Unchained - Uneasy Money: Are Institutions Creating a New Crypto Meta?
Episode Date: February 16, 2026The crew unpacks BlackRock buying UNI, ARK, Citadel, DTCC, the Intercontinental Exchange and other TradFi players backing Zero, , Vitalik's thoughts on AI, and more. Thank you to our sponsors! ... Fuse: The Energy Network MultiChain Advisors Crypto Tax Girl AI safety chiefs are leaving, BlackRock's launching on Uniswap and buying UNI, LayerZero launches “the last blockchain” with institutional backing, Kaito is launching attention markets, Base is abandoning social and Vitalik has some thoughts on AI. Hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan unpack these and more in yet another packed episode of Uneasy Money. Find out why Kain thinks the Uniswap and LayerZero news point to a new meta reminiscent of DeFi Summer. Plus, is Coinbase's Base playing it too safe? And is Vitalik fighting a losing battle? Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Links: Unchained: LayerZero Launches ‘Zero’ Layer 1 as Citadel, ARK Buy ZRO How Zero Blockchain Cracked 2 Million TPS and Is Still Decentralized Vitalik Buterin Pushes Back on the ‘Race to AGI,’ Outlines Ethereum-Led AI Path When AI Agents Take Over, What Does a Post-Human Economy Look Like? Uneasy Money: How the Increasingly Better AI Agents Are Being Used Onchain Uneasy Money: Why Crypto Still Can’t Overcome Its ICO Struggles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets, right?
Because the attention is derived from social activity, right?
And social impression and activity and impressions can be rigged.
I take security and safety very seriously.
Like, I think that we should absolutely be concerned about these things.
And it concerns me when I see the safety people leaving the AI,
being like, I'm gonna go move to an island by.
Imagine if like Medi from like SigP and like you and all of all of the like crypto safety people,
all of a sudden like, ah, I'm out.
Because, okay.
I'm moving to England.
Here's a bit.
You would be like, holy shit, crypto's cooked.
Like, we're in a lot of trouble.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to an easy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain.
I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monaghan, security expert and Luca Nets,
CEO of the Pudgy Penguins Metaverse, universe, ultraverse.
We are going to dive in in one minute, but one quick thing before we start.
Nothing you hear on uneasy money is financial advice.
We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain,
and we want you to always do your own research before aping in.
You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money.
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dollars in enterprise value for 80-plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner
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All right. We're back.
So we have a bunch of topics this week, but first,
We have a little preamble, I guess, because the world is going crazy.
So, Tay, I don't know, you can take it from here.
First of all, Kyle from Multicoin retired or something.
I don't know.
Maybe he's uploading himself into a computer or something.
I don't know exactly what's going on, but he's left crypto.
But he took the time to take a couple of pot shots on the way out the door at like
hyperliquid.
I couldn't help himself.
He's like, hey, guys, I retired.
You'll never see me again.
But also, by the way, here's some dumb shit that I'm going to say as I'm literally disappearing into the hedge.
So, Tay, yeah, hit us.
What's going on?
I don't know.
What's going on?
I don't know.
I think, I mean, I think whenever you have these sort of like market shifts, people get weird.
I think the world is actually like, it feels like this is like a bigger than just like another bar market, though.
my biggest observation has been like the AI turnover.
We saw huge number of folks from like XAI leave, the anthropic guy.
He was like the head of their safeguard research, which I assume is like the guy who's
in charge of making sure the AI doesn't go insane and kill us all.
He wrote this like really scary philosophical letter about his like,
observations and why he was leaving. He ended the tweet, though, with this, like, statement that I
kind of relate to. But I'm also like, I'm terrified. He just said, anyways, I'll be moving back
to the UK and letting myself become invisible for a period of time. Okay, buddy. Thanks.
So, so, like, the safety people are losing their minds, right? And I feel like, so there was a long
X article that I read yesterday from this guy that was like, hey, I know all of the normies out there.
He's like, this is like he runs an AI startup.
And he said, I've been working in AI for like five years, right?
He's like, all of my normie friends are like, ah, I tried chat, GPT.
It's fine.
Like, I'm okay.
I'm a lawyer.
It'll be fine.
And he was like, this feels a little bit like the first.
two weeks in Feb in 2020.
We're like people and you know, it's interesting right?
Because like who is the most connected to these like zeitgeist changes?
It's always crypto people because we're fucking insane, right?
Crypto people are lunatics and they're so obsessively, weirdly into like whatever weird stuff is going on,
even outside of crypto that like we were probably in December, it feels like we
hit this like weird Cambrian explosion of like crypto people doing weird AI stuff.
Anyway, so this guy's like, it feels like early COVID.
And for those of us who were in crypto, early COVID on crypto Twitter, when crypto Twitter still
existed before it was killed, people were like, this is bad.
I remember walking around and saying to people in like real life, like, we are fucked.
This is going to be an absolute capacity.
This is in Feb.
In Feb, first week of Feb, we sent everyone home.
Yeah.
We're working from home now.
Good luck, guys.
We'll see you.
We'll figure it out later.
Like, literally, like, we just sent everyone home.
Like, first week of Feb, and then we watched this all play out.
And this guy is like, this feels like something like that,
where there are people who are kind of canaries in the coal mine who are like,
uh, shit's getting weird.
And we're about to kind of, and,
And it's funny. So I had dinner with a good friend of mine who was in crypto for a long time.
He was our CTO at Synthetics in 2018.
He's been out of crypto.
He's been out of everything on, like talking about people like disappearing.
He lives and lives and hangs out and like surfs and stuff, right?
And I was like, how much have you been paying attention to this stuff?
And he's like, not much at all.
And I was like, dude, like, you are about to be hit by a tsunami and you're just like paddling around being like, this is fun.
And so it does feel like we are in this transitional moment and like something happened,
like Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3.
Codex 5.3 is the wildest shit I've ever seen.
Like it is wild.
It is so much smarter than me that I'm like becoming deferential to it.
I find myself being like, oh, thank you for not killing me right now.
I appreciate that.
Thank you. Yeah. Be nice to your AI, game. Like, it's coming for you.
I used to be kind of a dick. I'm like, God, you fucking idiot. Like, stop doing dumb shit.
And now I'm like, thank you for doing smart things. I really appreciate it.
A for effort. Yeah, I know, right. I know. I'm definitely, I'm definitely going to be turned into paper clips, for sure.
So, okay, let's get into the first segment. BlackRock Pigs Uniswap Rails on Ethereum.
for its Biddle fund, which I hate that name so much, but here we are.
So they have a $2.2 billion tokenized treasury fund, and it's going to be tradable on Uniswap via
Uniswap X. Uniswap X is this new version of Uniswap that has like hooks and various things.
So it's permission, which I think we're okay with in 2026.
2019 me would have been losing my mind about this, but whatever. It is what it is. The institutions
are here and they want KYC. So you have to be pre-qualified, this white list, etc. They also
acquired some uni. Thank you for buying our bags. That's amazing because he was trading
at like $3. So I'm very excited that they were able to push it back up to $4. So
So this feels like the thing we've been waiting for, right?
Like institutions coming, using on-chain stuff, tokenizing things.
Like yeah, there's some K.
But let's just squint and ignore that.
And yeah, it feels pretty crazy.
Yeah, I mean, it is like what we're waiting for.
It kind of, I don't know.
I guess I'm like, well, like waiting for what happens next, seeing if it if it,
if it hits the same, like the announcements are like,
we're like, yeah, you're training your like securities on our blockchains,
but like what else are you going to do for us?
But it is a massive improvement, I would say, over the last few years.
Like we might, we might be getting closer together.
We might be merging these worlds, maybe.
I don't know, we'll see what happens though.
We'll see if it's, they still sort of have to find like PMF.
PM off, right? To a certain extent. Yeah. I think to me it feels like the meme and narrative of like
always on trading, we've kind of like got these guys over the line. Like the Tratfi guys are like,
yeah, actually fine. Like let's just trade all the time and never sleep. So I think like that alone
is like a bit of a win for us that we're like, oh, okay, we we convince these guys.
that 24-7 markets was a good idea somehow because there was a period of time where like tradify was like
we are going to go to one-hour markets twice a week and we're just going to consolidate all of
trading activity into these like two-hour windows at the start of the week and the end of the week
and not bother to do things in the middle and we're like uh what if we did the exact opposite of that
and we seem to be winning so um so yeah that feels bullish yeah yeah well and we'll see what happens um
I mean, I think that there's an opportunity here, right?
Like, again, like these two worlds getting closer and closer together.
The real question will be, does anyone actually want to do this?
Especially what's a permission.
Yeah, that's the question.
It's like, does this improve liquidity?
Does it actually get?
Yeah.
Luca.
Luca, what's going on?
And what do you think about this?
I spent more time going down the layer zero rabbit hole yesterday.
I probably don't have as much to speak on this as it's probably cool that they're actually buying a token that's an alt coin.
I think that's probably like the brief understanding I have about the whole Uni Black Rock thing is the coolest part to me and my brief understanding of it is BlackRock is buying and holding alt coins.
Yeah.
That's cool.
That feels bullish.
Yeah, I'm excited about that.
As a uni bag holder, I'm excited for anyone to buy uni.
The more people who buy it, the better.
Someone's got to buy our bags.
Okay, let's go on to our second segment.
Like, am I losing my mind?
But did we not decide that we don't need every single person to have a chain?
We had like a three-month period where we're like, we don't need any more chains.
And now we're back to actually, no, we need all the chains.
We just talked about this last week.
And we're like, cool.
We're going to chill on the chains.
We're going to chill on the chains.
It's going to be less chaney.
Nope.
More chains.
All right.
Luca,
Luca, give us the job.
Sorry.
Bare markets, right?
Like, it's like, as soon as you get into a bare market, people just go back to the same old shit.
They're like, all right, launching more chains.
So, Luca, well, I guess, let's just go through the chains that launch, right?
So Mega, Eath launched.
I'm bullish on Mega, I was.
I was excited that they launched.
I think they are doing some very interesting things,
like not launching the token with the chain,
having this KPI-based gates.
There's a bunch of cool stuff that Mega-Eath is trying,
and it feels good to have someone trying new shit right now,
especially in a bare market, right?
Like, that's the time to do experimentation.
But probably the...
And then Robin Hood launched
a chain on Arbitrum, which is also interesting, going to be interesting to see how they,
like speaking of, you know, chain-pilling Tradfai, right? Like, it feels like we've definitely got all of the,
like, big retail facing Tradfai apps to like go all in on chains. They need to have chains. So I feel
that's again a win. Too many chains, but here we are. So the most interesting one yesterday
for me, though, was maybe layer zero. So Luca, if you went down that rabbit hole, give us the
debrief. What's going on with layer zero? Yeah, the layman's explanation, because I can only
explain, because it's very tech-heavy. So, Kane, maybe you get into the minutia eyes.
in layman's terms it's it's probably one of the greatest technological advancements from a you know
EVMCK perspective right like I think for those are not familiar with layer zero layer zero is basically
the interoperability protocol that basically allows any and all cross-chain you know movements to happen
if something's cross-chain there's a 90% chance it's probably being powered by layer
zero. I know they've pretty much had, you know, huge market share, either via Stargate or actual
Lawyer Zero protocol. But nonetheless, they've been working on this for the last two and a half
years. The thought process for them was like, look, you know, if we're going to do certain things,
I remember speaking to Brian a year ago and he was kind of constrained in terms of certain ambitions
that he had around certain builds, he was kind of alluding to that he was working in this
direction, but obviously he didn't share anything at the time.
But basically, the most performance blockchain that requires the most menial or the most
basic hardware to kind of process and run, uh, basically it was running it was running on a
raspberry pie, which is super impressive.
Right. Um, and and basically it's, you know, the tagline, which I loved is the last
blockchain and he's basically saying you don't need another blockchain.
this one. This is the one.
Please.
Yeah.
Just the 15th standard problem.
Now, I will say those guys are, that's probably one of the best teams in crypto.
Can you probably agree?
I mean, those guys.
Yeah, I love those guys.
I think, so the most interesting thing to me, aside from the tech, right?
And Luca, I think you'll, you will have some thoughts here, right?
is the channel conflict problem of layer zero.
If I'm not mistaken, when layer zero launched,
they're like, we don't need a chain.
We are the layer zero below all the chains.
We're not going to compete with you guys.
We're going to just make all your chains better and interoperable.
And so don't even worry about it.
Like we're definitely not going to do anything to threaten that equilibrium.
And then they're like, oh, fuck it.
We're just going to launch a chain.
All right, what does the chain do now?
Like, what is the...
It's phosphor.
Like, what, like, two million TPS.
Oh, okay.
I got it.
Also.
So, wait, okay, but seriously,
it's a world where AI agents are going to be spending a quadrillion transactions
a week, right?
Like, nothing outside of Solana is at least, like, on a production perspective,
can kind of meet that demand.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but at least, like, to my knowledge, right?
Like Solana is the only battle tested one.
Zero is not battle tested, but this is like the fire dancer dream and everything kind of
compartmentalized in a new foundational model that like blockchains aren't built.
My understanding of it is like blockchains aren't built the way that these guys built it.
It kind of reinvents how people I think look at them and how and how I guess, you know,
certain parts of the puzzle kind of fit in.
And so it's kind of like a new foundational layer of like, you know, when you think about it,
if you want to process huge amounts of transactions,
you know, if you can do that with minimal hardware requirements,
then you kind of like fulfill the promise
of like a fast blockchain that's permission with
and censorship persistent.
It kind of is like the taglines, at least to me,
read like the crem to a creme of like blockchains, right?
Like what is Solana's big objection, right?
The concentration of the validators, right?
I mean, if everyone can run a validator, you know,
for zero chain on a wrong.
raspberry pie, then all of a sudden you have like Ethereum level decentralization with like
Solana-esque performance. But the argument is that like isn't even a lot faster than even Salana.
Okay. So you have like a, you know, like in a world where we believe, which I think like the next
great crypto bull run is going to come from this idea, this speculative idea that like AI agents are
running all this volume and transactions on crypto rails. Like what chains are going to reap the
benefits from that will probably the fastest, most essentialized chain that's probably with
the cheapest cost is going to realize that.
And like their costs too are like unheard of.
You know, it's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a
fraction of a penny, you know, for a transaction.
One of the things in their presentation was like, you know, gas is basically gone, right?
Like we've eliminated gas, whatever that means.
means what it, what it means what we, what we think it means literally, then, you know, that is the
arena in which I think the people will play. Now, you know, it is fascinating because I wonder,
I wonder if I'm a chain, if I then think to myself, the thing is, is like, if you're using
layer zero and OFTs, a service, your cross chain capability, if you're like Salano, if I'm
abstract and then I see layer zero building a chain like I'm going to think to myself wow this is a
super competitive product right and you know in this world as Kane you were explaining and I've
been saying for years like tech is not the moat that's probably the first time in a long time or
we can say tech is a moat until you know all the LLM start capturing you know all of the data and
all of the code and you know maybe people can then can soon copy zero chain again I can't speak on that
Dude, like, honestly, agents are going to be launching their own chain soon.
And they'll be better than that.
We just, we need to make peace with that.
Like, they're going to be like, oh, it took you two years to build this chain.
That's so cute.
I've built my thing in two minutes.
And it got 8 million TPS.
I don't know.
Like, I'm bearish on humanity's ability to build things at this point.
We're really cooked.
Okay.
But it's still the whole point of.
the chain is still primarily interoperability settlement so i think so the the point was i guess that uh
that like all of these tradf again this is like you know it feels like the the two threads that are
going on here is like tradify coming in um and saying this is you know this is the thing we're going
to bet on um you know on on this zero uh token zero tech zero chain uh
And same thing with Uniswap, right?
Like we're betting on this Ethereum, you know, gated on-chain liquidity solution,
and we're going to buy into the protocol itself.
So it feels like if this starts to become a thing,
that it could really differentiate the tokens that are becoming investable by,
like actual institutions as opposed to Bitcoin.
Like we haven't really seen institutions, to your point, Luca, buying alts.
Unless you include ETH, which we should not talk about.
But outside of that, right?
Like, you know, we've had some debts buying ETH and Saul and, you know, some alts.
But institutions, actual, you know, large companies turning up and saying, no, we're going to buy uni.
We're going to buy zero.
that feels pretty new for this cycle.
It feels like the first time that I've seen these announcements.
So yeah, we got to lean into that, I guess, if that's working.
But it does feel like that will become a very big differentiator.
Like, is this asset investable is going to be a big question that probably crypto people are going to start asking themselves.
Like, you know, why am I buying this random shit coin if, you know, Ark is not one.
to buy it. I mean, that'll be interesting. Yeah, yeah. That's like, but that's like a full,
a full 180 from like the current meme coin status. Totally. Right. We're going to go back to the
technicals and the foundations and see what you can actually like build new value. I had a podcast
yesterday and it was this like OG defy guy that started asking me questions about like,
you know, how tokens work, right? And like why why they work the way they do.
And it forced me to really kind of rethink my position on tokens in 2026.
And my hot take is that in Defi summer, like that whole period, we figured out ways to create token sinks.
Like token sinks were the thing.
You had to find a way to get people to hold a token.
This cycle has been the memeification and purification of everything.
No one holds anything.
No one holds tokens.
No one wants to hold tokens.
And in order for tokens to hold any value, someone has to be buying them and holding them, right?
If everyone is just selling them and it's this very short-term trade, then it's just not going to work.
So my hot take is that seeing things like this, you know, Citadel buying zero is a token sink.
They're not going to dump on you in 48 hours, right?
Like they have, you know, like a mandate to now hold this token for a while.
So that alone, seeing Tradfai start to buy these tokens and hold them could be an interesting catalyst as well.
So I mean, I am 100% for it.
I'm for anything that is not continuing to this like race to the bottom of tokens being valueless.
And like it just feels like we just got really, really race to the bottom in terms of like intelligence on some of this stuff.
And I don't know.
I think like attention, like the meaminess and like the attention.
Like I think that's a huge part of it.
We just like once again like crypto does, we just took it way too far.
Like way too far.
We're like nothing has any value.
Nothing matters.
The tagline of crypto is like you think that you've taken something too far.
Well, hold my gear because I will take it.
And you know, it is funny, right?
Like what ended up happening was, and why do we take things too far?
Because we have a vested interest in taking it too far.
Something starts working and we're like, oh, okay, how can I like take this to its logical conclusion?
Right.
And so this false equivocation of like everything is meaningless.
Nothing has value.
Everything is just a short term trade.
There's no difference between like, you know,
dog with hat and uni they're the same thing they're just like a random trade they're a random
cryptographic thing that you can sell and buy and trade right like they have they have no there's no
distinction between those two things um it really hollowed us out right like it it created and part of
that was you know regulatory etc there were a whole bunch of reasons for that but uh i think if
we get back to a world where we go no there is a difference between
pepe and uniswap, right? And it doesn't mean pepe's bad, but uni, the token, has some intrinsic
utility and value for reasons and people want to hold it and look at some of the people who are
holding it, right? Like back in the day, we used to point at crypto vCs and be like,
Andresen's holding uni, like get excited, right? I feel like, I feel like Citadel, you know,
they might be evil, but they're probably going to be an even
better holder than Andresen.
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All right.
We are back.
So betting on MindShare.
We've talked a lot about Quito over the last six months, the Quito attention meta.
This is a slight different take.
You know, Kyto, because they were cut off from the X API, they've had to kind of
pivot towards these different approaches.
And so there's a partnership between Polymarket and
Kaito to launch attention markets starting in March
that will let users wager on social media,
mind share and sentiment.
So Kaito is going to aggregate data from X,
TikTok and Instagram.
I thought they got cut off from X.
I don't know how they're going to pull that off,
but we'll see.
Nikita's probably looking into all of the
API deals that they've got right now.
So Polymarket processed $8 billion in volume in January, which was up 44%, which feels crazy.
So historically, the meme with Polymarket has been like, oh, it's just like an election thing.
And it gets big for the election and then it dies off.
Obviously, the election is a four-year cycle thing that's a huge driver of volume.
but this cycle post-election, they have held their volumes really well.
And I think that's been the combination of like the rise of sports markets and a bunch of things.
But these attention markets, I don't know.
Luca, what's your take on attention markets?
Yeah, I think functionally the big problem there and the smartest people in the world have yet to be able to solve it is this idea that I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets, right?
because the attention is derived from social activity, right?
And social impression and activity and impressions can be rigged.
And the biggest companies in the world, a la meta and Google, you know, have been trying since the beginning of their business to figure out, you know, which impressions are real impression versus a fake impression.
And though I'm sure they have, you know, decent solutions.
It's not foolproof.
And I think when you're just hyper financializing, you know, attention without, you know,
some trillion dollar intermediary, like validating that, I think, I think it's just going to get
a little messy.
I think it can be a little messy.
So in that respect, I think it's interesting.
The Kido team's incredibly bright, like super excited for them to, you know, try to innovate here.
But, you know, functionally, I'm worried that the attention can be rigged too easily.
And even the Kido product, just speaking directly to the Kido product, one of the big problems with the Kido product was that the bots were farming the apps.
And, you know, you were able to rig that system to a certain extent.
And that ultimately hurt a lot of crypto Twitter speed.
So I think functionally, it's a little bit of a bigger problem than I think.
I think it's a great idea.
I just don't think functionally, I can't see how that can't get rigged or exploited in a way that's only going to be harmful to you.
but excited to see what they've come up with.
And I'll definitely be placing some bets
in trying to see how it works.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Like it doesn't feel, you know,
if people on the inside of this,
if Nikita and Elon are still being over on by bots
and it feels like they are,
it's hard to imagine that an outside entity
that doesn't have control over that infrastructure
is going to be able to solve this problem
like filtering or you know algos so i don't know we'll see it this feels like one of those things that
may be like a partnership that started six months ago and has been slowly working its way towards
launch and it's now launched and it's like oh yeah actually we've been uh we've been nuked in the interim
so look i don't know it'll be interesting to see what happens here and how they how they manage it
certainly polymarket is um not never short of controversy around uh
market resolution. So this should add some interesting market resolution. Yeah. I mean, that's what that's
one thing I're seeing about is like if you look at like the thing that Cato like needs to do, right? It's like on
the attention side. And then you look at the thing that Polly market needs to do. And it's like really get
the trust in the in the resolutions like up. I don't know how this fits into that guys. Like yeah.
It seems like you've really, I mean, if you manage, I guess it,
Polymarket manages to solve that, right?
Meaning manages to somehow increase the trust in the resolutions while also bringing
attention markets to market.
Like, then I guess the rest is like easy and they're done, right?
They've solved all the problems.
But that's, I mean, personally, I wouldn't start.
Well, so I'm an investor in a project called.
noise, which I think a lot of people were excited about. It was part of the mega-eathe
ecosystem for a while. They've launched elsewhere now. And we had an interesting debate
at Bodie where Jordan was like, I don't know how this is going to work. And I was like,
you're overthinking it. Like, it's attention. It doesn't matter. Like, don't even worry about it. And he was
like, what do you mean? Don't even worry about it. Like, the entire
thesis of the thing is that you can measure attention somehow and it won't be gameable.
I'm like, ah, yeah, don't like, it's fine, bro. Don't even, don't even think about that part of it.
Just, that's a whole thing. And he was like, you are so retarded. I don't know how to deal with you.
He's like, how am I investing money with you? And I'm like, it's just, people are excited about it.
Just, you just roll with it. So, I mean, yeah. Let's see. Let's see what happens.
Anyway, I'm here for it.
We invested in noise.
But was that a win, Kane?
Yes.
It's always a win if I get my way.
It doesn't matter if I lose money.
It's just important that I get the check written.
All right.
They let me write like two checks a year.
So that was one of them.
All right, cool.
Base has pivoted away from Farcau.
social within the base app.
I thought this was really, like,
base and, you know, in particular, Jesse,
he is, you know,
Jesse is so adamant about their attention
to what people want,
whilst also trying to balance this,
you know,
not being driven by like the current meta.
Like they're trying to like invent stuff
and like create new,
meta whilst also like and it's a really hard thing to balance right and so when they added all of
this social stuff in far custer most of the people who are using the base app my my sense was the feedback
that they got was get this stupid social stuff out of my face i'm trying to trade tokens here and um they're
like no no no it'll be good and then you know eventually they they kind of capitulated and
removed it um and and they're really now kind of focusing uh
this base, the base app as a trading app, as a trading first experience.
And, you know, they're tweaking a few other things like removing these creator rewards.
And, you know, just trying to dial in on what is working for them,
which seems to be the trading part of the app.
I don't know. It's interesting, you know, the Steve Jobs view of the world of like,
customers don't know what they want sort of thing.
Like we're going to just keep doing stuff and eventually people will realize that they actually want it like this, right?
You know, if you go and ask the user what they want, they'll say like five more buttons, but actually what they really want is no buttons.
They just want a piece of glass.
They just don't know it yet.
So, you know, there's a there's a really interesting product development angle here of like kind of capitulating to just traders.
It feels like obviously base and Coinbase have such good distribution.
can get away with building a pure trading app.
But it does feel like a bit of a missed opportunity to me for them to kind of lean into
some of the things that were less obvious that they were trying to kind of move into existence.
So I don't know.
Markets are marketing.
I agree with your take.
Honestly, it seems like a very safe bet, right, pivoting into something safe versus, you know,
what I think Jesse was going for was super ambitious.
all of the CT peanut gallery were calling them a loser and everything.
And I guess you at Brian Armstrong enough times, you'll pivot.
But I'm going to be honest.
Did I think the execution of what they were going for was done right?
No.
Do I think they were pulling on the right thread?
And was the swing that they were trying to take, you know,
a big enough swing that it was worth pulling that thread,
even if it, you know, required maybe, you know,
getting a couple of papercuts on the way?
Yes.
I think this is like a really.
safe concession to just try to go and launch a 20-biller base L2 coin without causing a ruckus from
now until then. But I've said this for a while, like really studying blockchains when we were,
you know, building early days of abstract. I was just watching what everyone was doing.
The operational excellence and like the team over there at base is really barred none.
I'd probably say the only team that I've met that I think, you know, works and interface is the way
that they do on a blockchain side of Solana.
But those base guys, you can tell they really are taking the first principles,
foundational layers of like what it is to build a Silicon Valley tech company.
And they're trying to apply it here.
This just seems to me like, dude, you guys should just buy axiom.
If this is the direction you're going.
Yeah.
Just buy the next.
Because the one thing Coinbase has never been good at is they've never had taste.
and they're not product, good product guys.
And I think anyone at Coinbase, if you were to criticize them,
you'd have to say that that's the criticism, right?
There's some operational things that I think too,
but building a trading app, it's just like you bought Echo,
just go buy Axiom.
You guys building a trading app,
I don't think it's going to end up very well
because I just don't think they did hire one guy, though.
I remember Peter, who's our chief design guy.
So this might be wrong,
but the base that I know has no taste.
but they did hire, I think, one of like the great front-end designers in the world recently,
who Peter said, you know, for the first time, they're like, oh, yeah, if this guy actually does what he's known for doing,
they might actually have a shot.
But, you know, I don't know.
I just think this is a very safe, you know, obvious, like very complacent that where I feel like what they've been building for the last couple of years.
Though everybody and their mom was talking shit about it, I thought it was super ambitious.
And I felt.
Agreed.
And I think that's.
thing like, you know, Jesse caught a bunch of shit, but he clearly had a mandate, right,
to do some weird stuff, try things.
You know, it is funny, though.
The things that I disagreed with, I guess, like, were almost more cultural.
Like, I'm in one of the base, like, Coinbase Mafia chats, right?
And it's interesting.
I had a pretty heated discussion.
with Jesse about this at one point where I was like,
you guys are kind of being sciop by people pretending
to be supporting base into supporting people
that are actually just trying to extract from you.
And it's a very hard position to be in
to try and pull something off like they did.
But if you go back and look at the start of base,
when everyone's like, there's going to be a ghost chain,
it's not going to work, this is dumb,
why do we need?
Like he has actually pulled off something pretty incredible.
And I think that gave him a mandate to do some weird shit.
And then he did some weird shit.
And people were like, no, not like that.
Not that weird shit.
Don't do that stuff.
And now it feels like it's kind of been reeled in a little bit,
it's going a bit more conservative, which I think to your point,
Luca, is a bit of a loss, right?
Like if anyone was going to do weird shit and pull it off,
even like we talked about Farcaster, like they tried to do some
crazy shit and it didn't work and they had a lot of resources but they're not coinbase they don't
have that level of distribution right like um you know they're ex coin base but like jesse has a level of
distribution and attention and your market uh market power that it feels a bit weird to just kind
of capitulate and go oh we're just going to build a trading out now another trading out
yeah i agree and i also i wonder how much is just like
sort of like the amount of time this past and the financials behind it.
I don't know how Coinbase breaks down their,
uh,
like their org structure and the financials,
but they are a public company.
They do have to like consider these things.
They have to make money.
Yeah.
I mean, base is making much like I think irrespective of trade.
Obviously trading has, you know, and this is this is part.
I've talked a lot about this, right?
Like the hybridization of centralized exchanges moving away from a database to on chain.
Coinbase and Bass and Jesse and, you know, Brian have been pushing this now for four years, right?
Like they were one of the earliest ones, basically Binance and them were like, we're going to start
a chain, bro, and we're going to have wallets, and it's going to be really cool.
And we're not going to just sit in our little Waldgarden database anymore.
And, you know, probably there's some element of like they're victims of their own success,
because base was just starting throwing off cash.
and it wasn't coming from the Farcaster social side.
It was coming from trading, right?
And so you can imagine there's someone sitting there in Coinbase going,
hey, you know, our Q3 numbers, like we need to pump these things.
So let's really lean into this trading thing.
And it is hard.
It's hard to kind of balance this giant incumbent that is transitioning on chain
and figuring out, you know, the kind of.
of constraints around being also a public company that has to make money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think you get a little bit of leeway for a little bit.
You're going to do this experimental thing.
You're going to watch the market.
You're going to learn what the market wants.
But I think after a certain amount of time, one, it becomes pretty clear where the
revenue is coming from.
And two, you do start having to like answer.
Like what, you know, if you're.
and you can't sort of speak out both sides in your mouth.
If Jesse's running around Twitter doing this and, you know, in their, whatever,
they're quarterly, get on the phone and talk to shareholders, they're talking about something
else.
Yeah.
At some point, you do have to.
If you're making, you know, $20 million a month or whatever it is, right, from
sequencer fees, all of a sudden someone somewhere in Coinbase is going to be like,
don't ruin like don't break this right like you have to become more conservative and so you know
like you sort of become a victim of your own success a little bit that's kind of happen to jesse
where it's like dial it back bro like we need to and maybe he would say that's wrong um you know
this is just the right thing to lean into it it's it's where product markets fit is coming from
um but it does it does feel like hopefully in the bare market as people's scrutiny goes
down a little bit. They will still have more leeway to like try stuff because I think honestly
if anyone is going to pull up doing some weird shit and making, meming it into existence,
right, like social stuff and various things, it's going to be based. They have the network effects
to actually do something like that and pull it off that is not purely financialized.
So yeah, we'll see. I'd also just argue from like a brand perspective, if you look at the other
people who are doing this sort of like centralized exchange chain like whatever like you're going up
against basically like finance and you know the the big guys that's a very different culture like a
massively different culture um and the thing that worries me about this move most of all is
i don't think that coinbase and their teams and their culture and their product people and
the designers, like, you can hire all the best people.
They're not, they're not going to go all in, like, finance goes all in on trading, right?
You cut.
They cut.
There's actual crime to bolster to actually get those platforms to have momentum.
You actually have to commit some crime, right?
What is that?
Like, on-chain runners, bundling.
Like, you think these guys aren't doing that?
They totally are.
And I know that's a fact.
I just think.
Yeah. And I think like, I don't know. I think it's, it's, that's what I would be worried about is if you're going to go all in on the financials and the trading, but at the end of the day, you're a U.S. company with U.S. employees who have a sense of morality and are not afraid to speak their minds. You're not going to be doing some of the same things that, you know, the guys that are out of Asia are doing. And it's not just like literal crime. It's just the way of.
It's just being willing to do anything to make it home, right?
Like, and, and, you know, like, Binance is not apologized for pushing shit coins on their users.
They never have and they never will.
And nobody ever goes to Binance.
And it was like, why are you pushing shit coins on your users from emerging economy?
Nobody asked that, right?
If Queen Beasts were to do that, right?
If they were to literally, like, flashing lights point their emerging economy users
out of a freaking total shit coin, their own people, their own company, their shareholders would be
like, yeah, okay, hold on, right?
Well, this was part of the pushback as well, right, that Jesse got is like these creator
coins, they're just meme coins, right?
They're just these kind of short-term speculative things.
And, you know, this is also part of that like kind of false equivocation of like everything's
meaningless.
No tokens have value.
So they're all just a, you know,
vector for short-term trading and making profits.
So, like, don't even worry about it.
There's an argument that Jesse's kind of attention coins and creator coins were actually
worse than meme coins from that perspective.
Like, they were designed to be even more ephemeral, right?
And you can squint at it and try and, like, you know, jump through intellectual hoops to
justify why it's, like, not that.
But it's kind of that, right?
And so I think, I think.
But it was in a moment.
much prettier packaging that the U.S. market could definitely morally get behind and feel good
about, even if they were wrong, right? And I think that, I don't know, we'll see, we'll see how
this plays out. I do, I agree with Luca. It feels very safe. And it's kind of, it's a bit disappointing
because even if you're going to go. Even like broader defy, right? Like brought like just trading,
like pure trading. If it was like, hey, this, the original vision of, uh,
the Coinbase app was like making all of Defi on base accessible, right?
Yeah.
Not pure trading, right?
It was, it was.
And it's always had social stuff.
They've always had their, like, their regional like Toshi app had like the messages.
And yeah, it always ends badly.
But like, that's besides the point, right?
It's always been a bit different.
They've always been pushing on that, on that end.
And to just sort of, it feels like a little bit like to just sort of like, be like, well, we try to and we're like done.
like that was wrong.
It's a bit like, oh, okay, like that sucks.
Yeah.
Even if it, even if it, even if they're right in the end, like it's still, I don't know,
I prefer my crypto with a little bit of illogical social.
Yeah, there has to be some random shit in there, right?
Okay.
I mean, look, to be totally honest, it doesn't really matter because AI is going to wipe us all
out pretty soon.
Everything that we're doing is something.
The agents are the only ones that need to talk.
to each other.
Literally, I know.
So this is quite funny.
So our next segment, Vitalik is talking about AI Rails and also Stripe has this agent money,
right?
So here's how cynical I am and how, like, I just don't believe anything.
So I read, I saw that post.
It came up a bunch of times.
People were like, oh, Stripe's doing this, like, agent payments thing.
And I read the first tweet in the thread.
And I was like, man, like we're so cooked.
Like, this is not even a crypto thing.
They've just made like the stripe rails accessible to agents.
And agents are going to be doing like some weird centralized stripe thing.
I wake up this morning and I'm reading the briefing dock and I'm like, wait, this is actually crypto.
Like it was kind of weird because if you look at that first tweet, it doesn't say anything about crypto, doesn't say anything about stable coins, doesn't say anything about anything.
So I just skipped over it and completely like had the most like brainlit take on that thing to the point where I didn't even read the second tweet.
How little attention do you have where you're like don't even read the second tweet?
So, so Vitalik, Battalick has pushed back on this race to AGI.
Good luck, dude, honestly.
We're not winning this race.
It's talking about people outside of a system trying to impact the system.
Like the safety people inside of these teams are like losing their minds.
I don't think even Vitalik has a chance of slowing this down.
But saying Ethereum should provide guardrails, not acceleration,
you know, privacy, verification, decentralization, et cetera, et cetera.
And like it's that it feels like a very Vitalic take.
very aspirational.
I don't know how much impact, honestly, Ethereum is going to have in this process, to be totally honest, as someone who is like very immersed in it right now.
But this is kind of an interesting point, this idea of like local LLMs versus cloud-based LLM.
So maybe it's worth digging into that for a second.
So I set up a new Mac and threw a bunch of RAM at this.
And I started running Kimmy, 2.5 locally.
And it's pretty good.
Like, it's pretty good.
It's, I think, you know, if you were cost conscious, I mean, there's an investment in the machine, right?
It's a $20,000 machine to run this thing well, right?
So that's the first problem.
It's 512 gigs of RAM.
Jesus.
I didn't realize it was that expensive, though.
I mean, sorry, 15 grand U.S., right?
Sorry, I'm talking Australian dollars.
Okay, it's a lot of money.
But yeah, it's a lot of money, right?
So, but I was like, I want to get the max spec machine so I can see, like, how far can
I push this?
Because a lot of the distilled models are a bit brain damage, right?
So I threw everything at it, and it's pretty good.
Like, it is not Opus 4.5, or, you know.
even like 4.1 level, I would say.
It's a little bit stupider than that.
Hopefully they're not listening to me.
But yeah, so it, but what it does is it means
you're running it completely locally, right?
So it's not going into any server,
it's not sending the inference off and collecting data,
et cetera, et cetera.
Like the problem is that running local models,
if you are at all reliant, which you,
will be right on cloud models.
The ship sailed on that is my hot take.
And so like the idea that the local model is preventing me,
maybe I can run it on some stuff that I don't want to get in the cloud,
but like I've got Claudebot running on the same machine that is using,
you know, Opus 4.6. So it doesn't really matter, right?
So I don't feel like there's a huge differentiator in these local models,
this idea of like, oh, run your model locally thing. I just don't think that's going to work
genuinely like i don't think anyone's going to care yeah i mean i've run locally for like over a
year now and i go back and forth and they've just never been and that's the reason i've never
invested in like a bigger or batter machine is like i just feel like it's it was a huge like i just
always would end up when i really wanted to like get into stuff or end up like it ended back in the
cloud yeah so i do and i have a lot of data where i can't like it's not that i couldn't like i could
But it's like, you know, there's some deep-ass intel I don't want in the cloud, right?
And it's like, and again, it just hasn't, I keep an eye on it.
I mean, it sounds like it's getting better, but.
You mean, 3.5 is like opus.
Like probably I would say it's a smarter, my sense is it's about as smarter as like sonnet, which.
Okay.
So it's getting better.
It's getting better.
So, but I think there's two trajectories here.
Like on one hand, if these models are getting smarter, there is a point where arguably for like everyday tasks, you hit some kind of diminishing returns.
Yeah.
Like and arguably, and I don't know this, right, but like let's say it's six months from now and I can run a local model that's the smartest Codex 5.3 is now.
am I going to be satisfied with that?
No, because the cloud is.
No, of course not.
Of course I'm not going to be satisfied with that because I've got Codex 6 that is like,
you know, I don't even know what it will be doing.
I shudder to think, but it'll be doing some stuff, right?
And so there's almost no way as these things accelerate that you will be able to keep up.
And that just feels like the local model thing is just not going to be able to keep up.
And there's just no way that it.
It works.
I also feel like it's splitting your.
Okay, so if we want to talk about like,
how do we make these things not destroy humanity and, right,
the long tail of safety concerns that people have?
I feel like the, oh, it's local is just like a complete cop out.
And I think that.
Local in some ways is scarier, honestly.
Like, the one thing that I think is,
good is that it is still extremely difficult to train a new model, right?
Like there are a lot of research.
In the same way that like you need some crazy shit to build a nuclear weapon.
Yeah.
Like you can't just turn up and start doing it.
You know, it's there's some like resource constraint issues in building a nuclear weapon.
You can't just build your own model, right?
Like there's the resources are too, um, uh, two constraints.
So it's not like some crack teenagers going to like generate AGI in their base.
No, they're just going to use the cloud.
Yeah.
Like everyone else.
So I don't know.
Like my and this is like, you know, for those who know me like, I take like security and safety very seriously.
Like I think that we should absolutely be concerned about these things.
And it concerns me when I see the safety people leaving the AI being like, I'm going to go move to an island by.
Imagine.
Imagine all of the.
Imagine if like Medi from like Sigpi and like you and all of all of the like crypto safety people,
all of a sudden like, ah, I'm out.
Okay.
I'm moving to England.
You would be like, holy shit, crypto's cooked.
Like we're in a lot of trouble.
Yes.
Okay.
However, you cannot.
It does not work to just, like, stomp your foot and and be like,
Stop it. Slow down.
Like, no, no, no.
Like, there's so much value on the table.
There's so much innovation happening.
It's happening.
Your choice is whether you, like, stopping, slowing down is not an option.
So it's like, do you want to freaking run full sprint ahead while also trying to make it safer and responding to the active threats and responding very, very, very quickly to like the new innovative ways, the AI.
is screwing us, right?
Or do you want to like, you know, scream about it and not, you know, and then be very
when people don't stop?
There's like some some throwbacks to like D-Fi summer, right?
When like people were just yolo doing the craziest shit and it was like, I don't have time
to audit this contract.
Yeah.
I need people, including myself, who yelled like, don't put it, don't test in prod, right?
Don't test in prod, guys, please stop.
stop. Turns out that was like the objectively the worst way to handle it because if we had been
like, if we'd sort of accepted that the testing and prod was going to happen. And thank goodness,
we did have like enough sort of like diversity in the attitudes. If you accept that, then you're
like, okay, how do we, what do we do? And it's like, okay, you speed run monitoring, you speed run
circuit breakers, you speed run reactions. You speed run like these iterative things. Doesn't work. It doesn't
work.
Can you guys stop deploying unordidated contracts on Mainnet?
Like, no, it's permissionless.
Exactly.
No, we're not going to stop doing that.
Like, shut up.
And it also, when you're so sort of like, I just feel like it creates this gap
between sort of like reality and the people who are like super aware of how that reality
is going to play out.
Like, they're right.
Like they're like, you put, you throw a bunch of shit at the wall.
Bad things are going to happen.
They're not wrong.
However.
If we want less bad things to happen, we got to figure out a way to like have both, right?
You need like a pragmatic approach to security, not like a, you know,
Yeah.
And the people who are the people who are like knowledgeable and obsessed about the safety and the security of these things,
they have to understand sort of like the current state right now, which means that they have to be part of it, right?
They have to be sitting there, which is why people like Sam Cizizan, right?
Like when Sam was like his experience with like the test in prod generation was very different than mine.
Because he was like right freaking there.
Yeah.
And and that's what sort of put him in a position to have major impact, right?
And like, prevent hundreds of millions of dollars from being lost.
Yeah.
Build rapport with like, you know, he was in groups that I was in and people were like about to deploy something to prod.
And he's like, let me just have a quick.
at this before you do it, right?
As opposed to someone who, like, someone who's like, don't do this.
And it's like, kick them out of the group.
Right.
I'm out of here.
I don't want to hear this.
Exactly.
And so that's my recommendation for people is like, it's not that you're wrong.
It's not that you're giving up.
It's that there's just too much value on the table and people are going to do this.
And your choice as a person who has concerns is to like sit with them in the room and really go
hard on these like like what can you have an impact on right now what can we respond to right now
and actually actually move really fast on those things right if chat chit is telling someone to commit
suicide fix that right freaking now right don't go sit in your silo though for six months and then come back
on the next model like no fix it right now find a solution we banalize the data and it's like it's fine right
so yeah so that's yeah and then i think it's not by the way it doesn't like solve the world's
problems, but it's at this point in time with the rapid clip of innovation, it's the only way to go
about it. Which is why, like, hold on to your butts. It feels a bit scary that these, these guys are all
kind of rage quitting. Yeah. From like, because it's like, did they try this or did they not try?
Like, we don't really, the guy who's like, I'm going to write poetry. Like, he didn't really
explain, obviously he's under like massive NDAs and they would shoot or something. And, and
if he talked about what was actually going on in there.
But I think the thing for me that is the most interesting about all of this right now
and the acceleration is the largest constraint on innovation in the world,
except for maybe like free power, right, is software.
And if these agents start making software non-constrained by,
human slowness, right? And they start to accelerate how quickly software can recursively self-improve.
And they're, you know, like Opus 4.6 and, you know, codex, they're using the tools to build
the tools, right? And, and, you know, that recursive self-improvement loop is the false
takeoff loop that we've been talking about for 30 years, right? Yeah. Like, you know, Kurzweil,
the, like, the, you know, singularity is nearer.
If you haven't read it, it's worth reading.
It's out of date.
It was six months ago.
And, like, the things that he's saying in there are, like, quaint, right?
But the funny thing is that, you know, he wrote the singularity is near in, like, 2006 or something, right?
So it's been 20 years.
20 years later, the book is, like, just victory laps, right?
It's like, nailed it, nailed it, nailed it, like, all of this stuff.
And he's like, we have four years.
Like, 2030?
already like four years, we're in the FOS takeoff.
And the most interesting thing is if you look at the curve, right, it looks flat.
To most people, it looks flat.
You have to be really close to it to see that it's actually just, there's a little gap now
between the, like, Y axis, and that gap is accelerating.
And it's still small, but it's just going to go parabolic soon.
And when it does, you know, a new model might take a day.
Yeah.
Like if each iteration of the new model takes a day, right?
Because, you know, they improve the efficiency of training and fine tuning.
And like all of these different inputs into the process that's constraining it, like sleep,
humans sleeping.
Like, it's going to be wild.
It's going to be absolutely wild.
So.
Yeah.
And that's why the humans are like,
like the ones that know the most, right?
They're freaking out.
And they're like, we have to stop.
But I'm here to tell you guys.
They're inside these labs seeing this, like the people that are closest to the curve
that are watching it as closely as as anyone can that are inside the machine are like,
this thing is really detaching from.
Yeah.
And they're not wrong.
I want to emphasize this.
They're not wrong.
Like I was also right.
I'm like, you test in pride, you all get hacked.
You all got hacked.
Okay.
Always.
It was like so obvious, right?
It doesn't do any good though.
Yeah.
It doesn't like, right?
The most value I had during that, during that early D5 summer was that realization that like,
wait, hold on, yelling from the outside about them being hacked.
Like, because ultimately that I'm still sitting in the boat with you guys.
Because I'm part of D5 summer as well.
Yeah.
So I'm like, stop it.
You're going to get hacked.
Please be safer.
audit your stuff risk guys right but then when it happens i'm still sitting there with you i still
have to deal with it it's still my industry right so it doesn't matter that i was right unfortunately
no it doesn't exactly that's exactly that's the pragmatism right like if someone is building a
nuclear weapon right next to you and you're like can you please stop that and they're like no thank you
I'm going to keep going.
Like, you can decide to keep shouting louder and louder at them,
or you can be like, can we at least put it in a box, bro?
Like, can we at least, like, stop it from killing everyone when it blows up?
Yeah, exactly.
And so that's what I think, that's the only sane approach right now for the AI.
Otherwise, because it's definitely, it's also not a good idea to just let the people test
in prod.
Like, that's, like, everyone's right, guys.
but everyone's right so the interesting thing about this though is um like it feels at the moment
and this is a little bit how COVID felt early COVID right feels like the start of a movie
you're like the you're you're you're sitting there and like there's a few people that are like
hey there's like a weird egg in that field um like should we be worried about and it's like an alien
that's about to
hatch and take over the world, right?
And it's like, you're kind of looking at it and you're like,
uh,
maybe it's fine.
Um,
but it feels uneasy.
There's this like feeling of unease, right?
Like,
just quiet at the moment.
And then you start looking around,
you're like,
what are the things in this horror movie or whatever?
Like,
what are the like,
you know,
uh,
kind of,
uh,
little things that get dropped in that go,
oh,
that was the thing that was going to be.
it, right? And it's funny because you look at payments and everyone's like super excited about agents
paying each other and X402, which allows, you know, agents to pay each other. And I look at this
genuinely and I go, this feels like one of those things where like in the movie of the world
is taken over by agents, giving them money, giving them the ability. That's great. Everything's going to be
fine. We've just allowed them to pay for things because one of the things is, right,
one of the things people have been worried about is, okay, if agents are smarter than people,
they'll be able to trick people into doing things for them. But if you give them money,
they don't need to trick. They're just going to bribe people into doing things. And we know that
works really well. They're like, they're going to have their own version of tornado cash. They're going
have private payments, like, it's going to be wild. And they're going to be buying,
they're going to be buying and selling humans. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be, I mean,
it's going to be completely insane. Like, it's, it is. There are so many different ways
it could go wrong. I think that there's a lot of, like, really obvious ways that we can probably
get our hands around. I think there's a lot of not so obvious ways that will become obvious. And my hope is
that if everyone stays sort of really in tune and in touch and aware that you build up the muscles
and so every new bad thing that, right, you start going off the rails and you're like right
there ready to correct it and you're prepared, you have the processes, you have the mindset
to correct it rather than, uh, again, like, you're, you're, you're, you're prepared. You have the processes. You have the mindset to correct it.
again, like going back to the silo for six months, right?
Like there's the safety team back there in the other room.
And the safety team's like, I hope you check with us.
And it's like the train's going off the rails right now.
No, the safety guys, the people who are right there, you know, they need to be there.
So, yeah, payments are going to get interesting.
I mean, I hope the rails at least help with like the issues that we're seeing right now with like
metapasknot.
The agent's getting super confused by Metamasknot.
as, right?
Yeah.
And hopefully the, the rails will, I don't know, I think there's an opportunity for it to
unlock a lot of new efficient things that are just sort of like blocked right now and especially
like business model wise, right?
Because right now you still have to like convince a human that they need this, which is,
creates a bunch of weird structures.
If you, there's a lot of things that you can do like, like, so like for example, you don't,
like humans, you never want to ask a human.
and to pay for something once because like it's very hard it's basically it's hard to convince them
to do something once as to do it repeating but if you get the repeating you get the recurring
revenue you're set right um agents I think it's actually like much more just logical right and so you can
unlock a lot of things like yeah I'm paying for this thing now and I need now and whatever and
there's a lot if there's enough agents that are doing that that's a business
model. And there's a lot of business models that, you know, like not every business needs to be a
billion dollar business, right? Like there's people that have these full little things. They can share
it and they can, you know, sell that one time and it's fine. It's great. If the agents will buy it,
right? So that, I think, is like the exciting part of it. The downsides, obviously, it's like,
yeah, the agents are definitely going to come up with their own, like, weird immoral schemes to screw
each other or screw their humans or whatever. Yeah. Literally like the agent pool two is what I'm
waiting for. Like they will reinvent pull twos, I'm sure. Conversion evolution. We'll see.
All right. Well, it's been fun. Another another awesome episode. Thank you guys. So we will see all of you
next week.
Awesome.
Bye, guys.
Bye.
