Unchained - The Chopping Block: Zcash +400%, Tempo’s $500M Shock, EF Pay Firestorm & AWS/Base Meltdown feat. Mert - Ep. 929

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, Helius’s Mert returns to defend Zcash’s ~400% run and the “encrypted Bitcoin” framing, digging into anonymity sets, privacy UX, and why Bitcoiners are so riled up. We then tackle the Tempo bombshell — a ~$500M raise at a ~$5B pre, Stripe/Paradigm ties, Dankrad’s move from the EF — alongside Péter Szilágyi’s letter on EF culture and compensation: public goods priesthood vs. market incentives. Next up: Mert’s “USD Manlet” rethink (why coordinating Solana around one stable is hard, and why pushing USDT to compete with USDC may be the sharper play) plus a gripe-fueled tour of today’s DeFi trading UX. Finally, an AWS-outage autopsy: Coinbase downtime, Base sequencer hiccups, Infura/MetaMask ripple effects, and the case for multi-region/multi-cloud redundancy when real money — and sometimes safety — are on the line. And no, despite the memes, Mert is not launching a DEX. For more links and Show Hilights - https://unchainedcrypto.com/podcast-chopping-block/the-chopping-block-zcash-400-tempos-500m-shock-ef-pay-firestorm-aws-base-meltdown-feat-mert/ ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius “One Long Memo” [A Letter To The EF] by Péter Szilágyi https://gist.github.com/karalabe/a2bc53436f29e0711fe680d59e180f6c  Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:22 Mert a Madman of Solana and now Zcash 05:20 Bitcoin vs. Zcash: A Philosophical Clash 14:35 Tempo Fundraise and Ethereum's Talent Exodus 33:05 Ethereum's Social Layer & Public Goods 34:45 The Importance of Religious Priesthood in Crypto 41:01 The USD Manlet Proposal & Stablecoin Coordination 49:32 AWS Outage & Its Impact on Crypto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And part of that is the fact that Zcashers have just been sitting in a dumpster for the last like five years where like the price action has been going nowhere. It's been like slowly bleeding down. And then all of a sudden there's this, you know, opening of a meadow and, you know, trumpets blaring and a light shining on you. And all of a sudden, oh, Zcash is the best trade in crypto. I can understand why it feels threatening to a bitcoiner to have Zcash, have that be the philosophy behind this price movement. 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 to trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eat is the ultimate problem. DFIPOTOC protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective

on the crypto topics of the day. Toki controls first you got Tom, the Defi Maven and Master of Mews. Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Robert, the Cryptoconosur and Tsar of Super State. He is currently cosplaying as Turun, so he is late, but he will be rolling in shortly.

Joining us today, we've got special guest, Mert, the main manlet at Helius. Welcome back, Mert. Hello, hello. Yes, thank you. Yes, and I am a sieve, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We 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. Please see Chopin Block that X, XYZ, for more disclosures. So, Mert, you very generously offered to come on the show because I think last episode, we were talking about the crazy run-up in Z-Cash. And I think the boys were saying that they had some skepticism about how organic and or orchestrated this run-up in Z-Cash was or how fundamentals-driven it is, let's say.

And you did not seem to take to that too kindly. So we thank you for your very generous offer to come on the show and to bash our heads in. I think last time you came on, this was, I think it was like at, it was in person that we did a podcast in Dubai. It was in Dubai? I think it was in Singapore.

No, Singapore. It was a Singapore. That's right. And I think at that time I called you the mad dog of Salana because anytime anybody is wrong about Solana, you would just come at them like a ghost. And it does feel like you have softened, but the Zcash thing now has become like your new animating thing that you're haunting people over. Talk to me, talk to me how you think about that.

Yeah, it's essentially the meme, you know, not now, babe. somebody's wrong on the internet. It's basically just my personality in some sense. But yeah, I certainly softened up on Solana specifically. And one reason is just the physics of it, which is to say as you get more successful as an ecosystem, it starts to look more and more ridiculous to like punch down, basically. And I was helping Salana much more when they were the underdogs. But once you're already near the top, I'm not going to say they're the top of everything, it starts to look like you're bullying people, literally. And also, I feel like a lot of the things that we said for Salana,

like, for example, high volume fees actually adding up to making a lot of revenue for the chain. That was controversial in 2022 for some reason. But then we proved out that it does work, at least, you know, I don't know about the future, but it did work for this year and like a year and a half now. And so there's not that much left to disagree on, so to say. Obviously, there's M.EV and all these. You won, so there's no more fighting is what you're saying. It's over.

I don't think we won at all. You're basically Napoleon. You've like united all of the... He wept. There are no more worlds to conquer. Yeah. I would say it's about a some time of peace. It's a momentary time of peace after a good showing.

Okay. Now, with Zcash, this one's pretty... I just, I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons. for why I started talking more about it. I've actually been talking about it since last ETC. Now, obviously, I wasn't talking about it as much, but I have been talking about it. And obviously, people don't necessarily pay attention

unless the price goes up, in which case they need to rationalize what happened. And obviously, when the price did go up, I did jump on the momentum to be like, like, this is the time to actually spread the word around privacy. So, like, certainly there's a lot of speculation around it and flows and there's, And there's traders involved in all these different things.

So, you know, nothing in crypto is like, you know, you have Ben Graham on the corner there just doing value investing based on fundamentals. It's always a very chaotic motion of like flows and speculation and discussion. But one thing that that brought out was just how little people knew about, you know, how privacy works, how Shilla transactions work, where anonymity set is. And like, then I basically started realizing, okay, really. are really behind on this as an industry. I mean, people didn't even know that stables can be frozen, like central out, central issued stables. Like, there's just so much that people who are like knowledgeable in crypto like you guys know that we're not even realizing how little the new folks know. And so like, you know, that combined with price action and all these different things

kind of just added up. That makes sense. That does make sense. So I mean, just to give give some context to the viewers. So right now, this month, Zcash is the number one token by price performance. It's rocketed up something like 400% over the last 30 days. A crazy price movement. Now there's been this little bit of a civil war breaking out among OG bitcoins who are now seemingly threatened or shitting on the Zcash movement or this claiming that it's being orchestrated that, you know, this is a coordinated token pump, quote unquote, I think Lynn Alden said, don't become exit liquidity for coordinated token pumps. You've got Ansem now jumping into the fray.

You've got Luke Dash Jr. jumping into the fray. So there's a lot of, for some reason, you seem to have now pissed off the Bitcoin crowd. And it's kind of mostly you and Naval who are on the other side pushing the Zcash story, as well as the Zcash OGs, but very clearly their voice is not nearly as powerful with the new generation of crypto investors, as you said. you know, a lot of the Zcash OGs, they've been around since, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017, and their audience is a little more oldies, you know, a little more people like us who follow them. Whereas this new generation of the folks who really have, you know, size, for lack of a better term,

it's really kind of yourself, Naval and some of these newer influencers like Anselm who are driving a lot of these flows, it seems. How do you think about this Bitcoin or backlash and how do you interpret it? Well, to be clear, I'm also getting old. I'm going to turn 30 soon, so that's not great. Well, 30 is old? Oh, geez. Come on, man.

Don't do that to us. In crypto, it's not great. My employees call me encore ready. So the Bitcoin thing is kind of interesting in that I wasn't necessarily expecting it, to be honest. Now, there's, of course, whenever you're talking about a blockchain, you don't want to generalized to every single person on that chain. There's different groups and segments of population, so to speak.

And I would say, for example, like the guys like Udi are maybe making fun of Zcash in like a joking way, but they're not like against it fundamentally. They have better things to do. The interesting thing with the Bitcoin people is that they do seem a bit more threatened than I would have figured. I think it might be stemming from the fact that, you know, it was framed in, a way as, you know, this is encrypted Bitcoin, right? Like, hey, look at all these people encrypting their Bitcoins, which was basically just

people swapping Bitcoin to ZEC via near intense, right? And I think that really started being, pissing some of them off. Now, I'm not sure why. Like, it seems logically, or at least inconsistent on a principles level, which is to say, you had all these literal shitters and scams and paper. papers go up to billions of dollars. And they didn't say anything about those. But the one project where it's literally like very similar to Bitcoin terms of tokenomics and it's just encrypts it via ZK and that makes it private. And then like even Hal and then like Satoshi have quotes about like

how they wanted to do this. That's the one project you choose to like get angry at. That just seems weird to me. And then, you know, then there's a, you know, exit liquidity pump and dump thing. And it's like, okay, to calm myself down a little bit, that part like really makes me angry because it's like, okay, what chain am I on? Okay. I'm on Salana. I run most of the infrastructure. You know, I have a big following.

It would be infinitely easier to pump and dump literally any other scheme or token than to market by a proof of work token that has been distributed for eight years where everybody is down horrendous. Like it's just, and by the way, you can go to jail for writing privacy code, right?

As you guys know with like some of these guys. Right. That's right. There is no more negative EV. I mean, I'm sure there are some more negative EB place to do, but like with Zcash,

it's about as low as it gets. You know, I can be, I can pull a tempo and like, I don't think I would be able to raise as much as them, but I can just talk about, oh, I'm going to forked salon and whatnot and raise a pretty big round.

And it's like, It's just not about that, right? It's just, it's about like, it's. So, if I could summarize you basically saying, look, if I want to pump a dub, it's going to be the most legendary pump and dub you fools have ever seen. That's what I'm getting from you right now. That's the energy. Is that a good summary?

I would say, yeah, if that was my main goal, there are way easier ways, in more effective ways and less visible ways than to just buy the token. Yeah. So let me just say, look, I don't think anybody seriously thinks that Mert or or Naval is pump and dumping a token. I think there is a little bit of you guys, the rhetoric that's being used around Zcash is now stepping into the lane of Bitcoiners.

And there's, of course, this contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin is that now the Bitcoiners are talking about ETFs and Black Rock, you know, buying their bags when, you know, the, of course, the animating philosophy behind Bitcoiners is this cypherpunk, you know, screw the banks, screw the financial institutions.

So there's a contradiction now in Ben's, in this market that's becoming increasingly connected with TratFi. And Zcash is not that. Zcash is actually that kind of pure love of the game, cypherpunk, pristine ethos. And part of that is the fact that Zcashers have just been sitting in a dumpster for the last like five years where like the price action has just been going nowhere.

It's been like slowly bleating down. And then all of a sudden there's this opening of a meadow and, you know, trumpets blaring and light shining on you. And all of a sudden, oh, Zcash is the best. trade in crypto. So it does, I can understand why it feels threatening to a Bitcoiner to have Zcash, have that be the philosophy behind this price movement when, you know, Bitcoin now has, kind of sullied its claim to being this kind of pure cypherpunk coin. Not to say that Bitcoin is captured or something like how, but it's just, how has Bitcoin sullied it?

Not that, not that Bitcoin sellied it, but like all the Bitcoin influencers, all they talk about now is ETFs. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, that's obviously what at the margin is impacting the price of Bitcoin. Or like they talk about Michael Saylor buying Bitcoin in a public company, you know, like this is this, this is what you talk about if you're a Bitcoin influencer now, which is just very different than what it was like when I first came in this industry. That's not what Bitcoiners talked about. They talked about, you know, the sovereign individual and, you know, the right to privacy and all this stuff. And they don't talk about that anymore. Well, they always talked about price, right? And they always talked about,

price because that was the stimulus for adoption through this social consensus around, like, what is a good cryptographic asset, right? So I don't think it's actually that different. I think, you know, Bitcoin is almost not unique in the fact that there's reflexivity to it. And it's always been based on this. And it's always been this, like, positive, you know, feedback loop of price leads to attention, leads to adoption, leads to price,

leads to attention, leads to adoption. And so, you know, the ETFs and all of that is just the latest chapter in this reflexivity narrative. But I don't even think it's that fundamentally different

than what it's been, you know, going back to 2011. I'm not arguing it's fundamentally different, but the question we're trying to answer is like, why are Bitcoiners

uniquely offended by Zcash going up? You know, as opposed to like hash graph or whatever, you know, like whatever random stuff is pumping on any given day. I think when the critique is valid, that's when it stings.

It's very much like a, me thinks the lady does protest too much. I mean, to Mert's point, you know, Satoshi literally wrote like, oh, yeah, it would be great to do ZK proofs over the entire chain, but like, I just don't think it's technically possible. And it's like, well, they did it. And, you know, it exists. And it's like, it must sting a little bit to, like, not have that be part of Bitcoin. I think various reasons for that. But it just kind of speak to the way the culture has evolved over 10 years, which is,

Like, you didn't get all the cool features and things that were supposed to be part of it. And they've kind of kind of pushed up other ecosystems that now people call them shitcoins. I just don't quite understand as a $3 trillion asset almost like the mentality of the pie being this fixed. Like, Zcash is like a three billion dollar asset. Like it's quite a bit smaller now. Oh, okay. Cool. But like, it's just, you don't have to just pick one or the other, right?

You don't have to just be like, oh, while I'm doing Zcash, so fuck Bitcoin. Like, that's not how it works. Like, I hold both. And I think most sensible people who, like, you know, if you are very low risk tolerance, you know, relatively speaking for crypto, then you'll probably not just hold Bitcoin. If you have a slightly higher risk tolerance, but you actually believe in, like, the ideals, then you might also add Zcash. But, like, it's not like you must sacrifice one for the other.

Like, that's just not a dichotomy that exists in my view. Fair enough. All right. So let's shift gears from one drama to another drama that's animating crypto Twitter. So there was a recent announcement of the tempo, the blockchain that's incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, the VC firm, that there was a fundraise that they conducted at a $5 billion valuation, $500 million they raised, led by Thrive and Green Oaks Capital, Sequoia, Ribbett Capital, and SVE Angel all participated.

Apparently Stripe and Paradigm did not invest in the round, but of course they already owned a large chunk of this chain. from their prior investment where I think they co-led a seed round or something is the way that it was framed. Now, this fundraise, one of the biggest fundraisers that we have seen, this is larger than, you know, the Monad fundraise, is larger than almost any L1 that I have seen for a pre-launch layer 1 fundraise. That being said, this is obviously a very different kind of chain than any of the other chains aforementioned. This is a chain that's, you know, nominally incubated by Stripe, which is one of the largest fintechs in the world. and of course having Matt Huang at the helm of this thing running it day to day makes it a very different kind of beast than most of the other L-1s that we've seen. So now there's been a lot of backlash against this fundraise.

And a lot of the backlash is coming from different places, but one of the pieces of backlash has been that this is quote unquote, maximizing for tempo, not for Ethereum. And so you had RSA, Ryan Sean Adams from Bankless, you had Joe Lubin coming out and saying the same thing. Joe Lubin stated the goal of paradigm in many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem. And then, on top of that, after the fundraise was announced, there was an announcement that Dankrad, who of course is one of the key people at the Ethereum Foundation and a longtime Ethereum researcher, he's joining Tempo.

He's going to remain a research advisor, but he's going to be full-time at Tempo. He said the real-world moment is now with Tempo, that at Tempo's Ethereum values aligned, and open source can now integrate back into Ethereum with innovations that are made at Tempo. everybody was very upset that Dankrad was going on to Tempo. Many people claimed that it was bearish for Ethereum. They called it a talent drain, a worry that corporate L-1s are stealing from the commons in some way, and that Ethereum is now on its way out, and this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum in some way,

seeing this talent exodus going to a chain like Tempo. Lastly, there was a letter that was published, seemingly in response to this, by Peter Zelagi, who was the head of development at Geith, I believe. I can't remember what his title was, but he's basically the guy who owned Geh for the last, like, seven years. And Peter Zalagi published a memo that he wrote to the EF leadership over a year ago. And in this letter, he basically revealed that he felt that the Ethereum Foundation, at the time, of course, the Ethereum Foundation was turned over as of the beginning of this year.

But as of the time he sent that letter, he felt that the Ethereum Foundation was extremely political, that basically resources and decision-making was very centered around Battalic and his inner circle and his friends, that the fact that they were underpaying people very dramatically and not allowing them to take on any kind of other economic interests was naturally going to lead to this talent exodus. And lastly, he revealed that he had made 600K roughly in the six years that he'd been at Ethereum, at the Ethereum Foundation, meaning that he was paid very little for a developer of his stature compared to what most people expect developers

with that kind of experience to make. And so this, on the whole, has led to all this big kerfuffle that Tempo seemingly has awakened within the Ethereum community about how Ethereum's relationship with both the Ethereum Foundation and with these corporate chains

ought to be conceived going forward. So I want to get quick reactions, Tempo fundraise, Ethereum drama. What was your guys' thoughts seeing all this play out? Congrats to Tempo on a great fundraise. You know, I think if this were to trade today, just based on where everything else, as now one is trading, you know, given the backing strip, I think it trades on an FDV of $15 billion, you know, how much is going to be trading. You know, everyone releases a small portion of the float. But like, if this were trading today, it would be over five.

I think objectively, given who's involved in how it's structured, it doesn't feel that expensive. So kudos to them for a $5 million fundraise, you know, bringing great people on board. Kudos. That's what you should be doing. And so, you know, I just want to say, well-played. Well, there was a great tweet by, I think it was Conejo Capital, who tweeted. So paradigm, in addition to this fundraise, they ended up acquiring Ithaca, which was the layer two startup that George-O's-S-Pradom.

Congrats the paradigm on acquiring paradigm and marking up paradigm. That's right. and the fundraised by Paradigm. Because, of course, Paradigm also invested into tempo, which is an interesting. So there's a lot going on there. Tom,

what was your reaction? This reminds me of, what was, there was some corporate chain that ended up, what, building its own EVM or maybe building on Solana.

There's some other, there's some other drama over this summer. It was like some big company announced that they weren't going to be building an L2 or something. And then everyone got really mad. Was that Robin A chain?

No. Robin and chain's an arbitram. Oh, that's right there, no, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's very, very similar thing where there's all this like moralizing and hand-wringing and it's like, no, I mean, the actual answer is like this is like, like a loser mentality.

It's like the actual answer is that like clearly there's something like not sufficiently good with like the current offerings that's that they chose to go and build this thing. And you have to like recognize that you're in a marketplace and you have competitors. And if your competitors are winning, like you should take that as a lesson and figure out you can be doing better. I think all the thing around Dankrad, it's like, what is he all the standard here that he's not allowed to like leave the EF and he's not allowed to go work at another block? Like that's obviously insane. And I think so much of it is like this culture. I mean, he was kind of caught up in this weird EF culture war and people were like yelling at him in Twitter and he was

defending himself. And it's like, yeah, I probably would not want to stick around and work there either. And so I think you really have to look inward and think about what can you do to make the culture and make the place a better place to work versus just sort of finger wagging. these people that leave, which obviously going to happen at some point. And also, again, it's maybe more representative of, you know, Ethereum than Dankrad or something. Well, to fill in the backstory there, so Dankrad and Justin Drake last year were named as advisors to eigenlayer. And if you remember last year, there was all this hand-wringing about, oh, is Eigenlayer capturing the Ethereum staking layer? Is this some kind of systemic risk?

And they were chided very aggressively on Twitter as being, you know, somehow greedy and terrible people. And so Peter Zalagi points us out in his, in his letter that he wrote to the EF leadership that the backlash to the two of them going on and taking this advisership basically was a message to everybody at the EF that either you can be Ethereum aligned or you can make money. And there is no doing both, right? Like you sort of have to, it's a little bit like working for the church. You know, if you work for the church, like if you're getting rich, it's a scandal. Absolutely not. You either choose one or the other. Either you're a nonprofit land or you're in for-profit land.

And if you go from nonprofit land to for-profit land, then you're also a terrible person. As you can see here, like, there's just the insane degree of backlash to Dankrad going over to Tempo. And to be clear, I think actually most of that is not a dank rat. It's mostly at tempo,

which is also interesting that, like, people don't seem to be mad at Dankrad, but they're mad at tempo for poaching him. How can you be mad at tempo for hiring, like, good people? Like, that makes no sense to me. I look, don't look at me. I didn't say anything. Merd, what's your, what's your,

reaction to this whole drama? Well, there's quite a few things there, but like maybe some summary of it is one, yeah, I mean, there's, I don't understand how people can get them out of tempo. They want to build their own thing and they want to hire the best talent. That's how it works. They're not going to shoot themselves on the foot just so people on Twitter don't yell at them. If they are to do that, they're going to fail. Okay. That's very obvious. I think I have some other thoughts on tempo, which I wrote about a while ago, which I don't think payments, chains are going to work as L-1s. I do think they might work as L-2s. I don't think they work as L-2s. We can talk about that if it's interesting. But other than that, I think losing Dancrad is

like huge. I think it's like losing like Kevin Durant in some sense. Like I think Dancrad was probably the main reason why I respected Ethereum, to be completely honest. You can see this some of my posts where I'm like glazing Ethereum sometimes and it's like basically just glazing Dancrad. Like he would debate with Tolly and I was like, okay, this guy actually can debate with Tolly, which is not something I've seen too often because Tolly just finds these weird technical loopholes all the time. And then, I mean, the thing that was most shocked by to be completely honest was that Peter guy getting 600K over six years, which I thought was insanity, right? The lead that for the client making a hundred game per a year.

Like, I know he's European, but there's got to be a limit to how absurd you get. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, his code is securing how many billions of dollars and he's getting what? Zero percent of that in some sense? Like, I think that's just, I think that's just like whoever was doing that

and organizing that organization to align incentives should not be able to run an organization again. Like, that is a colossal failure of leadership. I pay my, I think everybody on my team more than that. Like that is, I just, that part is still by far the most shocking. And if people are being paid that way, then you obviously cannot blame them for leaving. So there's a, there's a quote in his letter where he says, to paraphrase Vitalik, quote, if someone's not complaining that they are paid too little, then they are paid too much. If somebody's not complaining they are paid

too little, then they are paid too much. Yes, basically meaning that everybody should be complaining they're paid too little otherwise. So clearly a lot of this was coming from Vitalik himself. in that there's there there there is this you know it's it's ironic and part of the reason why people were found this so perverse is that of course vitalik's a billionaire and he made enormous sums of money from from his work at ethereum well i think he's like he's like pretty i i feel like metallic is not you don't want totally running foundation you want like a raj basically you know what i mean like vatelic doesn't even i mean he has like a few posts where it's like yeah i don't fly economy because like it's not a good deal for me and it's like

you have a billion, or he flies economy, but he has a billion dollars. And it's like, kind of weird. Or like, laundry. That's what he said. Yeah, yeah. Like sometimes. Like, he'll literally do the, and I think there was a tweet that went viral about doing laundry at the hotel, like, not being worth it or something.

And I was like, okay. Like, he is like, he's literally just, his mind has to stay intellectually consistent with his principles, which is why he should not be in charge of running a business. right or or like running an organization where because nobody's he's going to have a very different value set than most of humans you know what I mean so like you need uh you need somebody to balance them out and to be clear tamash has now come into the eF from from what many people were saying in the comments the eF vibe has completely changed tamash has experience running engineering organizations battalick obviously you know he started ethereum at whatever was 17 18 so it's no surprise

that he maybe made a lot of organizational mistakes. And he admits to that, that he did make organizational mistakes early on, trusting the wrong people. And it seems like there's probably also some cultural issues that were taking place at Ethereum. I remember actually when I first came in the industry, 2017, the first thing I thought that, okay, I should go work as an engineer at one of these organizations. And so actually, I don't think I've shared much about this. But the first year that I was in the industry, I left Airbnb where I was working at a software engineer

and decided to come work in crypto full-time. And I interviewed a Coinbase, interviewed at Consensus, and I was thinking about interviewing at the EF, because at that time I thought, like, oh, the EF is like the most prestigious organization. Of course, the Ethereum was the center of the universe at that time. But I had heard from somebody who worked at the EF that they just paid like shit and that it was a really not a great place to work.

And so I decided, okay, never mind. It doesn't make sense to work there, even if it's, like, prestigious in some sense. And I came to realize, like, oh, it's prestigious like working at the Linux Foundation is prestigious in that it's like sort of a weird, wonky kind of rainbows and unicorns kind of place to work, but it's not necessarily the place that is going to set you up for long-term success. And, you know, I think it's very difficult for foundations to have that kind of organizational rigor.

I think Solana Foundation is probably like at this point the gold standard of what a well-run foundation looks like, in large part because of what Lilly has done, kind of coming in, as a business person and realizing like, hey, you actually need to be really competitive. You need to think clearly about talent. You think about reporting lines. You think about OKRs and accountability and all this stuff. Whereas at the Theater Foundation historically, it was like Infinite Gardens and sort of this vibes maxing approach to organization building, which results in this.

It's like so many years later. And we all kind of knew from a distance that the EF was not the best run organization, but seeing the wheels come. off a little bit like this where, you know, you've got Peter Zalagi basically throwing everybody else under the bus. Because he stepped down, what, like a year ago or something, wasn't it? I think it was. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what it is, what was like the animating thing that made you decide like, yeah, you know what? Screw everybody I worked with. I'm going to publish this letter. But it does seem like, man, he was nursing this frustration

for a long, long time, which is not good to see. So I do think it's a lesson. to anybody running one of these organizations that look, we are past the religion phase of crypto. You cannot run an organization like this. Oh, no, I would just, I also read Peter's letter and it reminded me of, I mean, part of this obviously you get public critique and getting dogpile.

I remember one time I had this tweet, this was maybe like four years ago. It was making like a cathedral in the bizarre reference, which is kind of these two different styles of organization and planning these like top down versus bottoms up. And it was like, you know, sometimes you want the cathedral and you actually end up getting geth. And then Peter, I think saw it and chimed in.

he's like, well, what if Geth is the cathedral? And it was like, yeah, it was sort of a slight. And I was like, oh, shit. I was like, maybe I was like part of this. I'm like shitting on Geth in public. But I think the point still stands, which is you end up selecting for a very strange group of people if you end up having your organization this way with incentives structured this way.

And maybe it works for things that can have a very long time horizon and they don't really exist in, you know, a market. Like they're intended to be purely researched. But the fact is, as we've, I mean, even seen with the tempo thing, Ethereum is in a marketplace and it does have to be competitive and it is ultimately selling a product. And so I agree. I think under Tamaj, it seems like things are moving in a much better direction. But and who knows, maybe this is more, you know, opportunity for a reset, even though I agree, Dan Kred's great.

Well, okay, I want to engage with the strongest version of the critique that people are levying at tempo, right? So what a lot of people are saying is that, look, when everybody was aligned, when everybody was like, yes, we all need a row in the same direction because Ethereum stands for these values. that the whole community can get behind. When you have more and more corporations coming into the game, and in a way this may be similar to what we saw with something like Linux, is that you've got the AWS of the world coming in and taking all these open source projects and monetizing them

and making so much money hand over fist that it's kind of like crowding out the ability for these public goods to really become monetizable on their own. And it may well be that tempo does just say, look, we're just going to outpay everybody in the EF because they're all. people who know a lot about Ethereum and know a lot about Geph and know a lot about the EVM, why wouldn't that be a cause for concern?

Because capitalism is always about hiring the best people and paying them the most amount of money and taking them from academia or taking them from places where there's an arbitrage to be had because they're under-compensated. But this is a public good, right? I mean, this is the quintessential public good. But again, why do you, why would anyone mind that a public good is paying up, so to speak? Right? Does anyone get mad when Facebook is overpaying for AI engineers? Like we sort of laugh at that.

We're like, oh my God, you paid a billion dollars for like for an engineer. Like that's insane. I don't know. It's just the market at work. I don't think this is like even that interesting is what the market should do. Obviously, the single event, if it's just one engineer got hired, yeah, yeah, whatever. Obviously, it's not that interesting. But I'm pointing more towards the principle because I want to steal man the frustration that people feel or the fear that people feel.

They're like, hey, now that these corporate chains are all raising a ton of money and they're all coming into this game, why wouldn't they just pick apart everybody who's working at the EF and pay them more than they're making? They should. You think they should. You think that's the optimal allocation of talent is that everybody good at the EF goes and works at a corporate chain and gets paid way more money. They should pay wherever is most competitive and whichever, wherever aligns best with their values, right? You're not going to, because what's the alternative? The alternative is central control in some sense, right? Like, or shaming. Like, these are not things that are long lasting or sustainable. This is also what I like, I'm going to, I'm going to just bring in Salon

to this conversation about Salana, which is like, it's just like ruthlessly competitive. We just, it doesn't, there is no alignment on Salana. It's more like you just have to compete or you just fall off and die. Like it's, you know, and some people might think, oh, well, you know, like you can't build a public good that way. But like, you know, totally sole principle is that if you have permissionless competition at each day of the stack, then you just let capitalism do its thing and like the free market picks the winners for each part of that stack until you have the best kind of holistic product. Otherwise, you don't have this feedback to reality. And if you don't have that feedback to reality, then the system doesn't last anyway.

Right. Like it can't be any other way. It's like kind of the physics of the situation. Like otherwise you get what? You get people becoming better and resentful and then writing public letters about how much of a cheap ass you are in some sense, right? Like it just doesn't work. Now, what Ethereum should do is they should pay these people more. They should tell the story better. They should run the organization better. Right. And like they do have a very strong social layer. And it's like, you know, use that. Use some of the richer patrons, let's say, so to speak, like the Joe Lubins of the world and just compete. Right. Like you can't just cry about competing. Just compete and be better. Win. I mean, I agree. I think there is like kind of this

worry that you get your sort of, you know, long-term privatization of the public goods, right? If it's like, well, eventually, it's almost sort of like tempo is sort of dumping on the market instance of prouting out any financial ability for anyone else to bid because they have these sort of corporate backing. And then it's like, okay, gradually, you start out open source and graduate gradually starts to move indoors. But I think the kind of maybe, and you see this a little bit, frankly, you know, what happened out, it played out in kind of AI land where it's like, you know, actually the best in class models aren't open source anymore. I think maybe interesting undercurrent, though, is there is like this kind of evergreen desire and push for open source from like

really good engineers. And so, I mean, you still see, I mean, Open AI obviously released its own open source model, you know, with like a couple months ago. And so like it is still somewhat prestigious. And there is like this like ethos of, yeah, we should still be publishing open source and trying to make public goods. And like, you know, even even at these large corporates, I think really talent and engineers still see the prestige and have this sort of philosophical desire to go and work on these areas. So maybe you don't get total sort of corporate monopoly at some point. But I mean, I see why people are upset, but the answer is not to finger wag. It's to be better. So I obviously mostly agree with you guys. But I'm also sympathetic to the intuition that it's

actually very important for society to have this religious priesthood that doesn't live within the market system. And within Ethereum, that was like the EF, right? For better for worse. And maybe it wasn't so explicitly communicated, but it was certainly there. And the norm enforcement that took place of, hey, you know, take Dankrad and Justin Drake, right? They were like, hey, we want to get paid. We're going to go and take this advisership with Eugenlaer. And the immune response from the Ethereum community was overwhelming. And if that was, you know, Mert or, you know, whatever, somebody else, nobody would have given a shit. And he was like, oh, yeah, whatever. Of course, Merck can get paid. He's in the private sector. But the idea of the idea

that like somebody who's, you know, it's like the equivalent of, you know, someone in government taking a kickback or something, like the fact that we, we understand that there are these different spheres with different rules is actually very important to upholding civil society. In crypto, we have public goods. People talk all the time about, oh, you know, public goods funding and how do we maintain the commons and blah, blah, and so it does seem like there is some tension here. Like the fact that people are responding this way is not because they're sort of losers or they don't want to compete. It's because they understand that like, hey, there is something special about the people who are

upholding the layer one. And it's, it's certainly true and valid criticism of like, hey, pay more. Like, you guys have the money. Obviously, they have a gigantic pile of Eath. They can pay people more. But it's also probably true that, like, you know, the Linux Foundation or whatever is never going to pay people as much as, you know, Microsoft is going to pay them just because they literally don't have the resources because it's a public, that's why they're called public goods problems. You know, that's why there's this whole body of economics around how to solve public goods problems. So I don't have a great answer, but it does feel to me too simplistic to say

we should just abolish the specialness that people feel about the EF, that like, oh, the EF should just be like any other organization competing for talent and it should have the same rules as it does anywhere else. Anybody else at any other organization takes an advisership, I wouldn't care. I don't think anybody else should care.

I do think people should care if somebody at the EF goes and takes an advisership with some company that's, that's politically sensitive. I think it's right that people care, and I think it's good that they continue to do so. Well, I view this from a really macro sense in that there will be different approaches

in the Darwinian process of creating blockchains in a hyper-competitive atmosphere. I think there will be chains that are religious in nature, right? Maybe that is Ethereum. Maybe there will be some new chain that comes out that's even more religious in nature. It says we have to be double, double, triple pure, right? everything will be tested and the Darwinian process will decide what people actually want where people care about, what people value.

I don't know if the average user of a blockchain cares about how pure the developers are, frankly. I don't know if the application developers really do. I don't know if the end users do. So I think it should be tried. I think someone should take it and run even further with it. Someone should make a blockchain that's like, you know, we survive off of water and soylent and like we only talk about our blockchain. with no other hobbies, right? But I really don't fall.

Anyone at play leaving Ethereum to go to another chain because they get paid more, I don't, right? And if the market wants a super pure thing, it will be created. I think in a way, though, like Ethereum as a product

has been pretty shit over the last few years, right? So just objectively speaking, it's not the fastest blockchain, not the best you acts. Like there's all these footguns with the EVM and all the stuff. and nevertheless, it's managed to hold on to its position.

Why is that? I think a big part of it is this special valence that Ethereum has because of the purity and the high priesthood and the smells and bells, so to speak. I do think that's doing something in the same way that the fact that the Bitcoiners are really mad at Zcash, right? Okay, that's absurd that that's happening,

but it's also really important that that's happening. That's part of the reason why Bitcoin is Bitcoin, because it has this religious contingency that like Barretain doesn't have. You know, like for Barra Chain, when the party's over, it's over and everyone goes home. Whereas like for Bitcoin and for Ethereum, even when nobody else cares and the lights go out and the price is doing terrible and it's at 1800, there's still like the monks chanting and you go into the sanctuary and like they're still there and the flame is alive.

And I think, I do think that's meaningful. Well, yeah, it is meaningful. And so like that's why I'm not sure how much just really fundamentally matters. like when you're that mission aligned or you have a specific mission that you're trying to solve, then you're going to attract those types of people anyway. And you're just, it's like the, it's adverse selection, right? Like the people who care much more about the money and not because they just like are money hungry. Maybe it's just a life circumstance are just going to do what's best for them in that circumstance.

But if they're like, oh, I really want to work on like interesting consensus problems or really interesting open source rust shit, you're going to attract those people. and those people are going to aim for learning, prestige, in some combination of these. Money won't be the main motivator for all of them. So I do think the public goods thing is, I do think for Ethereum needs to be a bit more market-driven. Like, obviously public goods can't be entirely market-driven.

But like, there needs to be some demand for it that is a bit more bottoms up rather than like public goods shouldn't just be centrally planned. Like on Solana, we run RPCs, and we don't open source everything. And so over time, people have actually basically like the users, like the market, has said, hey, we actually want, we don't want this much vendor risk. Like, can you guys get your shit together? And then so it's like a bunch of these RPCs, including us, kind of started coming together to open source some parts of the stack because the market demanded it.

Right. And so there's like this equilibrium between the two. And I think like all Ethereum used to really do is shift a bit more towards market-driven, not abolish its values or anything like this, but come back to reality a little bit, right? Like just don't completely ignore it. Okay. So this is a good segue into one of the other topics I wanted to discuss, which is speaking of coordination problems, this notion that you introduced Merck called USD Manlet.

And so what is USD Manlet? USC Manly was this idea when the whole USDAH hyperliquid stablecoin drama was going on. You propose like, hey, right now the dominant stable coin on Solana is USDC. Why are we giving all the yield to Circle slash Jeremy Aller in the same way that, you know, the same thing was happening for Hyperliquid. Why doesn't Solana as an ecosystem come together and say, hey, let's make our own stable coin and let's kind of almost form a union effectively and all agree that we're going to privilege or prioritize this stable coin

that's going to be dominant with the Solana ecosystem with the revenues going back to Solana or going back to the ecosystem. Now, in the time since you said that, Jupiter, which of course one of the largest DeFi protocols on Solana announced that it was creating

its own white-labeled stable coin in partnership with Athena. And it doesn't seem like I've seen any progress on this USD-Manlain thing. And we, on a previous show, claimed that we did not think this was going to work because there are just too many disparate parties that have different incentives within Solana.

And it's kind of too hard to coordinate all these people. It's like coordinating a gigantic trade agreement among like 20 countries or something. Like it just doesn't generally fails when you try to do that. Well, it could come top down. Like it could work. I actually love Merritt's idea. It's an interesting idea.

The question is like, will it work demonstrably? With hyperliquid, it was obviously more straightforward because hyperliquid as a single application, it's just easier to do that without having a big U.S. hit. Whereas across all these applications, the UXS.S. hit is spread out across everything that has to do bridging and, you know, whatever, flipping into one asset or another or whatever. So I wanted to pause there, give some background for the audience. What's going on right now with U.S.D. Manlet, anything that we should

know and how are you thinking about it now, you know, a month or so down the road, now that you've socialized this idea within Solana? I think, so since that time, Phantom and Jupiter came up with their own stable coins. And I think it's a very difficult incentive problem because he who has the distribution and the users just obviously has, like he who controls the front ends, basically controls everything. And Phantom and Jupiter control the front ends on Solana, right? Like that's going to be 90% of the flow, maybe, maybe 80 or something. And so whatever they decide, that's kind of what's going to happen. Now, the thing is, USDC does strike deals with people, right? Like, they do share some of this yield with some of these teams. And so who ends up

being left? But the yield doesn't go to Salana per se. It goes to the team with which they strike the deal. Correct. Correct. And so, but what ends up happening is the only teams that end up needing this are the teams who don't have the negotiating power, the bargaining power. You know what I mean? So it's like this adverse election problem. And I think Solana is too advanced of an ecosystem where there's so much competition between all these different teams, they're not going to be like, you know, I'm just going to give away my leverage. Phantom is multi-chain, for example, like, why would they do that? And then Jupiter, I mean, Jupiter wants to launch their own chain too. So it's like, why would they do that? So I think the idea was, I think with something like M-0 where like everybody

kind of has their own, but then it all kind of has like this shared liquidity base at the bottom where you can swap them out, could be interesting. But I think it's, you know, it's, it's not going to necessarily work. So I think the smart play actually, so I changed my mind on this since then, is to incentivize tether more on Solana as opposed to launching, because the one thing USCC fears is USDT.

And Salon is one of the few ecosystems where USCT has a huge edge over USET. And it's not super clear publicly why that's the case. And so as USET comes more onto Salon, and there's more of a less of a USC domination, then you're really forced USC's hand to compete, offer more shit for the builders and the app level people, right? So I actually think that's probably the stronger play. So anyway, it's not going to work. Okay. So basically it's I wanted to work. Come on, make it work. So there's also that, right? Like you also need,

you need like an organization to some extent that's driving this. And like it would basically have to be me or somebody who's equally annoying publicly. And I just, I'm not sure who that's going to be. It's so much opportunity costs to like not work on your own business to drive value. So like again, it's this incentive problem. It gets a little gnarly. I do think though as you get more competition between USDT and USC. and perhaps even a third one, like PayPal USD,

then the market will kind of do its thing where they actually have to start competing in some sense. Interesting. I mean, so USCT has kind of not really worked on any chain in DFI, right? USC is totally dominant on almost every chain with respect to defy energy. So that does seem very hard. How do you imagine UST would start to get a foothold on Solana?

It really depends on the user type. So we actually, I didn't know, episode with Rob on this and Laura, where we were actually basically talking about the office sentiment, which is like USC is so good. It's hard to see how USC or circle the company will be able to compete with that brand, right? Like people in South America, for example, don't even say I want dollars. They say I want tether or something, which is USCIS is not that brand. I do think that, you know, the one thing that I do like is that once I push that kind of messaging.

I think more, like there was some discussions. There was a lot of discussions between Salana people and like everybody's like, oh yeah, like we should probably start to think a bit warm out of this. Because like the thing that annoyed me, by the way, it wasn't like I was trying to be constructive. It was purely out of spite where I was like, this money from USC literally goes to base. Like why is this happening? And, and so like, I was like, I messaged if you were in Salon.

I was like, I was like, why are we like just directly funding somebody who's trying to compete with us. This seems a little weird to me. Anyway, to go back to your question on how would you do USCT, I don't know. It's just really going to be up to the defy teams, which is an area that I've generally stayed out of. But I'm not sure if you guys have seen my latest tweets, but I'm going to start getting a bit more into defy to see if I can help the situation a little bit. Okay. Give us the what's getting into defy. What's what are you doing?

Wow. I would say... Are you vibe coding a PIRP DeX? Yeah. Leaked the Alpha. Is this the thing that everyone talked about? Oh, totally is building a new thing? No, no, no. I'm not going to be building a PURP sex. I'm not. You don't want me building a Purp sex. You don't want like a volatile angry guy.

I do. I do. I completely do. I 100% do. What? We do. You want like a calm guy like Jeff who's like respectful and no it's risk. You're mostly respectful. Come on. Make a perp text. It depends on who's talking.

I do feel like that is true. Relative to Jeff, Merth's primary motivation is spite. And so I do think that it creates a very different kind of exchange, I imagine, that's built out of anger as opposed to out of a desire for efficiency. Yeah, I've been like compared to not like in terms of intellect, intellect or business ability, but like spite to like Bill Gates in the early days where he would just like try to destroy people. And it's, I'm not like trying to destroy people, but like,

I do get angry. But anyway, in terms of some alpha, I guess it would just be that I'm sick of getting a seizure when I try to trade things on Salana. Like I feel like a meth addicts after I go on some of these UIs and try to trade things. Right? Like it just does not feel like it's designed for regular people

or that I have the data to make any decisions that I need to make. So that's some alpha that I'll give. All right. I don't know how deep that alpha was, but I appreciate you sharing that. That was like surface level. That was like. So coming back to your anger at base, it seems like there's now even more motivation for that anger,

which is that there was a massive AWS outage today at the time that we're recording this podcast. It's been going off and on for like 12 hours now. Seems like maybe it's resolving, but it sort of came back. So it's been very intermittent. It hit a bunch of applications across the internet. So Signal was down pretty dramatically for the day. There was issues on a bunch of, of course, Web 2 websites. but the most notable within crypto is Coinbase had massive downtime.

And then we also saw base the layer two go down, which of course, unsurprising, given that it's a centralized sequencer, that the centralized sequencer, I guess, was running on AWS. And as a result, transactions were just failing on base. Apparently, Metamask was also having issues via Infura. So there was a few other applications that had issues, but you had a lot of people basically dunking on Coinbase slash base slash the L2 complex for not being sufficiently decentralized and for having a lot of the nodes, especially that run RPCs on Ethereum being run on

AWS. And you had Lawrence from Wildcat stating angrily tapping my debit card against the reader trying to pay for groceries, but getting bounced because it's a crypto credit card settling on an L2. And so it turns out all these interconnected things end up failing together. So thoughts, is there any referendum there is to be had? Or is this like, hey, whatever, AWS goes down, what are you going to do? What's the vibe? Burt, are you angry? Is this fuel for your spite?

Or are you just like, ah, it happens? Okay. So to be very clear, I'm not like angry at Coinbase in general. I actually like most people there. It's just I'm angry at them making money from Solana liquidity. Anyway, okay, the AWS thing, I think. So I don't know the details here. I just saw people say that base is down.

I don't try to transact on it, so I'm not sure myself. But the news outlets did say it. So hopefully they're not lying. Okay, I think it's kind of embarrassing that there is not like a failover or like some geo-re redundancy. Like that's not a hard. Coinbase already does this with all the other systems, by the way. And really any web two organization does it. So I'm not sure how there's no fallback to a different cloud region.

Like even AWS like West. And so that part AWS West was working. It was only AWS East that had downtime. I'm missing something there. Like maybe some reverse proxy stuff doesn't work or people don't implement client fallbacks. I don't know how the EBM guys do this.

It's also pretty ridiculous to me that infura went down. Like as an RPC, I'm not sure why you're using AWS. Like a nobody serious on Salana as an RPC would use AWS. Now, okay, that's probably also going to be because it's too expensive. But like, you're always going to have a lot of redundancy. Like, you just have to because that's the single point of failure and everybody yells at you the whole time as an IPC provider. So, you know, I don't like me to dunk because I think like fundamentally it's a solvable problem.

Like, just have a failover in a different region. So like, I'll leave it to the EVM guys. So I must be missing something because that should not really be a thing. I think the AWS outage was like rolling across regions globally, but obviously it started in U.S. east. but like I think it hit like most regions. But to your point, like you would think you'd at least use some sort of like multi-cloud solution, especially I think migrating an entire site like Coinbase seems very, very difficult.

But for something that's just migrating a sequencer you think would be not extremely difficult or at least, you know, to your point, if you're an RPC provider, having nodes on different surfaces not seem extremely difficult. So I also don't quite get it, but it does seem like also one of those things where it's like, there are so many points at different levels of the stack where if you have it. an outage, like the whole thing also kind of doesn't work. Like, okay, even if these did work and the data nixir is down, the site's not going to work, so you're not going to use it anyway.

So maybe this is a lesson for about redundancy, but I mean, also this is also kind of a blue moon thing. I don't know if there's a lesson. Yeah, multi-cloud has gotten a lot easier than it was, you know, call it five, 10 years ago. There's just so many more solutions that will kind of make easier a lot of the really finicky, pointy edges of multi-cloud. but I agree for something like base it is it is kind of unacceptable

for their not to have been failover my guess is that probably there was some bug and though they just didn't test it and like probably they have some failover solution because it's just very difficult to imagine that they had not contemplated what happens if AWS east goes down so my guess is that like

we're going to get some post mortems and some of them are going to say our failover didn't work that I really hope that's what happens because they have you know all these people have DevOps people and like, you know, system reliability checklist and all the stuff. They're the kings of DevOps.

This is literally what they do. I don't know if I'd call Coinbase the King of DevOps. Why are they the kings of DevOps? There's a, they have a guy, Mike, Michael, who works on that team. And he's probably like a top two engineer I've ever seen. So it's hard for me to believe that it was like an engineering oversight. Maybe it was a priorities thing. Like, hey, we need to kick.

There's a web of effects, right? So, like, half the APIs that these things use also went down, right? So it's not like, okay, we built on US East. That's down, right? It's, hey, we're using, like, 19 different APIs from other third parties and, like, five out of 19. For the sequencer, they're using all these APIs? But who knows? But, like, there's so many.

Like, for Coinbase, sure. Coinbase has got a lot of different, you know, they got a hit chain of healthists and this thing and, like, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to Robert's point, it's like, oh, if the, like, the, CICD provider also goes down, that it's like, okay, the failover is going to work. So it's like, yeah, there's, and maybe you can always, again, figure wag and say, well, you should have thought of that.

Maybe they should have thought of that. But, yeah, this is obviously a global, global issue. Yeah. The ultimate blame rests with Amazon. And, you know, we can look to them. You know, they were proudly tweeting. No, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not.

No, that's not how it works. Like, these are global services with gigantic, like, building. millions of dollars inside of them. You cannot just say, oh, whoopsies, Amazon is down. That's never happened before. It's like, no, it has. It literally has. So, like, if you're building a robust system that has real money that people are going to

lose if the system doesn't work, no, like, they absolutely should have some kind of. We're not disagreeing on this, right? I'm just saying that, like, you know, we can be making fun of all the different crypto applications as well, but like the root of the issue is fundamentally, everyone is building on one domino. Okay? Well, not everyone

because obviously not everything failed. I mean, yeah, but like how many people are building on Google Cloud and like Microsoft

and like some people? Some people? A small amount. Almost everyone's building on Amazon. That is not correct. No, so like that's pretty big.

Yeah. No, no, but what's interesting is because there used to be a criticism that Solana is like an AWS chain because

it's like the skeuomorphic thing to say because it's the biggest cloud provider. I thought it was like a Hetzner chain. I thought that's what everybody made fun of it for. Oh, Hetzner blacklisted Solana. Like you're actually literally not allowed to run on Hetzner. And they did the same thing in Ethereum. In fact, they banned Ethereum like a year and a half, two years ago. And then somehow all the Solana nodes went down.

And like, so this actually already happened with like Hetzner actually literally took off all the nodes offline. But people used to say like, oh, like Solana's AWS chain. But what's interesting is barely. any Solano nodes can use AWS because AWS bandwidth costs would literally bankrupt you. Like, you need to use per metal, which ends up making it like more decentralized in some sense on certain vectors. But yeah, I mean, I really, I will give them the benefit of the doubt here. Because like the same thing happened last week too, by the way, which was like lighter went down

because their AWS configuration was wrong or something. So like something weird is going on with the L2s where I'm not quite sure. I think like the status quo has been so much that compete on product, compete with hyperliquil we need to ship products that like as a business person, you know, as a product person, you're kind of like,

okay, fuck the tech to that. AGB isn't going to go down. We're just going to ship products. And then it actually does happen. And then you're like, oh, well, you know, maybe we should prioritize it now. Yeah, but there's levels, you know, it's like when you're a tiny startup,

like lighter, you know, lighter is like a pre-GGE, you know, training app. It's like done out for like whatever. a year, six months something. Base is one of the titans of the industry, right? It's like signal. No excuse for signal going down. That's a application that people rely on potentially for their life, you know?

And if signals down, it's like, oh, I can't communicate securely with somebody I'm supposed to be, you know, whatever, doing something with reconnaissance or something. That, like, they're, like, I think this is one of these places where the anger is justified that, like, engineering, like, these products, people rely on them for real sums of money, but also like their lives. And if somebody, you know, I don't know, just got liquidated for a gigantic pile of money

or just like some bug caused something to happen because this thing went down. That's real economic damage. Like it's not something that's like, oh, well, you know, pumped on fun is down. Nobody can bid on shitters today. Like there's a,

there's levels of seriousness with which you need to take engineering robustness. And I think it was, you know, my guess is we're going to get a lot of postmortems and they're going to tell us that it wasn't as straightforward as we're,

imagining of that literally there was just no plan. But yeah, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, as a wise man once said. Mike Tyson, yeah. That's right. Okay, well, with that, we're on time. Mert, thank you so much for jumping on with us. I know it's very late where you are. Anything that you want to plug, where can people come find you?

I'm sure they'll see me on their Twitter if they haven't muted you already. What's the name of your upcoming decks, Mert? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a Dux. It's not a deck. Your new decks? All right. So go trade on Mert's new decks.

If you don't find it, just Google it. I'm sure something will pop. I'm just kidding. Don't do that. There's no decks. Thanks, Mert, for jumping on. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you all next week.