Unchained - The Chopping Block: Perps, Privacy & Prediction: Aster vs. Hyperliquid, Zcash Pops, Polymarket Soars, Galaxy One Debut - Ep. 921

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Polymarket scales with Wall Street’s blessing, Kalshi fires up KOLs, and BNB chain melts down as fast as it ran. We dissect Aster’s data drama, the new privacy wave lifting Zcash, and Galaxy One��s glossy yields—what’s smart strategy vs. old mistakes in new clothes? Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, we unpack Polymarket’s jaw-dropper: a $2B raise at a $9B valuation led by ICE (parent of the NYSE), the token tease, and whether prediction markets will eat sportsbooks. We get into the KOL wars (Kalshi vs. Polymarket), the line between paid shilling and product marketing, and what “parlays” look like on prediction platforms. Then: Aster vs. Hyperliquid and DeFiLlama’s delist sparks transparency questions, while BNB Chain’s 72-hour meme-coin supercycle goes boom→bust. Privacy takes center stage as Zcash rips and the “privacy meta” returns. We close with Galaxy One’s 8% yield pitch — BlockFi déjà vu or smarter risk management in a post-CeFi world? Show highlights 🔹 Polymarket’s $2B at $9B — led by ICE (NYSE parent): why a TradFi giant is backing prediction markets and what integrations could follow. 🔹 Token tease — the crew debates what a Polymarket token could represent amid a CFTC path and U.S. re-entry. 🔹 KOL Wars: Kalshi vs. Polymarket — disclosed influencer marketing vs. “paid shilling,” and where the ethical line actually sits. 🔹 Product vs. Asset promos — why “use this platform” ≠ “buy this ticker,” and the gray zone of shilling specific markets or sides. 🔹 Do prediction markets influence reality? When odds can sway decisions (Fed, elections), and why markets may self-correct before hitting “99%.” 🔹 Sportsbooks in the crosshairs — parlays on prediction markets, Robinhood funnels, and why DraftKings/FanDuel should care. 🔹 Aster vs. Hyperliquid — incentives, wash-trading risk, and DeFiLlama’s delist after suspicious Binance-correlated volumes. 🔹 BNB’s 72-hour supercycle — memecoins moon, CZ’s “not endorsements” tweet, then a brutal boom→bust as bridgers retreat. 🔹 Privacy supercycle — Zcash rips on Naval/Mert momentum; Zashi UX + NEAR intents cited vs. “it’s just flows” skepticism. 🔹 Old coin, new crowd — why ZEC’s age + thin float can turbocharge moves, even with lower on-chain usage than Monero. 🔹 Galaxy One’s 8% yield — comeback arc for BlockFi’s Zach Prince or smarter, public-company-backed risk management? 🔹 CeFi vs. DeFi lending — on-chain transparency, Coinbase’s approach, 60-day gates, and whether unsecured credit is creeping back. 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  Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:08 Polymarket & Shayne Coplan’s Journey to Success 05:28 The Role of Prediction Markets 10:21 Kalshi vs. Polymarket: KOL Wars  23:56 Sports Betting & Prediction Markets 29:19 BNB Chain's Memecoin Boom and Bust 33:55 Aster and Defi Lama: The Delisting Drama 37:04 Privacy Supercycle: The Zcash Bull Run 50:02 Galaxy One: BlockFi's Comeback? Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We spent multiple years basically saying privacy is useless and meme coins are better than privacy, right? So it's like there is this like feel good element to the old people in crypto, like not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. I like that E is the ultimate top. DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody. Welcome to the chopping block every couple weeks before of us.

get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick controls, first you got Tom, the DFI Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. So we've got Robert, the Cryptoconauauau and Tsar of Super State. Good evening. Joining us to guest, joining us

today, we've got special guest, The Ghost of Turun, the New Brain and Grand Puba at Gondlet. He'll be here at some point. Oh, he'll be. He'll arrive at some point. I have no doubt. Tarun is professionally on time. And I am a C of the head hype man at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto. I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.

Please see Chopin Block and XYZ for more disclosures. So it is the week after token 2049. There's been a lot of craziness in the news and a lot of price action going on. But the big news this week has been around Polly Market, which full disclosure, all of us are investors in. So Pollymarket raised $2 billion at a $9.000. billion dollar valuation, one of the largest fundraisers in crypto history, and as well, one of the fastest valuation runups that we've seen in crypto history, because it was just very recently in August, they announced their $1.2 billion valuation round led by Founders Fund.

Now, this round, notably beyond just the dollar amount, it was led by ICE. Now, this is not immigration ice. This is ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, no relation to immigration. So the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, where it's one of the largest exchanges in the world. And the other part of the story that's so notable is that this officially makes Shane the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. So Shane, I believe, is 26. 27, 27, right? 26, 27, 27, 27. I think 27. So Shane, 27 years old. He started the company in 2020. You know, I remember the seed round of Polymarket. He was, what was he? He was

like 22 in the seed round. Yeah. Yeah. He was just a little baby. He had almost no experience. He dropped out of NYU and he was just like, I read this paper about prediction market. We should make one. And he went from very, very humble beginnings, raising just a few million dollars in the seed round.

Robert, I believe you were an angel investor in the seed? No, that's incorrect. There was actually circulating on Twitter. There were these screenshots of like early, like crunch base like who invested when. type things. So robot investors invested in the seed round in 2020, but it was wrongly attributed to myself as an angel and Turin as an angel, even though it was our firm that invested at the time. Got it, got it. Okay. So robot, robot is an investor from the seed round. We invested up at the, which, which round was it? I think like the, the 2024 round, very early 234 round.

Yeah. Was that like 100 million valuation? It was a little bit over 100 million, a little bit over a hundred million valuation. And I mean, the funny thing, so that we have a lot of history with Shane. Funny note, we were actually the first term sheet that Shane ever received. So this is one of the really dagger in the heart memories that we have. So Shane was in the Ced round, he was striking out with everybody because Shane at that time. He didn't strike out with Robot Adventures. He didn't strike out with Robot Adventures.

That is true. So Shane was striking out with almost everybody. And Shane at that time was totally unpolished. he was kind of just a wild man. I remember he was taking a lot of these deal meetings and just like a tank top. Like he was just like in a couch on like a roof deck and like, yeah.

That's right. That's right. I remember it was he's he's just a wild man. And at that time he had, I think he just had no, he had no polish compared to what he has today. And he, he pitched us and we were just like,

okay, this guy's kind of insane. But he's just an animal. He just has an energy level and a, a seeming just like sharpness that is extremely rare in founders. And so we gave him his first term sheet. And I can't remember the, it must have been at like $8 million or $9 million or something. It was like, okay, you're kind of crazy.

We were, to be clear, we were the only term sheet that he got. He struck out with everybody else. And eventually Polly Chain came in. So he was very grateful because he was like, oh my God, I can't believe you guys believe in me. Thank you so much. Because he was also dead broke at that time. So that was the other thing.

was like taking pitch meetings with absolutely nothing to his name. And Polychian ended up coming in. I think it was at like 15 or 16 million. I think it was like a 12 pre. Was it a 12? It was 12 pre. So it was like, oh, it was 16 post. 16 post. Yeah, it was 16 post. And I remember we, I mean, this was like so, you know, it was like 2020. We had, it was our first fund. We had almost no money either. And we were just like, oh my God, you know, we were never going to double the valuation. It's crazy. And we just told Chey like, look, congratulations. We love you. You know, but we just, like, we can't pay 16 for a prediction market. Prediction markets are not even a real thing.

And Shane was just such a grinder, you know, he like, prediction market is important to understand. In 2020, like, we invested in auger super early, right? And, like, we were longtime believers in prediction markets. And auger was just, you know, it was the first prediction market, like, 2017, it was like auger and noses. And both of them were just pieces of shit. They were awful products.

Nobody used them. There was no demand. There was no volume. There was nothing. It was all just, we believe. We want this to be true, but no one's using any of these things right now. And Shane just kept grinding. There was a little bit of volume in the 2020 election.

There was a little bit of volume in like the World Cup. But other than that, it was just a ghost town. And Shane just kept building. And if you remember in 2022, CFTC came after them and there was a settlement. They had to pay a fine of like a couple million dollars, leave the U.S. market. And Shane was constantly doing this on just a shoestring budget. He had almost no money. Guy was dead broke.

And eventually, finally around like 23, 24, things started working. And the UX got good enough and the on-ramps got good enough. And, you know, they were using Polygon. And Polygon finally had the users and the throughput. And eventually, 2024 election things started really growing rapidly. And we were, I think we looked at the deal again, like very beginning of 24, where the volumes just started to ramp. And we ended up putting in.

a big check and we're now one of the biggest investors in the cap table because we invested along the way in that round. There was another subsequent round and then the founders fund round. And it's just been incredible to see how Shane as a founder has just willed this category into existence. Like prediction markets are in the Ethereum white paper. Everybody in crypto has wanted prediction markets to work for a very, very long time. Shane was the one who made it work. just out of sheer determination. And now today it's just an incredible testament to the company and what he's built.

Well, if we're telling Shane stories like everyone on crypto Twitter is and like sheer determination, Polymarket was the third company of Shane's that I looked at. Really? Wait, what? He's doing some of like Cosmos thing or something? So I met Shane in 2017

because he posted some ridiculous product to like product on and I like I was in the comments like hey man you should rethink this like you know like this is not the right product like what do you like I don't know like what's your plan here that was the first that bet second one he like brother Robert yeah like I was like I was like starting to build a defy two I was like big brother Robert I was like hey like you know let's rethink what you're doing here he came and pitched me like a year or two later right And he's like, oh, I'm going to build this like staking product like on, yeah, like on like Cosmos and like, because there's very few like crypto assets with staking or yield at that point. Adam was one of them.

And so he was like, I'm starting like a delegated staking system. And there was a few things like this at the time. And I was like, interesting. Like don't really know if like you're the right guy to do that versus like how much competitioners. And if you look back, like there wasn't even that much competition. you know, it didn't really go anywhere. And then, you know, when he came through with Polly Market, you know, I was like, well, prediction markets, I mean, this is a tested category.

Nothing is working. There's been a few people trying it. Like, I've been pitched a few times on prediction markets in the last couple months. I'm like, but man, this guy has grit. So I was like, okay, third time I see Shane, I'm like, I have to write a check. So, I mean, that guy's got tenacity. I love it. Yes.

Incredible amount of tenacity. So there's obviously been a lot of excitement around what this means with respect to the integration between ICE and their properties and polymarket. And Shane was also on Twitter teasing a potential polymarket token. So I think his tweet was something like, you know, BTC, ETH, BNB, Seoul, Polly, question mark, and then like a, you know, emoji. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of energy now around, oh, polymarket is going to be the crypto-native one and the, you know, between, you know, Polymarket and Colchee and their prospects for a token. Not totally clear what the token is going to represent and how it's going to work, because of course they're now, they've got the CFTC license,

they're planning to go to market and reopen in the U.S., and presumably that's going to be in concert in some way with ICE or New York Stock Exchange, given the strategic investment that ICE has made into polymarket. So TBD watches space. We'll be talking about it. The other story relevant to prediction markets is these new what are called the KOL wars between KOLC and Polymarket. So KOL is the term in crypto for an influencer.

KOL is an Asian term, which stands for a key opinion leader. Robert, what's the thumbs down for? I was just saying I hate to see KOL-led marketing efforts and especially a battle between. You hate it. Why do you hate it? I mean, all right, there's a few reasons why I hate it. Okay. Walk us through it.

Yeah. There's a few reasons. I think there's a negative and slightly selling history in crypto of projects paying influencers to promote a product very either transparently or opaquely. You know, there's a litany of historical examples of like people getting paid to post some ridiculous tweet or to tweet and then delete it or to just like chill a project. And I think it's, you know, one of the lowest comp denominator forms in market. I think, I don't think it's a great advertising channel, frankly.

I think it doesn't work or that it's just low integrity? I don't think it's very high integrity. I think it. What if it's disclosed? Because I think in this case, these are all disclosed. These are all K-Wels who are putting on the Twitter badges for these respective market markets. Disclosing it does elevate it up.

I just think the concept has a slightly, slightly tarnished past and I just... Tom, what's your... Yeah, let's see, Tom. Yeah, I'm the boomer here. No, no, I remember this, right? It was like, well, I feel like specifically it used to be that people would make these tweets, not disclose that they were paid, and insinuate something or post a price target about

a token and get people to buy it. And so there's clearly like, you know, it was financial advice. I think like with kind of the current KOL setup, it's more actually like kind of traditional web two marketing, right, and that I'm sharing. a product, you disclose that you're being paid to, you know, endorse the product, but, like, you don't want to use the product. You don't have to. It's not, like, I'm encouraging you to make an investment or something like that. And I just think, like, the, and there's obviously all this sort of back and forth around what constitutes a disclosure. Do you have to, like, put an actual

disclosure at the bottom. Can you do hashtag ad? You know, a lot of systems have their own, or a lot of social media platforms, their own sort of, like, sponsored content, you know, labeling and badging and things like that. And I think the Twitter sort of affiliate model works decently well, but then you just go around Twitter and you also see all these different accounts that have an affiliate. And it's like, wait, I know this person, they make memes. And now, like, do they work for this company or they're just getting paid by this company? And so, yeah, I don't even know what constitutes as a KOL anymore because I do see people with like a thousand followers and they're like, I'm a, I'm a KOL. I'm like, what? Like, what's, can I be a, can I be a KOL?

I mean, yes, you could, Tom. If you, if you, if you are, you very much more. Cali Qa. Cali or Polymark. If the negative valence, you were at Colchie Carewell. Yeah. So I think I agree with you, Tom, that I think there's a big difference between you are, you are an influencer for a ticker or for a financial asset versus you're an influencer for a product, right?

So for Colchie and for Polymarket, there's nothing you can buy. It's just use the, you know, come on this thing and trade. To me, I think that's definitely totally okay. Same thing that you've got influencers, Hawking Beauty products and, you know, whatever. this kind of thing seems like, okay, this is how advertising is done in the 21st century. So to use an analogy, if someone's like, okay, use my exchange or use that exchange, that's cool. But if they were like buy B&B or base token, bad? Yeah, I would say it's much dicier to be like buy this financial asset than it is to

use this product. And I think like product marketing is the oldest thing in the universe and like having celebrities or influencers or whatever advertised products is his oldest history. So I think that is totally fine unless you're doing it again with subterfuge or it's not disclosed or whatever, then more suss. What about things in the middle? I think it's actually interesting discussion. Okay.

So what's in the middle? Shilling a ticker, bad, shilling a platform, fine. What if it's shilling a specific market? Like, oh, bet on will so and so win this baseball? Right? Like, I think that's fine. I think it's fine. I think that's totally fine. If you were telling people bet alongside me, I'm betting this way, which I can't imagine you would advertise to like bet in this market

without telling them which way you're betting. Like that does seem more dicey because it sort of looks like maybe you're manipulating the market or pushing the market in a certain direction or whatever. Although, you know, with a prediction market, the idea is, I mean, I guess if you're trading in and out of it. Like the whole idea of the prediction market is that it doesn't really matter. Right. The outcome is independent of the market, right? Yeah, it resolves to the correct. outcome. Exactly, exactly. So it's not, it's not like, it's, in a way, it's like more dicey for a token because it is very much the school of fish pushing the price toward something that maybe isn't tied to a fundamental outcome. Whereas a prediction market, like that seems to me the most neutral way that you could do it is because there is just a source of truth, which is, you know, who will win the baseball game or who will win the election? But in a black mirror, like tailwags the dog type scenario, like it is possible. And I think we've talked about this like years ago on the show that the predict.

that the prediction market itself could influence the actual outcome depending on the market. So you might, you know, just use a crazy example right now. You know, we're like a day or two away from the Nobel Prize being awarded. It's possible if like, if everyone's paying attention to a prediction market and the odds of like Trump winning go to like, you know, 99%, it could change the thought process of the actual decision makers and actually skewer the outcome. Just like, and this is a classic example, expectations about Fed movements in rates actually does influence the Fed's decision-making.

If the market is saying it's going to be 50 basis points, it almost always is. And the Fed almost always follows where the market is pricing things, right? Potentially reactionary. To be clear, that's not been true over the last year. Over the last year, like, CME has been terrible at predicting interest rate cuts, right? Yes, but you could see scenarios for the market itself.

You can see scenarios where the market itself does influence the outcome. Yes. I mean, people talk about this with respect to like, I think this is kind of conspiratorial, but like election markets, hey, if you, you know, see the some candidate trading at 90%, that's maybe a little bit of subconsciously voter suppression, like, well, I'm not going to turn out and vote because this person's definitely going to win. I think the thing that maybe we've seen like flavors of this is, um, the market basically turning into a bounty, right? You see this already with like mentioned markets of will this person tweet this thing or, you know, will this person say this thing in the speech? And then it's like, oh, well, you know, I can get compensated for doing that. I don't think we have any, you know, kind of smoking guns of, you know, the person in the market basically taking the other side and then getting, getting paid for it. But, like, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like that in the next year.

You can even imagine with the, you know, the WMBA dildo thing, like someone who wants to, I don't know, commit a crime and get a buck, you know, basically being the other side and get paid for that. Yes, but here's the thing about that story, right? So, like, the co, sort of the multi-causal thing of like, oh, the thing causes this, which causes the outcome to be different. What that should imply, if that's true, let's assume that's true.

Right now, I think it's mostly not true because most people don't use prediction markets at all. So it's a small minority of people who are reading these as opposed to reading, Fox News or New York Times or whatever. But let's assume that we're in a world where everyone's reading the prediction market, right? And that means that if it's ever true,

that, you know, let's say in the next election, J.D. Vance is 99% to win. And you think, oh, well, that's going to lead to voter suppression and people aren't going to vote, and that means J.D. Vance is going to lose. What that means is that, J.D. Vance will never hit 99%. Because the moment the prediction market moves past a certain point,

it can't go to 80. If it goes to 80, 80 is going to cause him to lose the market. And so it equilibriates at like 75, 77, right? Like, you'll never go to 99. Because if it goes at high, people will start selling it because they'll realize like, oh, obviously, it's no longer 99 when the market says it's 99. So it's been overbought, right?

So what that means is that if, like, that happens in real time. It's not like, oh, well, it's 99. and now it's going to cause this and we sit around while the market's still sitting at 99. It will immediately sell down to the point where it's never anywhere near 99. And that causal mechanism doesn't happen. Same thing I think for these mentioned markets, right? So mentioned markets where it's like, oh, well, we'll blah, blah, blah say this in a speech. Will they say the word, you know, I don't know, transgender in a speech?

These kinds of markets will just never get that big. Because if they ever get big enough, they could be in. They immediately start breaking. Yes. I agree with that. I don't think we're going to get, hey, even a few thousand dollars, like for some people, maybe that's sufficiently large bounty. And who knows, you know, these things have not a ton of eyeballs right now.

You know, you get big enough and people tuck in a few bucks. Who knows? Totally. This is not that researched because I'm just going off of what I saw, like, one or two tweets of, like, a few weeks ago. But, like, I think there was some small French market where it was like, can this guy, some influencer, can he go camping in the Sahara Desert and survive 30 days? Like camping in the Sahara Desert?

Or, you know, some ridiculous market that, like, you know, Lord Miles. Yeah. Yes. And some folks on Twitter, you know, dug it up. They're like, oh, he gave up and he placed bets saying that he was going to give up like it's manipulated. And I guess it was like a controllable enough outcome that supposedly some guy who was supposed to be camping the desert shorted himself and like pulled out of the desert camping. Yeah.

So these kinds of markets, especially with this type of behavior. So I don't know how polymarket is going to address stuff like this. certainly at some point they're going to have to, but these kinds of markets will never get that big relative to the big objective markets. You know, when's the government shutdown going to end? Maybe there's, you know, some senators are in a room somewhere and they have some alpha about when the shutdown is going to end. And I think the understanding with those markets is that we're mostly okay with those being

insider traded, right? If the senators in the smoky room are going and betting on the market, then now the rest of the world knows when the government shutdown is going to end. That's futarky. That's like actually sort of what people think is a good thing, which is like, oh, the prediction markets show you the actual odds of things occurring, including all the information that's not public. The world might be better off if we know for sure that the shutdown is going to last like two days and 12 hours more. Exactly. So I think there's like kind of two categories of markets, one where there really is no useful externality.

So like, is this guy going to keep camping in the desert, like kind of who gives a shit other than the people betting on this market? Or maybe his fans. I don't know. maybe they care. But for things like the government shutdown or like, you know, are we going to war with Iran or like when is a peace settlement going to be brokered in Gaza? Like these questions, I want insiders trading. I want whoever knows the most about this market to price it in ASAP.

Yeah. I think Matt Levine has a good kind of bit unlike the SEC's sort of theory of insider trading being around theft, right? Hey, this gain should have gone to other people. And instead one individual is sort of stealing it from people. and that can kind of manifest in different ways. But to your point, this doesn't feel like there's no theft. Like no one is owed some gain on like the accuracy of the market of the government shut down.

And so nothing is being stolen, just information being, you know, it's sharp, basically. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's also just like the balance of the interests of the people in the market and the interest of everybody else outside that market. For the government shutdown, I don't know how much is being bad on that market, but like the interests of people outside that market are way bigger than the people in the market. Whereas for, you know, is this guy going camping in the Sahara Desert, that the interest of the people in the market and the interest of people outside the market is just nobody outside the market cares. So I think in a way, I just have a very different intuition morally about if an insider or somebody with control over the outcome is trading, how should we feel about that as a category.

I think that's how I draw that line between those two. But coming back to this KOL thing, the KOL wars. So we're seeing right now, Kalshi is really going on the offensive. in hiring a lot of crypto KOLs to be team KALS. So they, of course, hired John Wang, who is a big prediction market influencer. They recently brought on ICO Beast. They've also brought on a lot of sports influencers because now overwhelming majority of KOLSI's volume is sports betting.

And there's a lot of talk now about, oh, is like every KOL and crypto going to be drafted into the polymarket Kalshi wars? Tom, you're giving your closeness to the Kalshi team in what colorful history you have with them. Yeah. Yeah, you are obviously the prediction market influencer. Where are you going?

Well, I mean, I feel like it's an open secret now that Cal she's, you know, imminently going to launch a crypto product to compete head-la-head with with Polymarket. And so I think it's sort of interesting, like I kind of competent, I guess crypto exchanges where you have, you know, these big sort of non-U.S. exchanges now looking to enter the U.S. I don't think we've seen, you know, a ton of U.S. exchanges have a ton of success internationally. I mean, it's, you know, coin-based international.

But who knows, maybe, you know, prediction markets will play. play out kind of differently. But I also find it interesting that they also see crypto as like this, you know, very huge treasure to kind of go after. And it's like worth fighting for. And I think certainly Polymarket, you could say it's a crypto product. But by and large, I think it's actually like not a crypto product. Like it has a dedicated crypto fan base. But like, you know, most of people I think who know about it often don't even know that it's a crypto product under the hood that it's, that is on chain. Like, you know, it's cited on the news and it's a mainstream topic. So I'll be kind of curious to see how it plays out on both sides, I guess, going, both teams kind of going

in the opposite direction. So what do you guys think about the sports betting side? So now Kalshi, we can see the vast majority of their volume is sports betting. Of course, a lot of that is coming in through their Robin Hood integration. So sports betting in the U.S., enormous market, obviously very, very profitable. Interestingly, so when the polymarket deal was announced that they were taking strategic investment from ICE, I think Draft Kings and Fandul, like their stocks, like just lag down like 5%. So clearly they're very afraid of competition on the sports betting side. Kulshy's regulated U.S. business doing a ton of volume on sports betting.

And apparently now the sports betting lobby is very upset about this because what they see this is a runaround, sports betting laws. And from Kulch's, like, well, no, this is not sports betting. This is a prediction market. We're just making predictions different from sports betting. But if you look on Kalsh, they also have what just straightforwardly you would think of as parley. So a parlay is, you know, normally you would just bet on, okay, is this guy going to

or is that guy going to win? A parlay is like a, almost you think of it as like leverage where you're betting on multiple things at the same time. So it's like, are these three teams all going to win their matches today? And if it pays out, it pays out really big. But, you know, the absolute likelihood is low. So they even have parlayes effectively by just like stapling together, you know, will A, B, and C all win their games today?

What do you guys think happens here on the prediction market side and with respect to sports betting? Do you guys have a view? Here's my extremely macro, like 200,000 foot view of prediction markets in general and what they're good for and what they're bad for. What they're good for is what traditional futures markets and derivative markets are bad at. And like, I don't know the exact game plan between ice and polymarket, but I actually see them being an incredible compliment because traditional markets are good at evergreen markets. You know, you want S&P futures every single month going. for the next hundred years. It's never going to change. You always want S&P futures, right? Prediction markets are incredible at disposable markets, things that are happening and then they're

done and then they go away. And they might not be around for that long, right? There's like how many baseball games, there's how many boxing matches, there's how many soccer games, there's how many crazy political events, there's how many, whatever. It's like all these things that are like slightly different, they're here and then they're gone forever. And you really can't anticipate all these things. You need a dynamic system of like user generated content that's like the long talent, infinitely large. And what prediction markets are great at are things that like will come and go. And you might have hundreds of thousands of these events that people want to speculate or hedge them. And I think they're phenomenal at sports, right? I think as prediction markets grow, like sports are

like perfect for like disposable events that come and go and no one's going to. think about again. And it's, you know, you don't always need like, you know, Cincinnati Reds versus, you know, the Yankees. That's not a thing that happens every week. It's the thing that happens once or maybe once a year, right? And so prediction markets awesome for sports. Prediction markets, honestly, it could be awesome for finance, like things that don't need evergreen things. It's like, oh, like, you know, what are Google's earnings going to be? You know, bet specifically on their earnings, not the impact of the stock price, but like the earnings themselves. Do they beat? Do they like not beat? There's a lot of things that like come and go that

prediction markets are just a really good fit for, right? And so I think prediction markets are going to find a home in all of them. And we'll complement the evergreen like always on markets that like should never go away. There should always be liquidity. It should always like be there where it should roll. And you know, I think they will eat sports gambling over time. I think they will eat a lot of like financial speculation and hedging over time. And I think they'll find their way into all of these crevices because, like, at the end of the day, if you can build a framework for users to generate the content of markets, the users, like, will be able to generate everything that needs to be speculated or hedged on, you know,

even if it's only around for days. Like, oh, like, you know, there's a ship stuck in the Suez Canal. Like, that's extremely important from a macro perspective to a lot of people. And like everyone's talking about it. Like you need the market to be spun up right now. And then like it goes away in two days when the problem's over. And so it's hard to predict like how far this long tail goes. But I think it like covers everything in an era of like AI and automated trading and 24

7 in robotics. Like you want there to be like somewhat infinite long tail. Even if it's an infinite long tail of tiny markets, you're going to see this like extreme growth of prediction markets. that's very well said well terran has just risen from the grave who could have predicted that against all us I know unbelievable I am very sorry

my uh my jet lag really got to me I like slept through my arms you were sleeping that's your yeah yeah I'm late I think my I don't know what time zone my body thinks I'm in so sorry okay are you in Eastern all right I mean I am physically in Eastern time zone right now but my body

mentally is like somewhere else. Okay. All right. Well, just in time for you, Turun, we're going to be moving over to Asia.

So there's a B&B renaissance going on right now that may have just recently ended a little bit unclear. But for those of you who are following at home, there was a big B&B bull run that seems to have coincided

with the rise of Aster. Astor, of course, is the PIRP Dex Challenger that's doing insane amounts of volume. Right now the number one perp Dex by volume. And with the rise of Astor, seemed to have also arisen this gigantic neem coin run on B&B chain.

B&B alongside it had a huge run-up, hit an all-time high of 1250. So you remember B&B way way back in the day, was at like 50 cents, one of the best performing assets in history, blew through its position now in the top five. And CZ himself was personally getting much more active on Twitter pumping the B&B ecosystem. And so we saw Binance B&B chain briefly overtake for the top chain by Dex volume, did $6 billion in 24-hour volume on chain, most of which

was facilitated by pancake swap, a lot of which was meme coins. And then, as all these crazy meme coin B&B chain tokens were running up, all of a sudden yesterday, it all came crumbling down. I believe it started with CZ tweeting that, hey, just so you know, tweets are in endorsements. This seems to have spooked the market for some reason. And within 12 hours, most BATTS B&B meme coins were down 90 plus percent. Just a complete pancaking of the B&B chain ecosystem. It's now the case that most of these meme coins dropped 90 plus percent. The top coin was a Chinese, a coin of four Chinese characters, which translates to

Binance Life. That token was down like 95%. And apparently 94% of traders who had bridged into B&B chain from Solana are now down and now setting on losses. So many of those people looking at their wounds have come back. B&B chain has retraced a bit. Volumes in B&B chain are down quite a lot. So we had this B&B chain super cycle that lasted about two days.

Any thoughts and experiences? I assume you guys were not in the B&B chain trenches. I don't follow B&B chain closely. You don't follow B&B chain. I should maybe. Tarun, tell us about your experiences in the B&B chain trenches. I just saw a lot of group chats where everyone was like Google translating Chinese characters and text.

and being like, I'm an expert on this random B&B coin. And then 10 hours later, tons of memes about why did I trade based on Google Translate? So that was my entire experience with this. It was just like, obviously because I'm reading these at weird times flying back. So I like, I didn't have great plain internet. So I like read something. And it was like, everyone loves B&B. And then by the time I landed, everyone was in horror at their investment decisions.

investment decision. Tom, any reflections on the B&B trenches? I mean, I just think the whole, like, image of it is quite funny. People, you know, bridge in from Solana to go trade a bunch of Chinese name tickers. And then, like, three days later, they lose all their money and they bridge out. And I was like, I tweeted out that they, in like the diff log for the finance API, they added support for Chinese characters for perks because they launched perps for some of these. And like, that was basically the top.

And then after that, like, all the, you know, all the coins just crashed. I don't know, it's just kind of a beautiful little story when you zoom out. You know, it's like a very fracas 72 hours. Yeah, it's a little bit like that, what is it like never invade Poland in the winter or something like that. It's like, I feel like every time people try to like create this big narrative around, okay, be a B chain memes. It always lasts like three days and then it all comes crashing down again. And people just don't seem to learn the lesson because I remember there wasn't there this thing about like broccoli, CZ's dog and there was all this stuff that happened. I think it was last year.

and it all similarly seemed like a flash in the pan. I don't know why talking about this like L2 founder dog coin and like chain founder dog coin narrative. It just makes me feel so old. I'm like that was only a year ago. It feels like that was like so many seasons of air drops ago that I can't even count. Time just has flowed in some way I don't understand.

I think that might be more of a Tarun thing that you're just, I assume that's why you're perpetually late to all of our podcasts because your time for you is just a river in which you're slowly waiting through. There you go. That's it. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. All right. Well, if there's no more reflections on the B&B micro wars. Well, actually, didn't it happen right after Aster was like delisted from DeFaeloma? I did think that was kind of funny. It was like Aster DLISD. It wasn't right after, but it was also part of the storyline.

So maybe also worth bringing that up. So Aster, of course, the B&B chain affiliated PIRP decks. So Aster, it was posted by ZeroX and GMI, who is the founder of Defi Lama, that Aster perps seem to have extremely tight correlations with Binance volumes, which doesn't make sense it like Binance the exchange, not BNB chain, finance the exchange. Its volumes and Aster's reported volumes seem to be almost one for one, which nobody really understands what that could possibly mean. Is Aster claiming that their volumes are actually Binance volumes? Is Binance claiming that they're running their perps through Aster? Is it that people are hedging on Aster, the positions they enter on by? How could you possibly explain this?

No response from Binance about what exactly is supposed to be. And in response to that, Defylama just delisted Aster. Now, people say delisted, it's not an exchange. It's not like people are trading Aster on DeFi Lama. It's a data aggregator. And so it's no longer on their data aggregator. but it's the leaderboard that most people look to to understand how much volume

is each of these perpetual swaps exchange is doing. So they delisted Aster and the thing is Aster is also unclear what's on chain, what's off chain, what's actually getting, what's actually settled on chain. So everything right now with Aster very, very unclear and there hasn't been

a lot of disclosure as of this moment. So that happened, I think, a few days before. I think the whole B&B chain run up happened after the Aster delisted. from defile lava. So I don't think it was causal. I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think in a way, people were like,

at least the people who are farming this are like, fuck yeah, CZ's the man. Like, you know, you can just do what you want. So there is a little bit of like, you know, you can just do things by from the whole B&B chain run up. Yeah, I do also find it like one of the kind of, there was this whole sort of discussion around like, you know, hyperliquid being kind of a lit order book.

and then that being bad with the whole James Wynn thing, and then CZ chiming in saying, oh, it should be private. And then part of the DeFi Lama delisting was like, well, we can't actually see who's making or taking the orders because it's private, so we don't know if it's washing or not. So it's like, you know, kind of somewhat poetic and that like the privacy is also the thing that is maybe getting the data removed. Maybe a little too private.

Yeah, maybe a little too private. But that being said, like clearly their TVL is very large. That's not, you can't fake TVL. They're a very, very large TVL. I think last I saw before the delisting it was like something like five billion so the tvL got very significant but of course it looks very much like this thing is being farmed and if you hear just people on Twitter talking about it they're like yeah this thing is being farmed to hell so and the fact they're incentivizing volume which generally most perp dexes are a little more mindful about hey if you

incentivize volume you're just getting a lot of watch trading this is not really organic activity okay let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the other super cycle going on crypto, which is the privacy super cycle. So it seems like privacy is now on meta. There was some very large tweets that we mentioned in our previous show that were from Mert and Naval that seemed to have, and then later from Arthur Hayes, that seemed to have kicked off a Zcash crazy bull run. So Zcash was sitting somewhere around 30, 40 bucks, maybe just six months ago.

It's now sitting at 170. So it has had an enormous rally over this week. Privacy coins in general have all been rallying. And there's a lot of talk from people of like, hey, it's the comeback of the cypherpunk movement. Privacy is, you know, this eternal meta. I think the tweet from Naval was Bitcoin is insurance against Fiat. Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin. There's a lot of excitement right now around privacy.

Curious for you guys, how do you guys read this privacy meta? You know, the markets have been a little bit sluggish the last couple days. Zcash is up again, another like 20% in the last day. So in a sea of red, privacy seems to be the standout. How are you guys reading this moment? It's always hard to say why is something popping off now. I mean, Zcatch was one of the first coins I ever bought like in 2017 or like earlier, right? Like the Seacatch has been around for a really long time.

It's not like, you know, their roadmap suddenly changed, you know, it's not like there's any like fundamental like, oh my goodness, this thing is worth like six times what it was, you know. So what the Zcash people are saying is that the phase shift is two things. one, Zashi, which is the new Zcash wallet, which is much more usable than like previous Zcash wallets. Previous Zcash wallets were absolute dog shit, like extremely unusable. No consumers would possibly touch them. So Zashi is actually a pretty good U.S.

And then NIR intense. So NIR has this intense protocol that allows you to basically interact with any chain using and trade on any chain using a single wallet that's like abstracted over multiple chains. And apparently this is how a lot of people are interacting with ZEC now. is actually not through Zashi, but through near intense. So that is the story that feels like rearview mirror justification for the fact that a coin has gone up massively, like massively. And this is crypto, right?

Like certain assets accumulate prices, like incredibly rapidly. There's a crowd effect here. Like I remember like the conversation on Ccash has been going up as like, you know, has been running up and more and more people like, oh my God, like I've got to chase this momentum. So like, this is not a market where fundamentals are the only explanations. There's just a lot of capital flows moving into assets and trying to chase whatever narrative sort of exists. Robert doesn't believe. I don't believe. Robert says this flows. Robert says flows. True, you got to take Zcash Supercycle? I think I think Zcash is probably one of the reasons

I ended up being full time in this industry is like I feel like they really pulled off something. people didn't really think was true. You know, I feel like you can go to Bitcoin talk posts from 2010 to 2013, where Satoshi talks about ZK proofs, but doesn't believe that's possible to ever get them into a blockchain. And then zero coin and, you know, Aaron Trauma and stuff kind of somehow pulled the rabbit out of the hat. And that sort of created the entire ZK ecosystem, I guess, in crypto, right? So, so, like, I think it brought, like, for a lot of.

a lot of us, we have this kind of special, warm place in our heart for Zcash. And, you know, I think it's also interesting because, like, there's a lot of people who hate Zcash because they're like, oh, it has transparent mode, so it's fake privacy, whatever. But I think, like, they've done a lot for the space in general. That being said, I mean, this... That being said. That doesn't seem like exactly organic, right? Like, the near intense stuff I could I've done six months ago. And, Zashi,

it is better UX for sure. Like, I don't have to wait seven minutes to send a S-to-T or T-DAS transaction, let alone S-TAS. Is that enough to justify this? No, I mean,

this feels like a, you know, this feels like a KOL B&B pump. Like this, and look, Z-Cash deserves that. K-L-B-N-B-B-Pum. Z-Cash deserves that.

They've created much more, many, that's in this space extract much more value than they provide in terms of the technology they write in terms of the things that build upon them. And you definitely cannot say that for Zcatch, right? Like tons of stuff like literally relies on a lot of design decisions they made and improvements upon it that have been made. So look, I'm, I'm hoping I'm happy for all the Zcash people still hold them out. So if I can summarize, you don't believe either, but they deserve it. That's the, that's the turn and take. Yeah. And I do. I,

will say I love the copy trades that are going on, like rail gun going up like 5,500% or whatever. I agree. That's the best part of this narrative. The copy trades are the funniest thing here. Yeah. I also people that about Starknet and like, oh, it's like privacy. I mean, I agree this. It feels people want to sort of look back and find some sort of cause post hoc.

You want to believe. Like everyone does have a soft spot for Zcash, you know. Yeah. But it's like, you know, okay, you look at intense and it's like not. that much Z-KKKK. And it's not even, like, listed really on many big exchanges. Like Krakken is, like, one of the few big ones. I may the only big ones that still has Z-cash. But I do wonder if there's like a kind of collective, subconscious kind of thing going on because there's also, like, the EF put out this, like this privacy cluster announcement on Monday about all these new privacy

initiatives that they're funding. And I'm like, okay, clearly this was in the works for a while. It's not like they scrambled to put this together a week after Z-Cash started pumping. And so it's just funny me, like maybe there's also, there's like a, a, hunger deep down, all of us for some new meta that we can go and, you know, invest into trade and people are like, privacy. That's a good one. Let's bring it back. This is like a meta that has like philosophical justifications from like the early days

of crypto. Yeah, you think the hunger is for the meta, not the hunger for privacy. We spent, we spent multiple years basically saying privacy is useless and meme coins are better than privacy, right? So it's like, there is this like feel good element to the old people in crypto. Like, and then also the fact that there is sort of, there are some, like, there are some, like people who are not over 30 shillings e-cash is like the most bullish thing for them that could ever happen because it's like it is kind of a boomer coin right it's almost 10 year anniversary

i think it's next year so it's like it is an old coin and so like having you people who are younger and newer to crypto really shilling it is i don't know that that's hard dinok coins like it's hard to 10 years later find new community so i think it's because they have to like they're solving a problem that's about a fundamental human right not like walls entertainment i yeah so it it wasn't that long ago that we were all talking about roman storm and the tornado cash case so privacy like if anything it does feel like a very delayed reaction to a lot of the anger and frustration and the backlash that that you know we were we were really seeing in the community just, you know, three, four months ago

when the Trinidad Cash case was ongoing. I think I agree with you guys. Also Zcash, one of the first coins that I bought. Also, everybody I know who's been an OG in the space has a soft spot for Zcash, and they did invent so much that the industry has later built upon. At the same time, I don't even know

if I called a dino coin. When I think dino coins, I think like Iota or, you know, Doge. Doge. No, but Zcash might be older than Iota. Yeah, yeah, totally. I think it's older than I'm sure. No, no, no, it's definitely older, but I think of it like Zcash, I think of it as a

cypherpunk coin, right? Yeah, 100%. The old guard of like the true bitcoinsers and the people who like descended from that set of values, which is really quite different in like the phylogenetic tree of crypto from a lot of the other dino coins, right? Like when I think dino coins, I sort of think like this existed in a previous cycle and retail woke up and like remembered like, oh yeah, I remember crypto. I'm going to go buy some stellar.

Like that's where I think of when I think dino coin. Or actually, yeah, like nobody was buying Zcash back then. Wait, wait a minute. I oftentimes reference my friend on this show who is like a XRP bar owner.

And he sold a large stack of his XRP to buy Zcash in this rally. So I think the interesting thing about this is this rally is about both the high brow and the low brow. You know, it's like the XRP rotators. selling their XRP to buy Zcash. And then the KOL led,

Naval and Mert led KOL storm. So I think it's like kind of the barbell, the barbell bull market. Totally. That must be true because I've always believed fundamentally that cypherpunks don't have money. Like if you're targeting cypherpunks, they're not going to be able to make the coin move.

They're not going to buy this thing in size because they just don't have money. They have a lot of anger, but they're not the ones that are setting prices at the margin. So it does seem like all of a sudden, retail's gotten activated. There's this bigger narrative that has momentum. And momentum is everything in crypto, as we all know. So TBD, where this is going to land in six months. If you look at the chart of transaction activity on Zcash, I was just looking at this yesterday,

it's basically like sort of, it's kind of like flatlined over time. If you look over the last six months, it's not much. and then all of a sudden, like four days ago, boom, not to all time highs, but we're near all time highs, but like a solid level, and then it's like elevated now. It's significantly less than Minero.

Manero, of course, is the most used privacy coin, and Monero still doing more volume than Zcash in terms of transactions that are transaction count that's taking place on chain. But these rebrandings can often be really sticky. There's like a, there's like, price levels almost are self-justifying in crypto.

It's a, like once something moves to a certain price level, just like, well, I guess that's where it's supposed to be. So I can, I can kind of see Zcash making a new home where it is. But right now, the momentum, like the volatility in Zcatch is so high that really hard to know where it's going to go. So I could see this thing going to like, you know, 300 and just blasting through stuff because the other thing is that it's such an old coin that a lot of people have just forgotten about it. A lot of people will hold it or just like, oh, it's there. So there's not that much trading hands any given day, which just means that it's easier to move the asset than something that. something like Doge is just so widely circulated and there's so much market cap,

it's very difficult to move the price. I would go as far to say as the marginal new user in crypto since 2022, would the probability of them knowing what Zcash was was like less than 1% for like net new users. Because yeah, yeah. Honestly, I would argue the MERT effect of this is probably more important almost than the Naval effect because all the all the kind of new Solana users from 2022. Likely didn't know what Zcash is. And I think his advocacy probably brought it to the attention of the gambling part of the world.

More so. So to them, it's a new coin. Yeah, exactly. When is he getting his Zcash affiliate badge, you know, and that's, that's really one of that's really want to know. No, he's definitely, definitely clearly the chief KOL for Zcash in my mind. I am now a Zcash KOL. I've gotten tagged in a bunch of these tweets because I did this interview with Gen Zcash, which is like their Gen Z marketing arm.

And now I'm getting like these Korean influencers who are tagging me of like Hasif is part of the Zcash. Like I didn't do anything. I didn't say anything about Zcash. I was just like, yeah, that's cool. You're hosting a whole podcast about Zcatch. Yeah. Did we just spend like now.

Now we are Zcash influencers. Well, but you guys are shitting on it. You guys are like, oh, I don't think it's going to survive. I'm not shitting on. I literally gave a fucking diatribe about how it like is a philosophically important. It was a philosophically important coin. We know my Zcatch. And they thought it's not going to be sustainable.

I heard you guys and I summarize your points. All right, all right. If you say so. Well, look, I believe. I'm a believer. You guys said you don't believe? I believe. I believe Zcash.

Look, if 50% of the Z coin Zcash rise is from like people rotating out of meme coins, is that like a bad thing? Obviously not. It's a good rotation of that capital. Hopefully. Yeah, yeah. In the sense that, yeah. Well, now apparently people rotating out of B&B chain into Zcash.

So all right. One more story that we want to run through is that apparently now, BlockFi has come back to life. So there's a new product launched by Galaxy, the public company today run by Mike Novogratz, called Galaxy One. So Galaxy One is being run by, it's basically a retail facing finance app. No relation to coin this one. So Galaxy One is going to be launched as the retail facing finance app. launched by Galaxy. Galaxy historically has been an institutional business, but this is their first, as far as I know, consumer product. Now, Galaxy One is going to offer 4% APY, FDIC insured up to 250K,

8% premium yield only for accrediteds, 1 million dollar cap per investor. So obviously this is not sustainable. You can't just go park your corporate treasury into Galaxy 1 and get 8%. That is not FDACC insured. They've got a bunch of assets. You can buy, deposits enabled it or whatever, brokerage, zero commission trading. They got a lot of stuff. So it's like a fully fledged finance app. The interesting thing about it is that this is being run by one of their recent talent acquisitions, Zach Prince. You might remember Zach Prince because Zach Prince was the founder of BlockFi, which very famously ended in infamy with a explosion because they went bankrupt. They were very briefly rescued by FTX. Turns out they were being rescued by somebody who themselves needed to get rescued.

It was a mess. So, no, they all fell into the ocean alongside the Titanic. So this, there's gotten a lot of interesting eyebrow rays of like, oh, this is kind of BlockFi-esque of 8% yield on cash. That doesn't sound like that could make money. But, of course, it's a acquisition strategy to bring in customers, not uncommon. So Galaxy 1, it's a different universe today. So I want to be clear we're not implying in any way that, you know,

that it's going to suffer the same fate. And obviously, having a $15 billion public company behind you puts you in a very different financial position than what BlockFi was way back in the day. And I'm assuming that their loans are probably not two, three euros. So thoughts, Galaxy One? Well, all I'll say is, you know, you love to see it and you hate to see it. You love to see a second chance and a comeback story. It is cinema to watch Zach Prentz reboot BlockFi from within Galaxy. When he joined them, I don't know what, like a year ago, I was like generally curious.

I was like, what is he going to do with Galaxy? I was like, and I'll be honest, it was not on my bingo card. I actually did not expect the answer was going to be he's going to bring back BlockFi. I actually thought it was going to be something totally different, frankly. But I love a comeback story. I love to see second chances. I definitely hope that it ends differently than BlockFi for Galaxy's sake and for everybody's sake.

I think there have been a lot of lessons learned. I mean, you know, that was such an insane moment of time. Yes, there was a bunch of dominoes. But at the end of the day, Blackfai blew up because their largest customers, three hours capital. It was the largest customer of all the lending desks. Everybody made a really bad decision to make massive loans. It was so tragic about that story was that first,

it was three arrows, then it was FTX. So they had two borrowers who just defaulted. But Zach got burned lending the majority of the money to three arrows capital, which was not a trustworthy borrower. There was extreme concentration risk. The whole thing went sideways and it ended terribly. It was horrible risk management, frankly, right? But you suffer a problem when there's a lot of retail and they're like pumping money

and you have to put it somewhere to earn that return. And like the biggest borrower was three arrows and they borrowed from everybody and they burned everybody, right? Because they were doing dangerous stuff with that money. It was just an inverse waterfall of risk. They got riskier and riskier and riskier and riskier. Hopefully a lot of lessons have been learned. Hopefully there's better risk management. But at the end of the day, I haven't seen additional transparency into the product, the balance sheet, the composition of it. Block 5 was notorious for no one really knowing what was going on under the hood. I used to critique all the time, C-Fi lending relative to D-Fi lending,

Defi having radical transparency in real-time 24-7, and C-Fi having absolutely no transparency. And that lack of transparency is what blew up the entire system last time. And I hope to see improvements made there. If no one has really relearned the lessons and we're all just like, well, galaxy seems more responsible than everyone else who's come before them. I mean, Genesis seemed responsible. You don't think being a public company is going to solve some of those issues just default?

I hope so. I think hopefully there's enough scar tissue there, and enough lessons have been learned. But if mechanically the product looks and works the same way and we still don't really know what's behind it, right? How do we know if it's not another giant three arrows capital? Like lurking in the darkness, borrowing all the money and all this smooth until one day something blows up and it just spirals out of control. So I just hope that the lessons have been learned. I hope they can calibrate for that. The only true difference I've seen, and this is, I guess, risk management, I'll throw quotes in a question mark on this, is that there's a 60-day redemption period to withdraw from the product.

So if you give them your money, you can't immediately demand it back. You have to wait 60 days. And in some ways, maybe that does sort of prevent, you know, what happened in the actual death throws of block five, the 11th hour when things were really collapsing. was like the problem is, you know, people ask for their money back and they didn't have it. So it's possible gating the liquidity does make it a little bit more defensive. But we'll see. I wish them the best. If your counterparty is three arrows, 60 days is not going to save you.

Right. Yeah. The loans are dead. Yeah. That being said, today, I mean, so I don't know this market terribly well, but today, the prevailing source of Bitcoin yield, isn't it like farming? Isn't it like, you know, BTC, and like Babylon and all this stuff.

There's that. There's also, you might know this better than I do. There's also Bitcoin basis, which is like the same as it's always been. It's like, you know, you can essentially lend cash by buying Bitcoin,

selling Bitcoin futures, you know, whether through perks or futures and earn like 6%. So like the crypto risk free rate is like closer to 6%. I'm sure the unsecured rate that they're lending and will lend more into is probably higher by like 10%,

12%. 14% or something, but like the risk-free rating crypto is like 6% right now. Makes sense. Turun, how do you, obviously with the stuff you guys do as a rangers or gauntlet and Morpho, you guys are very plugged into the Bitcoin yield market. How do you think that the yield market has changed compared to what it was like in the three arrows days? Yeah, I mean, I will say like a lot more of the lending facilities overall are on chain.

Like I don't think the centralized lending has come back to anywhere near the same. size that it was. I actually think it's like funny. We're talking about three arrows and DCG, whatever the, I don't know why I'm like Genesis. Genesis. On the day that like TradFi is basically learning that a lot of

private credit had about the same level of diligence as people did on three arrows. Oh, great story. This current story of like this huge loss and where $2.3 billion is unaccounted for and no one knows where it went. So anyway, Great articles in that.

Yes. First brands type of stuff. So I think it's actually kind of interesting whenever you see like the same types of lessons learned again. And it always just shows up whenever there's sort of like an asset bubble of some form. But I think like people are much more comfortable using on-train lending than they were then even to the point of like just looking at the size, looking at the fact that the centralized exchanges aren't even offering competitive rates anymore. So I think that part is different. although I'm sure like if you really want a large size fixed rate loan you were probably giving a galaxy or some prime anyway you weren't so like I think then the difference I guess is like

galaxy has been sort of doing this more than blockfi ever was to some extent so yeah I don't I don't totally understand the borrow side of this but I actually imagine a non-trivial portion of that eight percentage of syndicating on chain and you can get close to that anyway so That part is actually, 8% doesn't sound so crazy. Like if they were like promising over 10 fixed, then I'm a little more dubious. But 8 actually on chain right now is pretty relatively simple to do. But we don't know if they're doing this on chain. We don't know.

We don't. We don't, to be fair, I'm just saying. I do think it's possible to make that product that way. I would say the thing that is a little bit funny to me about this is like, why is the product named the same as like a bunch of other things? Like a lot of fintechs have this like X1 type of thing. Like Robert made mentioned to Coinbase 1. There's like a bunch of other things that are like these like subscription plans and fintechs.

Like I just don't get the naming because honestly it kind of confusing to me. Like Galaxy 1 also sounds like a phone. Yeah, it sounds like a phone or like a spaceship. Right? It doesn't really, it doesn't really sound like a bank product. And so the name is the part that I'm just a little like. like I feel like it should be galaxy urn galaxy land oh no no I I think a lot of people GFI should be GFI GFI GFI would be a great name actually GFI would be good

I feel like there's lots of memes to make there all right hit up Robert if you're doing a rebrand galaxy yeah yeah I like that yeah I guess like I the only thing I would add to this at the end is just like I just don't see the same borrowing, unsecured borrowing ecosystem in crypto. Like people still have a lot of scars from that in general in a way that I think people like... Agreed. Yeah. But the onshan stuff is coming back. Maple and Wildcat and like we are seeing a resurgence of unsecured borrowing, right?

Like we are. It's true. It's true. People are forgetting the lessons of the last time. Yeah. I may be more optimistic though, like, hey, we actually have good, you know, better risk management controls in place. I mean, I will also be very curious to see how this does versus Coinbase's lending product, which is all on chain, right? I think they kind of got some flack on Twitter when they announced their own lending products. They're like, because they, you know, sort of led with this earn up to 10.8% or whatever. And people are like, oh, this is black file over again. But it's like, no, no, no. They're just taking your UCC. They're putting into morpho. You're not guaranteed 10%. you're getting whatever the market rate is, but like, ultimately it's just sort of this like, you know, defy mullet. They're sending your money into like a contract and it's, it's secured. And so obviously they've seen crazy growth on the lending side,

on the borough side, rather, we'll be curious to see how the consumer lending product does. But it'll be kind of a cool case study of like, hey, can you actually get something, you know, really big just using defy rails or is, you know, kind of the centralized version still going to, you know, be able to win out. Yeah. Very good. Okay. Well, I think we're up, on time, so we got to wrap things there. But thank you, everybody, and we will be back next week. Thanks, everybody.

You all.