this. But I I at the last. The last six weeks is like every fucking thing. No, no, no, no. And last six weeks has been like everything. You have to remodel a lot of stuff. Like, and I think I would say like his 12% is probably a little high, but like if you're telling me seven or eight, I'm much more amenable for that being closer to the well, it is seven or eight right now. Yes, but it's seven or eight with like duress and like lots

of liquidity leaving. Like I mean, when it's equilibrates a bit, a couple weeks, hopefully. Like then, then you can kind of get the real equal room, right? Whereas like right now there's still a bit of capital flight, right? Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, there have been like a number of like close calls and, you know, obviously, you know, Maker did do system debt issuance and there was a coordinated effort around buying the MKR. So it's like, yes, like on paper and from a simple analysis, you are correct.

But I mean, obviously with the Ave thing, okay, we get like a weird donation thing and that's all why there's not, you know, a haircut for people. But like, I think if on 10, 100 year timeline, you have to assume that the probability of there being, you know, a serious haircut is, you know, north of zero. And so therefore, like, you should be applying a discount compared to, you know, sort of the risk-free rate. And again, like, the alternative being, well, like, why not just go and buy some sort of tokenized treasury product on chain and not have to worry about this kind of thing, also being kind of the alternative. So I don't know, I kind of struggle with, I think the answer is in a lot of these

cases, like, there is just kind of an oversupply or there's, like, latent stock capital. And, you know, the market isn't hyper rationally efficient, but no market ever is. Shia, what's your take? Our rates too high or too low, I should say, sorry, it rates too low. I just thought that was a dumb question. I mean, obviously, I think it serves the purpose for crypto Twitter and investors who love to analyze. I found that to be a very unnecessary question.

And, you know, we don't think a lot as a firm because I think on the one hand, there are many reasons that people stay in crypto because of lack of access or they can't get the underlines, even though the underlying is probably not even good enough. And we have to take the access into consideration over the risk premium. And then I think the second part is, I mean, right now is like everything's buckled together, right? The lenders and borrowers and you have this weighted average rate. I do think in the very near future we're going to have way more specialized use case. And this wouldn't be a question anymore. So it's a good intellectual exercise now, but I don't think it would be applicable going forward. And then I think lastly,

it's just we have to find more exogenous yield rather than what we have right now, which is looping and then just the same old thing. I mean, just even going back to Defi United is all warm and fuzzy. It's all great. But I feel like Defa has not really moved forward. In the last one year, we have just really boring merit asset on Chang. So yeah, I think the question itself is a good question on the public square, but it's not a fair question because there's just no benchmark against it. I mean, yeah, okay, so looping. I mean, looping is just leverage, right?

I mean, there's looping in and of itself is not a thing. It's like looping what? So you're getting leverage on exposure to some carry trade or staking or whatever it is that you're doing. Like if you look at like what risk parity funds do, which are some of the largest head funds in the world, it's the same shit. They just get leverage and they have. have this trade strategy.

But the way they get leverage is weird, right? Like, they're not guaranteed to you. You don't have to model in exactly their leverage in the market immediately. Whereas, like, here you kind of do, like, if you look at the user base, instantly elastic, they're super elastic. Right. Right. Like these traditional hedge fund strategies, like I have a Stadarb fund or a multi-strategy

fund like Bridgewater or Millennium or something. The main fund will borrow a ton of money from a bank at some rate that's unknown. And you're the pod person. You just get some capital. You don't really even know what your implied leverage is. You just go buy a bunch of bonds. And you can't really, you know, you have to go kind of be like, hey, bank, can I get some more a loan at this rate?

And like, there's so much friction that you don't really have to model in this impact cost of leverage as much. Whereas here, it's like instant. You literally change a rate and you see like everyone's bought immediately deleveraging. Right. So, like, there is kind on the sort of larger loopers, right? So there is this elasticity of borrowing to rates being very low duration. That is a very unique thing to crypto. I think, like, in the normal economy, it takes a while for that to, you have to, it's an effect,

but it's not like instant the way it is in crypto. Right. I mean, we saw something like that with the yen carry trade, right? Where, like, people were basically getting cheap funding from the yen carry trade. B.OJ rates moved slightly and boom, a bunch of stuff exploded. Yeah, but that's because. because B.O.J raised rates, right? It wasn't like, oh, someone, you know, just so, yeah.

So, like, it's very intentional manipulation of the interest rate versus, like, some market dynamic as screens are pointing out. Yeah. So that elasticity thing is very unique to, I don't think you really have that outside of. That is, but that is like a benefit of composability, right? That if you want to talk about what this system is providing us different is very fast elasticity to price changes, which in the normal market might actually be quite slow. But isn't that just in part?

because like the size of the crypto funding market is just not that big relative to the demand for these particular sources of leverage. But it's also it's very immediately algorithmic. For a lot of these other markets, it's like part of it is not algorithmic, my bank loan is not, this thing is algorithmic, I'm trading, oh, I have to mix these two systems.

Here it's like I send a single thing and it immediately goes in, right? Sure, so it's more efficient, right? Like the interest rate is propagating faster because the fact that everything is much more efficient. But the reason why this stuff is so tied to these particular trades is because there's just, if there was way more capital on chain, these trades would already be saturated,

right? So anyway, so my point is, I do, but I do agree, Shiaa, with your argument that a lot of the reason for this is that a lot of the people who are on chain don't have access to overnight rates. They don't have access to treasury yield. You know, these are people who are not Americans, in many cases, obviously crypto is a global market, and their opportunity cost is not the risk-free rate in terms of holding treasuries. And for a lot of them, they may be like, be like, hey, I really need to be able to move my capital quickly. And if it's sitting in treasuries, that's not quick. Same reason why I have my money sitting in a savings account when I know putting in a

money market is going to earn me better yield, but I need to be able to pay my credit card bill quickly as opposed to waiting a day or two for my broker's stuff to move. Yeah, I think what Tarun said about the elasticity, I think I feel very, how to say, I think it's a very painful realization to me, at least, because there are just like so many variables that you can't factor into consideration where you're thinking about what's the fair rate. And I feel like everybody needs to somehow be more open-minded on the range of the race would be going forward.

So finding it, I think the right level is that that's not happening. Yeah, I think this idea of like a static single risk-free rate that you think is never moving until the Fed intervenes, that's like a very trad-fi. If everything is dynamic all the time, it's like kind of hard to say. I think you can say relative statements. Like relative to this is high or low. But I don't think you can say an absolute statement. Like this amount is the real cost of carry.

Because like there's also sort of weird things that go on in crypto, right? Like pre-Etherium staking, all of the yield metrics or like people using the Bitcoin basis trade as their, they're kind of risk-free rate or like some blend of the different exchanges. And then staking comes out. And then people start being like, oh, staking is the real rate, even though, of course, the staking that was live before Ethereum, no one ever viewed that as a risk-free, even in looping protocols in like Solana, right? The risk-free rate in Salana is like 10 times higher than Ethereum. Something is like weird about that.

And so because of that, you kind of, it's very hard to distill things to one number. And I think, again, it's just a relative risk. You can only, not to sound like a philosopher in terms of like relativism, But, like, I think you can only really measure relative things in crypto. You can't really measure absolute in a lot of ways. I guess maybe another thing. I'm curious what you think of this, true. And is, like, when we're looking at the rate on Ave, we're looking at the wholesale rate, right?

If you think about the cost to borrow as an individual, like, normally there's not just, like, one rate to borrow as an individual. They look at your creditworthiness based on what you're doing, right? Like, they look through your book and see how crazy of a motherfucker are you before I decide what rate I'm going to quote you, right? So if you are a levered looper, then really like you are, like at the margin, the next person borrowing on Ave is probably a leverage looper, right? But if I know that you are somebody who's actually very low risk, maybe I'm willing to pay you a lower rate, but I can only give the wholesale price on Ave. And so something about the nature of lending when it's big pool model leads to systematically,

like the rate is the looper rate. and if there were some way that I could look at your book and say, hey, you're actually a very low risk type, if you're a very low risk user, therefore actually your rates should be better than the rate at the margin? I mean, I think this was sure out's point, right? Yeah. Why there's this idea that there's like a single rate is like kind of,

it's very hard to really define. But in what universe do we move to that model, right? Like what does it even look like to go to that model? I mean, I think that's kind of more of like the isolated lending market, right? oh, you know, you're pledging, like, you know, better collateral, you're naturally going to, the market is going to form to offer you a lower rate versus obviously something that's more, you know, exotic. And, you know, I think so it's not quite the, you know, exact same, but like, you know, obviously higher volatility or like less, you know, more liquid assets

do get more of a haircut if you're looking at, like, the DCCC. And so, like, I don't know, it's not, like, there is a little bit of a market, but you're right that it's not maybe as, like, dynamic as you would expect or, you know, kind of the same way it happens in defy. Yeah, but I feel like that's still at the collateral level as opposed to the borrower level, right? But yeah, I see your point. Yeah, yeah, no, I understand your point. Okay, let's switch gears. So, Chiao, one of the stories that's getting a lot of attention now is what's happening with Mega-Eath. So Mega-Eath, full disclosure, so we are investors in Mega-Eath. I believe Robot Ventures and Dragonfly are both investors in Mega-Eath. Megaheath,

has launched their chain as earlier this year, but very interestingly and fairly unique within crypto, you launch your chain without launching your token. Now, Megheth did an ICO, so there are investors, retail investors, in the Meghaith token, but they don't have their tokens yet because you are doing something,

I don't think I've seen any other project do in crypto called KPI vesting, okay? Trio, explain what is KPI vesting, why did you do it, and what are the KPI's? Yeah, we came up, up with the KPI gated TGE largely because we hated the fact that protocol can just launch a token and giving inside us 40% of the whole supply without showing any good work. That's really something that I think the industry must move on. We believe that a protocol needs to earn their

TGE and in fact a protocol, the core team, needs to earn their token after TGE. So what is KPI-GETA TGE? So when we launch our main net, we really, realize that the token does not deserve to exist if there's no economic activity on the chain, period. We do not want to be an empty blockchain. No one wants to be an empty blockchain, even though we're really fast. So we set up three parameters that we think. We call them KPI, which sometimes I regret we call them KPI, to be honest. They're more positive lines. They're more like milestones. KPI's give a lot of people of PTSD, but they're like major milestones. So we set up three milestones that we believe kind of signal signify that, hey, this token is ready and

mega deserve to exist. And the first KPI is more than 10 Mega Mafia application go live. So Mega Mafia is our accelerator program, novel applications. Also, I would say like left curve ones and right curve ones. So you have just a lot of like arcade finance, entertainment finance, but you also have a lot of exogenous, you know, yield. We just talk about dexes, et cetera. So that's the first KPI, 10 mafia apps hit main net. Second one is USGM supply, which is our protocol native stable coin. We work with Athena to launch it together. We set a pretty ambitious one. Like if anyone question our KPI being a bit like wishy-washy and too easy, 500 million USGM is a hot KPI and we just put it out there. And then the last one is.

probably the hardest to achieve, which is we want our applications to make money. So the last KPI is, hey, three of our application make like 50K revenue per day. And, you know, it took us two months to get to hit the first KPI. I would be lying to say that the road was smooth. The road to TG was fucking hard. It was hard because we launched the chain. The chain was ready. Most of our apps are very novel.

What do I mean by being novel? It's like you have this defyed primitive that has not been tested before, right? These are not copy pasta. And then based on security concern, we basically ask most of our apps to do another round of audit. We basically asked them to insert way more safeguard. We started monitoring our sequencer as well. But that took some time. And then a lot of the apps started testing with their close friends for a bit.

And it wasn't until last Thursday we officially hit number one KPI and obviously we're ready to TGE. So going back to the original ethos of KPI, right? So we believe that once we have novel applications and once we have USGM, which also for audience who do not know, it's our economic engine. We internalize all the USGM yield, which makes mega-eath probably the first blockchain that has really healthy revenue day one. would say. And yeah, so I think the apps going live, the Sabo Coin DeFi Flywheel being the right place, kind of earn us the position to TGE. So this kind of echoes the old Vitalik proposal of DAICOs. I don't know if you guys remember that. Yes. So DAICOs, I think Vitalik initially proposed that like you do an ICO, you raise money from retail.

but the ICO funds only get released on certain milestones and the team doesn't get all the money up front and if the team never hits them, the money gets released back to the ICO people. Was that the inspiration for this KPI vesting thing? That was not, unfortunately, but I think we did exactly what he said. And we as a core team,

we only took 9% of the entire total pie chart. And we will not basically earn our token unless we continue to hit KPI. So folks, if you, like you will continue to see mega-ease people just talking about KPI for years to come. Because that's how we make money, how we can as a core team earn more token. I think the interesting thing about the KPI-based best thing is all of the historical attempts of doing it have always been people who launched a token and the token launched

and go well. And then they're like, I want to do it afterwards. But it never works if you do it after you launch. So there's this like, there's this very famous blog post from Uma, the Oracle Protocol, called KPI options from like 2020, 2020. And it's exactly this. We launch our token. We wish we didn't do it this way.

Let's have some KPIs. And so, and it's not just them. This has happened to every ecosystem. Solana had some projects, have the same thing. Like, I feel like I've seen this trend of like people kind of wanting to do it afterwards, but then it's the genies out of the bottle and its tokens just don't work that way. It's like very hard to get that to happen. So I think it's good to actually see it live before, you know, because I think that's like a very crucial thing.

You have to kind of launch with this. Otherwise it kind of doesn't do it work. True. Do you want to see more projects doing KPI vesting or not yet? I guess it depends on the project. Because like if you're a project where you expect kind of revenue relatively quickly, like you're a defy protocol and like there's immediate fees or something, like maybe it doesn't totally. make sense unless it's like liquidity base or like there are some reasons to do it but if you're building an ecosystem it makes a lot more sense because that's like sort of like company management or like

you know if you were a company imagine you're a centralized company you're an AI company who has to build an ecosystem you're not building ecosystem on day one and it's not like oh like it's not like a target i can touch a threshold of and then like everyone quits and we leave and there's sort of a sense in which you need to also like have that be a very long-term minded KPI. And so, like, I think it's like, if you have something that's like long-term enough, it makes sense. If it's like too short-term, like integrate 100 protocols using our Oracle, it's probably not that useful. So I don't know, there's like, there's, there's, there's shades of gray. I can see kind of reasons not to as well. But yeah, I would say it's

actually the opposite of how we're thinking about the KPI is very, it has very little to do with, I say, company management is more of finding out the diamond hands among the investor community. So going forward, right, people who, let's say, buy mega token are able to stake their mega, like against certain KPI, the longer they stake. And when we hit the KPI, they will get more token. So I think the idea is even, you know, sometimes we're internally, we're even thinking we should have a prediction market on which KPI will get hit when, which basically is what happening

on polling market, right, if you are talking about when we hit our KPI. But really the goal is, okay, these are the KPI's we think are super important. And by the way, the KPI going forward will really be on, you know, USDM, which is our economic engine, applications, health, sustainability. There's even one KPI on Ethereum decentralization, because that's important for mega-eathe. So I want to be able to understand who is staking behind which KPI. How much do they care about it? That will actually help us allocate resource and then kind of push the core team to do more. I fundamentally believe token is the most beautiful instrument that crypto has ever come up with.

I think whoever said, you know, equity is superior than token is fucking out of their mind. I think they just lack imagination. Token is strictly superior because you can just do way more than equity. And I think what Megga wants to do is we, we will. want to set an example via this KPI, via this, we have a product for our investing, which I guess I can't disclose right now, by our design to kind of engage with the wider community. But this time it is not performative anymore, right? If we look back on the tokens, I think most previous tokens are performative.

When you talk about their governance token or, I don't know, some sort of vague buyback, they don't solve coordination issue. I think what we're trying to do is we provide granularity to people to consider. community, like, you can use your token to signal this preference. And the core team is aligned with you because we also believe this is good for us and this is how we get paid. So it's a long run, but I'm very passionate about token. I think KPI is the best thing, the most innovative thing the industry has seen. There's a lot of risk, by the way. I think it requires a lot of courage for us to do this. We didn't have to do it. But we think that

this sets a good example to other team. I think it also push us. to do things that's uncomfortable, right? Like, you know, we could have waited to have, like, three of the apps and then with TGE. We picked 10, and I have a thousand telegram chats. I have to, like, chase every app. Be like, dude, just go online. Yeah, I was like, I mean, I guess,

I think incentive alignment, classic recurring story in crypto. I mean, I guess, like, how do you guys, like, think about choosing the right KPIs and the levels? I mean, kind of like, I guess you were you were getting at. I feel like this is kind of like the old story with like liquidity incentives, right? It was just like, oh, if you do it too much, you know, then you get this crazy looping behavior, then, you know, too little, not great.

And it feels like people try to eventually kind of calibrate and we kind of got points. What do you think the kind of, I don't know, equivalent kind of learnings or sort of progress are going to be in KPI vesting? Yeah, I think don't do it too much or don't rely on fake metrics has been our day one ethos. because whatever fake. I mean, fake metrics also is extremely damaging in a bad market. To be very honest, a bad market, you just have to be really honest. So I think we are looking for productive assets on our chain.

We have an application that enable the looping, the healthy looping of productive assets. I don't want to turn this into a mega application shield, but we have a bunch of them. You're just trying to maximize your KPIs. I was just maximized, yeah. KPI maxing. KPIXX. Myel Mastro Maxing. And we, I mean, for us internally, it's the, what's the real metrics for an ecosystem? Is do you have retail order flow and do you have them coming on in a sticky way?

Which is why if you look at mega ecosystem, we have a bunch of left, I call them the left curve apps. They're addictive. They're fun. I would say they are the dream. of market makers. They are very uninformed order flows. And then on the right cut up, right, you have the sophisticated dexes and et cetera. But what we want to do is we want to bring healthy order flow. We want to bring exogenous yield. We don't believe, you know, a simple like big fat TVL sitting somewhere can actually help with the ecosystem and that's not

what we incentivize. Now, on the other hand, the part I struggle every day is maybe there's something that's really good, I just need to light a bit of fire. It just need a little bit of push. And I'm debating every single day, where do I put my incentive, right? Where do I put the KPI toward? And I don't think that we're always successful. If we look at our TGE-based KPIs, I mean, the last one was just overly aggressive. If I could take it away, I would love to take away. But, you know, we stand on business as a company. So yeah, a lot of- KPI, die by the KPI. But in the KPI, yeah.

So, yeah, a lot of trial and error. I think we wanted to go after real metrics. Well, I think a lot of people will be looking at how this goes as an indication of whether this is something they'll want to emulate. Because I think, as Surin said, I've never seen a project do this beforehand. I've seen projects do it afterwards, and I've also seen projects try to retcon their TGE,

say, okay, lockups is being extended. You know, we're burning some token. You know, we saw World Liberty Finance do that. a couple times. So I've seen all sorts of shit, but have not seen it pre-TGE. So I think everyone is going to be watching closely to see what this experiment in governance of a different kind, pre-token launch governance, how this is going to play out and what to learn from it. Now, one more story I wanted to get through. This is not about another thing they were invested into, which is polymarket. There was a big story, front page news in a bunch of venues I saw,

which is that there was the first major insider trading case based on somebody, a soldier who was involved in the Venezuela invasion, the nabbing of Maduro. There was a U.S. Army soldier who was part of the planning for the Maduro capture. He bet $33,000 on Polly Market, made $400,000. And there was cooperation between Pollymarket, the DOJ, and the CFTC in order to nab this guy. So he is now facing trial, or whatever he's been arraigned, it will be facing trial. And the big question, I guess, as a result of this, is, so there's many people have said, like, well, you know, part of the point of prediction markets is, quote, unquote, insider trading.

And of course, insider trading being people who know something about the market are giving information to the market by trading. But then there's also this view that, well, somebody trading on secret information that they are required to, especially by law in the case of your, you know, a soldier in the military, you know, that is also known as treason giving information that you're not supposed to that can be potentially given by the enemy. So people had kind of different, I mean, most people were like, okay, that seems right, probably a soldier who's trading on their knowledge that they're going to commit and be part of an invasion that that person is probably going to jail. But the question is, okay, does this change how we think about this part of what prediction markets do? Is it supposed to be, you know, do we hold on to this thing of like, oh, yeah,

inside of training is good, or does this kind of show that, well, when push comes to show, we kind of know you're not supposed to be inside of training on prediction markets. Before prediction markets, you existed in practice, but people were talking about them theoretically. This was always brought up, right? Everyone always goes to the assassination market. Nope. There he goes. Let's wait a second. Assassinated. Oh, there we go. He's back.

Sorry, my browser just... You just get assassinated? Died. Yeah, I got assassinated while talking about the assassination. Okay, all right. Start over with your answer because that's not going to go off. Yeah, so, so yeah, you know, like, this has been true since the beginning of, like, the theoretical kind of stuff for prediction markets. You know, there's some stuff in the 70s, some stuff in the 90s, and of course,

Robin Hansen, who kind of first really wrote about it. And then since then, I think this notion of like, hey, there's some boundaries that legal will always have some legal issues like assassination markets and stuff like that. But I think fundamentally, the point of a prediction market is to allow people to build these markets and then figure out where that boundary is. If you don't actually try to build these markets and see how people want to try them, which things people view as informative, morally, ethically and financially, you're not going to know. And I think restricting that list to everyone who can figure how to IPO or everyone who can meet certain economic standards is probably just too restrictive, right?

Like I think we kind of start with the system too restrictive. You know, I think fundamentally there's an innovation aspect that exists here where you're always going to have some part of the Wild West that you retrench from. But I do think the interesting thing about this case in particular as well, some of the other ones, like the, the sort of hyperstition aspects of things where like people, you know, the other case that was in the news recently was, there's this Paris weather market. And it's baited the Oracle for the market

was the sensor in Paris somewhere, I think near the airport or something. And this guy just went to the sensor, took a hairdryer and, like, he did it up and then, you know, made some money off that. And that where, like, you're changing the outcome to get the thing. That's, that I think is actually kind of where,

that's where I think the more market structured thing, hey, is that going to work? Like, in this case, right, we have the soldier leaking information potentially, right, to adversaries or whatever that this is going to happen. But you could also imagine someone market manipulating like a market to make it look like that was going to happen and then cause, you know, cause something different than what ends up happening to happen.

or what would have happened without the market. So the conditional on the market existing and conditional on someone manipulating it, you change the outcome, right? That part, I think, is more like the hairdire thing. Yeah, so the hairder thing is not manipulating the market, but manipulating the outcome itself. Right?

It's like throwing a fight. Like, that's, that is very different from manipulating the market to a outcome. In the wartime scenarios, I could imagine you manipulate the market. Right, right, right. So that would be, okay, you manipulate the market to convince people an invasion is coming. invasion never comes.

We've not seen that. That's purely theoretical. And I think that's actually less of a compelling argument. To my mind, I think the equilibrium that this is driving towards is that, look, the prediction markets are not going away. I think that's pretty clear, at least for now. Who knows if the political heat turns up by a threefold, maybe that changes. But right now, I think the right answer is, look, there's a symmetry here, which is that

there's a market also on, you know, will the head of Iran, be replaced by the end of the year, right? And if that market shoots up, it's probably not because Americans are betting on it. It's probably because Iranians are betting on it, because they know something is going to happen. And that is information that leaks to us. And so the right equilibrium is that your government,

if your government is capable, your government stops your people from leaking information in the markets, but it listens to all the other information that exists in the market that's being leaked to you. You want that. There's way more information about the rest of the world than there is of yourself

because you're a small part of the world. right so i think it's it's a little bit short-sighted to look at this event and say oh well clearly this proves that prediction markets are terrible there's a if you if you talk to people at the FBI for the record i didn't say this is awesome no i don't want to ever be accused of saying no no i'm not not necessarily talking to you i'm making argument to the people who probably read this in the news and are like oh my god this proves this prediction markets are terrible i i bet people at intelligence agencies are like prediction marks are fucking awesome this is so what it it does remind me of the early crypto, right? Where people like, oh, it's just like only drug dealers. And then intelligence

agencies are like, this is great. Right. And the fact that the fact that they got this guy probably means that, okay, the next soldier from the U.S. military is going to be way more afraid of trying this. But, you know, somebody in the Iranian military, how the fuck is Iranian going to figure out that people are betting on polymarket? Yeah, I don't think they're going to cooperate with Iranian intelligence when they come with a subpoena. I agree. I think, I think, I think, like, people, again, love to sort of extrapolate from single points. But the real answer also is that, like, national security is basically special case in the law, right? Like, the things you kind of think about around common law just don't apply when it comes to

national security. The government can make you do things. They can suspend your rights. They can limit what you can do in the name of national security. And so that seems like what is more about versus, like, someone, you know, trading on proprietary info about the price of commodity or the outcome of something else. like that I agree like you want people with edge in the market to reveal their information and that is the benefit that we all enjoy this feels like okay well you could have put people

and American you know interest at risk and that's kind of why they're coming down hmm all right shia we got a wrap but I'll give you the last word thoughts on uh polymarket and search rating anything you want to let us know shiel about your upcoming token launch you know my my ending word would be I I always think that there's somewhere over there manipulating a prediction market to get the opposite outcome. I feel like there's like 5D chess being played in prediction market. I think all of us talking here just like is not into the dimension enough. You know, we have to deploy some inception thinking.

Yeah. Somebody somewhere out there is manipulating a prediction market right now. And we just, we just don't know. All right, Shia, where can people find you? They can find me on Twitter. They can find you on Twitter. What's your handle? Do you want to give them a handle?

At Hotpot underscore Dow. At Hotpot underscore Dow. And you wonder why I introduced you that way. Thank you, Brother Bing, for joining us. Appreciate your service. At fun. Thank you, guys. We'll be back next week.