Unchained - The Chopping Block: Nic Carter on Hamas’ Crypto Funding, SBF’s Courtroom Collapse, and Dramas Involving Lido and dYdX - Ep. 564

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, the gang sits down with guest Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures, whose tweet thread pushed the Wall Street Journal to correct its story that Hamas had raised tens of millions in crypto. Carter discusses the challenges in tracking how much crypto Hamas has actually received, the declining prospects for Sam Bankman-Fried’s acquittal, and ongoing dramas surrounding staking protocol Lido and decentralized exchange dYdX.   Show highlights:  Why the cross-examination has not gone well for Sam Bankman-Fried how the Wall Street Journal misinterpreted data and may have overstated the amount of crypto donations flowing to Hamas for terrorist activities  why it’s difficult to pinpoint how much funding Hamas has raised in crypto donations how extensive crypto funding for terrorists is believable to many outside observers of the industry, even recently some of its supporters in Congress, but does not reflect reality Why Hamas has decided on its own to stop trying to raise funds in crypto how Lido is upset at the way Layer Zero has pre-marketed its bridge why dYdX’s pivot to decentralization with fees going into its token is a positive development but does not give the protocol the moral high ground to attack erstwhile competitors such as UniSwap. Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Guest Nic Carter, general partner at Castle Island Ventures Disclosures Links Previous coverage by Unchained on the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried: How Heated Sidebars During the SBF Trial Could Impact the Jury’s Decision Day 1: Possible Witnesses Include FTX Insiders, Big Names in Crypto, and SBF’s Family Day 2: DOJ Says Sam Bankman-Fried ‘Lied’ While Defense Claims His Actions Were ‘Reasonable’ Day 3: Why a True Believer in FTX Flipped Once He Learned One Fact Day 4: SBF’s Lawyers Annoy Judge Kaplan, While Wang Reveals Alameda’s Special Privileges Sam Bankman-Fried Trial: Here's Everything That Happened So Far Day 5: SBF's Defense Finally Found Its Legs, But Can It Counter Caroline Ellison? Day 6: Caroline Ellison Recalls 'The Worst Week of My Life' Day 7: In SBF Trial, Did the Defense Lose Its Opportunity With the Star Witness? Day 8: Former BlockFi CEO Adds Credibility to Fraud Charges  Day 9: Nishad Singh Describes Former FTX CEO as a Bully and Big Spender Day 10: Defense Struggles to Discredit Nishad Singh's Testimony Day 11: How Alameda Got FTX Into a $9 Billion Hole Day 12: Former FTX General Counsel Speaks Out Against SBF Day 13: Before Judge, Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Gives Few Straight Answers Day 14: Sam Bankman-Fried Casts Blame on Others for Key Decisions at FTX Day 15: Prosecutors Hammer Bankman-Fried’s Contradictions With Reams of Evidence Day 16: In Final Cross Examination, SBF Gets Caught Again by His Own Words Hamas Unchained: Binance Helps Israel Police Freeze Hamas Crypto Accounts: Report Unchained: Bitcoin Slips to $27.4K Amid Escalating Israel-Hamas War but Long-Range Impact Remains Uncertain Nic Carter Twitter thread: Can crypto-twitter OSINT outperform the WSJ’s chain analysis? Nic Carter Tweet: Liz Warren wyd? The Wall Street Journal: The Wall Street Journal and Liz Warren double down on the Hamas crypto canard Washington Post: U.S. to warn crypto firms against financing Hamas, terror groups CoinDesk: The Hamas Funding Story Is Why Crypto Is Sick of the Mainstream Media Layer Zero/Lido LayerZero’s wstETH bridge deployment draws Lido DAO ire LayerZero introduces omnichain token to move Lido's wstETH across Avalanche, BNB Chain and Scroll dYdX Examining dYdX’s Path to Profitable DeFi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so you just had this chain of events with kind of like a game of telephone, where at each step you're getting further and further from sort of the ground truth. So subsequent to all that, I decided that this was completely unacceptable, push the Wall Street Journal to retract or update their story, which to their credit they did do. It was a pretty milk toast correction, in my opinion. I mean, journalists never want to correct themselves. It's all they have. It's like their pride. So the fact that we even got what I think was a meager correction was still a huge one. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two con.

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed to trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. the quick intros first we've got tom the defy maven and master of memes

tom you got to say your little thing so i'm supposed to say something now okay there's my voice hopefully you identify me perfect robert the crypto connoisseur and czar of super state it's going to be a spooktacular episode oh uh it is it is the day before Halloween as they we're recording this uh and then we've got a special guest nick carter the illustrious performed bitcoin maxi i don't have a catchphrase but yeah i'm happy to be here this is actually i i i kept same catchphrase from the previous time you were on the show, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And then I'm the see of the head hype man at Dragon Ply. So we are early stage investors in crypto, but I want a caveat that nothing we say here is investment

advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block. That XYZ for more disclosures. Nick, it's great to have you on the show. You are, at least for the moment, the main character of Twitter, or at least you were going through this last weekend. I went back through your previous appearance on the show, which I don't know if you remember, but it was the day that FTX collapsed.

That's insane. We ran this special episode right when the CZ had just made the initial bid saying that we are taking over FTX. And we live streamed a show. It was you, me, Tom, and Laura, because everything was insane. I think none of us had slept in like 36 hours. It was so interesting hearing, I listened to it back because I was just like, when I saw that, because I went to go look up what your title was at that time because I was, okay, I want to keep to dirty. When I saw that, I was like, what did it feel like then to hear all of us processing

what was happening the day that FTX was collapsing? Now, having read the SBF book and watching SBF go through cross-examination and all this stuff, now that we know so much more, it was incredible how naive we all were and how much credit we were still giving to Sam. We were talking about him being like this regulatory golden boy wonderkin. And we were like, oh no there's no way that alamedo is really that bad like i'm sure there's a better explanation like it was so it was so innocent i think the way we were seeing all this at that time i was going to ask you did any one of us have an actual sense of how bad it was at the time no no no no no every single one of us was like this looks really bad but i'm sure it's not actually this bad

something must have gone wrong it must have misplaced the books you know something weird happened but like you know what we were talking about we were talking about how bad this is for the industry because finance is going to consolidate market share. That's what we were talking about. That's amazing. Predictions are hard. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Yeah. How does it feel now looking back on the SBF trial? So for context, SBF trial is still underway and as is contractually obligated, we have to talk about the SPF trial. Last week it was off. This week it was back on. On Friday, SBF,

began giving testimony. So his direct examination, meaning his lawyer was asking him questions, started on Friday. It is now Monday night, and on Monday was the day that the cross-examination began, basically meaning the assistant attorney general

started examining him and asking him a bunch of questions through cross-examination. And it so far is looking pretty bad for SPF. He has been more or less denying, denying, denying, denying. So they'll ask him a question and say, did you ever say that, you know, I don't know, do you ever say one example that people seem to be fixating on?

Did you ever say that keeping your hair long and crazy was good for the brand? He was like, I don't recall ever saying that. They say, okay, interesting, let's play this back. And they would play a recording of him saying, I don't cut my hair because it's good for my brand. He'd say, that sounds like something I may have said at one point. And they just did that over and over and over again, apparently for the entire day.

And a lot of things him saying, I do not recall, I do not recall. So we're still halfway through the cross-examination. is going to continue tomorrow. Gentlemen, what's your perception seeing how this court case is playing out? Well, I'm not a legal expert. So my analysis is that of a total layman. However, it doesn't seem like he has a good chance.

A lot of people who are lawyers commented that it's very rare for a defendant to take the stand themselves. I see why now that he's done it. I don't think it seems like it's been in his favor. It seems like more than anything. You know, he doesn't have good answers for any of this stuff. Obviously, the odds of him having good answers were pretty minuscule as it is. So I'm taking the consensus legal opinion that representing yourself is rare for a reason

and that most people are cautioned not to do it because, you know, it hasn't done him any favors. I think, you know, as an outsider, this has only lowered the probability that a jury finds him innocent. Now, juries seem like they're wildcards and who knows what's going to happen. I mean, I still put this at like a too high of a chance that there's a mistrial or like a hung jury or something crazy. But it doesn't seem like this has gone that well for him. It doesn't seem like his legal team is great. It doesn't seem like he's gotten good advice.

If he has gotten good advice, it doesn't sound like he listens to it. You know, we saw this when he was running around the world doing deal book, doing every podcast he could post collapse. He's not working with an a plus team of legal counsel or he's just. ignoring what they have to say. So I don't think his chances are good. He also doesn't seem at all contrite. I mean, maybe now is not the part of the trial where you show contrition, but he seems very obdurate and defiant still.

So to the extent that that matters in sentencing, he's kind of failed that test as well. I bet you that doesn't change at all, ever, even like post-sentencing. I bet that doesn't change. Well, he's trying to get out of sentencing, right? The goal is you never get to sentencing. Right. I understand that. Once you get to sentencing, yeah, that's when you start bringing out that. I'm sorry. And, you know, I can't believe I'm such a good guy.

Yeah. It just feels like, hey, he's trying to shift some of the blame off of him without directly pointing fingers at the other lieutenants. But yeah, I mean, the cross-examination has it been digging out evidence, Sam saying, I don't recall, or that may be something. And then presenting the evidence. And, like, it's really damning stuff. It's like the fuck regulators message that he was like, you know, sending with the other FTX people. And so. It's like, you know, the Fifth Amendment only works when, like, they don't actually have the evidence. And, you know, but, like, if they already have the evidence, like, you just look stupid. And the judge is also really not having any of this shit. Like, I think at some point, Sam says, I don't recall. And the judge's, like, look, just answer the question. And so it really doesn't feel like things are going particularly well. But I guess we'll see.

I remember when he was doing the media blitz immediately after the collapse when he handed off the bankruptcy keys and they went on deal book and all these places, start talking about, you know, Twitter spaces and all this stuff. And I remember at the time, you know, all the lawyers. were saying, like, this is really dumb. You should never do this. This is such a bad idea. But all the crypto people were like, wow, he's still, like, he has such amazing PR instincts. Like, he knows exactly what to do and, like, to come out of the open and fight the narrative and blah, blah, blah.

He has this 11-dimensional chess in his mind. And it turns out, no, he didn't. It turns out everything that he said in those Twitter interviews and on dealbook and all those things, it's all getting played back in front of the jury now. And this is exactly the reason why they tell you, don't do this. because no matter how, you know, open and direct and appealing you think you are, and obviously he thinks he is very open and direct and appealing, eventually you're going to say something that contradicts what you later want to say.

And if you want to say, like, look, I had no idea what was going on, then you say, I fucked up and I did not put enough risk management into place. It's like, well, it sounds like you know that you made this error and you were aware of it and you let it get away from you. And then the contradictory stories about, oh, it's about a risk margining system and that That was what went wrong. And now, obviously, that's an untenable position to have taken. So it's like, okay, well, either you lied then or you're lying now, which is it?

And, you know, boom, now you, there's no way a jury's going to buy that you didn't understand what was going on. Well, the problem is this line of defense and this, like, approach that he has worked in elementary school. And it's possible that this used to work for him even later in life by just being like, oh, I, you know, I have no idea why that went. wrong. We did our best. It doesn't work in a criminal court of law for like one of the largest disappearing money situations in history. But it's possible that he, you know, has had former

success with this, you know, in lesser stakes situation. I remember he was getting a lot of plotts at the time when he was doing his press tour. People were saying, hey, has Sam found like an alternative way to deal with a scandal? Like, you know, he's really gunning for it. Is it going to work? didn't work. In fact, yeah. Those receipts are now showing up in the trial. Well, it is admittedly early to say, but right now I saw Martin Schrelli was making bets on Twitter. He was like making a market on the odds of him getting convicted.

I think, what was it like 100 to 1 that he beats all the charges, something like that? So right now, if that's the market, it's not like that. Sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would put down $10. just as like a hedge for the sake of our industry. Like he gets off.

We're all screwed. So you, yeah, you'd make, what is that, $10,000 if, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, sorry. $1,000. Yeah, you'd make a thousand dollars if. 100, yeah. Yeah. So you'd make $1,000 if our industry exonerates SPF.

I don't know how much that's going to hedge you, but yeah, that's a, yeah, it would be bad. I'm slightly embarrassed how long it took me to figure out that 10 times 100 is 1,000. But anyway, it's okay. We're recording this. We don't do math. We don't do math. We just sign term sheets.

We take whatever terms we're given. Speaking of betting, I think we talked about a little bit about like the overflow room last time. And I did to get there at like 2 or 3 a.m. in order to actually hit the main room. There's a great article from the New Yorker out about the dynamics in the overflow room. And it sounds like a party. People are like making odds on how many times.

SBF's lawyer is going to object and people are like vaping and like playing music and like yeah it's like a because it's just though you know it's like a live stream of the other room so you know if you are in New York and you want to have some fun you know 500 Pearl Street they're waiting for you just go and you know play some bets and see how the trial turns out that's amazing we have you gone to how have you not gone to the overflow room yet I have I have a job I've been wanting to go but just has not really worked out but oh man we only got a week last supposedly they're going to wrap up cross-examination later this week, and then jury goes into deliberations Thursday, I think, something like that.

Yeah. So we should have a verdict before too long. By the end of next week, supposedly, good chance that we're going to have a verdict. So crazy times, but unfortunately, if SBF is your hero, it's not looking good for him. I'm sad to say. But for the rest of the industry, I think people are roughly what folks were expecting was that this was not going to go well for Mr. Sam Bank of Fried. So Nick Carter, you are the man of the hour going back to our illustrious guest.

Last time we talked about the first inning of the story with the Wall Street Journal and Hamas and all the reporting around crypto terrorist funding, I gave a pretty admittedly short shrift exposition of what exactly happened in the story. But I'd love for you to recapitulate from beginning to end for those who were just tuning in. What happened with the Wall Street Journal? What did you do? And how did all this end up in you being crowned the hero of crypto Twitter? Yeah, my gosh. Okay, so much happened and it's very complex. So if you all will bear with me. So this all

traces to three administrative seizure orders issued by the Israeli government, the National Bureau for Counterterror Financing. And over the last eight months or so, they've issued three seizure orders where they basically just list wallet addresses and finance accounts. And they say, yeah, you know, like tether, freeze these funds or finance freeze the funds. And one of them was related to this affiliate of Hamas called the PGI, Palestinian something, jihadis, maybe. And the other two didn't actually mention Hamas or anything. They mentioned the Dubai company for exchange or the Al-Wafak company for exchange, which I actually don't know how those relate. No one's actually explained that part yet.

So there's kind of like an epistemic chain here where you start with some degree of precision, and then as you move down the chain, you get further and further away, and you get more ambiguity, and then you get to something that has no precision whatsoever. And so the next link in the chain was Liptic, publish a blog early this year, adding up the nominal flows connected to the wallets for one of these seizure orders. that was a really important piece of evidence. And then Bit OK, which is another analytics firm that I'd never heard of, actually, before this whole thing. They also published their own estimate of flows related to these wallets.

So combined, all of those flows added up to about $130 million. It was mostly Tron, actually, mostly Tron wallets. And then, you know, the attack, I think was the 8th of October happened, and the Wall Street Journal kind of pounced on that. there's that catalyst and they referred back to the elliptic estimate of sort of terror-related flows based on the wallets that had been released by the Israeli counterterrorist financing group. And they just repeated the elliptic and the Bit OK data pretty credulously and effectively claimed that Hamas or its affiliates had raised this amount to finance their operations.

So that was kind of the Misan Sun. Of course, there are some problems with that analysis, namely that the Israeli counterterrorist group, they may not have been looking for precision when they listed all the addresses. They might have just been going for a pretty scattershot approach. Chainalysis then released a blog post, cautioning against this kind of analysis

where you just sort of naively add up all the flows in a cluster of wallets and declare that that's all related to this one type of activity. And they suggested, although they were kind of giving an example, an illustrative example, they suggested that some of the flows had nothing to do with terror financing. They were just affiliated brokers or kind of OTC desks. Elyptic itself then released an updated blog post

where they actually changed the legend in the chart that they'd published and didn't acknowledge the change. And so really softened the language there. and they also said, yeah, actually, you know, the Wall Street Journal misinterpreted the data. One thing I forgot to mention, of course, is that Elizabeth Warren used the Wall Street Journal article as her sole source for her letter, which was signed by 100 members of Congress, basically asking the Biden admin to really tighten up sort of counterterrorist financing rules. And she characterized crypto as sort of a major way that Hamas was funding itself.

And so she really sees the moment there using a... exclusively the Wall Street Journal source using only their interpretation, and she claimed that Hamas had raised over $130 million. So we kind of started from these list of addresses. Then you had a couple chain analysis companies doing what I think is now, we know, was a pretty naive analysis of the flows through those addresses. And then you get to Elizabeth Warren with no caveats definitively stating that Hamas raised over $130 million to fund their operations. And so you just had this chain of events with kind of like a game of telephone where at each step you're getting further and further from sort of the ground truth. So

subsequent to all that, I decided that this was completely unacceptable, push the Wall Street Journal to retract or update their story, which to their credit they did do. It was a pretty milk-toast correction, in my opinion. I mean, journalists never want to correct themselves. It's all they have it's like their pride. So the fact that we even got what I think was a meager correction was still a huge one. And I then also put together a bounty program to get sort of our community of sort of on-chain wizards to actually look at this data and try and ascertain what the actual number was. And that's the process we're in right now. I think I've paid out 15 bounties. I said that they would be 500 bucks apiece, but I could flex that up.

So I've paid out a few thousand dollars in bounties. I've like $30,000 left in the bounty pool. So I still want people to do this analysis. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it. And the other thing we'd like to do is to get the signatories to the Elizabeth Warren letter to actually retract their signatures now that the epistemic environment has really been muddied. So that's kind of where we stand right now.

And so I think just by getting the Walser Journal to moderate their language has been a huge key win and one that we almost never get. an industry, but we need to basically keep pushing and explain that you can't be that definitive with these, this on-chain data, which is very ambiguous, very complex, very hard to reason about that was kind of wildly overstated by the WSJ and by Warren herself. Yeah, it's one thing to say, like, look, we have confirmation that there was $130 million raised. Like, that's totally fine. It's really fine if you have evidence of wrongdoing to say, well, here's what happened. It's not fine to just sort of basically live in the world of innuendo

and saying, look, it kind of looks vaguely like something like this was going on on chain, and therefore crypto is very dangerous and it's being used to fund Hamas. In fact, one of the most striking things about the story is that we know, as I think Tom mentioned this last time, Hamas has backed off from crypto donations precisely because of the fact that they're not getting any, and they keep getting frozen. And so to the extent that we have conduits already within crypto, to go after bad actors and people who, in general, we don't want to be doing business with or who are sanctioned, for that matter,

they already get the message. That's why they're not raising money through crypto is because they know it's a terrible way to do it. Yeah, there's two more things to note there. So the cluster addresses that seemed affiliated with Hamas, maybe, or affiliates, they ceased activity when contemporaneously with the seizure order going out,

which was pretty damaging. would say, like, you know, funds were seized in Tether terms, finance accounts were seized. There's this one fundraiser run by Gaza now where they raised $21,000, so not a huge amount. 2,000 of it was frozen on finance. 9,000 was frozen by Tether itself. So, you know, the authorities are actually pretty good at contradicting this stuff. When someone contributes to a public fundraiser, they can also be associated, you know, with Hamas directly. So now there's a chain stretching back to them. So what Hamas said was, hey, to protect our donors, we don't want to raise money. It was actually Al Qasam, which is an affiliate of Hamas, to protect our donors, we

don't want to raise money in crypto. So while you have the organization itself saying, hey, we actually want to focus on other sources of funding, we don't want to focus on crypto, which is pretty visible and in some cases can be frozen. At the same time, you have Elizabeth Warren in the Wall Street Journal very confidently saying, this is a major source of ongoing fundraising for them. And that's just a crazy juxtaposition to me. Okay, I was going to say, based on the information you do have currently with the current level of analysis that you've been able to gather, you know, can you put together a range of what you think, the total fundraising that Hamas received in crypto transactions was,

if it's not 130 million? What's the magnitude? And like, what do you think, you know, the best knowledgeable range is, in your opinion? Yeah, it's very hard. And so I have my minions out there doing the. What we haven't had so far as someone who works at chain analysis weigh in directly, which is kind of what we need because ultimately the main database here is which addresses literally are concretely known to be affiliated, right?

We don't have any details on the methodology used by the Israeli intelligence, so we can't have high confidence in that. I will say that the PIJ linked order, so there were three orders. The third one was the PIJ. J-linked one. The other one that Bid OK profiled, it's very unclear to me that they're actually Hamas affiliates. I haven't actually seen evidence of that. So the PIJ-linked order was a $93 million, was acclaimed total flows. There was duplication in those flows because it appears to me the elliptic was counting intermediate transactions within the cluster as part of the total flow,

which is wrong, right? You can't just add up the nominal flows, especially if one, wallet sending into an affiliate wallet, then you're double accounting. So I think there was at least a 15% overestimate there. But then the ultimate thing is there were also what looked like exchange wallets or broker wallets that were in that sample. And those, I think, should probably be stripped out because they may have been facilitating this stuff, but they weren't exclusively terrorist financing. So I would say my upper range right now is kind of the sort of $80 million range. But within that $80 million range, I think a large portion of that is non Hamas-linked wallets that were just basically brokers.

But yeah, hopefully in a week's time, I can come back to you with a better answer. Well, Nick, sorry, I know very little about blockchain analysis. Why would you care about the flows and not the stock? Isn't what we care how much money they got in the end as opposed to how much money was going through a thing? Yeah, honestly, to me, it makes the whole concept here is wrong, because if you're counting up nominal flows between addresses, you're going to get a crazy high figure. right, for sure. You care about the stock, obviously. Their methodology, as far as I can tell,

was to add up the inbound transactions to every address in the cluster on a per address basis without contemplating the linkages or the relationships between the addresses. So of course you're going to inflate the figure. Of course you're going to inflate the figure. It sounds like to me the most important number when determining how viable this channel was for them is how much money were they actually able to receive and spend on terrorist purposes? And it sounds like, you know, yes, like the numbers are potentially still large of how much they received, but it also sounds like a lot was seized and didn't actually get into their hands, therefore able to be spent. And it sounds like whatever the number is, it's going to be

drastically lower than the headlines. And, you know, as a percent of the total funds transmitted, it's going to be a fraction of it, versus other channels. I saw on Twitter there was going around, you know, a photo of three suitcases of physical currency that was going to Gaza. And people were mad at Netanyahu's government because it was like aid money, like in the form of bills in suitcase. And it seems like that's a situation where 100% of what was transferred was likely received and able to be spent versus in this example, you know, it being seized along the way, you know, it not being a suitable channel for them and not one that they're looking to repeat due to its unsuccessful nature.

Yeah. The whole point of the story is that the money was seized. Right. Like they didn't get that money. That's why the big number comes from we, that money was taken away from Hamas. Yeah, they learned the hard way that it's a shitty way to raise money. It's not anonymous and it gets seized. Yeah.

I mean, Tether, you know, is actually really active in terms of. responding to law enforcement. I think this is a myth that people have about tether that they like don't listen to Western law enforcement. That's like all they do. They have 20 employees and, you know, one of them's palo and 19 of them are these guys that just got emails from law enforcement. They freeze the addresses. So tether's actually been really active here. Tether and Bidance are both under a ton of pressure to do this. So I can assure you this is what they're doing. do you have any sizing based on what's publicly available of how much total assets tether is frozen just in aggregate over the last six years oh man there's a dune dashboard for there is a dude

i was going to say it's pulling that up right now but but tether has blacklisted more addresses than us dc which most people have the opposite impression but as as nick mentioned no tether they're on top of this stuff yeah i mean i don't i don't tend to claim it's perfect but they are certainly responsive to law enforcement, especially when it comes to stuff like this. And I mean, this is the thing about stable coins. If you have back stable coins, right, is you can't freeze cash at a distance, but you can freeze stable coins at a distance. So it doesn't surprise me that it's not that useful for terrorist financing, obviously.

Right. Those suitcases are riding in a car right now, unless you're in that car. There's no ability to. There's a great quote. I think it was in the Senate hearing about the whole financial crypto terrorist thing. terrorist financing. There's this guy, Dr. Shlomit Wagman, who is the former director general of the Israel Money Laundering and Terrorism Finance Prohibition Authority, who said, crypto is currently a very small part of the puzzle for terrorist financing. In the case of

Hamas, quote, most of the funds are still being transferred by the traditional channels, including banks, money transmitters, payment systems, money exchanges, trade-based terrorist financing, charity, cash, and shell companies. So I found a due dashboard dating that I stopped running, I guess, in April this year where they list $460 million frozen. Yeah, that's what I'm looking at. That's maybe the most recent one.

They did not migrate over the new Dune Query Engine. So Shogun, if you're listening to this podcast, you got a migrate query over. Shogun, migrate your goddamn query. You're ruining our show. All right, we're going to add, we're going to add Shogun. Yeah, yeah.

Fork his Dune. Yeah, please, please. Just go in there, edit the, can you add comments? on tune dashboards? I don't think so. You can't like go and edit his and just like add a line

that's like migrate your query. Let me fork it. Tom, if you tweet this right now by the end of this show, we're going to have an active tune dashboard that the community is made. So just like, let people know.

We need to start a shopping blog, Dune dashboard. Yeah, 100%. We start a chopping blog Dune account. One thing people don't know is Tether is more active in freezing addresses than USTC. Like Tether loves to freeze addresses.

I did just say that. So I hope they know by now. Sorry. I think I said that like 20 seconds ago. You might have read that from me, Nick. Yeah. Brain not working. Brain not working.

Okay. Good, good, good, good. I think Robert, you touched on this point, though, which is, I feel like kind of like the missing part of this story, never understood, which is like, and maybe there's just my naivete, but it's like, okay, but where, how are they spending the money? Like, are they paying Hamas members with tether? Are they buying arms with tether? Like, where are those people then spending the money?

Like, there's, I feel like there's a whole missing half. of the story, which doesn't make any fucking sense. And no one has ever really in depth explained, like, this entire sort of life cycle. Right. What do the off-rams look like? I don't think there's some, like, crypto exchange that, and by the way, this is a really naive question. What is the actual currency that Gaza uses?

Someone does not know. Someone go ask Chad GBT, I have no idea. Okay. Well, yeah, the key question is, how do you get from a shekels? Oh, they're using as. Israeli shekels or girl? Israeli shekels in Gaza. Uh-huh.

So the suitcases full of money that people are mad at Netanyahu over or shekels. So it's the same currency. So the question then is what's the off ramp between crypto to shekels that Hamas is using? Yeah, maybe they're getting the money back into Israel to then go offloaded off crypto exchanges. Right. Like if you're following the money, I haven't, you know, seen that process. And I feel like that's an easy off-ram for Israeli, you know, counterterrorism and money laundering and, you know, the U.S. financial system and, like, the courts to be able to target is like, who's the bad actor? That's what happened, right?

That is like when Israel is like, that's the, yo, go get them. Right. They kept it on finance. They're doing it so well that Hamas is like, let's give up on crypto. Sounded good in theory. In practice, it sucks. Because Israel keeps finding us and taking the money. away. Right. Did they get any of it off of

of Binance into Sheckhles? I mean, this is the kind of reporting we should expect from the journalists, right? It's not just sort of like vague insinuations based on clusters of on-chain data that nobody understands. It should be, hey, we identified these AK-47s were purchased with Tether.

But that leg of the story has not at all been uncovered at all. And you know why, Nick? Because it's incredibly easy for you and everybody to trace the flow of crypto transactions, it's basically impossible for the public at large to be able to analyze a fiat transaction. Yeah.

And Hamas had a Barclays account. They had a Barclays account too. So should we shut down things? Well, Barclays has a history of, you know, money laundering, bad behavior. Yeah, yeah. But I will just add that the other reason why we don't have stories about people, you know, Hamas buying AK-47s with tethers is because the tethers keep getting fucking frozen.

So let's just bring it back there. Yeah, the reason why the other leg isn't happening is because it isn't happening, which is why Hamas moved away from crypto. So I just want to make sure that everyone underlines that. That's the backdrop of the whole fucking story. Is that Hamas, like, you don't need to argue about why should Hamas use crypto or not use crypto. They already figured out they shouldn't use crypto.

So we don't need to give them more of incentive to not use crypto. Like, this is not a big problem that needs solving. The problem has solved itself already. So going in and saying, ah, well, but we need to add all these extra rules and we need to make sure we KYC every single wallet. And we need to make sure that, you know, unhosted wallets now are, are, you know, have enhanced KYC applied to them. We don't need to do any of that because the problem is already solved. The issue, though, is that like roughly 20% of our legislators at the federal level don't think it's been solved. Right.

Exactly. They're operating on bad information. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Which is at least what we do in this show, I want to at least underline that part of this story. because otherwise I feel like it's easy to get lost in the Hulk or fuffle. But even pro-crypto legislators sign this letter, I went through the whole list. And there are some guys on there that are staunchly pro-crypto.

But on this matter, it's like the Natsakh part of their brain takes over and like, that's more important than crypto advocacy. Yeah. And the reality is that it's so hard to undo an incorrect story that feels true. and the idea that crypto is good for terrorist financing feels true. It just does. And it's even true for people like me and you. We understand intuitively why the story feels right and why having a bunch of people in the internet yelling at you telling you,

no, it's not. And it's hard to analyze on-chain data. You're like, oh, these people, they work for the crypto lobby or whatever. But to me, the most obvious answer to it is like Hamas stopped taking crypto. Dude, like Hamas already stopped doing it because it's so bad. Like this is before you show. up before you started yelling that crypto's bad and we should ban all of it. They already stopped doing it. That's how bad it is. They didn't stop using cash. They didn't stop using

shell companies. They didn't stop using banks. They stopped using crypto on their own, even though crypto is fucking free. And when we're at the point where we're trying to explain the nuances of on-chain analysis to senators, like we've already lost at that point. Because they're never They can invest the time to understand that. Of course, I mean, it's a very difficult subject. they don't want to be lectured about it. Right. Well, I think the more valuable thing then is to find the things that are directly responsible, like to find the bank, whether it's Barclays, or to find, you know, the actual institution that was facilitating crime and terrorism and to try to hold them accountable because it's, you know,

the 99.9% of the financing that's not getting talked about. Like more of a spotlight needs to be shed on. I don't think that works, man. I don't think that works. I don't think you're going to convince, you know, Elizabeth Warren. They're like, oh, the problem of the bank. she already hates banks, fine, but, you know, like, the problem is not the existing regulated system. I think, to my mind, and I can be, look, I'm not a political strategy, so I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. But to my mind, I think the part of the story that's compelling is that, you know, what does it mean for Hamas to say we're no longer accepting crypto donations? Putting up an address and saying send money here is free. There's no upkeep. You don't have to do anything. You just leave it up there,

right? They took it down. So what does it mean they took it down? That means that it's actively harmful to them to have this address up because so much of the money that people would otherwise be sending there gets taken by Israel. So the money goes to Israel. Money is like, no, no, no, Israel. You don't get this stuff. This is for terrorists who are trying to attack us. We will take this instead, right? It actually hurts Hamas to have money in crypto as opposed to having a Barclays bank account. So actually crypto is better, like, crypto is actually better for the good guys than a normal banking system type way of receiving money, that feels like that is an actual counter-inartive. Like, crypto is so much safer that actually it's so bad for Hamas that they don't

even want it. Anyway, sorry, I'm getting worked up over this just because I feel like I, but it's, it's, yeah, it feels like that story is not getting told. So instead, people are like fighting this tit-for-tat kind of thing. And it feels like that's never going to gain any traction. To the credit of the industry, though, I have seen us galvanize around this. And normally, It's like so asymmetric in terms of rebutting a bad story that people don't do it. We just kind of suffer it. In this case, I've seen a lot of work in the press and on the policy side as all, which is happening behind the scenes right now, to just combat the negative effects of this bad story.

So I'm actually really encouraged by the reaction I've seen. I think people realize the stakes are extremely high. That's been great to see. And I also, I will say, although we alluded to it before, you have been personally integral in starting this campaign and galvanizing the crypto community behind the story. And it's not the first time you've done it. And so you personally have done a huge public service to the industry. I know you've heard it because you've become, you know, crowned the sort of the god king of crypto Twitter. But I wanted to personally say what you're doing for crypto in general is awesome.

And you just sort of all the place you're getting. There's one piece of alpha which people don't know, which is the reason I did this was because I tore a tendon in my foot last Sunday. And I've been in pain for the last week, playing Padilla, actually. And I was just so mad on Monday morning, mostly because of the pain. That is what actually pissed me off and compounded this whole thing. So anytime things are going wrong, somebody should come and actively hurt you. Yeah. I don't think Padel.

I'll remember that. I'll remember that. I'll just been in agony all week, and it just pissed me off so much. Oof, okay. Yeah. I was half imagining that you were going to say the reason why you did this

was because you are in the Twitter creative monetization program. Yeah. I get $200 a month. It's bullshit. Yeah. Okay, got it. I did you guys.

Yeah, it's not great. Okay. Wonderful. Well, great. Well, I hope that this. This story ends up with a good resolution. I think right now we're still waiting on the lawmakers who signed up to this story and those who amplify the story to come to grips a little bit with it.

But knowing the nature of politics, that might be, you know, an unrequited hope. I think we'll have actual defections in the letter. And I think also in a few weeks' time, we'll have actual decent chain analysis, which tells us with a much better position what the number is. So you can hold me to that. That would be amazing. Okay. So we've got another story on the docket today, which is about layer zero. So there's this drama brewing in the Lido layer zero world. So layer zero is a interoperability

protocol that allows you to bridge from one chain to another, as well as send arbitrary messages. And they are competing to try to become the de facto bridge for Lido. So Lido has this asset, WST, ETH, which is basically wrapped, staked ETH. And Lido was trying to encourage a bunch of bridging protocols to give proposals to the Dow so that they could become the canonical bridge that Lido tries to concentrate the liquidity so that the liquidity is not fragmented across many bridges. And so many bridges were coming in.

Obviously, it's a big prize. Lido is a big protocol, and it's going to, you know, RAPD eth is going to end up in a lot of different places. And so the Lido community got very upset at Layer Zero. Actually, one individual, in particular, Hasu, who is, I think, like, chief of strategy or something for Lido, if I'm not mistaken. He became very upset at the way that Lair Zero

was sort of pre-marketing its bridge as though it had already been accepted by the Dow. And this was accused by Hasu as well as some other commenters within the Ler Zero ecosystem as the Lido ecosystem as being a kind of malicious attempt or bad actor type behavior to route around the legitimate governance processes

because people were going to assume that this bridge has already been chosen as a canonical bridge, and it just needs to be essentially ratified as a formality by the Dow, but the Dow now is going to be under this political pressure to not end up doing the full process of evaluating many different bridges. Some people think this is overblown and like, look, this is just an entrepreneur who is marketing their protocol and that's what you're supposed to do. Other people think that layer zero stepped out of line and what they did was very inappropriate. Want to go around the room here and get reactions. What you thought of this whole drama, if this was

really a big deal if this is a minor hiccup or if it deserves the vitriol it's getting on crypto Twitter. Nick, what's your take? I have to admit I haven't been up to date on this one. I don't know. I've been distracted. Okay. All right. We'll let you react after everyone else's react. You can react to the reactions. I'll steal something they say. Tom, what's your take? This feels like an overzealous marketing person who just kind of pulled the trigger on something without thinking about it. I don't get the sense there was a whole like, you know, master plan. with malice behind it when this was sort of put out. But also like, anyone that came out, like the first thought of my mom was like,

are people moving like rap steak Eth to like other chains that often? Like if you're on slosh, I don't know the chains they're everything thing, but if you're on Salana, like, do you really want like rap steak to eat? I guess maybe if you're on like a roll up and I was looking and like, yeah, I mean, it's like a few percent are on of Rhapsique either on rollups, but Rhapsicith is also a small percentage of steak teeth. So it feels, you know, people are really fighting over a very small pie to an extent. But I don't know.

I can't speak to the Lido, Dow side. Well, disclosure at Robot Ventures, we are investors both in Lido and Lido. So we're biased on all fronts here. It's honest misunderstanding. Everyone here's a good boy. So I love Lido, love them both. You know, I don't think it's that big of a deal because Lido itself is a, permissionless system and anybody could build their own wrapper or around steak either.

Like, it's an ERC 20 token that rebases. Obviously, you want to build a better wrapper for it to be able to move around chains and do all this cool stuff. I could go roll my own rapper for it tonight, you know, by asking chat GPT to fix my broken solidity. But like anyone can do this. And like, I don't think that process of rolling out a new version is a bad thing at all to Tom's point, it was probably an overzealous intern who framed it as like, oh, this is the new canonical version when it was like, should have been framed as, hey, we made this version. Everyone is free to use it if they want. Otherwise, like, you don't have to at all.

But they were probably just trying to like go to market faster. This doesn't seem like that big of a deal. And it seems like something that people argue about when there's nothing better to argue about, frankly. I feel like we could do a whole app on like Dow shenanigans. It also reminds me of what all the shit over like the uniswap cross-chain governance thing. Yeah, like this is all small in comparison to the big crazy Dow chaos governance, you know, whatever stuff that exists out there. Like this is like not that big of a deal.

I'm a little surprised at the uproar because don't people permissionlessly bridge assets to other chains all the time without really asking for permission? Yes, I think it was the way it was positioned in the marketing that this was the kind of. or like it's going to very soon be the canonical bridge before the Dow actually started the canonical bridge selection process. They were trying the front run being the most adopted system. Right. Got it. Yeah, it did feel, I think I more or less agree with Tom that it felt a little bit precious

of just, you know, getting really upset over what was a retrospect of relatively minor transgression. But I think there was just a lot of built-up animus toward layer zero that was coming from a lot of different directions to make this a bigger story. I agree, it was probably, you know, it was not good. They shouldn't have done that, you know, slap on the wrist, but this is not like a, this is not a felony. You know, this is like a speeding ticket kind of, hey, hey, hey, hey, don't do that again. We caught you this time.

Keep your hand out of the, out of the cookie jar and, like, back to business. That's what it feels like to me, but I don't know. Clearly there are some people on Twitter who are like, this proves once and for all that layer zero are bad actors and they're, I don't know. We're trying to get Hossu on the show and maybe we can get his perspective next time he's on. But it's like the 2017 meme. It's partnership confirmed. You know, it's, the partnership has been confirmed by one of the partners, by one of the partners. Yeah. Like at worst, it's like they made up a fake partnership, so to speak. You know,

like there's Dow's out there rugging everybody and, you know, doing actually bad things. Like people should be focused on like the magnitude of actually bad things, not quasi-announcing a fake partnership, so to speak. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, all right. Last story before we wrap. So, DIDX, they recently announced that they were migrating to their V4, which is the fully permissionless version of DYDX that lives on a Cosmos

SDK-based chain. The entire system is now fully decentralized, or at least that's my understanding ostensibly, that's what's supposed to have taken place. And as a result, after launching onto MayNet, all the fees from the exchange no longer go to the business, which was DYDX, the C-Corp.

I assume it was C-Corp. Now they are pivoting to a public benefit corporation, a PBC, as Tom says, everyone should know that acronym, which I'd never heard before, but a PBC, a public benefit corporation, exactly, public benefit corporation, please thank you. Basically, what that means is that now the company more or less just services the protocol, and all the fees go directly to the DYDX token. So DODX has rallied on this. But Antonio on Twitter, the founder of DIDX, was taking, I think in this approach that he was taking, he took some pot shots at Uniswap. And a lot of this stuff was kind of sneering out of the side of his mouth

at what Uniswap did with taking a front end and monetizing the front end and having the company kind of take fees in opposition to the token holders. I felt like great for the OADX, you know, golf clap, wonderful, glad that they finished the move to decentralization, which is great. But it does, I think for me, since we did that show where I kind of ranted about the Uniswap fee switch for a while. I've had a lot of people coming to me in agreement, but saying that they don't feel comfortable saying so publicly. A lot of DeFi founders, a lot of L1 founders who basically said, yeah, I find that to be really bad behavior, but you kind of can't go out on Twitter and say so because you're going to get mobbed by a lot of VCs who have a vested interest in saying,

this is great, this is so sustainable. So curious, what you guys think about this and whether or not it sheds any perspective on the whole Uniswap drama for you. Well, my quick take is that I feel like D-YDX might have taken that approach because their company had already minted oodles and oodles and oodles of cash for themselves. And so they could take the stance of like, oh, you know, Uniswap is so bad. They're turning on fees to their company because they had already done it and filled up the suitcases metaphorically with, you know, shekels. And I'm like, you know, past that point. So now it's fun to like dunk on your like one time quasi competitor, you know, but it doesn't make it right, you know, to say like, oh, we're a public benefit corporation. We're no longer taking fees. We're done taking fees because we made so many fees. Like we're good, guys. Like, you know, let's ride up. How much total do they make? Is north of 100, right? I've heard it's a lot. Yeah. Which is probably way more than the Uniswap front end is going to make. Like that's a Dune dashboard. Clearly. But it's like, okay, like they were basically, taking all of the profits from trading on this exchange where the token distribution was incentivizing

people to trade and they got all the fees back to their company. And it was like, you know, a stealth ICO for years, right? And now they're done. They've made enough money. It's like they high five. I don't think they have the moral high ground here. You know, if anything, they shouldn't have been taking all the cash over the last, what, two years. And it should have been going to token holders or to a public benefit corporation or to a foundation or to a foundation or whatever. Like, it seems wild that they, like, minted the truck of money and are now dunking on everyone else for starting that.

All right. Well, I will rush to DoIDX's defense, although we are investors in DOIDX. I am not. I would say that there's an element of truth of what you're saying, but at the same time, Uniswap labs, like, Uniswap was decentralized from the beginning, more or less, right? Like they really could have turned on the free search. The protocol, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the protocol could have.

DoIDX was not decentralized until very recently. And so, like, when they were running DOADX as a central order book exchange, like, running out of servers in AWS or whatever, I guess it probably not in the U.S. Like, they were running it like a regular exchange. You know, they had, they didn't take any U.S. customers. They, you know, they said very clearly, we run this exchange. We have an order book. Like, we have a whatever.

I don't know. Maybe I'm misrepresenting something, but. That's my understanding more or less of how it was running. And it's really only now that they can say, look, this thing is actually decentralized and therefore we can start accruing fees to token holders. Unoswop could have been doing that from the very beginning, but they just chose, they, you know,

have ostensibly chosen not to and or the token holders have chosen not to. So it does feel different in that respect is that DydX, if they had the fees accruing to the token holders from the beginning, this thing definitely would have been a security because they're running the fucking order book, right? It's all running on their own servers. And they admitted that very publicly.

And it's only now that they can say, look, it's not running on our servers anymore. But second, even in the case of DYDX or in the case of Uniswap Labs, both of them have tokens on the balance sheet. So if it's all about getting $100 million in the balance sheet, both of them, the balance of their tokens is worth more than $100 million. So, okay, go sell $100 million of tokens, boom, you got $100 million on the balance sheet. Fees or no fees. It doesn't matter. You have the value a lot. Like, if that's what it's about, that's what it's about.

But I don't believe that's what it's about. I think I did tweet criticism of Uniswap, but I think they just didn't find me. But I'm very sympathetic to the critique of Uniswap having pseudo equity and then equity and then picking one as the recipient of shareholder value. And I think it could have been, probably should have been the token, as you say, based on how decentralized as they were from effectively Dan 1. So I think that's the case study of the equity cannibalizing the token value. And I'd be very hard done by if I was a token holder.

So I think there's a lot of substance of the critique, frankly. Tom, is the defy maven. What's your take? I generally agree. I do kind of agree with Robert. Like, is a little rich to be able to be in this position once you've made, you know, hundreds of million dollars in fees and, you know, you know, be taking them with the moral high ground.

But, I mean, I think the, you know, a lot of times founders will sort of draw this, you know, MongoDB, Red Hat Fedora kind of comparison where it's like, oh, you got like, you know, the automatic having the SaaS product and then you have the WordPress that's like making the software. The difference is there isn't a WordPress token and people don't think that they're buying into WordPress governance and they're spending their money on it. And like that is, I think inherently the issue with this. And so I also was kind of thinking a little bit about like OpenC, right?

OpenC application, centralized server. They take a fee. They make money on fees on. the volume. They also have Seaport. It's the open source exchange settlement protocol. Anybody can use it. A lot of other NFT exchanges use it. No one is mad that OpenCCC is taking fees on top of seaport. The open source software that's dealt because there's no seaport down. There's no seaport token. There's no sense of seaport ownership and governance. It's just some software you can use if you want it. And it feels like maybe that's how

Unitomps should have been from the beginning, but then, you know, incentives, timeline, all these sort of things sort of force it into one corner. But On the DYDX front, like, what we'll see, I think, you know, the other nice benefit of having a for-profit entity is, I think it just kind of drives the right sort of shipping speed and motivation and incentives when you sort of have this, you know, fire to your butt versus sort of public benefit corporation or nonprofit, like who is really going to be sweating midnight's trying to ship out product on time if there isn't sort of that pressure to ship. So we'll see how things go. I wish I'm the best. I don't know as you said, we are investors in D-YD-D-X, but I think it's hard to sort of keep that same startup energy and shipping speed when, you know, you don't necessarily have to. I don't know if I buy this story because, like, at the end of the day, all these founders have a shitload of tokens and everyone knows where their tokens are on chain. And so, like, the thing that's making Antonio work really hard for D-Y-D-X is not that it's a C-Corp and not a PBC, right?

The thing that's making him work really hard is that he owns a shitload of tokens and he has a big vested interest. and if you wanted to try to sell that vested interest, like, D.DX would take, and everyone would run for the hills, and this thing would just fall apart. So it's the same thing. Like, when you're a founder and your equity fully vests,

founders don't just automatically piece out the moment that their equity hits four years, right? They generally stick around. Now, what mechanism keeps them around? It's not that we like, oh, well, now that it's four years, you're just going to go up and run away, so we're going to make you revest your equity,

or we're going to give you more equity, or we're going to do, usually none of that happens. And said, yeah, they can leave, but if they did, they'd be destroying the value of the thing they created because they are the best leader for it. And this thing would be less valuable if he were to get up and bounce. That is kind of the question is like, I guess not so much Antonio, but are employees getting compensated with tokens? Is there, you know, incentive alignment there?

I know in a lot of scenarios like, you know, for profit, you aren't actually getting any tokens. Yeah, the company has tokens on the balance sheet, but like you're just getting equity. And I mean, maybe it's always comes kind of down to the same issue of double dipping, different shareholder classes, misalignment. It all kind of feels like, you know, different sides. through the same coin. So the one thing that it does feel like a thing. And maybe you had some experience with this at 0x, right? Because in the early days, when the protocol first begins, you give people tokens.

And then, especially when you're in a bull market, the tokens go up and down. Some people are like, wow, I'm super rich. And then some other people are like, why, I'm super underwater. And you just get these wild swings in how people feel like they're being compensated. Some people are basically like, great. And I'm going to go retire. And other people are like, wow, I totally miss the boat. And whereas when you give people equity,

with the equity, it's like, well, it's kind of priced in this way that's kind of vague and it's not quite clear and liquidity is very far away. And so everyone's kind of, you know, that that obfuscation, I guess you could call it, seems to be helpful at just keeping people focused. How do you feel about that? I mean, you went through this as zero X. Yeah. I mean, early liquidity is a blessing and a curse. I think maybe more a curse in most scenarios. I think it's not unprecedented, though.

You look at small cap tech companies, you know, their stock's down 99, 95%. And that's why you see a lot of companies shifting towards yearly vesting and sort of true-uping where you get the amount of equity that you get is based on a dollar amount per year. You don't get a fixed package of stock at the time. Or, hey, maybe the stock's down real bad. You know, you'll get trued up to a value that is more comparable to the value it should be. but I mean, I think in terms of incentive alignment, like, that is kind of the issue is, hey, as soon as, you know, these things start to diverge, my ownership starts to diverge, inherently people are going to be incentivized differently. And I think for startups, kind of the talent that you want, the people that you want are people who are hungry and they want upside.

And they don't just want to, like, work at a foundation and collect a paycheck and, you know, put in 40 hours. And I don't know if you're going to get the same kind of people when there isn't that kind of collective upside. Robert, you saw some element of this as well, compound labs. What's your take on this? Well, I think long-term, you know, simpler is better. And the less entities, the more simple. Like, I think just from like a first principles perspective, the less possible things that could be an issue,

the less things that are going to be an issue. Like, I think there should be a single, you know, economic structure. I think it's probably cleaner. think it's simpler. I think over time, the world will probably gravitate towards, you know, hopefully a system, and I think we said this on like an episode ago, you know, where there's just a protocol and just a token and nothing else. It's just that like you can't start that way. It's impossible to raise money and like hire employees and like do all these things without some entity there. And so I think like the missing link is just going to be like, well,

how do you like start with a not equity non-company beginning? point so that you can just get to an ending result of protocol and token. And I think that's going to be an approach that future entrepreneurs take as they figure it out. So they figure out the legal structures of how they can get things going. But like, I don't think things should necessarily start as a company because it starts it off on, you know, a slightly more complex footing right from day one. Got it. Nick, we got a wrap. But it's been a pleasure having you on the show. What should we be looking out for over the next week? What's got you excited? Well, I have like 30 grand and bounties left to pay out. So if you work for chain analysis or you're a low-level

compliance officer in exchange and you have access to the software, please, you know, illegally use it to satisfy my bounty. Please. I'm like to be clear. Please legally use it. We do not endorse, you know, defrauding your employer. on the show. Nick might personally, but we don't as a show. Use the software and tell me, let's get to the bottom of this thing. We'll get the real data out there and then, you know, we'll, you know, conquer the Wall Street Journal once and for all and force a true redaction. So that's, that's what I'm trying to do. Amazing. Nick, I thought Wall Street Journal was one of the good guys. Me too. Are we wrong now? Is Wall Street Journal now the enemy? Is that the conclusion?

I think if you're a press organization and thousands of crypto bros are harassing your journalists, then you're going to dig in your heels for sure. But yeah, normally they're good. I'm very disappointed with the coverage here. I think they got very excited that Elizabeth Warren was using their thing for her advocacy. And so there are some bad incentives there in the newsroom. But yeah, ordinarily, I actually love the journal, for sure. Well, I read the Walsh Journal every day and disappointed to see that they got this one wrong,

but it sounds like things are moving in the right direction with large thanks to your great work. So, Nick, thank you for your service. you're the man and we'll be back very soon hopefully with good news thanks everybody