Unchained - The Chopping Block: In 'the First Crypto War,' How Should the Money Be Spent? - Ep.328

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give an industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First, we got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Next up, we have Robert, Cryptoconisur, and Captain of Compound. Third, we've got Turun, the Gigabrein and Grand Pubod gauntlet. And then we have myself, I'm a sieve head, head hype man, a dragonfly.

And today we have joining us a special guest from her Airbnb in a nondescript location. We've got Laura Shin. So the four of us, not including Laura, are early stage investors in crypto, but I want a caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice or legal advice or even life advice. So Laura, first of all, congratulations on your book. I think last time we were able to say it here, but you weren't able to join us at that time. Congratulations. I know it's been a huge effort in the undertaking.

And you're now on the road show, like going around giving talks or something? Yeah, I went to London right after the book came out. like literally the day after and I went to a chain alice's conference. And then after that, I went to a conference at Oxford. And that was actually really meaningful because I had done study abroad at Oxford. And all I can say is like when you go to a place that that's so close to your heart and that was so formative for you, like after a major milestone in your life, like, I was very emotional just walking around Oxford. I'm sure people were like, why does this lady keep crying everywhere? But anyway, so yeah, I, like, and obviously just going to the chain analysis conference was really wonderful because, you know, they helped me with so much in the book, but obviously they had done that demixing portion for the Dow investigation, which was great.

And actually, I will step away at a certain point and get you a really cool thing that somebody gave me, which was this FBI challenge coin. And it's like a coin that I guess these FBI special agents have. and it like says nice things on it. Yeah. And then I had my book signing in New York last week and it was totally sold out, which is awesome because apparently that's not a common thing. So it was great. And so many people came up and said hello.

And then, yeah, now I'm in San Francisco. I have a reading tonight at the Commonwealth Club and then I'll be in Seattle tomorrow. And there's more events coming up. But yeah, it's a very like fun time for me. How does it feel? Oh my God. Like amazing. honestly, I mean, I just can't even begin to tell you. First of all, you know, announcing the news

about the Dow attacker on the day my book came out, that was just incredible. And obviously, it was a huge boost for the book. And, you know, just kind of, I think, really got people talking about the book. And it was just great because, you know, I poured so much of myself into this book over the last few years. And so to be able to launch it in that way. And frankly, also, I had spent so much time trying to figure out who had done it. So that was really nice. And then, yeah, I mean, you know, just like people have been saying such nice things. Like the day that I revealed that news, people were tweeting at me that I was the goat,

which is just great, you know. People obviously aren't usually very complimentary toward, oh, yes, thank you. That's the book. I do have a copy somewhere. Oh, here. I've got one here. Yes. I have friends who are visiting men.

So this is one of their copies. Got my copy. I have to say it is a very long book. I have not made a lot of progress in the book so far. It's been a busy week in Crypto Land, as we're going to talk about today. But I am incredibly proud of you. This is so awesome. Your book has been killing it.

It's been like the number one crypto book on Amazon, which is crazy, given how popular crypto is. So it seems like surprisingly, it seems like kind of nothing has gone wrong, which is also very surprising for launching something that you've been working. working on for multiple years. I know. I know. I mean, between that and then the funny thing is, so you're in the middle of it, so, you know, I won't, like, reveal too much. But in my personal opinion, there's just, like, so many bombshells in the book. Like, just, there's just so much new stuff that I uncovered and, like, whole storylines that weren't even known before.

And so it's just funny because this weekend, Charles Hoskinson, like, tweeted something about my book, how it was, like, a work of fiction, which is kind of rich, consider. that if you read the book, he will find out that, you know, he has a tenuous relationship to the truth. So I was a little bit, at least that's what the people who lived and worked with him said. And, you know, all their stories are very similar to each other. And so I was like, okay, well, I also found out that, you know, what you claim about your education does not match what the school's records show. So I tweeted about that.

And, like, that has also blown things up. And I noticed, I think it, like, even boosted sales of the book. because people have been tweeting at me like, oh, since you found this out, I'm going to buy the book now. And I'm like, oh, well, if you think that that's interesting, wait until you read the book because there's like a lot more in there. So, but yeah, like I was a little bit like, that's the criticism you're going to give me. Like, if that's the criticism, then maybe you should look at your own history. I have one question for you, actually. From the perspective of, you know, being an author and a journalist, how does it differ in terms of your process when it's,

like you're the secret bearer for many years and you have all these breaking stories that you have to collect until you hit some. You know, you're like foraging for mush for truffles and you have to hit a certain number of truffles before you're allowed to kind of let them debut at, you know, some fancy restaurant. Interesting analogies around. That was one thing because, you know, I found out this thing about Charles's education years ago, but I couldn't reveal it, obviously, until the book came out. And there were so many things like that. But, It wasn't like I was holding off on publishing until I had some number of things. You know, it was just like I was trying to get the story.

Basically, that was kind of the main thing. I was just after like, like, you know, what happened at that time. Like, you know, I want to talk to all these different people. I want to like make sure I kind of get all the perspectives. So I'm like getting the fullest version and the most accurate version. So really, yeah, part of it kind of, it was a little bit hard kind of knowing like all this stuff. not being able to talk about it. And also worrying, like, am I going to get scooped? Like, are other people going to get this story and just get it out in an article before my book? You know,

so that was like a little bit of a stress. Like, and then just weird things around, you know, when we, you know, felt like we had an identity for the Tao attacker, you know, that all happened at the very last minute. Like, the book was like basically nearly done. And it was at the point in time where I was not allowed to make anything but the most minimal changes. And then, yeah, Then it was like, okay, we're going to have to make a very big change, you know? So we had to like push the publication date. And then, yeah, there was just like certain things like you'll see that in the book, that section is like much briefer than what we put in the Forbes article because since

most of the book was finished, the publisher was like, you know, you have to stick to a certain word count. It was basically like, we're going to remove what you previously wrote about the Dow and then insert this new thing. So I, so the Forbes article. just has a lot more because, like, I had more room because they were even saying things like, oh, the more you change, it even changes things like the size of the book jacket. And like, it's too late in the process to, you know what I mean? So it's just like, there were so many

downstream effects that they were just like, the original book jacket is an NFT now and now. Yeah, well, we didn't change it because I did stick to the word count. But, you know, there were just like issues like that. So, um, yeah, it was, And then, of course, I was, like, nervous that somebody was going to break the news, and they were going to, like, find out the identity. And then they were going to just reveal it before my book came out. And, like, that was a whole thing that we were worried about. And, like...

So whatever happened to the 10x founder after the revelations? I'm sure Robert is a big 10x whale, so I'm sure he's very interested to know. OG. O.G. Well, no, I'm kidding. I mean, he sent me his denial. I haven't seen, you know, anything else. I don't think he's released any additional statements. I did see that Mimo Capital, where he's, like, a co-founder. initially in their telegram group, they like close the chat down and they were just like,

you know, we were looking into these allegations, whatever, but then it revived a few days later and they were just like, he doesn't have daily involvement anyway, like, you know, he's like long, you know, not been involved with the project, stuff like that. And so. Sounds like crypto. Yeah. But the one good thing is, you know, I haven't seen a lot of people being like, you're wrong. Like this, you know, this clearly is you're off your rocker.

whatever. I think a lot of people recognize, like, okay, the evidence is very strong. And then even beyond just the things about, like, you know, what happened to that money and whatever, when you go back and fill in the story and you're like, oh, this was someone who was like very into the Dow. They were looking at the code. They identified flaws. They had reached out to the creators about it. They, you know, had written blog posts about the flaws. Like, I mean, just all the things. And like, even the exact problems they were talking about were the ones that eventually had to force Ethereum to Hard Fork because otherwise they would have been in Dow Wars forever. He identified all that at that time.

And so it just even made sense when you went back. You know, so I think people realize like, okay, it makes sense like from both sides. So yeah, I think that's why there hasn't been any pushback, at least not yet. So have any of you finished the book or? Guys, have any of you finished the book? I will admit, and I'm being radically honest and transparent, that I've yet to start the book. but I will start the book. Well, you have a good excuse, which is, I know you have a newborn on your hands.

So I imagine you're probably not sleeping very much. Yeah, Tarun, you've got, Tarun, you have no excuse. Tarun, you've got no. You're just sitting there drinking beer. Yeah, he's just hanging out in his apartment just doing nothing. The diet coat. I'm the one drinking beer. I have robot beer for Robot Ventures.

Oh, wow. That's very cool. You know, there's just too many math papers ahead of me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's the truth. I'm giving you radical transparency. Radical transparency. That's what we're all about here on the chopping blog, is radical transparency. Why am I not surprised that that's Tarun's reason?

And why do I totally 100% believe that reason? It's just, you know, I have a stack of things that's like, it's on there. It's going in my suitcase when I'm traveling so that as soon as I finish this queue, then I move into the book. But was it a stack or is it a queue? Yeah, is it a queue? Q. That's an important question. Well, that's a great joke. That's a very bad but hilarious CS joke. No, it's a Q. It's not a stack. It was a stack that would be bad for book

reading time. I actually think it's more like a mempool and some of these compete with each other and it's not a step or a queue. Transaction fees are going up in the MMPL you're about to get ejected unfortunately. I mean, 400-age book is a long, is a large bundle of transactions after all. Yeah, that's true. Now we're getting super, super nerdy. Yeah. All right, Tom, your turn for the confessional of why you haven't read. I've been moving.

You know, I'm in, I'm in New York. I've been traveling around. So, you know, I haven't had to be able to sit in a place and prop my feet up and read it. But it is sitting on my Kindle. So I'm looking forward to reading it. Cool. Okay. Okay.

So by next time, we'll love to submit our reviews. Yeah. Yeah. Shopping Block Book Club. Shopping Block Book Club. First up is, well, I do think, I do think it would be interesting to see what each of us thinks is the most shocking revelation, you know, like Bud's Feed article style. Like this, this breaking crypto story will shock you. Yeah. By next meeting, it'll all be in the first 20 pages.

I mean, the most shocking thing I read in the first 20 pages is that Vitalik could speak when he was eight years old. No, you have to skip 200 and then start reading. That way you get, you know, unique insights. I have a feeling I know what you guys will be most shocked about. And I'm surprised you haven't heard. I have tried to ask people not to do too many spoilers. Laura, that's been real. Enjoy your book reading. Bask in the sunlight of all the love that you're receiving. Oh, thank you. Thank you. All right. So you guys, have fun. Okay. So the big news of the week, or of the last two weeks, has been, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So this is a topic that, so I was actually in Ukraine last year because a number of the companies that we've invested into, were based in Ukraine. So last year I was in Kiev and Leviv last summer. So I know Ukraine quite well. So it's been really terrible, and our sympathy goes out to all the victims in Ukraine who are fighting back against the Russian invaders. But it's been a story that not only has grip the world,

but it's also one that has a lot to say about what's going on in crypto. And in fact, it has had massive effects on the crypto market. So, you know, I won't belabor a lot of the news about the details of the invasion itself, but there were a number of different elements of the aftermath of both the invasion and the sanctions that ensued from the invasion of Ukraine that had a lot of effects on crypto. So just to go through a very brief summary of the news. So Ukraine has obviously been very active in social media through the official Ukraine

Twitter account. And one of the things that they've been calling for is the blocking of Russian accounts within crypto exchanges. And actually, there's been equivalent calls within the U.S. from some U.S. lawmakers to also do the same thing. Now, the majority of exchanges have denied these requests to not freeze Russian accounts. And to be clear, these are not accounts of Russia, the nation state, but rather of Russian individuals. So, Binance announced that they wouldn't be freezing Russian accounts. There was actually a large announcement by Coinbase that there are 25,000 wallets ring to Russian illicit activity. that they were going to be blocking, that were belonged by Russian users, but it was unclear

what exactly this had to do with sanctions or if this is just an unrelated, you know, some kind of illegal fraud ring or something like that that they were shutting down accounts for. We saw massive spikes in volume in rubles. So unsurprisingly, there was a lot of demand within Russia for getting access to crypto, especially as the sanctions were starting to close in. Enormous amount of financial organizations are now cut off within Russia. so we saw a lot of demand for crypto and Bitcoin within Russia.

We saw not only the withdrawal of an enormous amount of banks that basically left operations in Russia, we also saw Visa and MasterCard shut off any access to cardholders in Russia. We saw sanctions from multiple countries, pretty much everything in NATO and in the EU, even in Singapore, was sanctioning Russia. And you also saw some interesting things happening on the Ukrainian side. So for one, there was an announcement that Ukraine was going to give anirdrop to crypto users. And Ukraine actually posted their crypto wallets on chain, which were verified by some of the prominent members of the crypto community, to solicit donations. And we saw over $40 million in crypto donations go to these addresses associated with Ukraine.

We also saw a – there was a – a number of NFT fundraisers, one of which raised. I think like $5 million for a NFT of the Ukrainian flag that was donated entirely to the Ukraine. You can see here we've got Dune Analytics up showing about $40 million in total donations between ETH-Dye, USDC, and a few other assets. Ukraine even announced that they were going to do anirdrop. It was unclear what the airdrop was or who was going to get the airdrop, if it was, you know, donated or something. They later announced they were canceling theirdrop, but they were going to be selling

NFTs. and I believe right now it's not yet public the details of all of this. So it's been basically the first crypto war that we've seen. The first armed conflict and obviously the most major armed conflict in Europe since World War II. And crypto has had a very strange role to play on both sides, both within Russia and in Ukraine. So curious to get your guys' thoughts on what's been happening over the last couple weeks. Tom, why don't you start giving that you were first on the list? I do have it on good authority that the NFC sale is happening.

So that should be interesting to see how that actually looks. But yeah, I think there's went through so many different phases where people thought the crypto addresses that Ukraine posted weren't real to criticizing, you know, crypto donations saying, hey, they actually need, you know, money. This isn't real money. How are they going to off ramp it to? Now I think there's a stat that came out. It was like 70% of the armed suppliers to Ukraine are like accepting crypto.

directly, they're not off-ramping into fiat, they're just accepting crypto payments directly, which is kind of insane to think about. I don't know, it just feels like, you know, generally speaking, there isn't a whole lot of clarity. It feels like just sort of a people have money and they want to sling it at something. And this kind of feels like the next thing that people are aping into is it's, you know, constitution Dow-like in many ways where it's like, this is something that I think is, I believe in and I want to donate to and I want to back. I think the, The weird thing, though, is that the donations are not necessarily going to, like, humanitarian causes.

It's not like, hey, this is going to Ukrainian refugees. A lot of the donations are going to, like, purchase arms for the Ukrainian military, which I think is a very kind of strange and scary precedent. Certainly they need the money to defend themselves, but I don't know how many people who are donating are thinking about the fact that, you know, the money that they're using is going to be used to kill people. And it's kind of insane. You have global fundraising for this army.

which is like never really been done before in human history. That is actually not true. Wasn't there some army that like launched a fundraise? I can't remember this. What do you guys know what I'm talking about? There was like some armed conflict that they launched. So there was one during peak pandemic between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which was settled by Turkey sending in drones and bombing the shit out of Armenia.

And that was like, I'm surprised no one called that as crazy as kind of the stuff we're seeing now because that was like there were two countries fighting over this disputed region and then this third party country just sends in a bunch of drones and like picks the winner and then like we moved on and like the world just kind of forgot it's about this conflict region called Nagorno Karaba in that area

but they did the Armenian side if I remember correctly did have a go fund me a go fund me I think it was a go fund me And I think they had, we were thinking about doing an NFT, something. There was like, it was like, it was like, it was like late 2020, early 2021. But it was like a little too early.

Like I feel like the open sea boom had just not quite taken off around the time. It was the nifty gateway days. I'm surprised that happened because there was actually a go fund to me for crypto. This is, of course, the other classic criticism of crypto. Well, you can just do this with Fiat. You know, you can just wire in your money. You can just send VEMO. And so there was a go-fund me to send money to the Ukrainian military and they shut it down because they have a policy against fundraising for weapon sales.

And so, you know, it's like actually a great example of where like, yeah, there really is no other possible thing you could do here other than, you know, use cryptocurrencies. I mean, what's wrong with? I mean, the reality is like almost every Western government is already using tax dollars to to basically fund, you know, donation of arms to Ukraine. So at the margin, it's not making a huge amount of difference. You know, $40 million is a pretty small drop in the bucket relative to the total amount of aid that's gone to the Ukrainian military. Sure. It's just very direct.

And that's never really been done before. And I don't think most people who are donating are considering that. Like, I don't really think this sort of, you know, direct contribution to like a armed conflict has really been done. And it's sort of maybe it's scary to think about, hey, you know, maybe in this scenario, these are the good guys. This is our side. But you can imagine, you know, this is sort of, you know, not too far removed from the whole assassination market meme from 2016.

You know, you can imagine that this is sort of, you know, a step in that direction. I mean, I think the thing about this war and one of the reasons why it's been so galvanizing in the West is that it's like probably one of the few examples of a just war that we've seen in the last, you know, called 40 years, where it's very easy to identify the aggressor. There was very little provocation. And certainly, you know, Putin invading the Donbass is one thing, but him going and trying to basically attack Kiev, the capital, which is in Western Ukraine, which is not even ethnically Russian, you know, it's like, they speak Ukrainian, they don't speak Russian there. They're, they're more European, like I was there. It's like a European city. You know, him basically going in and ransacking the entire country, which is very clearly unprovoked. There was no,

there was no first strike by Ukraine. And to have a conflict that's that clean and also that public, and also where, you know, of course, you know, Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, has been incredibly charismatic and has also very effectively used social media and, and the press to galvanize the world toward, you know, wanting to come to Ukraine's help. So I think that I think it's one of the reasons why this war feels so different relative to other conflicts in the past where, you know, I suspect that, you know, I, if I were to donate money to Ukraine, I would not be surprised that they would use it to buy arms. But I think most people are okay with that for this war relative to most other wars. I mean, especially the people donating, I think, probably believe that. Right. It's not donating to an extremely morally nebulous recipient. Right.

I mean, the problem is you don't know the recipient theoretically. Right. But if we assume that it's technically who it's claimed to be, I mean, historically there have been tons of wars funded in kind of indirect manner. over the lot. Like, you know, whenever people, like, the U.S. funded the Contras via selling weapons and doing, like, all this weird.

It's no different than this if we squint enough. Well, I think it's a point, though, that's a state actor, right? It's a state actor funding a war as opposed to private actors. Doing it via these, like, kind of this, like, the tentacles of, like, hey, we're, like, technically funding it via these weird organizations and there's many of them, and they all have to somehow collude. And, like, this removes the coordination pressure

of needing the state actor, but it kind of gets the same outcome. Yeah, but it's individual to nation as opposed to like nation to nation. Yeah, that's true. Although it's like a little bit weird because like if I think about the Argentina stuff, right, where like they took the Argentinian like worship as collateral for not paying back the bond. That's like the inverse version of this, right? In some ways. So like we've seen the other side happen. So it's like I kind of feel like you could argue that the like Elliott management high stuff.

of Argentina is like not is like the inverse of this and like you could probably rig the bond market to kind of like let you do this. The war bonds are selling I don't understand. So one thing I don't get the difference of is the difference between the war bonds, the raw war bonds and the cryptocurrency raise. So like I if we because like I've seen these things are like Ukraine raising $230 million war bond type headlines. Presumably that's just like Western governments buying those bonds or can individuals and entities like that that's that's that's something where I've been kind of confused about like where this is going like how do the corporate finances of a a nation look like when they like have debt issuance plus like cryptocurrency donation and like

they have to like manage that treasury yeah it is a good question of like how good is the ukrainian crypto opsec like are they like do they even have a multi-sig is it just like one dude's address i think that's probably likely but yeah it it does seem like like, look, the crypto donations are obviously coming from retail and just random people around the world who are, who feel passionate about the cause. It is a much easier way to donate than most other forms of donation at this point. And certainly it's more direct, right? So, you know, if I'm looking at one of these like TV fundraisers for Ukraine, I have very little confidence that it's actually going to Ukraine or that it's not going to get, you know, chopped up into tiny little pieces and

tax along the way. Whereas if I donate to the Ukrainian crypto address on Twitter, actually pretty high confidence they're going to go turn around and, you know, buy AK-47s with that, which is, in a way, it's a great endorsement for crypto for use cases like this. It's a great endorsement for crypto, but there's also the risk on the other side, which is, you know, the story that I'm most concerned about and aware of is that, you know, with the imposition of sanctions on Russia, the story that's coming out in crypto right now is concern from politicians that crypto will be used to evade those. sanctions and it's serving as a catalyst or a justification to impose draconian restrictions on

crypto, crypto exchanges, et cetera. And I think it's probably the most important sort of reaction to what's happening with crypto is that, yes, crypto is being used in new and exciting ways. And that's creating a lot of fear, at least within the U.S. to offset it. I think net net, there's some extremely positive things happening to crypto, but it's creating more of a pushback than I expected very rapidly. So I, yeah, so I tweeted about this in that, I basically said that, like, I don't, the language of using crypto to evade sanctions, I think is like a total non-sequitur.

Because the reality is that the sanctions were very well defined, right? There were certain things that are sanctioned and certain things that are not included in the package of sanctions. You can't include crypto in sanctions. There's nothing that says you can't, but they're not included. But in fact, some of the sanctions were OFAC restrictions. on basically transacting with certain parties. And whether you are sending dollar bills or whether you're sending crypto, OFAC restrictions are universal.

It doesn't matter what you're transacting with. So there are parties that are now on the OFAC list that you cannot transact with that are, I think they're all Russian banks, right? So you cannot transact with these Russian banks and Russian state or enterprises, whether you're using crypto or not. But transaction with private Russian citizens or with other companies in Russia that are not on the sanctions list, it is fine. Whether you're using dollars or whether you're using crypto, like the ADR.

that it is evading sanctions, quote unquote, for Russia transaction crypto. Well, okay, is it evading sanctions for Russia transaction R&B? No, obviously not, right? That's a total non-sequitur. So crypto is just not in the category of things that we can use as sanctions or that we have chosen to use as sanctions, but we could if we so chose. If the U.S. said, look, Coinbase, you are not allowed to send transactions to anybody who is verified to be Russian, then done.

We have sanctions on Russian citizens, but we didn't do that. You know, it also, I think, ties back a little bit to the whole Canadian trucker, you know, Bitcoin thing in some way where, like, you know, they also got deep platformed. And actually Joe Wisenthal from Bloomberg had a good piece today talking about how, you know, all these opportunities. Not that, I think also there's, I think the Treasury putter piece thing, like, it's not even like really technically feasible for Russia to, like, meaningfully, you know, conduct business using crypto as it is today. But certainly something like this, you know, these crowd funds, it's like the more crypto sort of plays to its strengths by basically creating this. independent, you know, financial system and sort of do the thing that it's supposed to do, it also is somewhat bearish in that it sort of creates this bigger target on its back for regulators. And so it's like the strengths of it in some ways are also sort of its downside.

And so you sort of making this case for Bitcoin, but maybe true across crypto more broadly. Yeah, I mean, beyond the obviously enormous humanitarian costs that we're now seeing as, you know, we have north of a million, I think a million and a half refugees now across Europe as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. We're also seeing, of course, as a result of these sanctions and just a result of the instability that we're now seeing in Eastern Europe, enormous effects on commodity prices. And so you're seeing, especially oil and natural gas being the most obvious,

we're probably going to see a significant spike in inflation globally because of what's going on in Russia. And that's going to magnify the effects that we've already seen the beginning of this year of the inflation in the U.S. It doesn't spell a great year for crypto and for broader financial markets, and you're already seeing that both in equities and in crypto prices over the last week. It's a little bit cold to sort of look at a humanitarian crisis like this in terms of the financial consequences of it. And I'm always reminded that we have some of the entrepreneurs that we backed are actually in Ukraine right now. And right now, every able-bodied man, I think, between 18 and 60

has been effectively conscripted into the Ukrainian army. They have to fight. And so some of our entrepreneurs are right now fighting in Ukraine to protect the country from Putin. So it's a really terrible situation. And we hope that it resolves peacefully soon, but it seems less and less likely that that's going to happen. I also want to point out that, you know,

in the history of this industry, actually, you really started quite heavily in places that I'm not sure newer members of the space might not remember but Georgia and Ukraine so like Bit Fury if you remember them I mean they still exist but I don't think they're anywhere near their prior states it kind of got beat out by Bitname but they were at one point the largest mining miner in the world there's founded in Ukraine and they basically used to they spurred on a huge sort of like indifference of like Eastern European people. Like there's like the Bitfury Mafia,

which sort of like led to a lot of the developers that are in this space from like 2015 to 18, 19. You know, I'm sure a lot of them are dealing with things that are kind of not great. So kind of my thoughts out to them as well. I feel like they're not, people kind of forget that like the early days of crypto were actually really, really Romania, Ukraine and Russia

or like where every single developer was. That's right. It's still a very important area of a lot of builders in crypto. I just wanted to close out this segment by talking about what prediction markets are saying. And actually, a little bit out of style, I'm actually not looking at any crypto prediction markets because they don't have a lot of liquidity. But as you look at Metaculous, which is one of the non-crypto prediction markets, right now they believe that the likelihood that Kiev falls to Russia by the, by April. So basically by the end of this month, is currently

about 25%. It was much higher at the start of the invasion. It was about 90% when the invasion started. So it seems like the tide has really turned on the likelihood of Russian success in this invasion. The likelihood that Russia controls Kiev by June is currently at 46%, meaning that people believe that it's about 50-50 that Kiev will fall to Russia within two months. So obviously, I'm hoping that Kiev is able to hold strong, but it's a tough conflict ahead of them. Anyway, let's move away from some of the more sober topics and talk a little bit more into crypto land. So one of the things that's been going on this week is there's been a huge spat fundraising announcements. There are a lot of new funds that are launched recently. First, we have

Electric. They announced a $1 billion fund. This is split between two vehicles, supposedly one is a liquid crypto vehicle that's 600 million and then a early stage fund that's 400 million. So supposedly it's a billion dollars between the two of them. Yeah, Vietal amazing timing to have 600 million to dry powder right now when it seems like prices are, have come down quite a bit. You can see him there laughing at how cheap everything looks after everything has gone on in the last few weeks. So electric's got a billion. Next up we've got to actually this was announced today. a very interesting kind of social media bonanza.

So Bain Capital announced that they were launching a $560 million fund. And they announced it slightly unwittingly on International Women's Day, which is today. They basically got piled on on Twitter because of the particulars around how they actually made the announcement. I think if you can, Tom, if you want to show one of the tweets. So we had no less than Mark Andreessen jumping on them on Twitter. Twitter as well as half of crypto Twitter basically dunking on them. Yeah, this is a pretty good one. Just a little on the nose the way they tried to position themselves very proudly.

I think in the announcement it was like, it is my great privilege to announce that we raised a shit lot of money to invest in crypto. And people were like, yeah, you got that right. All that being said, obviously it's still a lot of money coming into. crypto from top of funnel, even if it's not people buying Bitcoin and Ether on the public markets, we've got, you know, VCs to the rescue to come in and bid up private deals. So I don't know. How are you guys seeing the huge influx of capital coming? You forgot about Golden Tree, which is another $600 million fund.

That's right. That's right. Avi from Block Tower is going to run Golden Tree $600 million fund. Of course, we've got Andresen's $4.5 billion fund that's in the works. My understanding is that that's being fundraised right now. I believe Katie Hans Fund, which is a billion dollars between an early stage and a gross stage fund, is also closing. So there's a lot of activity going on right now in crypto fundraising. There's no shortage of capital coming into the space.

I mean, the weird thing, of course, that most of this is earmarked for private deals. And there's not that much, except I guess maybe some of Andreessen's Fund is going into Publix. But it feels like there's going to be a big mismatch between the dollars earmark for privates and for public for the next while. I agree. I mean, if huge amounts of capital go into privates, you know, there's really two paths for any organization. The equity path and the token path. And obviously some of it's going to go into the equity path, but I think it's going to go into a lot of companies, foundations, organizations that create tokens as well. And I think that's where the mismatch is.

So, you know, companies with, you know, investors staying on the equity path forever, you know, eventually they IPO and, And, you know, they stay, you know, equity businesses. But when there's a token, if there's going to be a hundred new projects essentially creating publicly traded assets, you know, in one way or another, you know, you run the risk of there being a mismatch or being off equilibrium where there's too many projects and not enough demand in the later stages of its lifecycle. And so obviously some of this is going into equity deals, you know, but a lot of it's going into projects, you know, all of those firms mentioned that are creating tradable tokens

and digital assets. And, you know, I feel like the biggest risk is that there's too much supply and not enough demand, two years ago. I actually think that the question is like, are these funds structured in a way that they can like hedge fund style like, I guess like the original paradigm fund kind of be able to do venture deals plus liquid tokens and like move between them seamlessly. I suspect that that's not true because a lot of them are raised as venture funds, as far as I can tell from filings and stuff. But it does beg the question of like, will there suddenly be also just like a difference in like liquidity terms where people want like token warrants that like go liquid faster or stuff like that? Like I think that's going to be the

interesting thing to look at is like, will teams that make tokens have to deliver tokens investors way faster than right now because these investors have these like kind of vehicles that have a certain amount of time that they have to return by. And then if they do that, then like, they just need the liquidity as fast as possible. And then that might be like bad for the market to to Robert's point supply-wise. Or you see the opposite, right? So if you have 10-year vehicles, they don't need liquidity for 10 years, right? And it goes the other way where the pendulum swings towards there's no liquidity upfront for the founders, for the investors, whatever, where the market demands or the market expects that, you know, it becomes liquid over a much longer and

slower period of time. I think, you know, Turin, you mentioned a paradigm fund. And, you know, I think the difference between like now and four years ago is you can't, you fill up a big chunk of the fund with like Bitcoin or Ether and, you know, expect to take, you know, two on 20 on that. Now people can just go out and buy that directly. And so if anything, it's like, you can't just compare like the, numbers that we're seeing apples to oranges compared to four years ago. If anything, these are

larger because they're explicitly bookmarked for like early private venture. And so it's just like a lot of money going into the market. Yeah, although you see things like Andreessen buying a ton of Lido and putting a ton of Ethan to Lido last week. And I feel like that suggests to me that the structure of these things does allow for some liquid purchases. And it's not like this is maybe the raise of venture funds, but the docs probably have some. some kind of caveat that like allows people to do some form of trading that's like low frequency enough. Well, there's nothing about a venture fund that disallows you from from trading.

It's not, it's not the most ideal vehicle for it. But, you know, and Driesen, I think all of their funds have actually been able to buy a token. OTC. Yeah. Yeah. It's more annoying. Yes.

Yes. It's not. Your team is generally not built for that. But like, yeah, you totally can. But I think what you're also seeing is that there's just the disconnect and price. between publics and privates. Like I was just chatting with an investor earlier today about notional finance

because actually Tom, you were talking about this earlier. Notional finance right now, so they're basically, what is it, like a fixed rate protocol. Their market cap, they're circling market cap right now, is 6.5 million. And they have 500 million TVL, 75 million fully diluted market cap, right? You know, just like a hot sea round

is getting done at 75 fully diluted. Whereas this is like a protocol that has 500 million TVL. So that being said, it's not just positive to just point out one protocol that that doesn't have a high valuation. But it goes to show that there's just a massive, massive disconnect in supply and demand right now for what you see in privates and what you see in publics. Yeah, agreed. I think, you know, it's not just supply and demand. I think investors are also thinking about EV and they have, you know, many years to deploy. And I think if the EV of doing these private deals can usually go down as public markets draw down, private markets,

are going to shrink that you as a result or it's not going to see as many deals getting done, like things just aren't going to clear. I mean, the only real answer is that, like, prices have to go down and ownership has to go up, right? Like, these things have to become more and more sort of VC coins where VC's own a large and large chunk, otherwise they just can't put the money to work. Other than that, I don't really see a way that this capital can get absorbed, given where, given where prices are and how many, how few private deals there are that can really absorb

large amounts of capital and stay fully decentralized. Last time, in 2018, this, led to the equity bonanza boom of funding equity, not token related crypto companies, right? And I suspect we'll probably start seeing kind of a switch in that. I kind of remember a sort of electric kind of claiming that something, Luz actually wrote something in their blog post announcing the fund. They're like, hey, we're going to start doing more companies, less tokens. Not exactly that, but like it had that sort of intonation.

And I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they told LPs, that like, we're like entering the new phase of like companies need capital for being in crypto, not just tokens. I mean, I think you're already seeing it. I'm not picking on companies like alchemy, but like you have companies that have absolutely bonkers valuations, you know, for their traction and revenue, like alchemy, because they can absorb and soak up a lot of capital, you know, from investors. And it's a, you know, palatable, politically correct company, right? Where it's like there's no token risk. because it's like, yeah, you can shove hundreds of millions of dollars into it at increasing valuations. And the valuation can get really in front of the traction.

And I think you're already seen. Who's the last buyer? That's the hard part. Yeah, eventually it has to be an IPO. Yeah. Well, Silver Lake, who's very famous for looks at watch, buying Skype. They've done some great deals, though. They've done some great deal.

They made a killing off Airbnb. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm just pointing out that, like, you know it. Right, right. Sure. Yeah. Right.

But like, when private companies with like modest revenue or trading for like $5 billion, like you should be worried. Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, though, the ML boom was no different. Like I remember seeing price to revenue on some of these self-driving car. Not even just self-driving car companies. Just like perception AI companies.

None of them had revenue. Well, they all would like sign an LOI and claim that that was revenue. But yeah, let's let's do it. Let's ignore all of the growth hacking tricks. I mean, Alchemy is very different because it's just like a very easy to underwrite business, right? You get customers, you get, you advertise, you like get them in, you have SaaS pricing. I mean, for all of these staking service providers, right, like at the like $1 to $10 billion range, right? Like BlockDamond was like three something figments like 1.6, whatever.

Let's just pretend that they like dominate and AWS has to buy someone. Would they actually buy them at that price? That thought experiments the one that kind of confused. No, they'd build. They would build because they have the technology is able to be built, right? Also, all of those people use AWS, so they just can easily snoop on that, their traffic. Like, that would be what I would do if I was at AWS, right? I actually, I doubt that AWS would build, but they don't need to buy the leader, right?

Like, I mean, that's the problem with all these staking providers. They're basically all the same product, right? It's like very fungible. It's very replaceable. It's just a matter of the overall security and like the kind of balance sheet that's backing them in case they get slashed or they mess up. So if AWS needs to buy somebody, they don't need to buy the biggest player. Like I don't know why you would. You don't really need to. Yeah. Amazon should buy Lido tokens on the open market. That's the That's probably. Disclosure. Disclosure Lido investors. Yeah. We are we are actually, I think all of us are Lido investors. So it's a tricky situation. And I think for us, you know, I think, probably the way that we want to be playing at Dragonfly, the investing over the next year, given the mismatch and supply and demand of capital, is just one,

staying out of the U.S., where you're seeing these things getting done at, like, north of 100x revenue. You just go outside of the U.S., even whether it's emerging markets or Latam or Asia, things are much, much, much, much lower than 100x revenue or even 70x revenue, where I'm seeing a lot of deals getting done in the U.S.,

even now at those multiples. So I think that's a large part of the answer for us and then also just stay early stage. Because if you're early stage enough, then seed always works. No matter where you are in the market cycle, seed always works. Doesn't necessarily make as good returns. All the big guerrillas are coming down to seat. They can't.

You know, how are they going to, you know. That's what they're proclaiming. Let's put that like. Yes, that is what they're proclaiming. That is what they're proclaiming. But like, you know, listen to the economics, right? If you're, if a seed bet is like a basis point of your fund, it doesn't, like, it doesn't make sense.

Like, you're not going to be spending. Well, then you spray and pray out of a thousand of those. Right. The question is simply, can your brand withstand that, right? Like, are you going to keep winning those deals when people know that you're just spraying and praying? It eventually catches up to you, right? It takes some time for the market signal to propagate, but eventually it gets there, right? Like, you don't give your seed round a silver lake.

It just doesn't, it's not how it works. And eventually that signal catches up. That's my view. That's my view. Anyway, let's move on. So another big news item of the week is Andre Cronier. Andre once again, Rage Quit, supposedly this time for the final time. He announced a sunset for all the projects that he's been responsible for.

Great illustration. I got to love coin telegraph. Got to love point telegraph. Always on it. Always on it. Just the great, great graphics. So, yeah, so obviously associated with Yern, although he hasn't been active on Yern for quite a while,

supposedly, according to Bantag. Also involved in Phantom. Also involved in Solidly. A lot of the projects in the Andreosphere have tanked in Price since the announcement of his of his defection. How do people feel about the Andre rugpole, as it's been called? I view it as a rugpole.

I mean, the dude has, according to people on Twitter, amassed like a billion dollars of wealth for himself and is leaving with no sense of responsibility towards... I don't know if you're going to be able to sell

that much mim and abacadabra. Just as a heads up. I don't mark to market on that one. Yeah, well, even if you're not marking to market, I mean, I think it's, you know, probably one of the most legendary figures in all of

Defi, not crypto, right, but Defi history, like the most legendary marketer of new projects. He's started so many projects. He's a genius in so many ways, right? Like, and I have a lot of respect for him in so many ways. But I feel like this was almost an inevitable end state, which is, you know, after Project 8, you know, you just, call it quits and right off into the sunset with a billion dollars and that's it you know i don't know i mean obviously i have immense respect for andre i think yearn is is is you know great and i think you know the whole wi-fi distribution and giving away it was you know credible and there's very few

people who i think have you know his kind of character and building chops frankly just in terms of like shipping ability but i i will say you know maybe i'm not in the in the Andre fan club in that like you know the tough part in building products is not shipping something right it's not I mean, that is tough alone. But it's like finding product market fit and iterating and building something that's sticky. I would say very, very few things. Basically nothing, frankly, outside of urine has had that fit that Andre has produced. And you got to give band tag all the credit.

Yes. And others and others for 100 years. Yes. That's right. Urine is substantially better than when it was. Speaking of our Russian and Ukrainian projects, like urine is like all of these people. And it's like 50 people in Russia and Ukraine for the most people. is not Andre.

Yern is a huge team of incredibly skilled people. It's people who shook it over from Andre, right? Andre is sort of basically orphaned Yern. Anyway, I'll just say, like, that's really where I think the true entrepreneurs are made is in, like, branding it out and, you know, seeking it out through many different iterations of the product until you find something that works. And it's pretty easy to just launch a bunch of stuff and then bail when you don't get the product market fit.

I think that is, like, not as impressive. Yeah, look, I wouldn't say I'm an Andre Fulf. fan nor an Andre distractor. I feel for the guy. I can imagine how difficult it must be to be in that position where you're constantly getting pulled in so many different directions. And you've got the internet yelling at you no matter what you do. And he's been very public about his emotional experience, being a builder in Defi, and I feel for the guy. But I also feel like this is not the most responsible way to go. I get it. And I can't fault a man for, you know, following his heart and his conviction. but it does suck to see someone leave that way.

I may be more sympathetic than everyone else here, but I do think Phantom was kind of a very ill-fated experiment to actually follow through on the promises that were made there, I think was way above what he wanted to do. What exactly one of the promises for Phantom? I'm not super clear on that. To be what Avax is. Here's my conspiracy theory, okay?

And this is the extremely bearish take on the situation. Phantom presented itself as an opportunity where there's basically an unused blockchain. And Andre saw this as an opportunity to, as a magnet, bring users and bring activity to Phantom. When Phantom was unloved, unused, and extremely cheap, right? So it's like his ex-die. Yeah. And he basically was able to create the entire fandom ecosystem himself, essentially. So like, Phantom should be extremely.

grateful to him for that. You know, I saw one incredible chart this week that during the mania of Andre quitting, transaction volume on Phantom exceeded that on Ethereum for a brief moment in time. That was the Geist launch. Yeah. Like, if you asked me a year ago, if Phantom activity would exceed Ethereum activity

ever, I would have laughed at you, right? But that was made of reality, and he single-handedly created that. Now, selfishly, did he probably profit from that massively? Yes, absolutely. Right? He basically probably owned a large portion of Phantom before being the sole magnet to bring users and activity and transactions to it, right? And the sole champion, to be honest, he was like basically

the loudest champion and developer that the entire chain had, like by two orders of magnitude, right? And that succeeded in Phantom today is like, what, top 20? I mean, it's crazy. I don't think it's top 20 anymore. Right, maybe not anymore. Maybe it's not top 20 anymore. Now it's 39. It's not top 20 anymore. Now it's 39. But like it's still a $4 billion blockchain that was a like $100 million dollar blockchain not long ago. Look, we all can agree that Andre is like, you know, he's a magic. He's a genius.

He's a genius activist investing. Phantom was like probably one of the greatest act of investing coups that we've seen in crypto, period. Agreed. This shows the danger of having your reliance on a single person, especially when that person is not, you know, kind of tied to you the way that a founder might be, right? Because Andre sort of adopted Phantom. And if you adopt, you know, at blockchain, you can just as soon drop it. So, I mean, the one big difference between Phantom and Avax is that, you know, Avax has, you know,

Goon, who's the, you know, one of the co-founders of Avax. Gune is not going to rage with, right? Gune is not going anywhere. He's tied to the hip to that thing. Whereas Andre can leave whenever he wants. And when you have that, that enormous level of dependence on a single person, you know, you're like Germany and Russia. However, EOS is the counter example where all of the folks around EOS bailed, and it was their blockchain, right? That's true. That's true. I guess that's, yeah, that's the importance of not letting, yeah, that was a reg pull, not a rug pull.

A wreck pool? Reg, R-E-G. Oh. I think my joke was better, but whatever. You guys tied for best. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Tom gets runner up for best joke of that segment. So last up, I wanted to also drop this because it's a little bit of a self-plug, but, you know, screw it.

We're running the show. So this week we announced, we had this blog post we've worked on for a very, very long time called the AMM test, a no bullshit look at L1 performance. And in this test, basically what we do is we benchmarked all of the major EVM-based layer ones alongside Solana. Try to see, you know, they make large claims for themselves about how much performance they can actually do. And the question is, okay, if you take a fair benchmark, the fair benchmark we came up with was being Uniswap-style trades, uniswap B2 style trades, what is the actual trades per second that you can get both at equilibrium and at max throughput on each of these chains. And the answer was, you know, maybe lower than what you'd expect. So I think Ethereum was like 10, Solana was about 270, avalanche was about 37, I think, or something. something at equilibrium, but then max is like 170.

Binance smart chain, by far the largest of EVMs at, I think, like 190. So that gives you a good sense of what kind of throughput blockchains can actually do today. And we thought that this was really important because we saw, especially among entrepreneurs, so much misunderstanding about how much throughput these projects can actually do. And when, of course, when they release their own numbers, and this is true even of companies that we've invested in, when they release their own numbers, their, their benchmarking that they use are very misleading because they're usually all transfers and they're almost always done on test nets, which are completely unrepresentative of what real smart contract

engineers are going to be doing on these chains. And so we ended up publishing this and getting some love and then the Salana crowd got really mad at us. And I think, Anna Tully wants us to. I mean, to be fair, you did go after, you know, they were the, you know, you did kind of go after them. I mean, look, we kind of have to, right, they're the king. You got to, you got to go out I think the interesting thing that this brought up in general is just this idea that, A, blockchains are pretty cool because you can actually go test this. So that's, first of all, that's like an improvement, right? You can test this without you committing a ton of resources versus like, if I want to measure some like SaaS startups claim on AWS, it's like a lot more nuanced to actually be able to do that. And in fact, there are companies that do that for you.

And it's interesting. It's going to be a zero of weights and measures for blockchains in like 20. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's going to be all the funds who are like invested in one blockchain so I'm not doing it. But kind of like this. This seems like to be the way I would expect to play out. But the interesting thing I thought from the Twitter commentary was this fact of like

people caring about message types of like how many messages do we consider consensus messages? How many messages do we consider non-consensus messages? And if you consider consensus messages in your transactions and like in your TPS rate, that's kind of like juicing it a bit, right? Because you're like, hey, those had to happen anyway. And those aren't necessarily messages that are economic transactions. So I think the interesting thing we're going to see is that we're going to have non-fungibility

of accounting over time in all these metrics. and it's only going to increase because like no one's incentivized to like make a homogenous thing instead you're going to have the cat and mouse game of like people like you guys going and do. I mean, that's the role of benchmarking, right? The whole point of a benchmark is to have a third party that isn't, you know, doesn't have, that isn't any of the parties involved. That's a joke. Go in and run a neutral test.

Yeah, exactly. That's reproducible. And so we have, we put all the code on GitHub so people can go run the test themselves and post their numbers. Now, the question of methodology is a fair one, right? because when we benchmark Salana, you know, one of the things that makes Solana not ideal for this particular test is that this test really only measures a single-threaded execution of a single Uniswap pool.

And Solana has this concept that actually, you know, nobody we talked to actually understood how Solana worked. So we had to go in and like go through a bunch of shit ourselves that like nobody, like none of the validators, none of the people even on the Solana team could explain it to us. So we had to go, you know, go to the source material and go to the code ourselves. and understand how Solana has this notion of compute units,

which is kind of like gas, but not exactly like gas. And there's a limit of 12 million compute units per block per account. And there's 48 million that you can total be in a block. So which means that if you wanted to max out uniswap trades, you could do four different uniswap pools, so provided that there's no, that they're completely segregated in state. You could do four uniswap pools simultaneously within a single block. But of course, we did not include the consensus overhead.

Because as you mentioned, Turin, every block on Solana, the consensus messages are part of the on-chain transactions, which fill up a block. Which is weird because no other blockchain does that. So in order to get a real Apple to Apples about what can you actually do at sort of user level, right? The real metrics you care about is like what can a user do or what actual throughput can applications get on top of Solana. to really get the apples to apples is complex, but of course none of these other blockchains are multi-threaded in that way. You can't paralyze uniswap trades on any other blockchain. So a truly fair benchmark would involve multiple things,

not just, okay, how many trades can you get on a single uniswap pool? But of course, when Solana goes down, it's because there's a single pool or a single IDO or a single thing that everyone's sniping at. And this is the reason why it goes down is because it gets overloaded on a kind of single piece of state that's in high contention. Well, I think the other thing that's interesting about their compute model that probably also makes this even more annoying is that technically the user is supposed to provide dependencies to some extent to state. And obviously, I'm sure, like, literally zero wallets do that.

And they just try to, like, run everything serially. And so then you get this weird thing where, like, there was some extra pair. But the user can't figure out to send the right transactions to take advantage of it, which I think it is like way less common in other sort of chains. Because like basically EVM, even though it's annoying, assumes the user's an idiot, which is, you know, kind of the goal there. I mean, the EVM is trying to move to stateless clients as well, right? That's on the right, right. Right, right. Well, trust me, everything's on each other.

They're going to have Celestia now soon, right? Dank sharding. It's like, what isn't on the E2 roadmap? It's a better question. My takeaway, and this was the important one to me, was that all of the blockchains almost equally suck. Well, if you look at the graph, they don't all equally suck, but they all suck. Relative to claims, relative to claims, yeah.

I'd say relative to claims, the spread between blockchains is much smaller than advertised. I think that's the big thing. And the other one thing is not to say that none of these blockchains will get there, right? I'm bullish that Solana will figure out a lot of these things. And the reality is a lot of these blockchings are just not very optimal. Like, it haven't been around that long. And the workloads that they're going to be under are, you know, surprising to the, to the founders involved. And so there's a lot of work that can be done both at the smart contract layer, but also at the infrastructure layer to just optimize the hell out of these things.

So I'm going to guess there's at least like a four or five X you can get just out of optimizing the current workloads. We didn't talk about the failure of the week, actually, speaking of this. Now you remember me, which is ESMOS. The EFMOZE was like quite an epic fail. I feel like it's unfair to talk about like a blockchain stumbling in its first week of launch. I feel like it's happened so many times. I agree with that. This time was this was an interesting.

What happened? We can save that. Give us a TLDR. Give us, give us a TLDR. I think the best view of the TLDR is a lot of people beforehand were talking about how like the code base was not super well thoroughly tested. Like if you went and look. Before you get there, true.

So quick background. So, EVM-compatible Cosmos chain that was very hyped up. There was sort of, there was no pre-mine. There was going to be this like wrecked drop. There was like everybody in the Cosmos ecosystem was very excited about the launch of Evmos. And after the first, after the initial launch, there was a protocol upgrade and the protocol upgrade failed and the chain halted.

And it's still in a halted state as of right now is my understanding while the validated trying to figure out how to get the system back up and running. Yeah. That's a pretty good summary. I think the main thing that has been its issue is that DGens are still trying to like, they're having this problem where like the validators are trying to restart the chain and within two seconds there's five million transactions trying. It's like kind of like the Solana restart problem, except that Genesis.

Like that's, it's a lot harder to have that happen like right at birth. And it's sort of a little bit weird. I mean, there is kind of interesting thing. If you compare like validator communities and like say swana to like or avax to like cosmos, there's a lot more DIY validators. And a lot more sort of like it's a just more diverse set of validators, if we're going to be honest. And like the cat hurting to get this is get this kind of off the ground is a little bit crazy. And I feel like they really rushed the launch because they hyped up the drop and they didn't do a lot of testing.

Like their test internet was like live for like three weeks, two weeks. It was a very short testing period. Because they, like, hyped up this drop where, like, anyone who'd ever been sandwiched attacked on Ethereum would automatically get a ton of EVmos. You know, my real question is, is there going to be a wrecked square drop? Like, if I got wrecked on a wrecked drop, do I get another? That's solid. That's solid.

You should launch a fork where that has a wrecked square dot. No, no. I mean, I wish them all luck. I feel like, I feel like if they just didn't hype it so much, it would have, like, not, it would have been easier to, like, launch this thing. And now they're instead, like, there's like this bot army ready to try to collect their, all of the drops. And so it's going to be, it'll be a little bit dicey, I think, for it. Yeah.

Ironically, their attempt to reward people for being victim's MVP has now made them a massive victim to MV. They should have tried to do it on the test net. Like, test the rec drop out first on the test net before going straight to prod with it. I think that's the thing that, because it's like a new, it's a novel mechanism. and it's worth kind of like making sure it works first. How do you actually prove that you were sandwiched on Ethereum? Do they just have a snapshot? They just did snapshot.

All the addresses? They did a snapshot. But the problem is it's like part of their consensus that you can claim it. So like it's a it's like a consensus rule that's like built in. Oh, I see. It's like very tightly coupled in a way that is not great. Got it. But I think it'll be interesting.

Like the Cosmos ecosystem is interesting because it's like grown so much organically without any bridges. Like it's basically impossible to get from ETH to Cosmos without going through Luna. And, you know, going from Eth to Luna to Cosmos is like a nightmare. Without any bridges you say. It's a little strange that like Cosmos has been so successful without bridges. I thought the whole idea was supposed to be the interoperability network. Well, no, no, sorry, without bridges to Eath to get people's capital over. I mean more like, hey, you know, when you grow these ecosystems, you need to be able to

let people onboard their capital from other places that they have it, right? No, no, I know, I'm being prestigious. Yeah, we were early investors in Cosmos, and, you know, I love the Cosmos vision. I think they've done very well, but I'm still a little bit mystified at what's really going on in the ecosystem because it does feel like a lot of face planting that's been going on in the last couple months. but it seems the momentum behind cosmos is really, really strong. Yeah, and I do think the IBC user experience is 100 million times better than the bridges.

Like, it is just coherent. I think the real problem is the Luna, Luna actually has made its own little territory that, like, you know, tries to make the U.X difficult for some of the cosmos wallets. Yeah, but ultimately when most of the value is outside of cosmos, that, that, that, That is where IBC really struggles is when you're outside of the kind of Cosmos Walled Garden. Anyway, we're over time. So we should we should call it here. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in again this week.

And we'll be back in a fortnight from now. Thanks, everyone.