Unchained - The Chopping Block: Does the New Terra Have Any Chance? - Ep. 358

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. Since Robert Leshner couldn’t make it, Laura also decided to hop on the show too! Show topics: how Terra is trying to rebuild what its value proposition is why Laura is surprised at how fast Do Kwon began shitposting again how teams affected by the Terra collapse, like Delphi Digital and Mars Protocol, are responding how its implosion will affect Cosmos why Tarun thinks Osmosis’ purchase of Keplr was the “best” purchase in crypto history whether the collapse of UST could help Cosmos in the long run what the legal implications of UST’s depeg will be whether Terra was a fraud like Theranos why Tarun thinks that investors should be sued for getting clients involved in Terra why Tarun thinks regulators are against 24-hour trading why Tarun thinks Matt Levine is a “boomer” what FTX’s chances are in getting approval from the CFTC to be the engine for 24-hour derivatives trading why NFTs are denominated in ETH/SOL instead of fiat why Tom doesn’t think airdrops matter what went wrong with the OP token drop   Hosts   Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital https://twitter.com/hosseeb Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures https://twitter.com/tarunchitra    Guest Laura Shin, host of Unchained https://twitter.com/laurashin    Show Topics Terra revival plan https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/terra-blockchain-restart-approved  LUNA 2.0 https://fortune.com/2022/05/30/do-kwon-luna-2-airdrop-plunges/   LUNA airdrop calculation issues:  https://twitter.com/terra_money/status/1531410663674888192  https://agora.terra.money/t/terra-ecosystem-revival-plan-2-passed-gov/18498  Delphi Digital https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/147755/delphi-digital-admits-we-were-wrong-on-terra-stablecoin-risks  Luna Classic https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/149361/mirror-protocol-suffers-new-exploit-and-could-be-drained-in-hours  https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/149342/a-90-million-defi-exploit-on-terra-went-unnoticed-for-seven-months  Korean prosecutors are looking to crackdown on Terra https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/149309/terraform-labs-employees-summoned-korea-prosecutors-ust-luna  Adam Neumann crypto project ​​https://www.vox.com/recode/23142106/adam-neumann-crypto-carbon-credit-offset-flowcarbon  FTX and CFTC and CME https://twitter.com/aguye_/status/1529547230318718976  ​​https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/143792/as-it-weighs-ftx-proposal-cftc-announces-a-roundtable-on-disintermediation  https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/148786/cftc-roundtable-on-ftx-proposal-highlights-barriers-in-clearing-of-digital-vs-physical-assets  Farmers vs FTX https://twitter.com/fintechfrank/status/1531605653269188608  CME word salad https://twitter.com/fintechfrank/status/1524811596421382144  Optimism Airdrop https://twitter.com/epolynya/status/1531719021833334784?s=21&t=MoImAkB4p8qwOV3p63sSnw https://dune.com/hildobby/op-airdrop    Unchained Coverage on Optimism https://unchainedpodcast.com/will-optimisms-op-token-draw-people-back-to-layer-2s-on-ethereum/    Unchained Coverage on Osmosis and Keplr https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-osmosis-is-trying-to-improve-the-crypto-user-experience/    Unchained Coverage on FTX x CFTC https://unchainedpodcast.com/ftx-wants-to-compete-with-cme-heres-why-its-a-big-deal/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First we've got Tom, the Defy Maven, and Master of Memes.

Next up, we've got Tarun, Giga Brain, and Grand Pubot gauntlet. We'll have joining us about halfway through, Robert, the Cryptoconistur, and Captain of Compound. He's in the middle of something, but he'll be joining us. And then we have myself,

Hesieve, I'm the head-hyped man of Dragonfly. And today, subbing in for Robert, because Robert couldn't make it during the first half of the show. We've got Laura, the CEO of the show, as I know she loves to be introduced. Quick caveat, the four of us are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice or legal advice or even life advice. Three.

Sorry, the three of us, the three of us, Laura is not an investor, as she often likes to remind us. She is a journalist, according to herself. So you're in, according to yourself. You're in Majorca right now. We're doing Majorca. I know. And please excuse me because you guys, there's like all kinds of pandemonia happening here.

But yeah. What's going on? I caught COVID. And so I could not fly back to the U.S. today like I had originally planned. I'm not very sick, which is good. You know, frankly, just going to enjoy a little bit of extra beach time. I'll have to work this week. But at least I'll be doing it in like this really.

cute beach town. Yeah, I feel like it's sort of like a blessing from the universe. You know, I just get this like little extra time because ever since my book came out, I have been like busier than ever before. I think I mentioned this when I came on before. So yeah, kind of nice for me, frankly. I hope it's pretty mild. Is it? Yeah, it is. I had like aches the other night. And then I like just slept 12 hours that night and then woke up and I basically just have a cold now and that's it. Okay. I'm glad it's not too bad. But your voice sounds kind of raspy, which actually works well for you.

I feel like it's actually pretty cool. Okay. It's probably also because it's so late here. It's after midnight. Yeah, it probably sounds a bit more normal. It's just the hour to start talking about Luna. Exactly. Exactly.

So, okay. So Luna, so it's been, we actually have. had some comments in Twitter, people telling us, why are you still talking about Luna? But unfortunately, they do it to us. They force us to do this. So for those, of course, last episode, we talked about the collapse of Luna with Kevin Joe and we sort of did a bit of a play-by-play of exactly how UST ended up collapsing. So in the interim, a lot has happened that I think we should probably discuss since it's

the, it's kind of the defining event of this month. So there was a proposal that was passed that Doe suggested called the Terra ecosystem revival plan. And the idea is that they're going to launch a new blockchain called Luna or called Terra. A lot of people are calling it Terra 2 slash Luna 2, but on corn market capital just be called Luna from now on. And this is the basically regenesis. It's the second birth of Terra. And there's going to be a big air drop to, sorry, I should say there was a. big airdrop to previous holders of Luna, as well as some of the people who kind of got wrecked

through different parts of the ecosystem. Some of the airdrop went to also staking derivatives, so people who had exposure to Luna, even if they weren't holding Luna directly. But there have been a number of issues. There were a lot of complaints about the governance process. There was a lot of complaints about theirdrop being miscalculated that the Terra Foundation had to go back and kind of issue some mea culpa about the air drop having numerous issues where people who were supposed to get some, didn't end up getting some, and so on and so forth. But the big thing is that it has, it has mostly succeeded. I believe the fully diluted market cap of the new Luna, Luna 2.0 is something, it's like $6 billion last time I saw. I think it's like $8 billion now. It's been moving up. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's been gaining some momentum. So it's obviously it's a far cry from what it was before. where, you know, previously its FDV was very high, I think, like 40 billion or so. But now, you know, it's a respectable showing. And there's a number of projects in the ecosystem, most of which were spun out of the Terraform labs, which is the company behind Luna, are involved in building on top of Terra II. But we've also seen a big migration. Many of the projects that were building on Terra 2, or sorry, they were building on Terra originally, did not decide to stick around for Terra 2.

And so many of them are shopping around for a new home. So as Teroon, you were mentioning last time, a lot of the other foundations, whether they be the Salana Foundation or Avalanche or Pocod, they're having engaged conversations with some of the new migrants from Luna. And so it seems like this thing surprisingly has gone off reasonably well, although there's always been some mistakes going on in that transition. The big thing that I've been hearing, chatting with some of the folks from the Terra ecosystem, is that it seems like Terra is doing everything they can to try to sabotage the old chain. So the old chain is now called Luna Classic. And there have been all sorts of issues with Luna Classic as the community has migrated away from the original Luna onto, you know, Luna 2. And so some of the things that we've seen, and I'll just be really brief because there's a lot of detail in some of these stories.

So first, that Mirror Protocol suffered a massive exploit related to their Oracle that end up draining a significant amount of capital and is likely to drain more. There was also apparently a $90 million defy exploit that was also on mirror that was unnoticed for months that has only now recently been uncovered by a gentleman by the name of Fat Man, which is a great name, I guess. Fat Mantera. Fat Mantera, there you go. And yeah, apparently there are, this bug was fixed quietly by the team behind mirror, but there was no acknowledgement of this actual bug until Fat Man was able to uncover it and describe it on Twitter. So, but broadly speaking, I've been hearing a lot of antagonism toward Luna Classic,

where the Luna team or foundation has been trying to, as much as they can, try to decommission things that are on Luna Classic and push all activity towards terror two. So it's been an interesting couple weeks to see the machinations of this migration to Tara 2. What have you guys been seeing? What have you heard? And what do you think about this new regenesis of Terra? Yeah, it's interesting to see how quickly people are willing to get this thing going again. Like if you look at the Terra Twitter feed, it's all about like all the new exchanges that are listing Terra 2, Terra 2 perps, like all these kinds of things. I think one of the interesting things about this in my mind was unlike a lot of, I guess, forks that we see of L1s, like

an Ethereum classic type situation, the state was not preserved. It was like a full re-genesis. And so, you know, you don't get all the old applications from Terra, not that again, they would make sense, as Turin pointed out, without UST most of the time. But it's like, you know, really trying to start from scratch, like get people to redeploy versus like, oh, we still have the old, you know, you know, you know, love. And it's just on this new blockchain instead. you just have to point your, you know, wallet over to this new thing. So I'd be curious to see if they can win people over or get some new stuff. I saw they had like a Phoenix Dex thing, which was going to be rebirth. So it's kind of like, you know, trying to get people over on

Luna. But yeah, I'm not really sure. I did see one also funny thing on Twitter, which is, you know, it's called Luna Rebirth. But, you know, there's a very famous trader, gigantic rebirth, which, you know, bet very heavily against Luna. So it's like this kind of weird, you know, kind of funny, I don't know, coincidence. But yeah, yeah, I'll be curious to see if they can actually like rebuild a meaningful state from from sort of scratch again. I mean, it's, it's weird because it's now a redefinition of Luna as just being a pure smart contract platform. Because of course, the UST component of Luna is gone.

Like they're not reconstituting that, at least not right now. So it's Terra as a competitor to Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon. And it's, to me, it's not really obvious where they're going to get marginal demand from. So sure, they're going to be able to have the, you know, some of the folks, decided not to migrate away, continue building on Terra. But where are new people going to come in? Like, what's their edge? What's their story?

Other than that, we're around and we have some TVL. So that seems a bit of mystery to me. Yeah. Everything I've read is just like, oh, it's the same chain minus UST, which, of course, that's pretty much what the old chain was entirely about. And I haven't read anything saying, like, you know, in all the competition in the space, here's what sets this new chain apart. Granted, I also have been traveling like crazy, so it's not like I've been falling super closely,

but it was something that I was wondering. It was like, this is a very crowded space. So how are you differentiating yourself? And I haven't seen anything like that. The other thing is that I was surprised by how quickly Do Kwan began posting again. I know multiple people, you know, have been talking about this, but I guess I kind of expected he might be a bit more humble, but I clearly was wrong. I think other people on Twitter were frankly surprised by that. And in general, like, you know, I guess I sort of felt that maybe there would be like more of some kind of effort to make it seem like more decentralized or like less reliant on, you know, certain individuals in that community.

So those were all certain things that, yeah, just kind of surprise me. I definitely agree with that. it kind of feels like, look, at this point, this is the Hail Mary to try to make whole the folks who lost a lot of money in the USDA debacle. And so it has to go right, right? And this is also the only chance at a redemption arc, in a sense,

is for them to kind of make this thing work. So I understand why, from Doe's perspective, he has to go all in here. He can't hedge his bets, he can't be cutesy about it. He has to go aggressive. So I think that, feels sensible to me.

But of course, what I've heard from some folks who were building in the terror ecosystem, that, you know, TFL is giving out grants to folks who were in the terror ecosystem to stay in

and not to go shopping around to other chains. Now, of course, the TFL doesn't have the resources it once had. So it's hard to be competitive with an avalanche or a Solana or a near if,

you know, your entire ecosystem just blew up. But they're competing on, level ground. They're trying to do the exact same playbook they were before with respect to layer one competition. Yeah. And I know that Delphi has a different role here, but I felt that their tweets were, you know, being more measured and saying like, look, you know, we, we can't necessarily say we endorse this. I forget that language they used. But, and granted, like I said, I know that

they have a different role from Doe. So you're right. Maybe he just has to like keep that sort of upbeat, like I believe in this. I'm going to build this kind of attitude. But, but. But, you know, Delphi's stance definitely seemed more measured and reasonable given everything that had happened. I did think it was interesting in the blog post, they really tried a position it as like community-owned Terrell. There was no explicit carve-out for TFL in the Regenesis. And obviously, they own a bunch of Luna. They own a bunch of UST. And so they implicitly got an air drop.

But it wasn't like, oh, the TFL is going to get a bunch of Luna. And then everybody else gets an air drop. It was, you know, a true, you know, sort of fair launch, even distribution. unquote. Yeah, I mean, I think the hard part for someone like Delphi, right? It's like Delphi Labs was probably the biggest grant recipient from TFL effectively, right? They were built, they built all the, they built Mars, they built Astroport. They, they had like pretty much, I'd say, I think labs in particular, I think Delphi wrote a blog post about how like basically labs took 99% of the losses for them. And, you know, I think it's very hard to convince these teams who you've convinced to, like, tie their, more their ship to your dock for two years that suddenly have had everyone lose everything all at once, suddenly continue to stay.

And we've already seen, so, like, for Delphi, basically, I think Mars said they're moving to osmosis. Astroport unclear, but they didn't deploy on start. Like a bunch of people had to deploy forks. It's actually an interesting opportunity for someone who's like, you know, wants to make a quick buck of like just redeploying all these terror protocols that basically were like, hey, we're not going to go back because, you know, the U.S. state is too valuable to our protocol that it doesn't make sense to redeploy, right? to Astroport, like, every single pool was like 18-month UST locked. So I think that there is sort of an interesting dynamic going on there. I think that also the overture is made by pretty much every other chain

to Luna developers and Luna teams. Will, I suspect, be extremely successful. Now, the biggest question is how the cosmos ecosystem, I guess, can rebound from this, because in a lot of ways, they really, really tied their ship to UST. Part of it was ideological, right? So if you talk to kind of the, you know, OG Cosmos people who are not Jay, so Ethan or Zaki, obviously the two Kwan's, Joe Kwan and Jay Kwan,

both will forever live in Twitter infamy. But it's a tale of two Kwan's. But I think there's sort of this interesting thing with when you ask like more on the people on the development side who are kind of still involved. Sonny, Zaki, and Ethan, they were all sort of, no matter what, like, even if they were all like, hey, Luna's still unstable,

they still kind of had to keep supporting it because it was literally the only driver of growth for the ecosystem. And then it did work for six months, right? Like, it did really surpass in a lot of metrics from everywhere else. So I think replacing that

is going to be quite hard, especially for the average, DGEN type user who's going to be like, oh, well, this Cosmos thing blew up last time. Like, why would I put my money back in this again? And I think that there's this interesting, like, consumer protection angle that, hey, we want, we're not going to let USDC come on Cosmos, or we're not going to make overtures to circle to have USDC deployed on Cosmos, which is effectively why it's the only one that has no native USC. I mean, I think now they're trying to rectify that.

and they kind of were like, we only want this like free money that, you know, that doesn't have like any tethering to the existing financial system. And that was sort of one of their core values. So I think it's going to be interesting to see how they redeem from that. Agoric, even though they've been taking kind of,

you know, they've been taking the slow approach to building it. They actually have a really cool system. But with, isn't it Kava also? Kava USD? Aren't they also? You know,

I think the Kava hack, the fact that Kava set their Oracle for U.S. X to UST equal one was not good. That was, it was not good. No, no, no, it's not nail in the coffin. Like, like, I think they, they, they still have a chance for sure. I do think that, like, the problem is they, they have, again, there's this consumer protection angle.

Like, if people lost money in minting USCX because of the fact that the workhole was mispriced and they got liquidated anyway, you know, are people going to come back? Like, yes, people do come back in crypto, right? We know that people love taking. infinite pain. I think this is a level of pain that we haven't ever seen obliterate at all at once, you know? Yeah. No, it's a, you make a great point, which is that beyond just the, the facts of exactly what happened in the Terra collapse, there's a kind of stank now that's hard to erase from Terra II. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's going to be very

difficult for them to attract new entrepreneurs and new developers to build on top of them. You may be able to retain some of the old community, but then it's a real question of like, what is a community worth? Like, how many of these people will actually be able to bring in new retail and new entrepreneurs and new builders? Because ultimately, that's what Ler1 Blockchins are about. They're about taking a shot at building the future platform that users down the road are going to care about, not just the people who are here today are going to care about. And then the other question is that, like, how much of that stank rubs off on cosmos? Now, I tend to think that it's in the long run, it won't be that much just because of the

fact that most users don't really know. Like if you're very technical, then yes, you'll have some understanding of like, okay, you know, UST was built on top of cosmic decay and then osmosis had a lot of exposure to it and blah, blah, blah, blah, and they all made these decisions that ended up looking bad in hindsight. But I think most users are not thinking that way. And, you know, if, for example, I'm trying to come up with a tortured analogy, but, you know, if there was some company that attached itself to Myspace, then MySpace, you know, imploded. Most people aren't going to draw, you know, if you're living in the valley and you're thinking about, you know, the kind of the chess game of startups, then you might think, like, oh, man, these guys who attach themselves to Myspace, what idiots, like, they'll never be able to call out of this. But most users have no idea.

I think one difference between crypto and MySpace is that the wallets are very branded to the chains you're using, right? And so in the Cosmos' case, interesting thing for the rest of the cosmos ecosystem is probably the best M&A deal in the history of crypto was. was osmosis buying Kepler and then kind of like really vertically integrating and probably building the best wallet ever i i will stand by the following statement kepler is a better wallet than phantom and metamask by a long shot i just think it has figured out the cross-chain ux perfectly compared to the other ones are like you have to sign 50 million transactions they don't hide all the call data like you know if i try to my mom's a relatively technical user who uses metamask but she has had trouble basically bridging and so like

I just generally think, like, I don't think she could, she can use Kepler. She, she had definitely a lot of trouble using MetaMas to use optimism, for instance. So I would say that, like, Kepler, I think is, like, really hit it out of the park. And the most important thing for Cosmos is that the Terra wallet, even though it was sort of a very widely used wallet, was not the most used Cosmos wallet anymore. Like, Kepler really took over. And so I think that in and of. of itself is a little bit of a saving grace. Right, because Kepler's not branded Luna or Terra.

Right, right, right. And that was all a sort of interesting thing because Terra had the first big Cosmos wallet, actually, one of the first big Cosmos wallets. And so most people would see it branded as Terra and associate with Terra. But, you know, my point is, like, you could have had something where the Terra wallet was the most used Cosmos wallet and almost every other Cosmos app was used through the Terra wallet. That would be horrible for them, right? You know, does that make sense? Like there's a different brand risk here with the wallet to chain connection that I think like from a consumer standpoint like does Sully brand image.

Yeah, actually, Tarun, because of your comments before about how you felt that Osmosis and Kepler had the best he wax. I did have Sunny on the show on with the one that actually came on today. We actually recorded it before the whole Terra implosion. I obviously had a switch of the schedule to include all that, so this is coming out a bit later. But the point is that he was saying on the show that he felt that having UST in that ecosystem made it hard for other applications to compete because they couldn't use natural yield because there was this element in the ecosystem that had this artificial inflated yield.

So I actually wonder if now in a way this might help the cosmos ecosystem more because then there won't be this kind of like weird element that's sort of like causing kind of weird market dynamics for some of the other apps that are trying to compete in that ecosystem. So who knows? And frankly, the fact that it happened this early, probably better for the ecosystem as well. Yeah, yes and no. I mean, obviously the Fed does the same thing with the federal funds rate. So, you know, if the Fed raises the federal funds rate to like 5%, then that affects all sorts

of private actors in the markets who might otherwise have a lower rate of return on what they're doing. So it's true in the real world, too, although we've been in a low-interest environment for a very long time. It seems like he might be exiting that. But it's certainly true that what you do in monetary policy at the base chain affects people upstream. It has to. But that's kind of the point. Now, if you set monetary policy badly, you create all sorts of weird effects, which is exactly what was happening in the Terra ecosystem, was weird effects that ended up causing this death One weird kind of analogy of like Anchor plus Terra is sort of like imagine if the central bank also was a commercial bank that took deposits and now had like this incentive to create the Oroboros because they were like not on one side handing the deposits on the other side controlling the sort of rates for deposits. And this has happened in a bunch of countries that has and it hasn't worked out.

Weimar Germany is a great example of when the central bank started like over. opening retail banks. This is in fact why in Germany until very recently the post office was like the biggest bank in the country. The Dutch post bank was really? Yeah, it used to be the highest deposits in Germany. So there's been some remnants of this type of stuff that like so from the consumer side I think there's a lot of lessons to think about how like wallets and protocols are associated and you know what that will this will be a good lesson to us of like whether whether there's like this affinity that's different than, say, the Myspace thing, because, like, oh, if the wallet was really branded to that chain, then, like, people start thinking, like,

oh, this chain is bad versus, oh, this app was bad. Well, so speaking of learning lessons, the other thing that's happened as a result of the Terra fallout is we are seeing prosecutors starting to sniff around. So there was a report that Korean prosecutors are now summoning the employees of Terraform Labs, the company that is behind the creation of Terra and asking them a bunch of questions about their involvement. I've heard that there's also a probe going around in the U.S. as well, although the details are still a bit hazy. And so unsurprising that when you see a situation like this, heads got a roll. Like this thing was global news. It was a cover of the Wall Street

Journal. It was just massive, massive story. It's now to the point, you know, when I talk to LPs, every single LPE asks me about Tara. And it's a cover of the world. It's a lot of the it's the one thing that everybody knows to talk about. Same way, like last summer, the one thing everyone knew to talk about was Solana. This summer, the thing everyone knows to talk about is Tara. Why did it collapse? And like, what does it mean for the industry?

And it's got me thinking a lot, and I'm curious to get your guys take on this, about, you know, we touched last time very briefly with Kevin on the idea of was Tara a fraud? Or I should say, was USDA a fraud? Because one of the questions I get all the time time from LPs. And I think this is often the way in which it's framed in the press is that Terra was like Theranos. And there are all these comparisons to consumer protection, investor

protection, of like, how can we create more disclosures, how can we stop this kind of malfeasance from ever happening again? And Tom, you made the point last time that everything about Terra was actually out in the open. Everything was totally transparent, right? The deposits on anchor, the yield, where the yield was coming from, you know, raising money into the LFG, the funds they were using to protect the thing, how the mechanism worked. Everything was out of the open. It was all in contracts, it was all on the website. Everyone knew this. I mean, not everyone, obviously. There are many people who weren't sophisticated enough to understand it. But all of this was out in the open. The question is, should, naturally, there's going

to be an attempt to try to punish the people who were involved in the creation and the, and the promulgation of UST. Do you guys think that is good or bad? We were talking about this a little bit in one of our team meetings, too, around, like, this being also made me reminiscent of GFC and, like, not one. wanting to criminalize failure that also just creates this massive, you know, chilling effect on the, on the industry. And I think, I guess, as I sort of said earlier, like, this was super transparent. No one really, you know, lied.

No one made misrepresentations around what this stuff does. I think externally, outside of Terra, you know, there were the, there was a story actually about stable gains, which was like this YC backed startup, which basically a front end for anchor. People were wiring in dollars. Initially, they were converting to USDC. and then eventually stable gains converted those to UST to get more yield to skim off and then sort of collapsed on the back end. I think stuff like that where they actually went through and they like changed the terms of service, they tried to obfuscate this from people. There might be

fraud there. But I think in terms of the actual protocol TFL, like it was all pretty transparent. I think also some investors obviously, you know, I think maybe misrepresented or overplayed how safest was and downplayed some of the risks. But it's hard to say that anybody lied or anybody totally obscured what was actually going on on the back end. I think maybe only the thing I would point out is around the reserves. We still don't have a ton of clarity into how the reserves were used to defend the peg. Not that I even know that makes a material difference in terms of the outcome for UST or for Luna, but that does feel like maybe the worst part of the story is just, you know, with $4 billion in crypto also went poof and we don't really know what happened

to it. Yeah, I mean, the story of crypto has always been that, you know, people try to solve insanely hard problems. And they mostly fail until someone succeeds. There were, however many attempts to create decentralized money before Bitcoin succeeded. And the same thing, there were many attempts to create kind of generalized computing platforms before Ethereum succeeded. And there will be many more attempts to create decentralized stablecoins that don't require the backing of real USD. And they will continue. There will be more attempts to do this because it is one of the holy grails of crypto. But, But it may continue under a very different pretense if the idea is that if you fail, you get punished.

And we will throw the book at you and find every possible way to make your failure even more, you know, discouraging to the folks who will come after you. I'm not going to be popular with the other people on this chat for saying this. But I think investors should be allowed to be sued for this to some extent. Like there is a sense in which the Theranos case you could argue. that there was information withheld that caused this sort of consumer harm, if consumer harm is the basis of your legal system's form of punishment. But I would argue here that there's like an ecosystem of that, in some case, in this scenario that happened, especially, I would say, to some extent,

more the traders than the venture investors, the trading firms that started becoming venture investors quickly. I do think there was certainly some of them were misrepresenting things quite dramatically. Anybody you'd like to call out, Tarun? No, I don't think there's anyone I would like want to directly say, but there definitely were, there definitely were people who are very, um, unnamed trading firms who were very involved. A couple of names came to mind based on the description. No, no, no.

I'm not trying to basically say, you know, the ones who are subpoenaed because like they're already, you know, they're already, I think there were, there were more. There were more in Asia that were really described, you know, I would say in like Korea and Singapore, there were just a lot of people, a lot of funds that were just like, oh, yeah, like, you know, pushing these kind of front-end products. The way that I have described at LPs is that the reality was Luna was more WeWork than it was Theranos. It was a dramatic failure, but like the failure.

Those are the only two examples of fraud that we can come up with? Well, no, WeWork wasn't an example of fraud. It was an example of incompetence. what investors would be like, well, you could argue that the LPs would say that, hey, that's like Masa being incompetent, which is in their mind equivalent to like, you know, the Theranos thing. No, but I agree with Haseeb. The sin here was Hebris and definitely we work and Tara fit that much more. I don't agree that Tara was a kind of Theranos and I think like fraud is really difficult to prove. And so maybe an investigation would turn something up. I have never looked into this.

You know, the bar for that is like pretty high. And given all of Doquan's swagger on Twitter, I would be super surprised if he actually like, you know, internally kind of like knew or was convinced that Tara would collapse. Just from the way he spoke, it seemed like he was fully convinced that he had made it. He was like a gazillionaire and like was set for life. And, you know, this, this was.

his baby and his big success. That's how he seemed. So I would be super, super surprised if, like, behind the scenes, he was like, oh, this is never going to work. And, you know, I would just be surprised. One thing from the financial crisis is a lot of the people who are kind of, like, high swagger assholes were the only ones who were convicted or, like, actually had legal trouble because they were just easy targets for regulators.

Yeah. If you're unsympathetic, yeah, you're going to get the book for that. I think, like, don't, don't underestimate in financial. crime, like how much of the fraud case does sometimes revolve around who can be made an example of the most easily? And were they an asshole, like, in a clear way that, like, it's easy to convince a jury? Yeah, but I just don't know then, excuse me, if the charge would be fraud itself. Because if he was fully convinced it would succeed, then how is it a fraud, you know? So that's why I agree with the CBS. Yeah, I agree that there's a sense in which this was not really a

fraud in the traditional sense. It was just more a for the protocol itself, right? The protocol itself in some sense is, you know. It works correctly. But I would just argue that financial law, the way it gets enforced, at least in the U.S., is quite weird. And people all the time can get, you know, the Schrelli case is a great example, a case where someone effectively actually made their investors money. So like from the perspective of like exactly how he he got in trouble, like it was sort of this very weird case to turn it into like a like a sort of mix of consumer harm and fraud. And so I wouldn't be surprised. And obviously him being an asshole made it very easy to construct this kind of roundabout case. So I wouldn't be surprised if like we see a lot of

that where it's not called fraud, but like the trial gets represented in the media as fraud. And like it'll never like most people will just think it's that. even if, you know, technically it was like this very obtuse thing. Yeah, I think that's very likely is that it probably won't be the big charge that you really want, but there's a feeling that something must be done. You know, it's like, don't just stand there, do something for, you know, any kind of prosecutor in this environment. So we'll see something, and I think there's a good chance that it ends up becoming untenable

to pin him with a really big charge. And so it's like, oh, you lied about this one really specific thing that we're going to nail you on and it's going to be like some slap on the wrist, but it ends up wasting everyone's time and attention. That would be my guess. But it's more about signing a message, right? And feeling like, hey, crypto is not this like lawless place where consumers lose a lot of money. We feel like we did something and the consumers feel like something was done. And so therefore we can all kind of agree to move on collectively. And is that what you think would be? Because, you know, before the SEC was trying to go off

to Doe Kwan because of, I guess, synthetic assets. mirror, but, you know, they don't have jurisdiction, I guess, because he's a U.S. citizen. Or not a U.S. citizen. In this case, it would be like some kind of consumer, like, what, do you know what the charge would be? Or have you seen any commentary? I don't know. My guess is that prosecutors are trying to figure out what can we, like, what can we possibly charge on this thing? I don't know what crime is involved here, but I'm sure there's something in one of these books that we can, that we can accuse them of. Also, not Not to make a hard pivot, but we did bring up WeWork, and I hear that Adam Newman is back in crypto.

And by back, I mean, by back, I mean started. I'm not sure what, I'm not sure what back in front. He's back in the startup game. Yeah. Yes, yes. So we heard a story that Adam Newman raised 70 million from A16Z for some kind of carbon credits on the blockchain, something, something. I don't know. Does anyone have color on this one?

I tried reading the A16CNs memo, and it was mainly a personal story about carbon. I was like, wait, I don't understand what this company does. I was like, this sounds like what happened last time is that the announcement of why we're investing was a personal story. I think personal story is justifying investments in things that are difficult. Makes a lot of sense sometimes. Sure, sure. But I do think it was very unclear. I also heard this rumor from a friend of mine who said the same team minus the Newman's were pitching the idea like four months ago.

five months ago and like didn't say they were involved or something and then like something changed. I don't know what happened in the last four months, but it sounds like this team has been like hustling on this idea for a while and then they got a little star power to help out. I see. Okay. Oh, oh, wait, wait, wait. So meaning they weren't like hiding their involvement and then suddenly decided not to, but actually they brought them on board to like help them get investment? I think, I suspect it's the latter, not the former. I saw the screenshots of this old deck that show the team without everyone except them. That's amazing that having Adam Newman involved would somehow lead to investment. Okay, anyway, I'm clearly not a VC.

You do not understand investors if that's confusing to you. Yeah. It really doesn't. Like, biggest failure of all time. But anyway, okay, okay, whatever. I don't know if it was that bad. If you think about it. Yeah, I mean, it's still like a several billion dollar company.

It's not there and us, right? It's closer to Uber at this point than... I think, yeah, Tarun, you're 100% right. I mean, clearly, Adam Newman is a bit of a nut job, but yeah, he built a really fantastic company. Like, I mean, go around and you'll see Wiiworks all over the place. I've used the rework in the last two weeks, you know? Sorry for...

Sorry about the barking. No worries. Okay, Therun, before you have to run, because I know you have to hop off early, this one, I felt like you would be able to give some good color. So, CFTC held a roundtable on FTX U.S. making a proposal for a new approach to clearing the settlement of trades. So the idea from FTX is like, hey, you know, all you guys who separate out, you know, your clearing house and your custody and, you know, exchange all into separate entities.

That's the way it's done in the traditional financial system. That's kind of dumb. What about the idea that we verticalize everything and one party does all of them? And this was a big pitch to the CFTC. CME was at the table. CME is a Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is one of the largest exchanges in the world. And the CME basically started yelling at FTX, calling it, you know, ridiculous and claiming that they were going to take advantage of consumers who didn't understand what was going on. And so there was a bit of a back and forth and some roasting that was going in both directions between FTX and CME.

Tarun, you're a lot closer to this from your Tradfai days. What are your thoughts on this whole drama? I just generally think I get what FTX wants to do. Obviously, from a technology standpoint, clearly makes a ton of sense. I think the boomers, though, who are in charge are just generally against 24-hour trading. Like, FX has 24-hour trading minus some tiny blips, and the FX market has had a lot of, like, weird behavior. FX is also just like, like,

like a very bizarre market, right? Because it's like there's only certain primary dealers who do half of the market, maybe more of the market trades per day. So like what I mean by that is like, let's suppose I'm Microsoft. I have Microsoft subsidiary in Europe. And every day for tax reasons, I need to like get my revenue outside of the US into Ireland. Right. So I need to like sell dollars by euros, ship it over. And in the process of doing that, I have to be like, hey, I need to like sell, I need to like sell a yard or a billion dollars like basically you know you're like okay who wants to handle this and there's usually only like four or five banks that will do it do you go to the banks they they do this trade they there was a whole scandal of this like post financial crisis about how

like all these banks would collude and they would like tell each other like hey look Morgan Stanley would say Microsoft is giving me a billion goldman would say Facebook gave me a billion and they'd be like okay let's agree that like we're going to charge them at least as much so it's like as a fee the the the The Goldman guy in London is the one who went to jail for Tom, something. So anyway, FX has this weird thing where because there's not really a jurisdiction that guides the security, like the European leg and the U.S. leg might differ on what they consider insider trading, for instance. Actually, they do. And so you get all sorts of very weird stuff, but it is technically the only 24-hour market.

And a lot of the weird stuff there, you can argue that in a smart, if it was actually done on chain, for instance. that you wouldn't have that. There's just like a single consistent law. But like I don't think I've ever talked to people who are like as averse to using technology and still use Blackberries as like a lot of the people involved here. So like I just feel like it's going to be it's a hard uphill battle. Sam's not exactly a sympathetic character I think to a lot of them for a variety of reasons, probably mainly Alameda. But like I just think that like there it will be an uphill battle. I wish them luck. Obviously, it should just be this electronic thing.

And, like, why am I, like, why do you have to deposit five different brokers to, like, do just, like, one trade between exchanges, like, stuff? There's, like, all sorts of middlemen in the middle. But just kind of, like, the pharmaceutical stuff in the U.S., where it's, like, completely non-transparent pricing. You don't understand, like, why certain warehouses, why, like, when you go to your local pharmacy, even though there's a warehouse that's, like, three miles away from you that has the drug. your pharmacy actually has to get it from like this like a huge ring of pharmacies that send it back there's all sorts of weird middlemen stuff going on here and the middlemen are they are boomers too so like i just feel like it's it's really hard to convince these people to change the electronic trading boom really was in a lot of ways like for for equities the reason that it actually had

they had to like just accept it was like people just started making exchanges on their own and just started trading and like soon tons of the volume, tons of volume left the regulated exchange, which is sort of what you see in crypto. So I think if you make this argument, you can try to make the same argument, but I think it's going to be hard. But I wish them luck. I mean, there are popular arguments against 24-hour trading, right? Like Matt Levine talks about this where it's like, it's just hard for dealers to be online that, like, for that amount of time. And so generally it's like you see worse liquidity in the market. And so it's sort of like in some ways, self-defeating versus just like having run, everyone who wants to make a trade online for like a small amount of time every day.

You're really deep markets. Everything settles. And then it's sort of over versus like trying to trade when, you know, markets aren't super deep or like requiring people to be, you know, posting liquidity constantly. This seems like such a bizarre argument to me, right? Because like, look, if it's not in your interest to improve liquidity at a certain time, then it's like, okay, well, at least it's better enough some liquidity than no liquidity. Right. If most of the trading activity happens at 5 p.m. or whatever it is, then fine.

Most of it happens at 5 p.m. But at least the people who want to be in the market can be in the market. And there's not this weird cottage industry around after hours trading and this thing and people better know where the things are open. And as much as I love Matt Levine as a writer, I generally think he has like very boomer technology takes. And like a lot of it has to do with the fact he didn't work in electronic trading. He was a derivatives lawyer at Goldman. That's a very different thing than like working at Tower. If you work at tower or jump, they have 24-hour coverage.

Every team is quoting wherever they can. This is not a problem. You have an international team that's distributed. Every single trading firm can do this. This is just a very boomer bank nonsense thing in my mind. These people who want this very, yes, there are all these mistakes that can happen. But it's crypto. It's like even less likely in some ways.

you can at least analyze why they happen post hoc. Like, you can't even really do that when you have like these five million brokers who don't, who like don't publish any information. And then like after, they only publish information on the SEC is like, hey, like, we think that like there was wash trading. Like send us all your records. Like, come on. What are your thoughts on the, uh, the poor farmers angle?

Um, which is basically like, look, if you look at what, you know, a lot of people are trading for. You're farmers already sold off their entire rights to their farms to cargo. Like, are we seriously? The Koch brothers already own most of this, like, agricultural feud. It's like Glencore and the Koch brothers. Like, why do we even care about the fucking individual farmer? Like, they don't even do this themselves.

They go to all these brokers. Right? Like, this is all a very strong lobbying arm. Like, that's what I would tell you. I agree. I would just be curious if you had any other thoughts. This idea that, like, the farmer, the poor farmer is going and sitting on interactive brokers and like he's like he's like in the tractor like selling a future like what fucking idiot

thinks that's a world we live in in? In terms of the like condescending attitude the boomers have or whatever it was that you were saying and like how the traders kind of know better. Did you guys see that little clip of when Sam Binkinfred got upset at how condescending? I think it was somebody from CME was being about yeah, people who use his platform. and he was like, I'm a little offended here. You know, the people who use my platform, they definitely know much more about these contracts than you do.

And you're pretending like you're trying to protect them. And I mean, he said it a lot more politely even than that. But still, you know, it's kind of a tense moment. And I don't know if you saw the previous one. Well, I didn't see it, but Frank Chaparro tweeted a little clip of it. But when the CME guy was asked by Congressman Rokana, what a blockchain is. He was like,

a blockchain is a node, and then like goes on using like word salad crypto, basically. I mean, he must have heard a definition, but like didn't actually know the definition. And so just threw a bunch of words together that made it sound like he knew what a blockchain was. But yeah, blockchain is not a node.

I thought it was funny. I had this friend who asked one of the GPs, 3 thing, like, you know, where you can ask it a question and it will generate an answer for you, like, what a blockchain was and it was about 100 times better than the CME on. So we should just replace some certain people with GPT3, I guess, is what we've learned. I was just going to say if people have more questions about this, I did have Chris Perkins, president of coin fund on my show discussing it. And he used to work at City and knows all about this. and actually supports the FTX proposal. And he spent 20 minutes explaining the whole thing.

So you can check that episode out. Yeah. So, I mean, the political economy of this doesn't look great because the decision being made by the CFTC is ultimately, you know, they feel like they're very beholden to an entire system that doesn't want FTX to do what they want to do.

It might be better in some holistic sense for everyone involved, but, you know, regulatory capture being what it is. I feel like the odds for FTCHAs, FTCS are not good. Tarun, how would you, how would you handicap them? I also would say, I give it like 20%. The Luna timing was horrible, right?

FTC has been preparing for this for a long time. I think like the pressure from the Luna stuff is just going to basically kick any of these things down the road. Like, you know, it's going to be like the Bitcoin spot ETF. It's not going to be like, like, come on. If we can't get that approved, Do you think they're going to do this much of a change?

Like, I agree with the SEC versus CFTC, but it's like, it's still, it's still like going to take a while. I'm more bullish on what kind of like the way the Eurodollar happened where like some other country made this product and then it grew really big. And then people in the U.S. were like, look, like, you can't have this if we don't like get this rule change. But right now the U.S. doesn't feel that way about crypto. I don't know exactly what it is.

that's not giving them that imperative. I just don't feel like FTCS has like the boomer suit, enough boomer suits yet. It just takes a while to like hire those people, get that, you know, like I don't think the swamp is easy to walk through without boots. Fair enough.

All right. Well, we're running toward the end of time. We were going to talk about the optimism, airdrop shenanigans, but at the interest of time, we have two, I don't know if we can cover it in two minutes. I guess I just wanted to end on,

you know, I think last time we, we were talking about, the collapse of Terra and kind of doing a post-mortem on it. But we didn't have a whole lot of time to really delve into what it means for crypto now that we've entered into this broader bear market. So we're now pretty firmly in this new territory where we're seeing much fewer product launches, trading volume is down across the board. We're seeing a lot less retail engagement. Most assets in crypto are down 50, 60% for the majors. And then below that, things are down 70 to even 90%.

and of course even steeper if you're Terra. How are you guys thinking about the present moment? How is it shifting your perspective on what's happening in crypto? Soul-dened-Eden NFT volume. Shockingly, not going down. Yeah, I had this little Twitter thread talking about this where it's basically like, you know, if you, sure, if you look at the prices, it's just sort of this broad drawdown and you assume everything is sort of going down

the same amount in sort of the same way. but if you look, there are interesting pockets of outperformance of things that are doing well, one of them being ether sole denominated, you know, NFT volumes, looking at NFT user numbers, like all really impressive, stuff that is structured to do well in a bear market, people taking on more risk like these, you know, DOVs, like, you know, these DOWs that are selling bonds or some bond issues coming up over the next few months, stuff that like makes sense to do in a bear market is doing well. But of course, the hyper-leverage, super speculative trading that everyone loves in a bull market is not doing well.

So I think it's like too dooming gloom to say like everything is dead, everything is dying. It's like you've got to kind of pick and choose and look to find those things that are structured to work well in a bear market and maybe be less attractive in a bull market. I mean, I love the take, but are we moving the goalposts a bit to start denominating? No, I don't think so at all. Because because I think NFTs are particularly unique asset in that they're one of the few crypto assets that is not dollar denom. people coin denominated. It's actually kind of crazy, right? Like, the average new user to crypto in 2021 probably traded in NFT. Like, I would guess that that is like 40, right? Those people had to learn how to buy ether soul. Like, that was not true before. But how many of them,

how many of them are denominating their reserves in ether soul? Right. That's the real important question. The ones who got rich off of trading that, they're still living in that ecosystem, I'm keeping it up. It's like they are net new users. Like I think like don't forget that. If you think it's so important, then why aren't they trading in stable coins? Because you can technically do that on all these platforms, but people choose not to. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I'm really curious how long that's going to percent. It's a change in consumer behavior for some cohort that we, that I think like that cohort is like the key consumer to understand. Right. The question, though, is like, you know, NFTs were able to grow to the extent that they were because there were marginal new people coming in

and being willing to buy and sell these things, right? Increasingly, the OGs, the people who are there from the beginning, they denominate their wealth in ether or in Seoul or whatever. The new user who's like, oh, this NFT thing is really exciting and I'm going to get Moonpaid to buy me an NFT so I can show it off to my celebrity friends.

That person is probably denominated, like they're not thinking the way that you're describing, which is denominating. No, no, no, no. The difference is before it was whales, now it's hypebeasts. It's hypebeasts who would go on, you know, like, high snobiety and, like, those people are denominating in Ethan Seoul.

That is a new demographic that didn't exist in this industry, right? And the fact that they're building their own economy around that, that is something that's a green shoot. So the question is, like, what are the products that are around that? Yeah. I mean, it is the only thing right now in crypto that is denominated purely in the native token. For whatever reason, it's NFTs. Like, it's the one element of crypto where crypto actually acts like currencies is in the NFT

marketplaces. Which is crazy. And it has new users, like, who are not necessarily, like, have been around, care about the original privacy reasons, the kind of internet philosophy. Like, none of them care about the philosophical things. So that's, like, an interesting... Well, do you think that that will continue? Let's say three years from now, do you think they will continue to be priced in the native

asset? Look, I'm not here to try. try to shill music NFTs or whatever, whatever people like to bandy about. I'm asking you to make an intellectual prediction. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. I'm just making fun of the music NFT people because they're really, it feels like very much like mean girls. They're just like really trying to make it happen.

It has been a rough slog for them. But like, don't you guys think that the reason that they're denominated in the crypto is because NFTs are all about status. And like, you know, the way that's reflected is, you know, I don't know, somehow like putting it in dollars, like that is nowhere near as cool as if it's denominated in ether soul and especially, especially Eath in particular. And the fact that that price was set by whales and that the reason that it's denominated in ether soul is because people got it and, you know, on on the ground floor when it was

cheap. And then now they have like tons of whatever this coin is. And then so the newbies, they want this status. And so that's why they're willing to, to pay in that coin because NFTs are about status. That's a good theory as I've ever heard. But it did attract new users, right? Whatever the thing, whatever the way it is. Yeah. And they're chasing status.

And the way they achieve that status is by paying and ether soul. Like the whales. Like the whales. It's like being like a, yeah, imitation whale. Be like Mike. Be like the whales. Also, I see one last thing. The chat is.

is really asking about the optimism thing. So if we have five minutes, we should. Okay. All right. Let's shoot for the optimism thing. So real quick. So optimism today was launching their air drop. There were a bit of snafus around the optimism air drop.

So first off, so for those who are enough familiar, optimism is a layer two optimistic rollup. They've been around for a while. They're kind of the second in command behind arbitram for TVL. They announced their air drop, but their air drop, they unfortunately had a lot. lot of issues with getting theirdrop up and running. So first of all, I think it was a few weeks ago, they ended up calling a lot of the list of potentialirdrop recipients for folks who were perceived to be bots or perceived to be gaming theirdrop. But the, when you looked at your irdrop, when you looked at theirdrop that you were eligible for, apparently their RPC endpoint

went down or kind of spazzed out and got really weird. So it started telling people that although they were perceived to have gotten theirdrop, been eligible for theirdrop, they then started telling them they weren't eligible for theirdrop. And so a lot of people mistakenly believed that their airdrop has been pulled from them. Now, second, the contracts were deployed long before any of the announcements were made. And of course, many people were monitoring for the contract. And so a bunch of people started taking their tokens out, selling them. The price discovery started taking place with a bunch of folks getting early in and dumping.

Even before the actual website to claim any of these things was actually available, there was an announcement by the exchanges that they were going to list optimism today, even though the team themselves didn't say anything. So the whole thing has been a little bit of a shit show. And a lot of people are, you know, kind of fish shaking about it. I don't know that this will, you know, by the time that you listen to this podcast, it might be so many days in rearview mirror. You're like, okay, whatever.

I mean, that happens with every token launch. I kind of take the view that this doesn't seem like a big deal to me. But everyone's talking about it today. So I figured we might as well do daff of the hat to that. I don't know. I don't know if anybody else feels more strongly about it, but this feels like a standard clumsy token launch. Yeah, it feels pretty clowny.

but like I think generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyway, so it's like, you know, I don't like, it's like, hold on, we might need to disentangle that. Why are air drops pointless? Well, I mean,

what is the purpose of the air drop? I don't really feel like I've ever gotten a good explanation of like what this is supposed to be for other than maybe creating a small float, creating some community goodwill, thanking people, but then people go out and like game in anyway. And so it's like, you know,

ultimately the products where lives and dies almost by itself, and this is almost sort of like a marketing stunt or a way to breed some community goodwill. But like, you know, I think if you look at, you like try to draw some sort of correlation between the quality of the air drop and the like the outcome for the product,

there's probably, you know, zero correlation between the two. So I think a lot of teams think about our air drop and plan on it. But like ultimately, I feel like it's just so, you know, window dressing. Well, yeah. Right before we hopped on, my assistant made the point that probably a lot of the people that were gaming things and interacting with the smart contracts because they realized that they were already live were the whales.

And so the whales probably benefited a lot and made a lot of money. And then now once kind of more retail users who don't really know these things get in, then the token price will have dropped and they'll be left holding the bag. So that's actually one reason why it does matter. Yeah. I mean, with an airdrop, right? So, I mean, there's something like, again, like,

these kinds of things happen pretty much always, right? Even if there's a, even if it was done fairly, there'd be people who are running bots that, like, instantly take theirdrop and then sell it faster than anyone can click buttons. So, yes, it's true. It could have been better. I don't know.

I think these things tend to get overplayed in terms of their importance to the long-term success of the project. Like, opt-ins will be successful if they build a great layer too. I think how well their airdrop was executed doesn't matter that. in a bigger scheme of things. I guess disclosure optimism investor. The main thing I would say is I do think layer two's are all launch and go launch tokens and the success of all the future layer two tokens is sort of predicated on like

the market appetite for it will somehow depend on how well or poorly this went. I think a lot of the RPC stuff was kind of bad in some ways just in the sense of like, I think, you know, there was a lot of, there were a lot of people on crypto Twitter who were just like, Solana sucks, like RPC endpoints never work. Avalon sucks. RPC endpoints never work. But I do feel like there's a little bit of like that, that fact that like, hey, look, the Lear 2 that is Vitalik approved, like, somehow didn't, like, wasn't able to get around. There's like this weird thing. And did the sequencer also go down? For a tiny amount of time, but I think that was way shorter than the RPC problem

was a big problem, because there were all these other contracts you could call that work, fine, and other endpoints you could go to. So I think the main thing was just like, I just kind of think like there is a little bit of like social salt. There's a little bit of desalinification needed. Like I just don't get why people are always like on each other.

your thing sucks because your RPCs didn't work. Because it's like, you know, like, every fucking new one of these things is hard to build. And like, no shit, no shit on launch you're going to have it. So anytime you make fun of someone, don't forget it will happen to you too eventually. I hope Doquan is listening. That's the carmic force of the world. Doquan might be a slightly different story, but I completely agree with Therun. Like, this happens to everyone.

and I think it's like incredibly not a big deal, although yet it's annoying at the time that it happens. I give Anatoly the most credit of everyone for this because for some reason, he is, he does not get, he does not yell at people, which is, and doesn't go like, oh, your thing sucks all the time, which, you know, I, you know, I think a lot, a lot of people are always like, you know, ready with pitchfork to be like, your shit doesn't work. And it's like, especially, you know, I think, I think a lot of you two researchers, not E2 devs. E2 devs understand that it's difficult to launch. E2 researchers love just like going and ribbing on all these things.

And I'm like, you guys are just, when you have your problem like we did with the beacon chain test net stuff, the Robson thing, like, you know, I don't know. Why can't people just not be dicks about this?

Yeah, no, everyone gets their day in the well. Everyone gets their day in the well. Like I agree, you know, Anatoly is probably a little bit more even killed than some of the other people when, when he's getting attacked. But I do have to say sometimes his spin when Solana has issues,

and then he's like, oh, well, you know, back in the day, Bitcoin had a block time, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, this is not the same. Like, like, don't try to compare Salana to Bitcoin. Everyone is at fault. I would just say he does not just go out of his way to like constantly be like, your RPC failed. You suck. Like, yeah. Now that we have brought Anatolia and we did, we did challenge Anatolia over Twitter to come on the show. So we'll have to bring him on next time now that the... I'm hoping that next time there will be no more Luna

to... No more Luna news for us to work through and we can start focusing on other things. So that'll be a good follow up to this. I do know the soul, the sun is the opposite of the moon. So if he's on the show, can't mention the moon.

All right. I guess that's that. I guess that's that. All right. Well, let's let's wrap it up, guys. because I actually do have to run. Thank you everybody for tuning in and we'll see you guys in a couple weeks. Good.

Yeah. Bye.