Unchained - The Chopping Block: OM’s Collapse, Vitalik’s Morality Test, & Tariff Chaos - Ep. 819

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this episode, the crew dives into the drama surrounding the OM token crash, the murky world of fake market caps, and Binance’s role in fueling questionable projects. They unpack Trump’s tariff chaos and whether Bitcoin could emerge as the real winner in a broken economic order. Plus, Vitalik stirs the pot by calling out “bad apps” like Pump.fun—igniting a moral war over what crypto should be building. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 OM Token Implodes – How a top-25 token collapsed 90% in 90 minutes and why it exposed deeper issues with fake float 🔹 Market Cap Manipulation – Haseeb breaks down how teams game CoinGecko, and why circulating supply might be mostly fiction 🔹 Binance Listings = Domain Squatting? – The crew explores how projects “reverse-merge” into dead tokens to skip the line 🔹 Coffeezilla Strikes Again – The panel reacts to OM founder’s bizarre interview and what it reveals about crypto’s accountability gap 🔹 Should Exchanges Demand Disclosures? – A fiery debate on whether market making agreements should be public 🔹 Tarun Goes Full Macro – Why Trump’s tariffs could actually boost Bitcoin—and what capital flight means for crypto 🔹 Vitalik’s App Morality Test – Did he go too far calling Pump.fun a “bad” app? The panel isn’t so sure 🔹 Ethereum’s Vibe Crisis – Solana and Base push back as Vitalik gets philosophical about the soul of crypto 🔹 Is Railgun the Real Hero? – Tarun questions Vitalik’s taste in apps and whether ideological projects matter if no one uses them 🔹 Regulation Without Regulators – Can the industry police itself, or is it time for a new kind of crypto SRO? Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Disclosures Links Use Code CHOPINNOVATE, for tickets to the U.S. Innovation in Crypto conference at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island (NYC): cbc25.eventbrite.com Timestamps  00:00 Intro 02:47 Trump's Tariff Turmoil 15:48 Mantra's OM Token Controversy 29:42 Crypto Disclosures & Market Making Agreements 31:49 Debate on Exchange Incentives & Market Maker Costs 33:57 The Role of Self-Regulation in Crypto Exchanges 44:15 Vitalik's Views on Blockchain Ethics 56:33 Upcoming Live Event Announcement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I mean, Ford is where I don't think Fatalek has ever had good taste in apps. I feel like the stuff that he cites of things that he's excited about are generally bad. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quond. 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. Dalek.8 is the ultimate.

Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hi, 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. Today, Haseeb as an influencer is going to show you his preparation that he goes through every single episode prior to the show. Yeah, guys, I don't know if you saw, but I recently became number two on the Kaito Yapper

leaderboard, which means I'm officially an influencer now. So, oh, okay. So let's just, it's time for, it's game time. Ooh. Oh, okay. Wow, that got all over the screen. Okay, now I just need a little bit of this. Wipe it off, yeah.

Oh, oh, beautiful. Okay. That's the youthful glow right there. Yeah. Can you guys tell? Can you guys tell? That looks refreshing. That looks really good.

Yeah. This is, I can barely read my screen now. Okay, we're going to put this over here. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, now we start the show. Steve does that every show, actually. I do that actually. I do that.

We just wanted to, yeah, we wanted to show the audience because we thought it might help personalize some of us. So quick intro is, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven, and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next we've got Robert, Cryptoconosur, and Tsar of Super State. Welcome to the show. Then we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And finally, I'm Haseeb, the head hype man, and now influencer at Dragonfly.

We're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. please see chopping block that XYZ for more disclosures. I need to wipe my face. Okay. So Haseeb, we have to ask you the hard hitting questions first now that you're in your sponsor. Yes, please.

Oh, I'm ready for it. The first one is, are you part of my trading group? It depends on how much alpha I can actually give you. I mean, my real question is, when are you moving to a TikTok house? Like, when are we going to see you, see a TikTok house?

You know, I don't like to give out teasers on shows like this, but let's just say I'm going to be moving to Beverly. heels very soon. So very excited. I mean, the jacket looks like you're like in a TikTok house video. It's like a vibe. It has an aesthetic. I'm going to keep it on. Keep it on. Keep it on. All right. Keep it on. I'm keeping it on. Keep me it on. Okay, cool. All right. So let's talk about what's been going on in the world over the last week. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Trump's tariff show has never ends. It's a show that keeps on giving. So of course,

Trump's crazy tariffs on the entire world, his global trade war was set to begin on April 9th, and then Trump reversed course completely, said that reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days. All tariffs on other countries would go back to 10%, minus the tariffs on Canada and on Mexico and on automobiles, as well as the tariffs on China. So during that period of time, China tariffs escalated in a tit-for-tat trade war that ended with now 145% tariffs on China from the U.S. So this 90-day tariff pause seemingly was instigated by Bill Ackman. It's caused a big rally in markets across the globe. We've seen massive, massive reversal in pretty much every single asset class, including in crypto.

So we're now in the weird position of basically wait and see. So we don't know exactly what to infer from this. Clearly, Trump blinked in some way with respect to the effects of his economic policy on the country and on stock markets and on the treasury markets. All that being said, there's still weakness in treasuries, there's still high inflation expectations, and the crypto market has recovered somewhat, but it certainly hasn't fully recovered, and alts are still kind of sitting in the toilet. So given where we're sitting, we have 90 days to see whether or not Trump renegotiate some of these tariffs, how are you guys feeling about how this is likely to impact the crypto market? I'll start. Well, I think the biggest thing that's been up in the air is the trade war with China has taken the front and center.

stage, right? Every other country has basically been pushed to the wayside. The Trump administration is negotiating fielding calls from discussing whatever with all the rest of the countries that we were proposing tariffs with. China, it's basically like a very serious trade. And yes, there's a lot of back and force on what's included, what's excluded. Is it semi-huneuctors? Is it electronics? Is it auto parts? Is it completed autos? You know, it's like every day there's a little bit of like different news there. I don't think any of it directly impacts crypto that much, frankly. No matter what the cat's already out of the bag and there's already like discontentment and disharmony in global markets, right?

Whether we've resolved these tariffs or not, I think, and we talked about this on the show last week when Jeff Park was on, some of the damage has already been done. And even if we completely reverted back to completely tariffless trade with China, I think they are going to have lingering distrust of the U.S. monetary order, and we're going to have some resentment and distrust towards them as well. And so for a crypto investor, I think it's generally bullish Bitcoin as a neutral asset that we've never really seen it play out in the midst of a global economic battle, but it is neutral. It's credibly neutral. It belongs to neither the U.S. nor China, nor the EU, nor Japan, nor any of the countries that are involved at the table right now.

So I think it's still an edge case, but I think, you know, the edge case probability is increasing that Bitcoin finds a role in the new economic order. And so I'm not looking at this in like a next week resolution. I think we're going to see this play out over the coming weeks, months and years. I think the dominoes have started the fall. Tom is your take. Yeah, I mean, to talk about it at the last show, which is, hey, all else equal. Weaker dollar, Qie on the horizon feels like it's good for Bitcoin. but right now there's just like uncertainty. And when there's uncertainty, you want to take your chips

off the table. You want to wait and see for every asset class other than, I guess, gold. So it feels very early. And I think already this has been extremely volatile in terms of the way that the tariffs were rolled out. There was even like, oh, there was an updated China tariff. And then they declared, I know that was on top the existing tariff. And so it's like uncertainty on top of uncertainty. And it reminds me a little bit of COVID. There was so much uncertainty. And then when the uncertainty kind of starts to crystallize a little bit, then people kind of start to redeploy and sort of have a firm review of the world. But right now it's like just, it's so risk off. Yeah, I mean, the difference with COVID obviously was that COVID was a natural phenomenon and this was a self-imposed policy error,

basically. It's a human hurricane. It's unpredictable. Yeah. It's been obviously from the perspective of financial markets has been a fiasco with respect to just the inconsistency and communication, people contradicting each other. You hear different things from from Greer. as from Trump, as from Bessent. Tarun, what's your take on the macro situation? Negotiations usually require two people to dance. Like both sides need to be playing. You don't need to keep calling and saying,

hey, why are you not showing up to the negotiating table? You're talking about U.S. China? Yeah. I mean, it's like kind of, it is a little bit comical. I saw a bunch of tweets that were like, that, you know, someone was like, there was some news headline that was like, oh, Trump to, Trump to Chi, like,

I'm waiting for your call. And one of the snarky headline, one of the snarky tweets was like, they need to negotiate with us. You don't have to negotiate with them. How come they're not calling? And like with the tweet was like, breaking, man expects his ex-girlfriend to call him back after they broke up. And I was like, you know, it's kind of, it was kind of a little.

It feels like that. It's crazy. Like this is exactly what kids do. It's insane. I, it did feel a little like, you know, I don't know. To me, that's like the number one thing. weird. The other thing is just like, how could you roll this out and have no deals before you announced it? It's like, I kind of feel like the game theory is like completely broken. If you're

we're going to do all this and force you into bilateral negotiations. And then everyone is actually, if no one else is doing it, I'm not doing it either. There's kind of this collusion that everyone can kind of do by being like, fuck you, we're all not negotiating with you. Versus if you go in and say, okay, I have some set of deals that are already done. These guys, because they negotiated with us before we announced it publicly, got better terms and you can, you act fast. Otherwise, you're going to get worse terms. It's just like the whole like bargaining strategy reminds me of maybe teenage diplomacy is not the worst description of it. It's very like tit for tat and not about like long term strategy and like what do you think the other person

is going to do in response. Clearly, clearly they're like it doesn't seem like they're doing any prediction of what the response of the other player is. I think they, are. I mean, I feel like it's very obvious game theory that like when you have two superpowers, the only response to almost any beef is escalation. I don't think, you know, is that or like alliance, truce, compromise and resolution. But I think I think another thing though that is different here is that it would be true if you had, you were two superpowers with equal leverage against one another. But the U.S. doesn't really have any leverage against China in this whole thing. I just feel like, I disagree. That's clearly untrue. That's clearly untrue.

I don't think they're pushing, we're pushing China to stimulate when China has really been trying as hard as they can to not stimulate their economy. Right. I mean, we're, we're clearly pushing China into recession if they don't stimulate aggressively. And China's still an export-driven economy. Like, they don't really have the consumer-driven country. I'm not saying we have no leverage, but I'm saying like we walked into this kind of like knife fight with a butter knife. You know, it's like we, in theory, we could, we had. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm, I'm against his trade policy as much as you are, but I think that that's clearly just not true. China is, is clearly in the weaker position given that they don't have as diversified. They're in a weaker position

on their own. They're not in a weaker position when everyone else also hates us at the same time, because now we have to negotiate all the swarms. Yeah, yeah. You are seeing that. You are seeing the swarm thing right now, right? Europe is also like, fuck you, we're not negotiating with you. No, no, no, no. Europe is totally negotiating with us. What are you talking about? Initially, Europe placed reciprocal tariffs.

They pulled back the reciprocal tariffs. The EU pulled back the reciprocal tariffs, said we're canceling those and coming into a negotiation. But then the EU, the EU had some weird things. Like some countries are like, we're going to negotiate on our own. And that's what I'm saying. It's like a total like mayhem thing. It doesn't seem like it's like a.

Here's the GT. solution to this. It's very simple. Every country is incentivized to discuss and negotiate because any country that reaches zero tariffs with the U.S. has a competitive advantage over every other country on Earth. If there's only one country in a hypothetical world, let's just say it's like Italy. Italy is the only country on Earth that we have zero percent tariff with and everyone else that's like up here. Every exporting business will move from their random ass country to Italy to be able to sell more products. And the country that basically breaks first or settles first or negotiates first with us, if no one else does, is the winner. And so, yes, we have to

negotiate with 60 different partners. But there really isn't a major incentive for those partners to reach a good set of terms with us very fast. I agree. I think the big, also confusion has been like the exclusions. And it feels like two weeks ago, the story was, oh, we're going going to reshore manufacturing. We need semiconductors. We know these advanced products. And then it's like, okay, no, actually those are excluded. And then we're going to like tax or tariff the inputs. We're going to tariff like raw aluminum. And it's like, okay, well, no, that's actually what you need. So it feels all very backwards and not not super productive. Yeah. I mean, some of the actual specifics of the policy clearly are being negotiated in real time. There's now a potential exemption

for car parts as opposed to fully finished cars. So there's clearly a lot of the stuff that the Trump team didn't really understand the nature of a lot of this trade in finished goods versus unfinished goods. Right now in Polly Market, there's a market on which countries will agree to do a trade deal first. And right now, what you can see is that the UK is leading, then Argentina, then Vietnam, then India, then Japan, then Korea, then EU, then Israel. And so there is an ordering and there's some sense that whoever comes first will probably

get a better deal. Now, is this true? Is this just perceived? It's hard to tell. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of pandemonium in 50 trade deals being executed simultaneously within a 90-day period. Normally, trade deals are incredibly complex. They involve lots and lots and lots of minutia in, like, actually how to implement these trade deals. Like, if you remember things like TPP and USMCA, they take many, many months and they're extremely Byzantine agreements.

So the idea that we're going to have like this real agreement, maybe we'll have like a term sheet or something. or just like a kind of spiritual, like, yeah, this is roughly what we're going to do. And then we're going to go back to the way things were before this deal as we hammer out the details. That's very likely all we're going to be able to get in 90 days at best. And right now, again, the way Trump is talking is that if at the end of this period we don't get these deals, that tariffs actually go back to the high level that were announced during Liberation Day, which basically, of course, means, okay, we're back to Armageddon mode. And it also means that producers and exporters do not have any.

confidence about where tariffs are going to be in 90 days, which is another just real kind of Armageddon level error on behalf of the Trump administration, is that you can see from all the recent reports that are coming out. Producers are frozen right now. They're just basically sitting and waiting. They're not making any investments because they just don't know what's going to happen. So that's going to be a big drag on the economy. Now, all of this being said, the real economy is clearly going to suffer because of this.

financial assets, it's less clear. We have seen capital flight taking place from the U.S. Capital flight meaning that it's not just that the stock market is weakening, but also treasuries are weakening and the dollar is weakening. All three of those are happening at the same time, which generally means money is moving out of the country. That's a really bad thing. That generally doesn't happen in the U.S.

Usually in the U.S., what happens is that stock market weakens, but treasuries are strong, and that ends up being the flight to safety asset. So this does not portend well for financial assets generally. It may well mean that the Fed has to step in. And the Fed may have to step in sooner than later, even if inflation gets elevated because of tariffs. And to me right now, this seems like the most bullish story for crypto assets is that basically this is the dynamic, is that the Fed is forced to step in and to lower rates or to even do QE to basically protect the dollar and protect the bond market. regardless of what's happening with financial assets.

And so financial assets may end up getting buoyed from all this additional liquidity, regardless of the state of the real economy. Unless we become a macro podcast, let's go ahead and switch gears and talk about what's going on in Crypto land. So first story is about this token called Mantra. The ticker for Mantra is OM, OM. So this is not Olympus Dow. This is OM. So Ome originally was another team from 2020 that had a finance listing and a ticker.

a new team took it over and rebranded it to Mantra, which is some kind of RWA chain. So it's apparently originated from the Middle East. It has a lot of Middle Eastern money associated with it, as well as some RWA deals from some Dubai families or something or other. So it's all very opaque. So this token ran up like crazy over the last year to the point where it basically became a top 25 asset. Now, despite being a top 25 asset, basically nobody, I would imagine none of the four of us

knew what mantra was or what they were doing or what they were doing in the top 25. So it was a very kind of weird, suspicious team company project given how few people in crypto were familiar with them, how much the token had run up. And many people believed that this was because of the fact that it had extremely low liquidity. So that the team was basically misrepresenting how much float was actually out there and how much of the token was actually trading hands. So it was claimed that there were billions of dollars of this token circulating. But many people, have reported that actually it's less than 1% of the total supply of this token that is in fact circulating. So a lot of this was, I saw a lot of this promulgated by this guy Mosey on Twitter.

I think Vana Charmer is his, is his handle who's basically going around telling that. That's such a good, that's such an amazing handle name because it's like a font finance joke to have that type of nickname. Vana Charmer. Vana and Charm are two different moments of a derivative process. So like if you confuse the expectation of a derogative process relative to spot like that spread, the cortosis is Vana and charm is. And the charm is actually a joke that's related to a physics thing. But I won't keep going down this.

Sounds like a riveting joke. No, no, no, no. But this guy being this like kind of like Mori of the blockchain, I don't know. What's like what? Mori makes dates me, I guess. But I don't know. Do you know what Mori? You know the guy who like the Jerry's.

But how is he morey? Yeah. Because he's like, he's kind of like bringing out the conflict. And he's, he's, he's, this is not just, he's done this for a bunch of projects. Investigative journalists more than Mori, but okay. I think in crypto, those two are very similar, though. Okay. All right.

Fine. But, but, but anyway, for someone who's like that to also have this kind of deep cut name, I got like, good credit. Okay. Well, Tarun approves. Good to hear. So to finish the story, what ended up happening is this token, despite going all the way up to five bucks,

It crashed 90% in 90 minutes on Sunday, going all the way down from 521 to 50 cents at the low, $71 million in liquidation, wiping out billions of dollars in market cap in the span of less than an hour. This was widely perceived. People widely thought that maybe this is some kind of team exit scam, something or other. So far, it doesn't seem the evidence is actually pointing in this direction. It looks like it was some kind of forced liquidation from an investor. and basically there was just no liquidity for this asset. Despite the fact that nominally it looked like this asset was worth billions of dollars,

there just wasn't a bid. So long sort of short, this token now is in the toilet. There's a widespread sense that something was very amiss with what's going on with this token. And there was a sense that this might not be the only one, that there may be a number of other projects, probably not a ton. This is not like a widespread phenomenon. But people have already started pointing fingers at several other projects that supposedly have misrepresentations about

the total amount of float that they have outstanding on different exchanges. So there's been a few accusations floating around, again, larger than pushed by Mosi, that this thing when tokens represent how much of the float they have, it's mostly self-reported. So what happens is that I was looking into this process because I was trying to figure out what exactly is the mechanics here about how this kind of a fraud could be perpetrated. And the answer is that when Coin Yeko or Coin MarketCap ask you, hey, how much of the tokens are currently circulating? They literally just ask you. Now, they don't just ask you because then obviously many people, the obvious incentive is to

overrepresent how many tokens are circulating. And so what they do is they check, first of all, are you listed on reputable exchanges, two, how much volume is there on reputable exchanges? Three, they look sometimes at the on-chain addresses to make sure that they kind of make sense, but they really can't do that much. If you're really motivated to lie to them, and how would you lie to them? You would lie to them by taking the majority of your purportedirdrop or your community distribution and basically claim it yourself as opposed to actually having your community claim it

and then give that to market makers and have the market makers just make volume on exchanges, just generate noise. That will result in the exchanges having volume, the on-chain stuff looking sensible and it looking like your distribution chart, but really no actual retail customers own your token. So you can have extremely, extremely low float and just a tiny amount of actual liquidity that's easy to push in any direction. So I think that's the story. And you've had other people, I think it was Kane who came on Unchained, talking about a similar

phenomenon earlier a couple weeks ago. So I'm curious to get your guys thoughts on, is this a thing that you think is happening broadly? And if so, how can we as an industry police this better? Or like, what do you think is the root cause here beyond just, okay? Ohm did a bad thing. I will say one thing is you have to watch this interview that just came out four hours ago with the Ome founder and Coffizilla. Dude sounds he sounds he's guilty.

Dude sounds he's guilty of what? Guilty of what? I'm just like he's trying to be like, yes, he pulled a Bill Clinton. It was like, I did not manipulate this price officer. And if you listen to the Coffey's all the thing, he's like, no, what's the definition of manipulation and like they both have very different definitions and it feels like his definition his definition was like you're explicitly doing the trading and you have to do it yourself and you if a third party does it it's out of your control okay when the person does it's yeah yeah yeah it's kind it's kind

of that's kind of his so i highly recommend the coffee's a little thing i never i kind of only knew about own because historically and maybe maybe i would call this one call this one call this some of my this stuff i would say i learned a lot of negative lessons from investing in the cosmos ecosystem over time and one number one thing is everyone in cosmos is shilling ohm so it's like anytime there's a cosmos thing that like everyone yeah because oom's a cosmos chain and uh montrose and anyone anytime there's like cosmos shilling something into like a multi-billion dollar cap coin like outside of celestia everything else has been like close up this was not cosmo shilling this was not No, no, no, no, no. Now you, you're talking about it right now, but the first time I've heard about mantra was like way before it had the big price increase. That seemed extremely inorganic. And it was all cosmos people shilling it. So it was like it was like it had, it was like an interesting thing that I was. Yeah, yeah. But I think this is like an epiphenomenon, right? It's like because it was going up, cause those people started shilling it. But clearly like it's the mantra team giving all their tokens to shady market makers. From an investment standpoint, not from a technology standpoint.

I'm not trying to make any critique of Cosmos technologically. From a market standpoint, anytime people who are Cosmos devs are showing a chain, I'm like, you should be shorting it, like historically. And so, from a tech perspective.

I thought you were like, I thought you were like, I thought you were part of the tribe. All I have to say is I've learned a lot of hard lessons from an ecosystem that love shooting itself in the foot. And embracing mantra as this like, oh, we're back thing was bad. So no love for your cosmos bros. All I have to say is I think they've done it historically and empirically, a great job

technology. They've got it adopted. A lot of people use it who don't even know they're using it. It exists everywhere. But when it comes to like financial products, they seem to have a lot of very bad jurisprudence historically. Yeah. So far, Ome and Terra is a pretty bad rap sheet.

Yeah. Okay. So, Tom, what were you going to say? Oh, I was more surprised as kind of, I've heard this own story last year about kind of taking over this, this old ticker. I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard about this from other projects. I'm also surprised that hadn't been delisted for finance because they've been kind of dormant for like three years.

And then it was like, oh, then you can skip this thing up. And the whole thing is very kind of bizarre to me. But I also feel like float aside. obviously there are sort of difficulties with that. It's like you can also just look at the chain. I think it's like no volume, no TVL, like no use. Like it's clearly like a ghost chain and it's trading like 10 bill FDV, like use your head. I think in my mind that that's like just a clear indicator versus you're trying to do some

some compensation around like float. Speaking of this ticker thing, a kind of funny thing I think about was like, do you remember when, oh, you guys definitely remember because you're avalanche investors. When avalanche launch, they could, there was some like random shitty ICO, called Travala, which had the ticker AVA, and Avalanche had to go to AVA because, like, Binance was like, fuck you. We're not going to let you take the Ava token. So, like, this, it's funny how like now it's like, ah, whatever, like, do our, be our garbage collector, take up our old tokens. Well, no, no, no. I think it's more like, it's like a reverse NASDAQ

listing, right? Or reverse, reverse merger, whatever that's called. We're like, you, you basically, you don't want to pay for the, for the finance listing. It's more economically efficient to take over a ghost chain and just like basically buy, it's like buying licenses or something. That's actually very clever. That didn't occur to me that we should be seeing more of that of these dead chains that just have finance listings or coin base listings. And it's, you know what? We're as an entrepreneur, instead of launching our own chain and our own ticker, we're just going to go acquire that chain, buy all the old people out, like basically buy the whole market cap and then just start over. But we have the, we have the initial distribution of already being on.

I mean, maybe you lose some of the coming out party. So you're saying Binance listings is like a domain name. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that does seem like an efficient outcome, right? As opposed to like these things just die on the vine slowly and there's like these,

this long graveyard of order books that just trade nothing. It's a CTO. It will happen. It will happen. Yeah, exactly. CTO and an old chain. It's interesting. Taking a step back here beyond just, okay, shitting on OM.

Like I, well, so one thing I was thinking. Tom, as you were saying that, that like, yes, you know, when we saw that OAM was ripping, we were like, what's going on here? Like, we try to monitor what's happening in RWA land. You go look at OMA and you're just like, oh, nothing is happening on this chain. Like this clearly is some kind of engineered pump. The other sign, I think, in general, that something weird is going on with an asset is that on days when everything is down, it's one of the only asset that goes up.

That is a sign that this thing is not being organically traded, right? So you saw days when everything was nuking down, you know, 5, 10%, everything is red. suddenly, oh, oam is up. Interesting. I wonder who's buying home today. Might be themselves. So I think that's one thing just as in general to look out for. The second thing is that people talk a lot of shit about TVL as a metric, but it's actually like surprisingly difficult to get a billion dollars of TVL, even if you have a $10 billion token, right? So actually it's easier to generate a $10 billion dollar token than it is to get a billion dollars of TVL. Unless you have lending, like big enough lending facilities that you could make the TV. Like I think that the thing

TVL. The question is, why didn't they do that? TVL is a great metric when it's actually very expensive to borrow against a collateral inflate it. And in the case of OM, it actually is really expensive. There's no lending protocol. Like maybe Mars or something has a tiny, really tiny float. But there's not, there's not like an easy way to do that with them.

Right. Well, one of the things I saw on Twitter was that people were sharing screenshots of home holders prior to the crash looking for borrowing opportunities. OMA's clever. And it was being shocked. That was the Vanna Charmer thing, this OTC sale and borrow stuff that he was posting. Exactly.

Which it was like, you know, have lots of O'm looking to borrow Stables at 60% LTV or something like that. Yeah, there's something, very, very weird timing for that. But it was literally a day before the crowd. It was like, it was actually hilarious

how close it was. Yeah. So, okay, take a step back from all of this. Let's talk about how we can avoid things like this. in the future. So one thing I want to make clear, this is not a widespread phenomenon in the sense that half the things in the top 100 are doing this. Nobody thinks that. There's probably on the order of maybe 10, five to 10 assets at most that have this kind of behavior in the top 200. And pretty often, it's kind of obvious which ones are because you're like, what the hell is this thing doing?

There's no adoption for this token. How did it go up? So suddenly, when I don't know anybody who owns it. I think the, I guess my question for you guys is, let's say you're a coin mark cap or your Gecko and you are trying to police somebody is reporting to you my float is this much and of course everybody's incentive is to lie in the positive direction to inflate the total float so that the market cap looks bigger and they rank higher on the total list it's not lying if someone else did the inflation no that sorry that was like the life that if you watch the coffee's a lot of thing that would be what you would say yeah i i i think and this is actually something that that showed up in hester purses disclosure's recommendation. So Hester Purse, I think last week, gave a list of recommended

crypto-relevant disclosures that included things like the source code, the multi-sigs, you know, this and that, blah, blah, blah, blah. That they're all, like the supply schedule, all things that totally makes sense. One of the things she mentioned was the market-making agreements. And I thought, yes, absolutely, this is something that we should start normalizing disclosure of market-making agreements. Now, the market makers will fucking hate this. They absolutely will not want their agreements to be public. This is what happens on S1. Yeah, this is normal and disclosed with all traditional security.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Every single issuer who wants to trade on the NASDAQ goes out and gets three market makers. It's a requirement. It's like you must have three market makers. But the actual agreement, like the market making agreement as well as all the covenants and all the side letters, if those are all disclosed in crypto, this problem basically goes away. Now, of course, you can always lie and like, you know, not disclose all of them.

But then, okay, now you're committing out. right fraud. And okay, if someone commits fraud, there's not that much you can do to stop that. But having that, I think, is how you solve this problem. Curious, what do you guys think? Well, I think it's, I mean, first of all, there's a difference between, like, the projects that would even go into a disclosure regime voluntarily and the projects which wouldn't, an offshore project that has a crazy checkered history. I'm not saying if they're registering with the U.S.

I just mean there's a norm in the industry. Like, you want to get listed on Binance, you want to get listed on Coinbase, you have to publicly disclose all of your marketing agreements. Right. If this was like a, we'll call it self-regulatory set of requirements that Coinbase and Yeah, that's what I'm proposing. That's what I'm proposing. Yeah.

I mean, if everyone implemented that, they'd be great, right? Like, the more information that's out there, the better, because you'll get a better allocation of capital to the real projects and less capital allocated to the bad projects. There'll be less people complaining that they got rugged by some. crazy manipulated asset, and more capital be available for the projects that are building amazing stuff. Maybe I'll take the other side, not more as playing devil's advocate, but yeah, I kind of, I agree with that philosophically, but I would say incentive-wise.

If you think about a centralized exchange, whether it's in Tradfai or in crypto, the job of a centralized exchange is to maximize fees, like just from their profit calculation, is to maximize fees and volume I can collect while offshoring the risk of market making and kind of like having to hold inventory risk, right? Like effectively the goal is like you're subsidizing market makers via discounts and rebates and all these other things to try to get them to hold the inventory risk so that you can collect fees without you holding the risk, right? That's sort of the tradeoff.

And I do think there's sort of this inherent thing where like, if you're, you start enforcing these things, all these market makers will leave. And I think to break that, you probably need a real regulatory regime. I don't think like that there'll be like a natural state in which you get an equilibrium where the disclosure thing will have. The exchanges will force the disclosure. Why wouldn't the exchanges? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the exchanges themselves have seen that their customers

are losing trust in them when they list these kinds of tokens. Right? Are they? Basically at any point, you got absolutely fucked. Have you ever looked at tokens around up-bit listings? I don't think that's always true, right? Like some of them are making much more in fees by actually having this happen. Yeah, but I mean, you can see from Binance's behavior, right?

Like, I mean, they recently did this big Twitter space where they were like, basically this kind of thing, Binance is the one company that never gets chastised for listing dog shit tokens. And recently their community has started basically, rebelling against Binance and saying, what the fuck are all these garbage listings? Everything is down only. And when you get something like OM, which again, Binance, OKX, buy bid, it was listed everywhere. This makes people lose trust in that, hey, can I trust these new token listings? Now, at the margin, is it everyone's leaving?

No. But is it bad for business, clearly. So their interest overwhelmingly is like, look, most trading volume is not in shitcoins. Most trading volume is in the majors. I agree with you, but I also think there's like this like, weird incentive thing of like you're forcing the exchanges to take more risk in some indirect way by making them have these kind of listing procedures and that they may have to pay a lot more to get more. Because they may have to pay market makers a lot more in rebates to get into the

exchanges are the project's paying the market makers? The exchanges are offering rebates, right? Like how do I ensure there's enough liquidity on a certain side? Unless until you get to major status when you're a new listing just like in an IPO market, you affect it. have to provide rebates, right? Like, every exchange in the world relies on rebates as this, like, indirect incentive mechanism for me to outsource the inventory risk that I'm supposed to be that needs to be held in the exchange, right? And my point is, I bet you that the adding these types of disclosure things actually increases

the cost the exchange has to pay in terms of rebates to get the same outcome. So that's where I think I don't. But the disclosure should come from the project, not the exchange. Yeah. But forcing the market maker agreement disclosure makes the market makers make money. I think the exchanges have all of the... They won't agree to quote at a particular rebate. My point is they will demand a higher rebate in exchange for this disclosure.

And I'm not sure that the stable... But why does the exchange absorb that cost? Why wouldn't they push it onto the projects? Like the projects at this point, if you're talking about if you're Binance or if you're Coinbase, you... This is like an extremely inelastic market. I think one reason you don't have this. is once these agreements are public, it's a one-way function.

You can't turn back because now everyone knows everyone's true cost. Now the projects will be like, well, you charge this other project, this amount. Oh, totally, totally. So the market makers will hate it. The market makers will hate it. No, no, no, no. But that's my point. That's why they will demand a higher incentive in rebates from the exchange in order to make up for that.

But why would they extract a higher price from the project? Why would they extract it from the exchange? Because my point is now the projects have transparency and pricing. They can see what other projects pay. and be like, fuck you, I'm not going to pay you. Or like, oh, try to find, you know what I mean? Like, they're going to run a more. Wait, but the price could just go up.

Yeah, I mean, but. I don't think I, I, I think it's, Amber, whoever I, you know, this project before the disclosure regime started only cost this much. Now the cost has gone up because you're right. The opportunity cost is increased to put a deal out there in the market. I think some of the costs will go to the exchange inevitably. I don't think it's like all going to be borne by the, the kind of project because there is this sort of like aggregate thing by like disclosing all the exact fee agreements and fee schedules

and loan terms and et cetera, you're effectively making it much harder for the market makers to do future agreements. And they will want some premium for that discount, you know, like that public. I agree. Here's what I would bet. Here's what I would bet. I think it may be actually the other way around is that the best market makers actually have a net benefit and the crappy, the shady market makers basically lose a ton of business. And what you are you. you may end up doing is kind of pushing more and more of the demand to a smaller set of market makers such that even even though like yes if they had the same set of customers they would they would be hurt but actually the total demand increases and people at the bottom of the food chain of market makers

they basically go out of business right if you have something that's so extractive or so shady that basically no project will be willing to disclose it you're the ones who go out of business because you had you had no edge beyond being shady in tradfi that ends up being more true because you enforce things like NBBO where you force all the exchanges to have synchronized prices. And if you don't use the exchange, get in trouble. But in crypto, I can always just start a new exchange that is focused on only the shittiest stuff. Right. Like I look at the other business.

There's already a bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. But my point is like you will just move that volume away. And then you is a big exchange.

Now you're competing against those small ones, right? Like I'm just saying. Yeah. But finance is not afraid of that, right? Coinbase, Binance, Upbit. These guys are not afraid of that. I think Binance is afraid of up it. And Upit would rather have more of these kind of tokens, right?

Like they have a different risk preference in terms of this listing stuff. I mean, I think that the- I think Upit is more risk-averse than Binance. Like, Bin Laden lists way more stuff than Upit does. Yeah, I think you're thinking about like a gate or a Mexie, which I don't think finances. Yeah, probably that's true. They probably don't care about that.

They're playing the short-term game. It's exactly the kind of exchange you're describing. I just kind of think this idea that you're going to squeak. ease out all the bad market make. It's like a little bit too much of a just-so story. I think the costs will be split between the projects and the exchange if you cause a public disclosure because of this notion of future bargaining power changing. And I think that will mean it's kind of like either very, take the long time to reach that

naturally without a regulatory force or you, it kind of is an unstable thing. Who do you think gains in the story? Who loses and who gains? Because, okay, you're saying the exchange loses and the money. market makers lose, that sounds implausible, right? Then who gains? Who gains is the, the, the, the user welfare for the, like, median or trader, right? Like, right now, if I think about these, like, bad coin. I think that's a bad mental model that, like, Binance is gaining from having, like, really shitty token. Because, like, people are going to trade whatever's on Binance,

you know, like, crypto traders are just addicted to crypto traders. And there might be more trading that occurs if everyone's, like, oh, all the assets are good assets. Like, I know, If the assets go up and people are not as worried about rug pulls, they will likely be more trading, right? Like, Binance is not in sore need of, I need more random crap to list. So, like, tending the garden and making sure that the assets on Binance go up and are good investments is good for Binance's overall trading volume, right?

Like, what's good for retail is good for Binance. I just think that, yes, that's sort of like a nice end state, but I don't think that they're like, oh, we're going to do that tomorrow, right? Like it's the type of thing where like they are forsaking some revenue now. And they will have to make this a very clear decision to be like, we are cutting off 20% of our revenue with this goal, right? Like that's what I'm saying. Like you're asking for the sharp chain.

On 20% of revenue. They don't even make 20% of the revenue from spot. I don't know what the, I'm just pick. I'm picking a number to illustrate like. Sure, sure. Depending on the type of work. Yeah. It's a tiny sliver.

It's a tiny sliver. But, but I'm saying like that that is like a thing where I think. like a lot of places will have trouble being like, oh, yes, we want to cut that out, right? Coinbase, I think, would totally do, right? But finance, I'm not really sure. But that's the thing. If you, if you're a top project and you don't have a Coinbase listing, like something is wrong, I think there probably would have to need, they would probably need to be at least a little bit of synchronization in order for this norm to actually spread. If both Binance and Coinbase did this, the whole industry would move. This is exactly the reason.

I think the regulatory version is the only way to do it. So in the U.S., we had to implement Reg. NMS in 2006 to kind of force this where you force the synchronization across exchanges. That regulatory forcing kind of made this type of thing happen more efficiently. But I think like I don't know how you do it on the crypto exchange world or like it is actually kind of there are, it's like more dispersed than trad by exchanges where it's so much. The answer is Binance. If Binance does it, the whole industry will shift because everybody wants a finance listing. Binance plus Coinbase is like the, that's like the pincer that just closes the whole market.

And at that point, anybody who wants real liquidity on their token and wants to be perceived as a serious project, they either do this or they're relegated to being like a B-tier type project. And by saying that, you're effectively saying buy-ins is a government because they're the ones enforcing this regulation. And they have like 40% market share on spot. So, yeah. I'm just trying to say like, you know, again, this gets back to this. I don't think this is like the natural market will find this. Like you do have to have some hard enforcement. We are the natural market.

We're floating ideas out there. People listen. If you're at Binance and you think this is an interesting idea, I would love to chat about it. Okay. Let's see. Let's see. I mean, look, I think this feels like it's becoming a real problem in the industry.

People are talking about a lot more to the point where I think if we can see a solve to this, I think it solves a lot of other problems simultaneously, to be clear. But I think if we can put a solve to this particular thing. Now, I don't know. Look, I'm not an expert in marketing agreements, whether or not this actually does solve the problem. But if it does, it does feel like a problem. a very elegant solution that can be implemented pretty straightforwardly by exchanges. So which is one of the virtues that doesn't require a global regulatory organization,

because of course no such thing exists. But just having a couple exchanges decide, hey, we're going to start doing this, even just on a going forward basis, just say any new listings have to do this. Previous listings, okay, your grandfather did. That may allow, again, the market to shift. We're like, okay, the way that market makers strike these agreements, they change post this change because they're like, well, okay, now going forward, I have to disclose these, so I'd better change the way to my pricing.

So, okay. Well, TBD, clearly Tarun does not agree with the concept, but we'll see. No, no, it's not that I don't agree with the concept. I just think there's always this like the reason that equilibrium is unstable is like if one one exchange deviates. They're like, oh, we agree. And then they deviate once. Then it becomes a race to the bottom again.

And like that's why I think, and this has happened in U.S. equity in my construction. I don't know if this is true. I think a lot of these things. This has happened before. I think a lot of these things in crypto is just that nobody seriously cared. Like, there's so many things for which you could think there's a big game theory equilibrium. A lot of it is just like nobody really thought about it. It's very easy to defect.

That's all I got to say. Yeah. Okay, sure. You list one asset and you didn't check their marketing agreements or you know they didn't disclose one and you're not forcing it. Yes, that can absolutely happen. But even just, even if 90 or 10% of the time that happens, that would be a massive, improvement over where we're sitting today. If you wake up one morning and the comments are overgrazed, just know it was Turun. Turin did it. Please, I am not, if anyone in FBI is reading the contents of

this group chat, please know that it wasn't me. Tom did it. Okay. Good. All right, guys, let's switch gears and talk about what's happening in Ethereum land. So once again, there is a drama in Ethereum land. So obviously we've had all this recent turnover in the Ethereum Foundation, the rise of Thomas, as well as a Siao Wei, I believe his name. I'm going to keep sounding like that whenever I'm sorry, her name. I'm going to keep sounding like that when I pronounce her name. So there was a particular tweet or post, what's it called cast on Farcaster? Are they called Cass? Are they called Cass? I guess they're called Cass. There was a recent cast on Farcaster by Vitalik, where Vitalik was basically criticizing the, call it, the amorality of certain layer ones

that don't have a really strong sense of a philosophical grounding about why they're building this L1 and what they think blockchains ought to be used for. He gives the analogy, imagine that C++ has been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is a general purpose. There isn't much surface for bad social philosophy to wreck it. Ethereum L1 is not quite in that position.

Someone who doesn't believe in decentralization would not add like clients or faux sill or account abstraction or spend a decade moving to proof of stake. Apps are 80% special purpose, but what apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what Ethereum apps and Ethereum in the whole

are there to do for the world. Having good ideas on this topic are important. He then asked for examples of, okay, what are good social philosophy and bad social philosophy? He says, which is the tweet that everyone's jumping on, or so the cast everyone's jumping on, good railgun, forecaster, polymarket signal, bad, pump.

dot fund, terra, FTX. So this seems to have instigated a bit of a firestorm within the Ethereum as well as the anti-Etherm crowd about, oh, okay, our dear leader is now prognosticating on what are the moral and immoral forms of application development. Turin, why don't you respond to that? I would say, yeah, the first thing is I would say it didn't cause a war between the Ethereum anti-ethyrium crowd. It was pretty clearly Ethereum,

Solana, and then Bass. Those are the three camps, I would say, made the most noise about this, where Bass and Salana actually both united in their disagreement of the characterization of Pump. That Fund,

mainly because they're like betting markets on internet content and attention are, which is how I think Jesse Pollock from Base described Pump. Fun, as well as things like Zora and whatever in their ecosystem. system. And I think like the inclusion of pumped out fun, I think is like kind of an interesting point of prognostication in the sense of I think in Solana, there is a belief that, hey,

people should do what they want. And if they want to lose their money and in this kind of somewhat predatory casino, they should do it. Whatever, that's their choice. And in the East world, I think there's kind of like this you need to have, you know, if you look at it. the other side of the things that he praised, like rail gun and stuff like that, they have very few users, right? Like, so it does kind of get to the heart. I mean, comparatively.

I saw Tom's face. Well, he's got a polymarket and forecaster. Yeah, no, no, no, no. Polymarket was the only one of those things I think. Like, I think, I think that's kind of my point. It was like, he's always, there's always some featuring of these things. Oh, a lot. No, sorry.

I'm really focusing on railgun because I was like, rail gun if I go look at its on-chain usage it's like why is that even the same There are probably exogenous reasons why people are not using railgun. I know there are exogenous reasons. I'm just trying to point out that there's generally this thing where it's like there is a little bit of the like our dear kingdom that you're you know you know the meme with the yeah and I think the fact that L2 app developers and D5 people were all dunking on it tells you kind of actually the fact that it was a very unpopular message even within Ethereum. Like, like, I actually think a lot of people on the application side where like this was,

this doesn't make sense. Because like, I think people agree there is a predatory aspect to pump us on. But there's also an aspect that like it created a new modality of how people experience these things and like people want to use it. And I do think that is a fundamental divide in Ethereum where they, the idea that an app can be, can generate so much. externality that could be positive or negative for the base L1 is like not acceptable beyond some point in a way that like I don't think.

Do you think he would have treated Satoshi Dice the same way? That's a good question. I, well, the thing is for those who don't know, Satoshi Dice was like an early Bitcoin gambling thing where you could gamble directly. Eric Voorhees. Yeah. But like I think I would say I think his views in my opinion from just watching Vitale for like almost a decade, I guess now, have changed over time.

I don't think he was as negative to that then, whereas like I think he would probably be more negative to it now, if that makes sense. Like I think like there is definitely a path of change. But I do think it's interesting that the ETH app developers who are very staunchly, generally never would critique Vitalik publicly like that. I thought that was the most interesting signal of this whole thing, is that. It was very unpopular amongst app developers. Sure. Tom, what's your take?

Yeah, I mean, Ford is where I don't think Fatalek has ever had good taste in apps. I feel like the stuff that he cites of like things that he's excited about are like generally bad. I think Polly Market being being like the only one. But he's also very excited about augurs. I think he just likes prediction markets independent of sort of specific product taste. I don't know. I kind of feel this is like a little bit like a who cares kind of kind of story. I don't think Ethereum or Solana would be so different if it had been this has been public a long time ago and therefore, oh, this had been part of the way they were shipping the roadmap.

Like Solana was not shaped to explicitly support something like Pump and Ethereum was not designed to absolutely not support something like pump. These feel like emergent properties independent of the creators. And so I just feel like people obviously love to cling on to Fatalic's word, but I'm like practically speaking, the reason why these exist on different chains or why different chains of different vibes is like it's not sort of a development feature set kind of question it's more do like-minded people sort of gravitated this chain or not was there anatoly's line in response to this was when you don't have PMF you get politics that was his response to the entire drama but i i also think the opposite of that was true sometimes if you have too much PMF you get politics right look at like bridgewater or like facebook right or like you know i think of like places that have so

much success that they like keep bringing money in that the only thing left to do is politics so like that i kind of found that quote a little bit weird because like i don't quite i think it happens in both i think it's a bit rich too like to like to go from you know we're going to bring nasdaq on chain to like no no no you are like the mean coin chain and that's what you're going to do it's it's kind of like this is your bit and we're going to fucking make you do the bit until you die and if you don't want to do the bit anymore then you're going to be irrelevant it's like those kind of it's like Wait, with that Rickinority meme with the like the little robot. That's like what this is.

Yes, yeah, that is what you do. Anyway. Robert, what's your take on all this? Yeah, I think it's. As an app developer. As an app developer, I mean, I don't really care what anyone at Ethereum or Solano or Arbitrum or name the chain philosophizes us about, right? I care, what can I do on the chain?

What other defy applications are there? What's the throughput? What are the costs? What's the integration throughout the rest of the ecosystem? The moralizing doesn't matter to me. And I honestly don't pay that much attention to it. And I think it's a little bit irrelevant. So you think everybody sort of having the vapors about what Vitalik says is there, it's

performative? Yeah. Well, I think for certain people, especially those who are not builders, right? right? There's nothing else to talk about. So like, that's going to be the conversation. There's a lot to talk about. You seem to be singling out someone who, or some people, very directly with that. So all I'm going to say is I really don't think it's the most relevant thing to focus on. And I just think it's a lot of, a lot to do of nothing. I think it's a great take is that, yeah, if you like went all in to go build a startup in crypto,

this is not a, you have much bigger problems than like, oh, Vitalik said something on Farcaster that baby was mildly upsetting if you really think about it super hard. I guess from my perspective, actually, I have a lot of respect for Vitalik and for his consistency. Like this is not new. This is not something he changed his mind about. Vitalik has been a missionary for as long as Ethereum has existed, right? Ethereum was a ideological project for him. And he still feels that way.

And I think many people look at that and they're disappointed. they're like, why didn't he become more like a business leader or more of a politician? And, you know, it's kind of like, you know, when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, and then eventually he rises up, becomes the leader of the Democratic Party and becomes the president. You know, you might look at him and say, oh, now he's saying things that he would never would have said as a community organizer in Chicago. And you're like, you know, that guy lost his touch. He's no longer who he used to be.

Vitalik is the opposite of that. Batalik never really became president of Ethereum. You know, he never really went. and said, like, look, now this thing is super successful. I'm going to throw away all my old ideological convictions. I'm going to wipe away all the blog posts, and I'm just going to become the Ethereum booster. And Ethereum number one, rah, rah, rah, like, how do you make number go up?

That's not Vitalik. Many other people in the Ethereum ecosystem became that after the success of Ethereum. But Vitalik did not. I respect Vitalik for that. He would have said this five years ago. He would have said it today. He'll say it again in five years. I think it's totally okay to build something and have convictions about what you want it

to be used for. and if it's used for things that you think are bad, that's totally fine. It's like, it's totally okay for the president of a country to say, you know what? I think casinos are bad and we should have less casinos or lotteries are bad. We should have fewer lotteries, right? And you might look at that and say, like, well, but the lottery makes so much money for the government and da-da-da-da-da. And he's like, yeah, well, I think it's bad anyway. Yeah, I know it's good for me and I think it's bad anyway, and I'm allowed to believe that.

So I respect it. I know we got to wrap in a second, but speaking of lotteries, one of the greatest lottery exploits ever took place in Texas in the last year. So, so I think, I think like, next week's shopping block. And I see, yeah, we can talk, we can talk about how crypto exploits and IRL lottery exploits are very similar. Okay. All right. Sneak preview. So anyway, to wrap, I think, I understand why people are upset. And I think a lot of that comes from people who don't really understand Vitalik. If you look at Vitalik, like he's a CEO of Ethereum, then yes, you're going to be very upset, blah, all this stuff. But Vitalik, to my mind, he's more like Jeffrey Hinton or something.

He's an intellectual godfather for the industry. That doesn't mean you have to listen to everything he says. Doesn't mean you have to agree with him. Doesn't mean that he has to bless your project. And if you look at the track record of projects that Vitalik is blessed, it's really hard to tell that he has any impact in the positive direction. Vitalik is Vitalik. So he says, he can say whatever the hell he wants, I'm going to respect that guy for as long as he's walking on this earth. But that doesn't mean I'm going to take product direction from him, and nor should you. I liked Bingy's tweet in response. I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee wasn't a huge porn hub guy either.

It's okay. If Vitalik doesn't like bumped up fun. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's a perfect encapsulation, which is that, yes, if you understand the role that Vitelli plays, he's the elder statesman in the industry, that doesn't mean he has to approve of your project. You know, it's totally fine.

With that, I think we got a wrap. Cool. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back next week. Wait, what? Oh, shit. Next week to talk about.

Yeah. Before we wrap. So we are going to be doing a live chopping block on April 25th at the Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island at the U.S. Innovation in Crypto Conference. So if you want to attend, it is we're going to be on stage at 1 p.m. Eastern. And we're giving out free tickets. There's a limited run. If you're in New York City that day, go to CBC25. That eventbred.com. We'll put it in the description. And the ticket code is chop innovate. One word, all caps, chop innovate. So we'd love to see you in person. See you guys next week.