Unchained - The Chopping Block: Why ETH Dumped So Hard After the Merge - Ep. 400

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry.    Show topics: Why the ETH price slumped after the Merge even though it was successful Whether the BTC security model is flawed and why Robert thinks Bitcoin will change Why Tarun thinks Bitcoin won’t change and why he’s bearish on Bitcoin development Whether the Lightning Network can succeed with so many competitors getting better more quickly ETHPoW’s performance after the Merge, whether it’s dead and why Robert wouldn’t rule out the PoW fork Why Haseeb thinks the criminalization of the collapse of Terra is a bad precedent The broader impacts of the Terra meltdown and whether Do Kwon not disclosing the fact that he had been involved with Basis Cash, which failed, is problematic The House’s draft bill on stablecoins and whether it is necessary to study algo stablecoins What happened with the Wintermute hack  Why Tarun thinks the Wintermute team is incompetent  Whether there is any positive news in crypto lately Who would be a better pick for deploying treasury funds between Three Arrows Capital and Wintermute What Haseeb, Tom, Robert and Tarun are excited about  Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Robert Leshner, founder of Compound  Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital Episode Links   Post Merge ETHPoW ETH issuance   Do Kwon and Terra Red Notice “Not on the run” Kwon’s Passport   Wintermute hack   House’s Draft Bill on Stablecoins Bloomberg’s Article Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed the trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Okay. Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So this is also, I just want to announce, the 400th show of Unchained. And yeah, it's amazing. We're very excited.

We're actually, we're officially taking over Unchained in celebration of the 400th episode. So every episode from now on is only going to be the chopping block. So we're just going to be doing this three times a week. So look out for that. All right. Team intros real quick. So first we got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Next up we've got Robert, the Cryptoconisour, and Captain of Compound.

Then we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba, and Gauntlet. And then you have myself, I'm a sieve, I'm the head-hyped man to drive and fly. So the four of us are early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. So, guys, it has been a pretty down bad kind of week. The main news of the week has been the merge. We were talking about it pretty much nonstop for every show for the last, like two months. And the merge happened.

It went off basically without a hitch, as good as one could have expected. And in my mind, like the outcomes, the, decision tree when the merge happened was either, okay, one, the merch fails, in which case everything's going to dump, or two, the merge succeeds and either rallies and everything's great and we're all happy, or path three, the merge succeeds, but it was priced in and nothing happens. Instead, what happened is that the merge succeeded and everything just proceeded to turbo dump and ETH is now in the shitter. I only have one word for you.

Taxes. Taxes? Wait, September 15th? Why September 15th? It's like October. So everyone is selling their crypto. People are selling anticipation of taxes. Yeah, yeah.

Here's the long and short of it. So everybody made a ton of money last year. The market was up. Everybody was like churning crypto, buying it, selling it. Everybody filed extensions, which are due soon. And people are just now realizing how much money they made last year and how much lower their crypto is relative to last year. But hold on, but why would this affect?

No, no, no. Why would this affect ether more than Bitcoin? That doesn't make any sense. It's impacting everything. Yeah, it seemsingly uniformly across the world. I think the ETH thing may have been that like more people are speculating for the merge. But then like once it was a nothing burger, it was like a nothing burger in a good way. Sorry, I don't mean that.

I'm not trying to say like nothing and like there was no excitement, right? ETHW died immediately, basically. So I guess like that part, people were hoping to probably make some carry on for whatever little time that trade existed. And then like, now they're like, oh, shit, we need to pay taxes. The best explanation I heard was basically people were long, ETH spot to get the air drop, short perps, and then just there's a ton of, you know, spot selling post-merge. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of why you're seeing that in the market.

But wouldn't that be offset by buying in the price? Perps? Yeah. And also, like, ETH Powell was so small. Like, it was price at like 1%. So what the hell of people were doing? It was a terrible air drop, but like a lot of people were putting on the trade, right?

Like, I mean, you see that in the funding rates and everything. So, I mean, the argument is like, ETH is less, spot is less liquid than perps. And so that's why it's just like, you see more cell pressure now. And it's like so immediate because no one actually wants the ETH after that. It seems like this trade just became so overcrowded that it no longer made any sense, right? Because like, you're getting presumably.

you're getting 1%. That's what this thing was being priced at in the IOUs. So you're taking this crazy funding rates. You're taking all this risk just for 1%. And then you have to get out of your trade, by which point, you know, Eth has already started dumping. So it seems that in aggregate, this was a massively, massively overdone trade that. But that happens a lot in general. Right. It was just such an obvious trade. It's so easy to explain why this trade makes sense. And there was all the story about moving to the upside. It's really unfortunate because I feel like Ethereum didn't really get a true celebration because basically the day after it got kicked in the teeth. It feels really sad.

That being said, I do think Ethereum deserves a lot of credit because the merge was completely correct. It was a non-event in a great way. The blockchain is running smooth ever since. The inflation rate is like half a percent a year at this point, like in the days since. you know, the block speed is 12 seconds. It's like Ethereum is better than it was a week ago. And I think it deserves a lot of kudos. Minus the deflation didn't happen component.

Yes, the argument for deflation. Yeah, for a minute there, people were pretty thrilled. But it's still materially less than it was, right? Like, that's sort of the counterargument. Well, it's also material less than Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is like between 1% and 2% inflation. So ether is now more disinflationary than Bitcoin is, which is pretty, very impressive. Yeah, very true.

I mean, clearly, like, if you, there was a, there was a chart that I can't, I mean, there's been like 20 of these charts of showing at the, at the rate at which fees are being paid and burned through EIP 1559, if the merge had been activated at different times, what would be the net inflation rate or deflation rate in Ethereum? And there are clearly a bunch of times over the last cycle that you would have been, net net deflationary. Now, right now, we're at the bottom of that cycle. Gas fees are super low on a relative basis.

And so, yeah, the ether is not going to be deflationary right now. But if we see another cycle coming to play, then very likely that ethel will go through periods of deflation. We just need more on-chain activity to get people revving up and paying high gas prices. Then it's deflationary again. And the world is right. Yeah. It's going to take Bitcoin a while to catch up, right?

It's going to be like 10 years, basically, until Bitcoin is at the level that Ether is at now, even assuming no net deflation. Yeah, we need a couple happenings. We need another two happenings. And there was also a great debate on this show between Eric Wall and I can't remember who the other person was, but they were talking about Bitcoin needing to have a tail emission. So having to continue to be inflationary in perpetuity, in which case, you know, that tail emission might be on the order of about what Ether is doing right now, which again, also breaks the narrative between what Bitcoin Ether would be about. Well, you know, we don't have to get into it on this show because, you know, it's a much

broader debate and conversation about the security budget necessary to keep Bitcoin safe in the end years. But fundamentally, I don't think the current model works. I think you have another couple havings. And it requires the price of Bitcoin to go up for the network to be as safe. Transaction volume has never supplanted minor block rewards, as was envisioned by Satoshi in the white paper, which when I read the white paper the first time, I was like, oh, my God, that's genius.

Like the block rewards are only there until the network is like up and running. It's a bootstrapping mechanism. But transaction fees have never supplanted the block rewards. And so there is a massive security risk to Bitcoin, you know, a half-inning, two-havenings, three-havenings, especially if price don't go up, that I think people are underpricing. And I think Bitcoin fundamentally will change. And I think it can be done in ways that are not going to violate the sort of like immutable $21 million token cap on Bitcoin. I'm sure Bitcoin will find ways to, you know, maintain a... Are you sure?

All right, you want to know my... Every developer just gets run out every time they make a BIP. I don't know. Like, I feel like Jeremy Rubin's been trying to get BIP 119 for like three years. Can you describe 119? Sorry, BIP 119 is a way of doing sort of like deferred covenants. So you can kind of like schedule transactions. And so a lot of like not fully defy, but like some defy like constructs that can be made using that.

Like you can do sort of like hash rate derivatives and stuff like that. using it. But like, Bitcoiners are really against it because it like, it's sort of like off, it brings back this op return, um, debate in from like 2013, 2014 Bitcoin. And op return was sort of like, hey, you could return an arbitrary value and it would store that. And then people started sort of taking advantage of that in a weird way. And I think like basically people are still kind of feel that way about confidence. But the problem is I don't see, what are you going to do? You know, half the time people are like, oh, we're just going to use lightning. Clearly, that's not fucking working.

Like, that, that just like, there's just like, no one wants to run nodes. Like, in fact, there was an amazing tweet the other day, but one of the main lightning devs, uh, Bosworth, Andrew Buffett, that was like, oh, like, I only need like 20, 20 gig of RAM to run a lightning node. I thought the shit was supposed to run your phone and you were just connecting to local nodes. He can't, he can't even like, and whenever, whenever Bitcoin people are like, oh, no, Eath has fat nodes. I'm like, this one fucking person's transactions like he's routing.

is already bigger than probably the uniswap set from 2020. And there's no way it was anywhere near the same amount of volume. So I just sort of think lightning is kind of a dead end. The whole like Starkware trying to do starks on Bitcoin thing, that maybe that has legs, but that's going to need things like Bipna 119. I'm just like very bearish on the developer side because like it feels like anyone who isn't like yelling at anyone who,

who isn't like Bitcoin standard reader is sort of like shown the door for development stuff. Tom, how are the lightning metrics looking? Because I remember a while back on the show, we were talking about how the metrics of lightning looked really good. I was, yeah, I was trying to dig into this a little more. But unfortunately, it's very hard to get data, like, inherently because it's all like off chain. So the network capacity has continued to go up, which really shocked me over the past, you know, year or two. There's like more and more, you know, Bitcoin and Lightning Network for, for, they can be, that can be traded. But like, you know, we don't know actually, like, what that volume looks like.

I suspect some of it is probably subsidized by, or like, it is not economically rational for some people to maintain some of these channels, but they maybe do it because they're a startup and they want to make Lightning be a thing. But, yeah, I've been trying to get, like, the network data in terms of volume and just haven't able to find anything. Actually, if you go to, so at least for the publicly indexable notes, if you go to OneML. that's sort of like a reasonable place to look. It obviously doesn't have like everything, but like this whole maxi shit from 2019,

we're like, oh, there's so many private channels because you can only see the open and closes on private channels, not the actual settlement, just turned out to not be true. So like the public channels at least give you a reasonable lower bound. And you can see that like it's kind of like it is increasing capacity wise, but it's not like the volume is actually really going out there. Yeah, that was a confusing part. Yeah, if you look at the network capacity, it is 4,800 Bitcoin, which is very small and compared to the amount of Bitcoin that's wrapped and put into DeFi on Ethereum and is flying

around. Someone who had their bridge hacked, and I won't mention it, who, but they, they were like, oh, yeah, you know, there was more funds stolen in my bridge times three than there was in the Lightning Network ever. which is kind of crazy. Weird flex, but okay. Yeah, that's a bad flex. Bad, bad.

Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree. But I thought that was like a funny statistic. It's like, oh, like, Bitcoin people are like championing the shit that has like no fucking volume barely has capacity. When you think about it relative to these bridges where people are like pummeling through a million dollar volume all the time, right?

So. But to be clear, if any Bitcoin Maxes are listening, we love lightning. Tarun, please direct your IRA at Tarun, not at us. We are team Lightning. Lightning's great. And it's interesting how many Lightning startups have also, didn't David Marcus' startup is like doing this like lightning-oriented startup where if I recall it was like we're going to figure out what the product is,

but we're going to target Lightning. Yeah. And then Strike. There's been all these stories about how the El Salvador Bitcoin push is kind of falling apart and people on the ground are not really using Bitcoin or Strike. very extensively. So it's, you know, because they're growing off a low base, you know, I think the lightning growth numbers in terms of capacity look pretty good. But the reality is that as crypto has grown and as the infrastructure has increased, the alternatives to settling Bitcoin

through Lightning have all gotten better and better and better. And lightning is just not getting that much better. And unless it drastically improves in a short amount of time or there's some kind of distribution hack that sets into place, I think everything else is just going to overtake it as there's also there's also this there's also this sort of schism between the like lightning labs lightning and uh block stream lightning because lightning labs added this overlay network called taro which has tokens and like you can issue stable claims on it but it kind of is like its own private network and so there's kind of this war going on between them of like you'll you'll see like the block stream samson type people being like oh like they're just like adding in this like private

chain, it's not a real lightning, and a lightning lab's like, no, no, no, no, no, we at least post some of the commitments. I'm like, the fact that they're still debating the shit just like sometimes boggles my mind. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd also, okay, so coming back to the Ethereum merge and all that, uh, so I think we can pretty safely say it's dead. Uh, it's now trading at $5, which is basically, uh, what is it, like 40 basis points of

Ethereum. It's down 91% from inception. So it launched at like $120. bucks and now it's trading in $5. Tarun, I remember you were telling us how you were in the private Discord and you were seeing all the mayhem that was going on. Give us the insider play-by-play of what exactly happened. Well, that discord disappeared.

That Discord disappeared. Wait, why? Yeah. I think they just were like, they didn't want the like negative press in general because a lot of people who were in there were writing all these tweets and stuff like that. So I didn't really, I didn't really follow much. Other than I heard about all the Maker MEV, some searchers I know I talked to were just talking about how like dye was sort of like the main form of MV because you could just like borrow a ton of dye against EW collateral. And they were running, they were basically running the maker oracle on their own.

And there's enough like you could just basically back around the Oracle. You basically take out a really big die deposit and then back run the Oracle and liquidate your own collateral. And it was like profitable because ETHW was going down fast. Oh, wow. I was curious about that. There's actually like a good amount of EFW volume on Cedros exchanges. Like it's like 70 mil today or something like that. Is that just like people doing MEPCashing out?

Like, why else, you know, it just seems like a very large amount of volume on like legit exchanges for something that no one is actually building on. I wouldn't rule out the P.O.4. I think that just. Really? Yes. Yeah, really, really. I'll be the contrarian. I'll say that I would not be surprised if in a year people are like,

oh, no, this thing is better than Ethereum Classic. Let's just use this for like our thing. And I think it's still around. I think everybody viewed it as like, oh, it's free. Let's sell it. And I think if you leave it alone from long enough and like we just come back to this in like one year, I think its price in ether terms is higher than it is. is today. I get the feeling that people are going to, people are going to walk away from this.

I think it's the, I think it's the opposite. I think that Heath, Pau, like, there's a narrative moment, I think for Eth Pau, and that narrative moment, unfortunately, has passed. And, like, I think blockchains very often have this small moment in the spotlight. And if you, if you, if you mess up your moment in the spotlight, like, they don't invite you back on stage, you know, and, and that feels like what happened to Eith Pau. But what did they mess up specifically? I think they messed up, like, actually coming out and having a coherent story, having some kind of pitch to developers, to users, right?

Like, the only thing I have heard from anyone about ETHPOW is how to sell it and how to trade it. Right? And specifically how to trade it in a way that, like, maximizes you making money from the ETHER that you have. To be fair, HeathPow, well, the two versions, biggest fan is Justin and Son who, you know, Arguably, Tron had the same sort of genesis of, you know, the only thing people cared about was really trading it. That's true. I mean, I think the difference, though, is that I think Justin, for whatever criticism we might make of him, he's clearly a very engaged founder who has big ambitions to how to make Tron successful. And I just don't, I just don't say.

I mean, maybe I'm missing it, but I have not seen any story about that with Eve Powell. You know, so, you know, this is part of the natural tension in blockchain is that you do need to have some kind of leadership team for a blockchain to really be viable unless the tech speaks for itself. And it's very hard for the tech to speak for itself in 2022. All right, let's move on. I think at this point, it's depressing enough to talk about either dumping and Heath Powell being a nightmare. Let's talk about other different depressing topics. So one of the big news of the week, of course, has been our good friend, Doe Kwan, who was on the show before he, before. war terror collapse and the vibe around Doquan really changed.

So, I don't know how else is this place. That's just like a funny way of saying. I know. It's been a vibe. I can't talk about Doquan now without I feel like, look, I like, look, we, I've met Doquan in person multiple times. He's a nice guy. I mean, I know that he's kind of a dick and he's a lot more of a dick online than

he is in person. But yeah, like, I don't know. It's weird the fact that like I know him personally and he's like now one of those famous people in crypto, period. ever right just like Satoshi and then like Doquan like Satoshi Vitalik Doquan is probably the list you know of most famous cryptic people you know I think the ultimate NFT of this last cycle that I will cherish forever is being followed by these accounts that basically are you know under siege in the sense that they're uh like like do so tile where like they make those accounts might be orphaned at some any point but like

whoever their followers are you get to keep them forever. Like, if you're followed by them, you're followed. It's like an NFT. Yeah. It's an NFT. It is a sort of NFT of the last cycle if you're followed by them, which I thought. Because, like, their followers haven't changed. They haven't been adding followers very much.

They've just kind of like. Yeah. They're too busy to. Yeah. No, it's weird. Anyway, so Doe Kwan, the news basically is that, so Korean authorities have now put out an arrest warrant for Do Kwan. We don't have a ton of details on exactly what is in.

the arrest warrant, I believe, but it's something around some financial crimes. Something, something, something. They're seeking to void his passport to prevent him from traveling. They've now also issued an Interpol red notice to try to prevent him from kind of hopping country to country. Doquan claims that he is not on the run, which is a kind of on the run thing to say of like, oh, no, no, I'm not on the run. I'm totally cool, but I don't know. At this point, it just seems kind of sad.

This whole episode seems very sad, where to be honest, personally, I, again, having met Doquan, all the, how he is as a person aside, I think the, the criminalization of the failure of Terra is a dangerous precedent. And now again, we don't know all the details, you know, they haven't released a whole lot of information about what exactly are the nature of the charges. It could be that they did absolutely heinous stuff, especially going to the terror collapse, as a lot of people have speculated. Right now, we don't have any hard data to know one way or another, whether or not they lied or misrepresented things. of people or if they misappropriated funds from the Lunar Foundation Guard for themselves.

No one knows. So anything along those lines is really speculation. But assuming that his crime was failing and losing people a lot of money, this feels really, this feels like a kind of dark and sad outcome for this whole Terra Saga. I don't know if you guys have any reflections on this or if you know anything that I didn't already relay. Well, I only know things that are already in the public domain. But, you know, I would suspect he's not being charged with, you know, losing people a lot of money.

It's most likely to do with the public statements that he was making about the soundness and the safety of the system, which really, you know, is potentially what was causing the harm to the users of the blockchain if it was misinformation in some way. You know, you don't, you know, get in trouble for losing people's money. you get in trouble for, you know, doing fraud or doing misinformation that loses people money. Like other situations where a huge amount of money gets vaporized and then like it forks between like crime and not crime is like, you know, Archegos, the hedge fund that, you know, imploded like, you know, $20 billion, you know, very quickly. That veered into crime because, you know, they were deceiving banks and the people lending them money. You know, Lehman or AIG, you know, vaporizes $100 billion.

And it's like, oh, no, no, it's no crime because they were a regulated business. You know, ha, ha, ha. And I really think it just comes down to whether or not, you know, somebody is playing by, you know, supervised rules or not in deciding whether or not. I think it's also just how sympathetic they are, right? Like, the reality is that if you want to throw the book at somebody, you're going to go find something. And if a judge or a jury is not going to be sympathetic, then you can, you can get it done.

I think, I mean, again, we, I don't know. So I'm totally wildly speculating, but whatever, it's our show we can speculate. It feels to me like somebody, it needs to feel like someone did something. And issuing an arrest warrant is like the most something that you could possibly do, even if the actual substance of a case is pretty thin. And that's what this smells like to me is that you're absolutely right. I'm sure that they can throw things from Twitter feed that says misrepresented,

the stability of the, but also like the clearly, you know, it's all in the docks. So you can see exactly how it works. They talked about despiles. That's why they raise money to protect against it. And if they didn't raise enough money, that's on you as an investor to decide whether that's enough money to defend the peg. But I will say the foundation guard and like sort of some of the like custodial entities involved in the middle may have misrepresented.

And those are in my mind, if I were to guess the Luna Foundation Guard probably is where all the legal liability lies. And I forget if there are a Singapore ND or Korean Andy. But like the accounting and stuff that they were saying, that to me is that feels like, that feels like the thing that's where like the liability exists. Yeah. I was about to say the same thing. I think, you know, when we were talking about this on the show initially, I was,

I was saying, you know, let's not criminalize your failure and very much in this, this camp of like, you know, Luna was an experiment and, but it was all open source and audible. And it's sort of on you. And it does feel like LFG funds, you know, the rumors they were misused. The basis cache thing as well kind of very much rubbed me the wrong way and kind of changed my perception. So I don't think there's anything necessarily criminal about what happened with Luna, but it's the stuff on the periphery that I think maybe is getting caught up. Why do you say basis cash?

So by the way, just for quick people who don't know, so basis cash was a pseudonymous implementation of the basis protocol that was actually launched secretly by Doquan. He was anonymous when he launched it. It failed. And that was that. Why does that fact rub you the wrong way? Something about, I don't know, like missing, missing disclosure around the fact that like this was happening to like, you know, Luna investors. I don't think there's anything actually like in, you know, the legal system that would, that would, you know, put it behind bars for this.

But it's more optically, you know, not sort of disclosing this fact while you were running Luna seems pretty, I don't know, very strange. I don't think we'd really accept that of like most other founders, especially if it imploded the same way basis cash did. I just think it's like a very optically poor decision. I see what you're saying. At the same time, I don't know anybody who didn't know that basis cash failed who actually understood how stable coins worked. But nobody knew that it was Doquan's project. Right. But like is the problem with Basis Cash Doquan like misman mismanaged it or is it that the fucking model doesn't work?

Like that seems like the takeaway. It's not that like, wow, Doquan really mismanaged basis cash. Yeah, basis cash didn't work. Maybe it's more of an argument that like, you know, having concrete evidence of the fact that like this model isn't work and then going in public and chilling Luna, which is, you know, effectively the same model, arguably even worse, feels very off. I mean, look, I'm going to do Team Luna right now.

I totally disagree. Like, what they did was they went and raised Luna Foundation Guard a bunch of Bitcoin to prevent exactly what they saw with basis cash, right? So to me, like the basis cash was completely public. All of us knew about basis cash. I mean, none of us were Luna investors, but all of us knew about basis cash and understood, said, hey, this is yet another example of this model not working. It's not the exact same as a Terra model.

It's different. Terra was a full layer one. They had some applications that were using Luna, and Luna was getting integrated, and USDA was getting integrated at different blockchains. So I think the story that they were presenting was a coherent one, right? And like, people fucking knew that most other senior shares coins have broken. So I understand optically, like it's kind of a, it's a terrible way to learn that story, right? like learning that oh basis cash was launched as like a little experiment by dough that blew up and he didn't tell anyone and then you know that we learned that like the day after terror blows up it all ends up looking really bad but practically speaking like unless you're going to impugn the ability of a founder to launch something pseudonymously or maybe maybe the argument is like look luna is so big that you shouldn't be okay for you to launch something pseudonymously if this is an experiment that you're trying to learn from you should allow the rest of your community to learn from it too and understand the way you're thinking about the less.

that come from this. But it feels to me like more that it was sensational, rather than that there's a clear reason why it was wrong for them to have launched basis cached honestly. I do think it's sort of weird in the sense that it is sort of like making a competitor to your main protocol and that under and on. Yeah. Yes.

There are multiple instances in defy of that. Obviously, we will not name names, but there's obviously quite a few projects where a team has gone out and built another project, you know, to the side or on top or adjacent, you know, especially with, you know, ad non-projects. I think it's more common than people think. Yeah, there was the famous story of the McCalla Now brothers who made the curve fork on Solana and ended up getting a bunch of attention, but I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're just the tip of the spear when it comes to DFI founders getting cute with their ecosystems. But anyway, you know, moving a little bit away from

Tara and Doe Kwan, there was another story that was just announced. last night that the House, the U.S. House of Representatives, is right now contemplating a bill that will involve the banning of algorithmic stable coins for two years. This seems, I don't know, so the bill just had a bunch of random crap in it. So if I can just quickly kind of skim through it. Okay, so it plays two-year ban on coins similar to Terry USD. It would be illegal to issue or create new, quote-unctonously collateralized stable coins. Now, to be clear, this effectively grandfather's in currently endogenously collateralized stable coins. So it only says that you can't make a new one or issue a new one for two years.

In that time, they want there to be some, I think like the Fed to investigate UST and how it works and like how to create a safer version of this or something. I don't know why they think the Fed is the right organization to do that. And they're also going to be allowing banks and non-banks to issue stable coins, which you would need to get, you need to get approval from the OCC in order to actually issue such a stable coin. And then there's some other kind of random stuff in the bill. It seems like a total non-starter bill to me.

It seems so half-baked that I think there's just no way this thing is going to see the light of day. Well, I think these changes are ridiculous. And I think these changes make the bill less likely. You know, if you asked me a month ago, I would have said, oh, the stable coin bill. Like, you know, there has a lot of broad bipartisan supports of, you know, regulate stable coins. Now it's like, you know, getting weirder. And like a lot of that is reactionary to, I think, Tara has scarred or, you know,

you know, freaked out a lot of people, you know, from staffers who are the ones writing this legislation to the people that will vote on it. But, you know, I think it's crazy. You know, I don't anticipate in its current form it'll pass. But the part that's mind-boggling to me is that, you know, I never could have imagined a year ago, you know, having a bill, you know, in the house that says no Algo Stable Coins. You will go to jail if you make an Algo Stable Coins. Like, that's the surprising part. And, you know, I don't know if the Fed needs to study it. I mean, I've traded almost every Algo stable coin that's ever been created, most of them unsuccessfully.

I know a lot about Algo Stables at this point. And, you know, there's not that much to learn. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think this seems like a, well, it's a very understandable reaction. Wait, can I actually pull the, pull the, pull the. others on the show. What percentage of Luna and or UST and or anchor, or I'm including B Luna Recomplication, what amount do you consider, what percent of that do you think was U.S. investors versus like Korean versus Singapore. I'm just kind of curious to get a sense of like

how much, you know, if it's like Americans lost a billion dollars, then like, yeah, I could kind of see this thing through. If Americans lost $100 billion, probably not. You know, you know what I I mean, like, I'm just kind of hard to get. Like, where do you guys fall on that spectrum? I think it was, like, completely spread out everywhere. I think it was, like, 50, 50. I mean, like, everyone I knew was, like, obsessed with Terra. Like, I don't think that was, like, a U.S. thing.

I don't think that was, like, an Asian thing. I think, like, everybody caught up in this because it was, like, the easiest way to make, you know, 20% until it collapsed. 20%. Yeah, 20%. Yeah. No, no, I'm just more curious about the. net damage to U.S. citizens because I kind of just roughly think the probability of success of these bills is like proportional to, you know, at least a monitor.

I understand, I understand the point you're making is that, okay, if the U.S. bore the brunt of the losses, then that makes it more likely that the standard of regulations are going to pass. I actually don't think that's correct. I think that, like, as a, as a legislator, you have so, you have such low fidelity in actually being able to understand the impact of economic damage. It's much more about the sentiment and the story. line that ends up trickling up into your constituents and into like kind of your general agenda, then it is like a clean, like, distillation of exactly where the damage was.

And the other thing, too, of course, U.S. is much wealthier than any other country, right? So like, even if we took more of the damage on a percentage basis, it might be much lower. And of course, the other thing is that, like, so remember at the time the terror collapsed, the market cap of crypto was $1.5 trillion. Okay. Tara, between Luna and UST, on the whole, had about $40 billion a market cap. And if you assume that was wiped out completely, which it basically was, then you lost $40 billion out of a $1.5 trillion base. But it's not actually, in absolute terms, it's not that much. It was the fact that it brought down all the other crypto assets so much and spooked

the shi-out of everybody. That was actually the broader impact, was just the narrative and the fear. I agree, but I kind of also think that if there were a lot of American losses, the stories you get in the news would be, would be like as bad as they are in Korea or Singapore. This is Korean Singapore stories. If you read them, even just like Google translated, the sentiment is like a hundred times worse than what they are here. So I guess my question is like, that's why I'm asking kind of like, where you think the U.S. falls and the like loss, if I were like, like, ranks.

You know, here's a, I bet there's a big confounder here, which is that Korea has a much higher savings rate than the U.S. So I suspect that a lot of these countries, like, I mean, ultimately, Anchor was a savings product, right? So if you have a very high savings rate, then it's much more likely that you're going to put a lot of your wealth into this product. Whereas in the U.S., because we're such a consumption-driven economy, you know, some guy loses 20K and he's like, oh, that sucks, but like, you know, I don't have that much savings

to begin with because I'm, you know, living, I've a ton of debt and I'm living off credit cards. And a lot of people probably lost their unemployment checks on Terra, which in absolute terms, they lost a lot of their wealth, but they didn't have that much wealth because they were, you know, you were such a credit-driven economy. It's just kind of different, I think. Like, I don't think there'd be nearly as much desperation from people who lost money in the U.S. compared to clearly you can see it, right? I don't see anywhere near the, you're right, the density of stories that you saw coming out of Korea

and different parts of Asia, than what you saw in the U.S. which is also, I guess, maybe including all of that, then it does feel like these types of bills are not going to pass because I feel like they need that kind of like breach of negative sentiment to get like the level of action you see you're seeing in Korea supposedly Singapore. Well, I think, you know, and this is speaking extremely broadly, but I feel like a lot of the attitude at least, you know, domestically,

is like one of like self-reliance. And it's like, you know, penny stocks are legal. And like most people are smart enough not to, lose money on penny stocks. We don't have to like criminalize them and make it illegal to create a penny stock, right? Most people don't do it and like, you know, your parents tell you not to buy penny stocks, right? Like, I don't think we have to criminalize making an alga stable coin. I think like what we would be better served by doing is educating people that most algaos stable coins are horrifically stupid ideas and that they're going to lose all their money just like they would

with a penny stock or playing blackjack, you know? And like I think the better. I think the better our outcome is directing resources towards, you know, education instead of like trying to criminalize something just because there was one like really dumb, you know, implosion. I mean, are U.S. entrepreneurs even making ago stable coins? Like, I don't get the sense that, you know, it just feels very, yeah. Yeah, this is not exactly a hot area anymore after Terra. And, you know, there was a moment. But this thing, regulation is always, regulation of this kind is always so backwards looking, right? Like, nobody wants to launch an Algo Stable right now.

Nobody wants to buy Algo Stables right now. This is a problem that market solved for itself because it saw the most catastrophic, dramatic failure in history. And so it's kind of like, okay, we're going to make this thing illegal that nobody wants to do. It's like, okay, great, awesome. We're glad you're here to save us. Although I think I've seen an Algo Stable coin, like, pitch deck recently. I think there's still like one or two people on the margins.

There's a few new ones. I feel like... No one's going to fund. No one was like the last one I saw that got. funded and is now like, oh, you can get all these like Angos, angle safe field vaults. But they're all just basically trying to be like, oh, we're like going to, they're all going sort of like for the Frax model. Right.

Like there's like a universe of RACs. I think there's been more convergence around the frax model, um, which is basically like as minimally algo as possible and super super high collateral ratio, which is basically just like, what's the point? Semi full reserve banking, you know, it's very, very safe. or just banking with a very high reserve ratio. So like 80%, 70% reserve ratio banking, which is very safe for obvious reasons.

I guess the other... I mean, not always, not always. Not always. The other thing I think that makes it particularly sensitive in the U.S. is because we still remember the GFC, right? And it happened here. It happened on our watch. And so I think there's a lot of sensitivity around financial engineering.

Wait, wait, wait, come on. It affected the whole world. We caused it. We caused it, I guess. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying, right? Like, if you're in Korea, you're like, yeah, the GFC sucked, but like, it wasn't our fault. It was the American's fault.

American screwed everything up for everyone else. And I think for that reason, we have this kind of collective scar tissue that makes us particularly sensitive to Terra, even if there wasn't actually that much direct impact on Americans from Tara. Obviously, there were some of those other countries. Speaking of scar tissue, because I remember that there was a – whenever we talk about Luna too much, we start getting people tweeting being like, this sucks, stop talking about Luna. So we probably, we probably should.

We probably hit our cap on Luna stuff. But we should talk about the other scar tissue, which is Wintermute. Oh, yeah. This is a sad one. This is really sad. So Wintermute, for those of you who don't know, Wintermute is one of the most highly regarded market making firms in crypto. They're very defy-native market-making firms.

They do a lot of stuff on-chain in defy through Dexas and other, you know, defy platforms, they ended up getting hacked. So the backstory was that there was a revelation by the one inch team that there's a tool used to create vanity addresses called profanity. So vanity address, for those you don't know, normally when you create an address on a blockchain, you just generate some randomness and it creates this address, which is basically the equivalent of your public key. And this address is just a bunch of random bits.

But what you can do is you can grind to try to find a, you know, basically try to generate more and more addresses one at a time until you get an address that has some kind of nice prefix that you want. So you might have a prefix that says, you know, dead beef. And that's cool because like it just kind of looks cool. It might cost you a bit of money to generate that by repeatedly trying, you know, millions or billions of combinations until you finally get one that has the right prefix. But with some mathematical certainty, you can do this. So there are a lot of tools to generate these vanity addresses. One of these tools was called profanity. And profanity, the one-inch team revealed that there was a bug in profanity, or not a bug, but an implementation flaw, that profanity

normally an address has 256 bits of entropy, but they were doing something very stupid where basically they ceded this algorithm with 32 bits of entropy and then did some key derivation that was deterministic to extend it out to 256 bits, which basically meant that the entropy of anything generated by profanity was basically 32 bits, modular, with some extra. kind of grinding on top. And to give people who don't think in binary a rough fraction, 32 bits has 4 billion numbers. Four billion operations

is not a lot, especially when the only thing you're really doing is doing a couple of elliptic curve multiplies their ads depending on your belief in the poll that Metallic and Dan had a fight over on Twitter. But it's actually a very small set of things, right? Whereas two to the 256 bit integers is roughly 10 to the 80th.

So one followed by 80s, but 83 zeros. And that's slightly more than the number of particles in the known universe. So that 4 billion is a very tractable number. 10 to 80th is not a very tractable number. And that's sort of like the problem. That's right. With 4 billion potential addresses or seeds rather, with 4 billion potential seeds, to try to iterate through, you can do that on commercial.

You're like, you don't even need fancy hardware in order to go through four billion possibilities. So what ended up happening was that when one has disclosed this, there was a bunch of folks who realized that they had these profanity generated addresses, vanity addresses that had already gotten hacked in the past. And but everybody started trying to migrate their profanity addresses away because of course they were now known to be insecure. And winter mute, I didn't actually catch the details of what they were doing because there was some kind of, there was some kind of multi-sick or something that their profanity address was on.

And they, they, they, so winter mute, by the way, has had a couple fuck-ups that have been epic. And they generally tend to come from the fact that like, you know, when you look at like the top tier defy trading firms, like the SVPs of the world, they never make fucking dumb mistakes like this. So I think this is actually winter mute sort of technical incompetence. It's not, I would not, I would not qualify this as a, it's kind of like, oh, like we should feel totally bad and like, oh, it was great that they like gave us the truth on Twitter. That's not true. This is incompetence.

Like, there's a fucking CVEE out. Like, you should be like changing your systems and monitoring them. So, Windramut's first f*** up was when they were supposed to be a market maker for optimism. And they didn't initialize the NOS safe on optimism as they did on main net. And then like someone figured out again, a kind of like a way where like you could figure out what the sort of private key was more efficiently or you deploy to that address and you own it. Right. they kind of f*** up on these cybersecurity stuff, like left and right.

There's a bunch of examples with them. So, like, this is actually them being kind of like incompetent. Like trading firms normally are structured in the normal markets where like, okay, if I'm starting HFT firm and I trade futures at the CME or I trade equities at NASDAQ and I Kolo there, if NASDAQ f***s up some cybersecurity thing and like someone breaks in and like changes my net margin or balance and gets me liquidated, I sue the shit at them, right? But you can't do that here. There's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no version function here.

And that means you have to be thinking about fucking red teaming your code. You can't be, you can't just like have this like yolo like attitude towards cybersecurity stuff as a trading firm. You actually have to act like a cybersecurity firm or to some extent, an auditor. That's why some of the best defy trading firms are actually people who are auditors first and traders second. Whereas the people who are kind of like keep up like Wintermute are mainly traders who like treat it like, treat it like. like it's centralized trading. And that's very irresponsible, especially when you have other people's money in their case. And so I actually don't think of this as like, oh, a sad story. I think this is a cultural f*** up on their part for not actually taking the cybersecurity and tech side seriously.

Because like this is a huge CVE. So the index finance hacker, in fact, his address drained. It was like, you know, Robin Hood, I guess. And I thought that was kind of funny. But there were so many things in the world that were like happening post this post by one. And there's a bunch of other people who validated different ways of like emulating it. And like you have a fucking set of wallets with a hundred million dollars and then. You're not like reading these CVEs. That's your fucking incompetence. That's not that you shouldn't be trading on chain.

Just stick to centralized. You should never be trading on chain. Well, especially especially that much money in what amounts to like an EOA. Yeah. That's why I'm saying like all these people. people giving them compliments on Twitter, I kind of disagree with, like, fundamental. They should just stop betraying. Well, here's the thing.

Here's the thing. I understand your point. And clearly, look, when this was revealed, the one inch disclosure was like two weeks ago. It was a while ago. This is not like the moment that it happened and then they got, they got God. That being said, the one thing that I will give Wintramute credit for is that, I mean, one, they owned up to it, right?

Like, you said, okay, SEP and some of these other guys, like, they don't have these kinds of colossal f***s. Well, they're also a lot quieter, right? so you don't necessarily see what they have made. We don't know what messups that other firms have made. I guarantee you everybody who's been doing this long enough has made massive fissups. So that's one, right?

Just the velocity of stuff that they're doing, they're going to mess things up. Crypto's hard. Everybody has messed up in some in bigger ways than others. But like, you know, I agree with you. The reason I say this is they, Wintermute has had very recently some clear fucking big stuff. And that shows a like cultural problem. that shows like, like, I would not want the market making any fucking protocol at all, ever.

They should just, like, get out of defy trading. I don't disagree. And look, the magnitude of this failure is so big that there's a good possibility that they wiped out all their profits from defy, potentially since inception. I have no idea, but that seems plausible to me that basically they're like net down on defy after having lost 160 million of their own money. Now, that being said, the thing I'll give them credit for is that it's their money. Right? They, they, although they are market makers. They have these loans.

They have these loans from protocols. Like that's, that is very different. That's why I'm saying, like, you actually have to, right. Like, they're covering it with their own money right now. Yes. But they actually did technically lose a protocol's assets the same way they lost optimism's assets. Like, it shows that like they're, like, they've said. I believe they said that they're going to pay back the, the on chain debts, no?

They're going to pay, they're going to pay them back. But my point is, if you are custodying these assets, that they're given to as a loan, you should be treating them with, like, the type of security. That's not custody. No, no, no, no, no. That's not custody, man. That's a lot. When you're in a market-making loan, these things are kind of half-custody, half pure debt.

Because, like, you- Yes, in a market-making loan, yes. But not the on-chain borrows. But you have SLAs that you sign up, and you're basically not guaranteeing that by two-s. Okay. So this is why I think- Let's give them the time to see whether they actually pay everybody back and make this hole. It's pretty clear. Look, Wintermute, they plan to be running for a long time.

They have a big enough balance sheet. They have, I mean, you know, if Guinea said that, look, we have a bunch of positive equity, we're going to be fine. This hurts. Clearly, that's a lot of money to lose for anybody. And there's also the possibility of getting some remediation because it is a lot of money to try to move through defy, especially with Tornado now, you know, in some way. Well, the hacker, the hacker was pretty smart.

They put it in the curve pool. Like, those are the first transaction. Because, like, the only thing you can do that is freeze the whole pool. And I don't, I think, like, that's, it was, it was, it was, it was, yes, they were smart, but you can still see, like, that doesn't, that doesn't prevent, it's not caching out, right? Like, you still need to somehow cash out. Sure.

Somehow out of crypto. And it's pretty easy to follow in a post-renator world. So I think there's a good chance for recovery for at least some of the assets and finance, they announced that they were on it. But I, I feel like, look, losing $160 million, fucking sucks. And I agree with you. Look, we don't need to yell at them. They're going to learn this lesson. They've already learned a good chunk of it. The fact that they are not a fund, right? They're a marketmaker. They raise equity capital, but they run their own money. So for me, it's like, look, there's no principal agent problem here. Right. These guys are facing the 100% the brunt of the losses that they took. And it's on them to fix it, remediate it and do things right. Yeah, I guess I'm more pointing out from the perspective. I have a protocol. a new on-chain protocol, and I'm like, hey, which market maker should I go to? Like, if someone I invest in, like, what market makes you?

I would just basically tell them never fucking go to interview. Like, they've proven that this is like a problem. I don't know. Like, you could argue that. Like, look, you shouldn't work with Jump because Jump lost all this money and wormhole and blah, blah, blah. But then wormhole, like, jump, put the money back in wormhole and it's all good. So to me, that's actually the strongest sign of strength, if you f*** up for $160 million

and you make good on all your debts, that's a strong sign that, okay, these guys are This is different than normal. This is like there was an active CVE for multiple weeks. This is not like there was like a niche bug in this complicated software stack that happened. Like this was like something where there was so many. Like this is more like incompetence than it is like Mount like kind of like. I agree with that in that if you're running a hot wallet with 160 million dollars of funds or more than it manages, you better be really careful about managing that hot wallet,

especially if it's a vanity hot wallet. I mean, I wouldn't use any address creation tool ever to make a wallet that stores a lot of money. Like maybe for, you know, a couple NFTs, it's fine, right? But like, let alone using like an address generating tool, you have a hot wallet that has $160 million. I'm just going to say if you talk to any custodians who are like generating entropy

for like an NPC ceremony or for, they literally will like have a laptop like in a room that's like a Faraday cage and like absolutely no connectivity to generate the initial entropy. And then like here we have the YOLO entropy, right? Like, and this is the kind of thing I'm saying. Like exchanges and custodians are very, very careful about this type of stuff. And they've built their business. In the defense, in the defense of Wintermute, right?

So they said the reason why they used profanity was not because they wanted to look cool and generate the school address. The reason why they did it was because they generated an address that had a large number of prefix zeros, which actually is more gas optimized. Their whole thing is that, look, we did this not for vanity, but for optimization. And, of course, premature optimization is the end. Right. I know.

I see the CV. I saw a good chart that was like, they saved like 16K and gas on the address, and then they lost $160 million. So, yeah, maybe not positive EV on that, unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, look, also, we don't know that they didn't take profanity and go run inside a Faraday cage. So, you know, like, it's a client side thing, right? So they still have to generate the entropy client side. But, yeah, look, Taran, you make a good point. The good thing here is that they lost their own money. So it's the most you can hope for when somebody messes up is that they are completely internalizing the cost of their mistake, which you can't say for many other failures in crypto.

So for that reason, that is the reason why, for me, I think it's very, very different than something like Tara. And I think the interesting thing that this has shown, if we look over the last two years, is the new type of trading for, you know, like when electronic trading started, say, like, pre-regn-MS, so like 2000, when it was like really starting to heat up, it was like, oh, like these new types of people entered finance who looked very different than the old Right. Like the 90s was like the math and physics PhDs, but then like the 2000s was like all the hard. Well, 2000 was really like software engineer, like low level software engineers and then 2010s like hardware engineers. And there's kind of at each stage of like finances like kind of increase in history, like adds one new technical skill that like the next generation of trading firms have to have. And clearly this has shown that like the cyber security ops sec type of thing is the next like high demand like finance job. That would be that would be my guess for the next. 10 years. Unless there's startups and platforms that abstracted away for people. Like,

you should be able to plug in or trade in defy without having to like become the world's best at cybersecurity. Like, I think this is the gap. And there's obviously a lot of startups like that are attempting to fill this gap. And like, I'm bullish on this. But like, I guess my view is like, you shouldn't have to be, you know, having like hard science inside like a trading firm. You to be able to plug in to someone that can like incredibly securely give you access to any smart contract without you know private key management. I mean, as long as these things are turning complete, there's just no way we're going to get there anytime soon.

It's kind of like, you know, you could say like, well, why is it the trading firms need to have like hardware engineers working on, you know, optimizing FPGAs and all this other stuff? It's like, well, in some sense, you can't be too prescriptive about what finance should and shouldn't be. Finance is always going to find some way. Finance also likes to vertically integrate, right? They don't like people at each firm like to silo and like not, you know, and I feel like that's what's going to happen.

That's kind of what will end up happening here. But it's good. It's like a good evolution. Like people having these events means that people realize that they start by focusing on these things. But there's always someone who takes a huge loss. Like there's always the LTCM of like every new kind of financial world. So maybe this is, hopefully this is the maximum of that. I kind of doubt it.

I mean, every time we put that in crypto, like the next week there's a even bigger one. Yeah. Someone else is going to lose a lot more money at some point. Yeah. If there is one bet to making crypto, this is one thing that Kyle Samani says a lot is that the number one lesson in crypto is that basically people have the memory of goldfish. And nobody ever learns anything really. Like, if you can bake the lesson into the software,

then maybe you can solve it. But if you can't do that, you're screwed to repeat history. And I think that's probably the case here. Well, I learned this specific lesson in like 2013 when I tried to use like a website to make a Bitcoin paper wallet. Did you just like siphon your address or what happened? Yeah, never used, never generated address, you know, unless it's in a Faraday cage, you know, or it's on hardware.

Got it. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, it's been a week full of just kind of depressing bad stuff. We haven't talked about anything positive. Has anything positive happened to any of you guys in crypto in the last week that we can end the show on? Well, the merge was a success. The merge was a success.

The Ethereum blockchain is humming along. It's incredible. So that's the silver line. That's great. Yeah, I was up super late that night. I was on the East Coast. And so it was like 3 a.m. that the merge finally went through.

and I was watching the live stream of all the EF devs in Berlin and they were all just like everybody was like oh my God I can't believe it's really happening and I got really choked up it was like a really special moment

and then markets had to go on all of it the next day so but we can't have anything nice in crypto for longer than a few hours that's not true you're just you're just like wallowing in the bear market

and you should be we should be excited about all the new technologies people are working on instead of new dog coins. Yeah. There's no new dog coins coming out right now, which is, that's a positive. That's good. That's up.

That's up. No, I actually saw, I actually saw that there was winter mute enu, uh, was actually a token. Why? Why? Why was you do that to them? That's what we got to get a Vigone on the show. We got to get a beginning on the show.

I agree. We need, we need, we need, we need, we need to defend his honor. I think we need to get, Evgeny and Turin one on one. get them to hug it out because it felt like there was a I didn't mean to just take out just on them I've seen a bunch of these trading firm mistakes and like I and then you see that you see the CPs then you see the people who are there's only one trading firm who's ever done a JIT attack is a just in time liquid the attack or you add a bunch of unisop LP position right in front of trade and remove it so that I mean all these people could say attack but this is a trade really

opportunity but you can't flash alone it so you have to put up capital and it's actually quite hard to execute because you have to hedge the the price movement that's uh happens and like the people doing that you can like see that they're like churning addresses and doing all sorts of crazy stuff to hide themselves and like i think there are some people out there who are extremely competent at obsec stuff like really really like very very confident and like i think those people will be the the the firms that kind of win in the long run that's true to end the show i'd like like to ask Tarun a hypothetical question, if you had a protocol with a treasury and you had to

pick who to send it to, either Wintermute or Three Arrow's Capital in their Treasury Management program, circa one year ago. You know, I was asking that and someone today had a shirt that on the front said three arrows capital treasury management, on the back sit three hours capital risk management. So I thought that was pretty funny. As long as we're talking about cool shirts, I got to wrap my shirt a little bit right now. It's probably not the camera. Very nice.

Yeah. No, no, actually it looked great. Yeah, look, look, look. If I only had those two options, I would say we're interviewed, but honestly, I'd rather pay up for the people I know who win the liquidation wars. Because like those people are clearly the best. But they're not going to take your money. That's the problem. Well, no, they'll do protocol marketing.

They're fine with that. Sure. I'm taking, they don't take external capital as one is when I'm not. I mean. But yeah. Yeah. So it's either three heroes or you, you know, you take, you have to take what you can get, man. Anyway, anyway, anyway. All right. So to wrap up just real quick, just because I've been, this shows been such a downer. One thing from each of us that you're excited about. I will, I'll go first. I'm really excited about ZKVMs coming to Mainnet. Tom, what are you excited about? This is kind of random, but internet game launched this week. I've been playing and it's super fun. It's like the most fun I've had playing a crypto game. So, So everyone should check it out. It's like, yeah, it's been great. Is it a GPS web three game?

It is not. It is a game that you play in your browser, which makes it fun. It's good. Cool. You know? Is this the thing where you win NFTs? It's like HQ type of thing? Yeah, yeah.

It makes it high stakes because it's like, I bought this ticket and I want to win, you know, the NFT. And so it's like, there's skin in the game and people are getting really competitive about it. And yeah, it's a cool. lot of energy. Robert, what are you excited about? I'm excited about compound V3. It's running. It's pretty sweet. It's going to grow. It's common. It's new. Nice. Exciting. Terun. I'm excited about features in lending protocols like Compound V3, where the supply side and demand side rates are adjustable separately. That will change some of the capital efficiency and defy.

All right. Now, leave it to Tarun to find the most esoteric detail to get excited. about that. That's great. I love that. Cool. All right. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you, everybody. We'll be back next week. I'm sure prices will be a lot higher than there today. Not really. I have no idea. Thanks, everyone.