Unchained - Uneasy Money: Did Solana Dapp Kamino Break the Golden Rule of DeFi? - Ep. 970

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Thank you to our Sponsor, Uniswap! Ethereum Fusaka is live, Infinex has embarked on its token sale, Hyperliquid is bolstering its HIP-3 markets and there is drama in Solana’s DeFi land. In this episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan delve into the significance and implications of the Fusaka upgrade and the controversy surrounding Infinex's token sale. They also take a look at the promise and risks of Hyperliquid's buzzing perp futures markets on tokenized equities and Kamino's controversial response to competition from Jupiter. In addition, they touch on Anthropic's smart contract study and the recent Yearn Finance exploit. Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Links: Unchained: Cheaper Fees and No More Free Lunch for Layer 2s? Inside Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Ethereum’s Layer 1 Lacks a Perp DEX. Synthetix Intends to Change That HIP-3 Records $500 Million in Daily Volume Uneasy Money: Hyperliquid’s Dilemma After 10/10: Protect Itself or Its Users? Uneasy Money: ICOs Are Back and Why Airdrops Are Instantly Dumped Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction ⚡️ 01:32 How Ethereum's shipping cadence has changed ⛽️ 9:36 Will Ethereum gas fees spike again? ⚔️ 12:26 Infinex's token sale controversy 💡 12:54 Kain explains the reasoning behind Infinex's ICO model 💥 18:47 What's driving the Infinex ICO controversy 🧏 24:11 How Hyperliquid's HIP-3 upgrade is changing DeFi participation 🤔 25:58 Are Hyperliquid's tokenized equities perps asking for SEC trouble? 🤺 38:48 Kamino v. Jupiter drama 🧐 44:59 Does Solana’s commercial tilt encourage more “gloves off” competition? 👀 50:51 Will Kamino users exit en masse? ❕️51:32 Anthropic's smart contract study coincides with Yearn Finance hack 💡 54:40 How AI can help bolster crypto security Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think so, like, there's no question of my mind. If transactions stay this cheap, there's so much money on Ethereum, someone will turn up and go, I'm going to build this thing and it's going to, you know, have hundreds of thousands of transactions and get a cause some chaos. I mean, ultimately, it just feels super shady. It just feels completely anti-web theory and everything that we stand for. Like, users having the right to exit and, like, actually having the right is a huge part of what permission is. Imagine if you just turn up to the NASDAQ and like stake some NASDAQ equity and get to

your own thing, right? Like good stuff will happen and bad stuff will happen there, right? And huge unlock. Just be a high integrity entrepreneur and instead of just trying to like, both an entrepreneurship perspective like super lame. Like that's like if Chad GBT like didn't let you use like Facebook. Hey everyone. I'm Kane and welcome to the fourth episode of uneasy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with Luca, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, and Tay from Meta Mosque. Before we begin, here's a word from our sponsors that make the show possible. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product?

The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-in-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto. It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity, less complexity. Visit hub.uniswop.org to learn more. 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.

All right. Let's get into it today. We got a big day for Ethereum today. Fusaka goes live today. It feels to me, before we go into all of the things, because there's a bunch of things that are going live with this upgrade. But it feels to me like the shipping case, of Ethereum has gotten so much faster now that we almost don't even notice these upgrades.

Like, they just roll through like every couple of months and we're like, there was a period of time where it was like a year would go by and we're like, oh, we're desperate for one-five-nine. Like, when will it happen? And now it's like, oh, God, another Ethereum upgrade. So I don't know about you guys, but the shipping cadence feels much, much faster these days. Yeah, no, 100%. And also it feels different.

Like, I think there's still a lot of things, like big things like are very heavily debated. And people really, really, really want and all these things. But it just feels like what's being shipped. And I guess like the type of debate is different. It's much more productive. More commercial, maybe. More aware of the market. I don't know.

Yeah, it's definitely a different vibe. Vibed of a different for sure. Like, there's no question. So maybe let's talk about it. So I was actually a bit blindside of myself. On Monday, I was talking to a couple of our engineers. And one of them was like, you know, this is like the SEPCA curve one where you get POS keys natively on chain, which has been on Polygon and I think a couple of L2s for a while.

But I remember in 2023, we were talking about this because Infinex was looking at, you know, would we use pass keys? Would you use passwords? Like, how are we going to do this? And, you know, two years later, it was one of those ones where I'm like, this is never going to ship. Like, there's no way. Like, this is just going to sit there forever. We're never going to ship pos keys on chain. But it seems like it's here, which is pretty exciting because I think, you know, from a U.S. perspective, once we figure out exactly how to dial the sim, that's going to be pretty amazing.

I think the other thing is maybe this is something that no one was asking for but blob space is going to increase by 8X. Yay! Do we need more blobs? Like, what are we doing here? Why do we have so many blobs? Yeah, so we can talk about scalability

and what's happening with blob space and, you know, dig into that a little bit. I think it's a very interesting market dynamic that we keep producing more block space yet are not consuming enough of it. But, you know, well, let's talk about that in a second. So I think the other thing that's interesting about the blob space conversation is Ethereum gas hit like 0.3Gway. And I remember in like, I want to say it was like April or May of 2018, we saw Gway go under one.

I don't know what the like all-time law of Gway is, but we're, we've got to be getting close here. So, so, you know, this culmination of like L2 proliferation, we have so many L2s. And we have scaled main net, like actually to a. create, like we've ripped out so many transactions off mainnet. We've scaled mainnet simultaneously. We've scaled blob space for L2s. And we now have like almost like gas free transactions on Ethereum mainnet. It's pretty wild. No, it is. And specifically on the gas one, the gas has always been super interesting because it's always been treated as a consequence of the block space, which it is to a certain extent.

But there's actually like a huge number of factors that go into like what the gas price is, meaning like how expensive transactions are. And I think partially due to just how many L2s there are and partially due to the overall demand of the market, but also partially due to people just being more aware of the gas price, all the wallets and all the interfaces, all the CLI tools have gotten so much better at really driving down the gas price for end users. And I just feel like it's never, it's like when you look at the charts, it's like dropped off. But we haven't seen that. I'm waiting for it to be seen with end users, like, realizing like what an online is.

How cheap. Yeah. It's pretty great. Like, I mean, we must be getting into the vicinity for, you know, 21,000 gas, right? for maybe, maybe like to take a step back for a second. So, you know, the entire reason why we went to this L2 scaling roadmap was that the L1 was so congested, right? And why was the L1 congested? The L1 was congested because we had so many different transactions and, you know,

defy composed ability basically broke the L1. We had all of these different DFI protocols that were all connected to each other. And if you touched one of them, you'd get this cascading. chain of transactions that would kind of go on to infinity and then curl back on itself and like just start again, right? So if prices were ever moving, you just had this like insane number of transactions that would kind of cascade through because of all the L1s. We moved a lot of that liquidity off to L2s. We, we did a bunch of things that have, you know, scaled, scaled the L1. And we're now in this situation where like for an each transaction, it must be.

be down to sense now. I haven't looked at it in a while, but like we're in the sense range, which, you know, when you, when you think about coming out of the bare market in 2023, Solana's, you know, Ethereum still had scalability issues back then. You know, transactions were still expensive. And if you go back to D-Fi summer, it used to be, I swear to you, you will not believe this, but it used to be $500 to claim your S&X stake. rewards every week on Mainnet. It was a real blocker. It was insane.

It was a blocker. $500. Like what are we like, it's crazy. Luca, you're very quiet there. I don't know if you're sitting here contemplating your life choices or what's going on. But are you going to move back to Mainnet? What's happening? What's going on?

Do it. No, I mean, this is probably not my like field of expertise. I'd probably say cheaper. transactions good. I think a huge reason why we didn't deploy Pangeau on Ethereum mainnet at the time was because it didn't make sense. The transactions were too expensive. And even then, you know, it was trending obviously lower, but now it's like getting incredibly low. It's like to the point of feasibility. So, you know, great moment for Ethereum. The only thing I can speak to about Ethereum is like, you know, eight months ago, six months ago, they started having like a founder success

team. And that was like a huge breakthrough to me. So you might be like, you might be like. looking at like the actual chain metrics. I'm looking at the fact that there's like a founder success team. Yeah. And that's awesome. Like that's, you know, I, you know, I'd spend three years working, you know, basically only on Ethereum and didn't even get an acknowledgement from anybody over there. Now I have like a direct line with somebody who like retweet my tweets.

Like, and that's like awesome. Yeah. It's much better. I agree with that. I think it's much better. The, the interesting thing, you know, this is not the first time we've seen this movie. We've seen this movie before where, transactions get cheap, and then there is this kind of induced demand.

But it has been a while now. Like, what would be a catalyst for Ethereum prices going up? Obviously, more transactions is one thing. What we haven't seen are people building contracts that consume more gas, like not necessarily, but like more complexity, right? So on Ethereum, the more computation, the whole point of the gas prices, is that it's about computation. This is a scarce, what used to be a scarce resource now, it's an abundant resource.

So we have an abundant computational resource, right, that we're trying to price in real time, and we have too much of it. So I'm surprised that people aren't, like, doing crazy stuff, like putting, I don't know, like, putting games on chain on, like, someone's going to do something crazy that's going to, like, cause gas to spike again for sure, but it just hasn't happened yet. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what we do about that. Yeah.

No, I mean, I think Lucas Point is part of it, right? It's like these L2s are all, and like even all L1s are all competing for the builders as they should be. And so, you know, when you're making choices about where to ship, that plays a big role. I think the other thing is that people, it probably hasn't fully set in yet just how cheap L1 is. So, like, you know, I think that'll take some time. But I do think it's interesting. Like, it's not just, it's like there's this whole series of things that have all come together to unlock the current state. Right?

Like, it also used to be that people would like just spam transactions nonstop because that's how you would like win. And then now with with like flashbots and everything. MEV and like how that whole market has evolved, it's just a completely different game. Right. So you don't have, you just don't have that, that spam that would would drive up the price and increase competition, even though there wasn't actually, uh, I mean, there was a competition, but it wasn't, it wasn't like real on chain transactions. Right. Right. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes next and, you know, yeah, if we do get a game, just, do we find some other fatal flaw in the, in the, it's.

in the mechanism design that we have to go, you know, figure out. Go and fix it. Yeah. I think so, like, there's no question in my mind. If transactions stay this cheap, someone will turn, there's so much money on Ethereum, someone will turn up and go, okay, I'm going to build this thing and it's going to, you have hundreds of thousands of transactions and get a cause some chaos. So moving on to our next topic, which I'm somewhat involved in.

So Infinex launched a token sale via Sonar ahead of the INXTG. And boy, was it interesting. So, you know, historically I have tried whenever there's some big thing that's going on, right? You know, some, whether it's a synthetics launch or something for Infinex, I try to look at the prior art and say, okay, what are all the things that people are doing? and crypto, you know, prior art doesn't last very long. Like someone was doing something six months ago. Like oftentimes it's completely dead.

You can't do it that way anymore. You got to try something else. But I looked at all the different things that people were doing, the objections people had, what people were looking for, et cetera. And also just trying to optimize the best thing for Infinex as well. And we proposed this sale. So we did an NFT sale a year ago. And the pricing was $125 million.

300 million and 500 million FTV. 88% of people or something like that chose the 125 million FDV. Funnily enough, back then, the reason why most people told us they chose that, with the longest lockup, right? So the 125 mil FDV had the longest lockup. The reason why they chose that is they were worried that we're going into a bear market. So already people are idiots. They have no idea what's going on, right? So that was the first thing. So we said, okay, we did. We did this sale a year ago, we can't rug people by, you know, offering the same terms a year

later for the token. We've got to have some difference. And so we said, okay, we're going to do a $300 million FDB, which is below the NFT price, but with a one-year lockup. So like oftentimes I'll write up a blog post, which is like, you know, Bezos has this thing at Amazon where they write the press release first, right? And it's like, if the press release doesn't land, then like get the fuck out like get out of the room right and and so uh so you know um i'd still wonder about that press release for the fire phone you remember the fire phone that had like eight LEDs around the skirt like how did that press release get there they just kept adding more cameras they were like eight cameras so it was like some weird um some weird thing but so so we said okay

300 mill but we don't want people to feel like they're locked up and have no choice so we'll give people a a free option and an early exit clause. Now, oftentimes early exit clauses, like the prior art here is you get a bunch of tokens for a thing, for doing a thing, yield farming or some incentive, an air drop or whatever, and they're locked. And if you want to leave, you lose some of the tokens. You know, there's like a tax, an exit tax, like 50%, 70%, 80%. There's a lot of people that have done this. And it always struck me as like very punitive. Like the last thing I want to do is lose tokens to a project that I that I want, right? Like it just doesn't seem like a viable thing.

Like if you said to me like, I'll give you some pengu and, you know, you can get liquidity after three months, but you got to lose half the pengue, I'd be like, no, that's just like, I'm never doing that as a terrible idea, right? So what we said is instead of losing tokens, you can just pay a higher price if you want to leave. right and so we're like let's just pick kind of an arbitrary price we'll pick a billion dollars as the as the exit clause so if for some reason it's trading over a billion dollars and you want to exit early you can pay a little bit more and get out but obviously that is also kind of punitive that's fairly high price so we'll have a decay curve which goes from a billion dollars down to 300 million over the course of a year The conclusion on the timeline was

you're a monster trying to sell tokens at a billion dollars what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you pricing this token so expensively? It's like no no no guys like this is just the game theory like this is what we're trying to do but it didn't really land on the timeline so I don't tell you what was your perspective as an outside

observed like on my feed it was just heat chaos but I mean I got I did get it on my I was like, oh, damn. I was like, main character arc right here. Let's go. So it wasn't just your feed as it sometimes is. I don't think people realize this.

When you're the main character, like even a little bit of the main character, your entire worldview is shaped by people yelling at you. It is wild. And it's actually not an accurate representation of reality. You're like in a little like bubble of hate and it's really damaging. But yeah, so basically what Keynesowski was like, wait, but was it really like that? It was a bit. There was a bit. My favorite all-time comment that I've ever seen was this guy, I'll have to go back and find it.

I don't even have the link, but it's so good. He basically was like, Kane is a scammer, this is a scam. These are the worst terms I've ever seen in my entire life. It's too much money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But Infinex is a great product, and I'll continue to use it. And I was like, what? My head of product. My head of product, like, printed that out and was like, there you go.

Like, my founder is a terrible person, but we're nailing the product. So who cares? I was laughing so hard because I think that's possibly the first time I've ever seen that argument on crypto Twitter ever. Because usually it's the inverse, right? Usually it's like you guys don't even have a product and I hate your terms. And it's almost like the lack of the product. or the fact that the product sucks or whatever, it's almost fueling the fud and like triggering the fud.

This one I was like, wow. Like I really like this, but he's so bad that I have to hate it. Yeah, I have to. He's such a bad person. It was really funny. So I don't know, you get like a badge or an unlock for that one because that was just like an incredible, yeah, just incredible commentary. In general, though, I think my sort of overall takeaway,

Because I, you know, I don't really care that much about any of the exact terms on any of these things. I just don't pay that much attention. It's just more of the same, like, larger debate discussion on, like, what are people optimizing for? What are end users expecting? What are the motivations of this? Like, what are people? Why are people yelling? And, like, for me, it's, like, I think, I don't know.

I think we're in a weird place in the ICO arc. Like, we've been talking about these, like, Monad and, like, for so long, right? It's been like a year ago. And I think people are probably, like, a bit apprehensive about the market in general. Like, you know. And then you, and then you. And this is the funny thing, like, 20, 24, right? Like, we did this NFT sale.

And people are like, I'm so worried about this bear market. It's coming in 20 minutes. And I was like, I think you'll be okay, guys. Like, I don't know that we're in a fair market yet. So. Yeah. People are always worried. Like, people who haven't been through multiple cycles, I think always over indexed on, like,

there's two components to it. One is, bull markets are higher as fuck. Like, it is so tiring to go through a bull market that by the time you're like six months in, there is a part of your brain that's like, I'm done. Like, it can be the best most fun party ever. But after three days, you're like, I just want to go home at sleep. Like, please. But there's no getting off.

You can't get off to marry around. It's like, no, sorry, you're chained to this thing. You're going. You're going to keep going until you pass out. So I think there is an element of like people are kind of hoping that it's over, like a pullback of like 20%. They're like, oh, yeah, like finally this is over. But then hilariously, when it actually is a bare market,

20 minutes off of that, they're like, please bring the market back. This is the nightmare. Everything's dying. Yeah, it's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. I don't know, Luca, what was your, did you, did that get into the Luca bubble at all, this Infinex? It got it into the Luca bubble, but the Luca bubble is a different opinion nowadays than he probably might have had in the past. I mean, dude, it's going to fill here today, gone tomorrow, once it fills, everyone's going to be aligned and saying it's the best thing ever.

And you could air drop them all, the entire supply, they'll find a way to fund it. So, you know, somebody, I think I might have coined this, but the peanut gallery, I really like that term of the peanut gallery, just a bunch of peanuts, you know, peanut gallering away, you know, nobody's serious in the comments, you know, saying anything. It's just not serious people. So it's just like a very interesting thing. Just I'm learning this. I've learned this deeply over the last couple of years, but as I get older in this space month over month, the more that I just realize it's like there's the peanut gallery and then there's the serious people like no serious people were under your post like saying anything that like caught my eye. Freaking out. Yeah. Like want to go and like read up on it. You know, just like the peanut gallery just clickety clacking their shells and I was just like,

okay, will be fine tomorrow. Well, you know, so that one of the most funny things from me, right, is like there, there are this new and you know, every single cycle there's a new cohort of K-O-Ls. that emerge, right? So there were this new cohort of KOLs who have emerged, some of them out of the InfoFi arc, whatever. But one guy was this guy, whale dot Mocha, right? And he was really like anti the terms, hated the terms, whatever. I don't know that he's ever used Infinex. So he doesn't know what the product is, but just in principle didn't like the term. So I was like, okay, fine. But then I was like, guys, and this was a little bit of a skill issue.

And if I could go back, I would do this a different way. I was like, we have, in two days, we have this CT Mafia blood money crates drop, where we're dropping crates to all of the CT Mafia. If you guys just waited like two days, you get paid your blood money and you wouldn't need to fund it. But the hilarious thing is, so two days later, he gets his crates. He opens up a bunch of crates, gets some prizes. and he's like, actually, I changed my mind. It's really good. I like it.

I was like, there you are. But it's like the mafioso that's like, hey, nice project, it'd be ashamed if it burned down. But he's already burned it down. He burned the house down. And then he's like, actually, I'm sorry. I made a mistake. You're actually a good kid.

I'm sorry about that. So, yeah, it was quite hilarious to observe the pivot. The pivot to like maybe like vague tolerance. from hatred. But yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. So next thing that I think we wanted to talk about was HIP3, this upgrade to hyperliquid. So this has been a thing that's been rolling out now for a little while.

It was proposed maybe like six months ago or something like that and has been slowly rolling out. I think it's very interesting to see how hyperliquid has been going about moving from this very centralized listing process and control from the team to opening up to the community. And I think one thing that they've been doing really well is saying, okay, if you want to do stuff on hyperliquid, if you want to come in and you participate in the ecosystem, build things in the hyperliquid ecosystem, we're going to have a very clear requirement of just staking hype, which is a bit different to like OG defy days. OG. Defy Fy days, you might have to stake the token to vote, but you were just like one person voting, right? So, you know, you go and get a bunch of

ABE and you're like, you've got 3% of the vote. You can't actually sway a vote, right? So almost nothing would happen. This is a bit different where they're saying like, just stake, you know, 50 bits of the supplier or what not maybe not even that maybe like five dips of the supply right like a few million dollars worth of tokens and it's an open playing field you can go and do whatever you want which to me like from a permissionlessness standpoint feels like much more aligned i think it's a much smarter i'm sure i'm sure there's been examples of this of happening to start with historically but this to me this cycle with hyperliquid where it's like come and stake this amount of hype and you can do this thing come and take this amount of hype you can do this thing, just from a governance and kind of coordination perspective,

feels so much more aligned in how that they've done this. So the most interesting thing, though, for me, I think is that we now have, like, YOLO equity herbs, which I didn't think was going to happen this quickly. Like, I know it's crime season, but I, you know, going back to, like, OG's Synthetics Days, Mirror Protocol. we did equity, not even perps, right? Just tokenized equities. We did it for like 30 minutes and every single, like not even my lawyer. It's just like any lawyer that I came across was like, bro, you need to shut this down immediately.

Like this is a terrible idea. And now we've got like the largest decks with like permissionless equity perp contracts. It's pretty wild. Yeah, I'm looking I'm looking at the numbers right now This is I don't know I feel like this is a huge unlock

Explain how this works The cane technically If you don't mind Or TAY if either of you know how this works technically Yeah so I mean Old perps It's not like a debt receipt Unlike the NASDAX

So like How is it functional Right? Like you know They have an Oracle price And you just looks at The price of gold or whatever And says okay

Gold is 4,000 an ounce and then they have a mechanism that kind of keeps the traders in line, whether it's a funding rate or something. So, you know, there's an external source of pricing data that's pulled in and then it lets people trade contracts with leverage on that pricing data, right? So, you know, if you think gold's going to $5,000 an ounce, you can go long. If you think it's going back to $3,000 an ounce, you go short. You're not trading gold.

No one's moving gold around in like buckets, right? It's purely a paper trading system. And this is the same thing with equities, right? If you're trading 30x leverage Nvidia contracts, like there's no Nvidia being armed in this process. But trading securities and derivatives of securities, like, I don't know, bro. Like, I don't know what happened to the SEC, but I remember those guys used to be pretty aggressive. and yet again, like here we are. Yeah, I mean, that's, I don't know, I do feel like this industry is really good at, like, we get an inch and then we just.

Just kind of like so hard. Gensler must be rolling in his grave right now. Like what, like, imagine the seethe and cope that's going on to that guy's head. I mean, we saw that lady a cover of her name, like, on the timeline for like two weeks. Mary or something like that. Karen. That was like losing her mind. Karen from the SEC.

Yeah. Was like losing her mind. Like losing her mind. She was like, you people are so, you just like, if you come out and say, Hayden is effectively a criminal, right? Like the most like friendly law-abiding, like, you know, like flowers and rainbows guy in crypto. And you're like, this guy is the devil.

It's like, bro, you don't even, you're not even close. Like, yeah. Anyway, so. No, any, I mean, that was the problem with the SEC, right? Like, that era of the SEC was just, one, everything is crime. Two, actually not everything is crime. Only like the legit players that are like within our orbit are the, are the controls. And meanwhile, every, every actual user, every actual person, there is actual harm in this industry.

And the SEC's like, no, no, it's, it's Hayden. Hayden and NeNezwop. They're the ones are bad, right? Like, what? So that's, yeah. And I think that this is, if you look at, like, how does this industry get to a point where we're not, like, if the goal is not necessarily like, whatever, the SEC, right? Just ignore the SEC. If the goal is like, let's have better markets, let's have less harm.

let's have more understanding, right? How do we get there? To a certain extent, the answer has to come from within this industry in order to have that buy in and legitimacy. On the other hand, like, it also has to be, like, I don't know, the second that you go too hard on anyone end, you just risk this, like, rebellious blowback. That's super unproductive. this industry is so good at just taking anything and then just running with it. And then the second that you were like, okay, maybe that wasn't the best idea in the world, they like just one alien just go the other direction. And like, I don't know. I think we will eventually have to get to a place where everything is just more, yeah, is like these smaller iterations in reaction to like real issues and harm and like go from there.

The interesting thing to me is like I had dinner with Hayden and Robert Leshner from Compound in like 2022, right? And we were still in this mindset of like the SEC is just like a little bit confused about what's going on. And if we could just educate them and explain to them why this is going to create more official markets. And then a year later, we had dinner again. And we're like, oh, they're trying to kill us. Okay. Like that it's totally we were just so naive and and oblivious to like what was actually going on But the problem is and and I've said this many times like if someone's trying to kill me

I'm gonna kill back like I'm not just gonna sit like once it's very clear that this is not like a friendly let's educate the person It's like no, no if you're gonna like start firing you know nukes at us we're gonna fire back and that's the problem is like that then creates this mindset in the industry of like okay now it's adversarial and you can't be educated. You don't care about what we're trying to do. And if you can like, if you can kind of weaponize someone like Hayden, like you've done something horribly wrong. So bad. Like, if Hayden gets radicalized, like you're in a bad place.

Yeah. And the end effect of it, right, is that the whole industry and the best builders in this industry, right, the best legal minds, the smartest people who like actually knew what was up and actually were potentially in a place to improve the ecosystem, spend all their time and energy fighting the SEC. Like, that was it. And the goal was not necessarily to, like, their focus was just primarily on, like, survival and not being destroyed.

Now it's like, okay, it's a free for all, but nobody's really taken the time to ask and understand. understand and dive into like what's the best possible path for us. Because everyone's been so busy, fight, like, just like trying to, to not die. I mean, look at like all of, all of governance. Like, there's so much governance. This is what I mean. I know this triggering for you, right?

Like, it was like, okay, actually no one's in charge, guys. There's like a computer somewhere. It's maybe in charge. We don't really know. We can't do anything. We've got no idea. And it was all this like smoke screen because again, like, you know, and this is this is my point, right? If you're like, oh, there are people trying to break into my house and kill my family.

It's like, well, I'm like I've got a couple of shotguns now, right? Like I'm going to defend myself. So, you know, and like having a bunch of shotguns in your house is net negative for everyone. Like bad stuff's going to happen, right? Like, but it's like you don't have a choice. There's people come in and going to be. break the door down and try and, you know, carry off to the gulag. Yeah.

Anyway. Well, that's, okay. So with regards to, I mean, it's everything. It's literally every, every product decision, every company decision right now, governments, like product priorities, right? When we look at like hyper liquid, right, I think this is a huge unlock for them, right? They're basically like, layering, like layering up in a way where they've unleashed. unlocked other people's ability to create basically markets, right? And it's not, it's not just assets. It's like entire sort of little markets. And then there's assets on these individual markets,

right? That's great. That's that's, I think that there's like a huge amount of value to unlock here. Commissionless NASDAQ. Like that's, like, imagine if you just turn up to the NASDAQ and like stake some NASDAQ equity and get to like lists your own thing, right? Like good stuff will happen and bad stuff will happen there, right? And this is, and huge unlock, like, full-off. Yeah, massive unlock. Okay. Also, probably a lot of different risks and like, a lot of different risks over a huge area. But, you know, it's funny, right? Okay, a bunch of risks and yeah, people will lose some money, but the end result is like the market progresses. We learn some things. And it's not like you can prevent bad things from happening just because you're a regulated market. Look at SPACs.

Spax just like was scorched earth. And like this is not happening in DFI. It's happening in the middle of TradFi. The middle of Tradfai while the craziest SEC in history is running amok and like the spack boom happens. Right. So it's not like there's some magic wand of like, oh, let's just regulate and like that will solve all the problems. Right. Like it's, you know, regulators are not magicians. No, they're really bad, actually, because they actually are quite, uh, like, they're, they're mostly oriented towards things that are not necessarily like getting the best outcomes. Like, they have all their other motivations. So that, like, always makes things messy, obviously. Um, they're very slow and inefficient, which is sometimes a good thing.

But obviously when you have an ecosystem that's rapidly evolving. like the faster that you can respond to like live issues and live risks and like you know help help steer or like oh it's it's literally they're hmm they're running headlong into the rocks and continuously crashing like you have to be able to like with a more iterative gentle hand like you know uh push people guys people some but i think that is like fun fundamentally a problem, right? If you know, if you're like, I mean, imagine you're sitting there at the SEC and you're like, okay, I am so slow. It takes me a year to do anything, right? Like, and there's going to be so much harm that will come from all of these things. I can see how you'd get yourself to the point where like, shut it down, right? And that's like, SEC Karen was like, we got, we gave you guidance in 2019 on like this one thing. What is your problem? Like, just don't do anything else. It's like, well, that, no, like, that's, like, that, like, that's, like, that's, like, that's, like, that's, like, like, that's. That's not going to work. So we're going to continue discussing Defy, but Defy on Solana and some Solana Defi drama after a message from our sponsor.

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So I woke up, I think, maybe yesterday, And I'm in the Salana Defytelegram chat. And usually it's fairly sleepy. And there's like, you know, 30, 50 messages a day or something like that. I woke up and there were like 1,500 unreads messages. And I was like, either it's some giant hack or like some crazy dramas going on. And it turns out it was drama. So there was a dispute, I guess, between Camino.

And I'll put my hand. I would say I'm an investor in Camino, which is the lending protocol. and Jupiter, which is now an everything protocol. They started as a Dex, but they do everything now, which is, I think, part of what's going on here. I think Jupiter is the biggest DFI project in the Salana ecosystem, and they're just stepping on everyone's toes. Like every single thing that anyone is doing well in Sala, DFI,

Jupiter is like, yeah, yeah, we'll do that too. Like getting into perps, getting into lending, getting into everything. They want to be this kind of every single. everything financial app within, within Salana. So, Camino was like, well, how about we just stop people from leaving Camina? Or just block people from being able to go to Jupiter Lens' new address, which, yeah, I don't know. And I don't know where we got to, like, I think this is like on chain. So I think we know that this happened.

They hardcoded it. And then Casamani was like, no, no. guys, you don't understand. Camino users are just choosing Camino. This is just a choice thing, right? Like, they're just choosing to do it. And also, if they happen to not be choosing it, really, it's Camino just protecting themselves from the risk of Jupiter to very classic Carl Simani takes on the world. So, yeah, what do we think about blocking people from going to other D-5 protocols. I'm team Jupiter on this one.

I'm team Jupiter on this one. I mean, look, it's not D-5 if you do that, right? Like, frankly, unless, like, you're preventing some sort of systemic risk, which, like, maybe at least in the beginning I thought it was like, well, maybe they're, like, trying to, like, stop, like, some elaborate looping scheme and, like, the two commingling or is, like, creating this scheme. But at the end of the day, like, that's D-5, right? Right, like even if that was the case.

It doesn't seem like it is necessarily, but I'm team Jupiter. And at the end of the day, like, if Jupiter is just going to go and take everyone's lunch, like that's an everybody else's problem. That's not a Jupiter problem. And it seems like the consumer is losing because Jupiter is doing great work and their competitors are upset. So I think Camino, and I like the Camino guys too, those guys, a lot of the Salana guys are over in Miami. So, you know, huge drift, Ju-Drift, Camino, the whole margin-fi. I love all those guys, but, I mean, it would be frank, like, Jupiter's in the right here.

Camino's in the wrong. I'd fix it if I was them, like, optimized for the user experience and the user above all else. And Jupiter has an amazing team. I mean, like, I'm in Jup land. I'm everywhere over in Jupiter lands. The only thing I used to, I've said this for a while. I think Solana's not Solano without the Jupiter team. I really believe that.

I thought someone was in the game. I think that's fair. So I thought it changed everything for them. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, it just feels super shady. It just feels completely anti-Web authority and everything that we stand for. Like users having the right to exit and like actually having the right is a huge part of what permissionlessness is. I think that Kyle's argument is like, well, they can still technically leave.

And that's a similar argument that like a wallet could make, right? Like a wallet could say, like, they can still technically owe to send all of their money somewhere else and not use our product if we start to screw them over. But that's like a huge barrier. And you know that it's a huge barrier, right? it's not super it's not super genuine to like stand on that position especially if they had the ability to do that

and you're actually removing their ability to do that. It's different if there's other, if there's like other considerations and that was the best part of decision for other reasons and it had that as a downstream consequence. I'm not seeing that here though, right? No. They just have the ability to.

to, right? They have the ability to do this thing. I mean, with Jupland didn't exist, right? So there's no, it wasn't like Camino was like, let's hard code this thing to stop people from being able to leave until they started leaving. And then they're like, what if we could stop them? What if we had the technology to stop them from leaving? That's.

And from a purely selfish financial business thing. So business, it's an interesting. So this is, this is my hot take on. this though, right? Solana is a much more commercial ecosystem. It is. And I, I'm sure that some crazy Defi project has tried to do something like this before. So I don't want to pretend like Ethereum is, you know, somehow completely, uh, above all of this. Okay, wait, but hold on, hold on, hold on.

Yeah. Sushi swap literally came out of nowhere and literally vampered all of Uniswai. Yeah. Right. And what did Uniswap do? They did not block. Right. Right.

They were like, all right, we're going to have to drop a token to then. Yeah, which was great for everyone. So, so, but this is my, this is my, this is my, this is my sort of question or point, I guess, on this, right? It's like, Solana is a much more commercial, uh, ecosystem. It has much more commercially minded people. It has attracted more commercially minded people. Um, I think that there is, and this is kind of weird when you think about it, that like, the Ethereum, you know, pure decentralized.

ethos somehow that the vibes of that prevented any large-scale protocols from playing these kinds of games whereas that doesn't really exist in the salon ecosystem so it's sort of like gloves off your your your business is being attacked by another business you need to do what you can to prevent it and and the overton window is like a bit different on salana it seems like no this is this is this is I wouldn't even look at it through that lens I'd look at it through the lens of entrepreneurship. And if you were to look through that lens, like Solana's tagline to ship or die, I can tell you I'm a Solana power user. And Defi power user actually only use Solana Defi instead of I don't use any Ethereum defy with the exception of a little bit of

size on Athena and Ave. Juplend is the better product. Like I just hate to break it. It's easier. It's simpler. The yield feels better. So like at that point, like just be a high integrity entrepreneur and instead of just trying to like you know both an entrepreneurship perspective like super lame like that's like if chat gbt like didn't let you use like facebook you know or dude okay hang on but ask chat gptt about claude and it pretends like it doesn't know that anthropic exists it's actually hilarious if you go like i've had weird issues with uh with anthropic and claud and cursor right and if you go to chat cheap T and you say, hey, I'm using cursor and I'm trying to figure out this setting or whatever.

It's like, do you mean the thing that shows up on the screen when you're about to type? And it's like, what? No, I obviously don't mean that. And like, I mean the AI platform. You know what I'm talking about? It's like, no, no, I've never heard of this product before. So then like, when to do this stuff? One person move into one another and like integrate.

Like, I could still steal man that though a little bit and just be like, okay, like, Camino doesn't need to like hop into this. pool or you know you know the terminology better but like they're they can not be commingled in any way and like obviously that would hurt both of their like you know tv or like maybe some like yield parameters but like completely saying like my users can't you know go over there great like jup plans the better product i don't have this problem because i actually just moved two weeks ago my money off commino to jupland because i was like why am i diversion you front ran the exit you front ran the exit front ramp.

You caused this, Luca. This is your fault. They're like, where are our size going? Leaving and they're like, we got to stop this mass exodus. We're drawing a line. What's Luca leaves that's over for us? So, all right, moving on to... Hold on.

Sorry. I have one last thing. Okay. Okay. Here's the difference between the Web 3 and Defiway. We're thinking about things and the Trotifyway. And it's actually really important to like remember this because it's not actually that Web 3 is like less valuable, right? Like the moat exists.

If you block in your users and you keep them that there's value there, right? The whole point and the whole thing that Web 3 is in Defi especially has proven is that with more interoperability, with more people doing more things and having more freedom, there's more value on the table. Right. And so when I look at a decision like this, it feels very like Tadfly Web to lock everyone in, try to keep it for yourself, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's a completely wrong mentality, not because it's not like a moat. It is a moat. There is value there. You can count that value.

But it's not as valuable as if you were to like prioritize on leveling everyone up because that's what's going to really get those. again like just look at the stuff in even just like 2019 2020 like early defy like that would have never been possible and nobody if people are locking things down yeah for sure yeah the interoperability is what and like is what creates more value and it's like only if you're really in this very old way of thinking that you don't see that and so like i would argue this is a bad business decision for them not because of the blowback not because of the you know the the most moat like it's a bad business decision because you're clearly not you like you clearly have not realize the true value and the potential value of what you could access and what you could get for

your users and that's going to end like that's why you're leaving value on the table ultimately right you can lock everyone up what you want but does the does the organism reject this sort of thing right like you know given that people have choice given that people you know is this something where people go, no, hang on. Like, we have, you know, we can move and go somewhere else. And if you guys are going to play these kinds of games, then we're going to, we're going to, you know, just exit. We're going to hit the escape patch.

I mean, one, I think people will exit, not to a degree that makes a huge, I mean, maybe, but probably not to a degree that makes a huge amount of difference. I think what ultimately, like if I was an investor in Camino, I would be saying, guys, you need to understand where the value unlocks are and how to, how to empower people and get in on like these unlocks, right? And the interoperability, because if you do that successfully, then like the sky is the limit. But if you continue down this mindset of like our values only what we can capture and therefore lock everything in and try to keep people and count the users, like, I would just worry about long-term, like what their product looks like, what choices they make, how they expand their product.

And I think it's self-defeating in this industry, not because people will yell at you on Twitter, but because there's actually just less value on the table. Yeah, fair. I'll clip that and send it to them. Thanks, same. So two more kind of interrelated topics to round it out for today. The first one is Anthropic is attacking our protocols, it turns out. They've got a red team that's, I guess, trying to figure out crypto exploits.

And then coincidentally, at the exact same time, your own finance was exploited. And we've had now some, like, it just feels weird that my spotty senses are tingling. I mean, Tate, you must have some thoughts on this. Like, why do these old vaults keep getting? exploited is this just like people see it happening and then they go actually maybe there's more more kind of exploits available here and they go back to this old stuff i would have thought people were pouring over this old stuff all the time anyway and like anything that's got like you know eight eight nine figures of money that's been just sitting there for a while like what's going on

here yeah i mean urine definitely feels very similar to balancer it's not and not because of the technicals or attribution or any of that, it just feels similar that you have these sort of like these OG protocols that are perceived to be robust. And then all of a sudden this thing happens that nobody thought was possible. I do suspect that yearn, well, I suspect the balance or probably has influenced a lot of people to go back and look more carefully about the old contracts and be like, maybe these things aren't as robust as everyone assumes.

I think the other thing, though, is that if you really sort of understand deeply the balance or exploit, there's like another takeaway here, which is that there's a lot of assumptions that builders and even auditors and even like red timers just have about smart contracts and how they operate and like what's a flaw and a weakness and what's not. And if you can find the right set of conditions in variance, then those assumptions break, and then you can hack the thing. And I think that in both these cases, like both these cases, it took a long time for the best experts in the space to deeply understand the root cause and all of the contributing factors. Like, it was, it's not everyone that was tweeting, by the way, in both incidents instantly, like. There's the root cause. They were wrong. They were wrong.

They were really, really wrong. These things were complex. There was a lot of different things that happened. Part of it is understanding exactly what the attack did, but then also understanding, like, the true root cause. In both cases, it is not a simple answer. This is on trivial, right? Yeah. And so I think that, yeah.

And I don't know. People keep asking me if it's AI. It's not AI. And the anthropic thing, which we'll talk about in a second, Cruz is not AI, right? Like, these are the best guys who are going deepest on the best status sets. However, I think that... What's your take on the anthropic red team stuff?

I think a lot of people are like, ah, AI's going to kill us all, which you will, but like not through defy exploits is the hot take, I guess. Yeah. So one, the research is really good. It's really like, it's robust research. It's like actual research. It's not... It's not like as exciting Twitter-wise because it's not like, we hacked everything.

It levels everything up. It defines standards for these sorts of things, which other people will then be judged against and things will progress. I think it's super interesting that they were able to actually find a kind of a lot of exploits. And even though these exploits weren't necessarily like, you know, these $100 million things, There were still quite a lot of them, including some active ones that were live and had been live. And so I think one of my takeaways was this. This is super cool because there is a whole, a whole demographic of builders and smart contract people that just like don't actually take security and testing and bug me seriously whatsoever. And they just exist on chain.

They just exist on chain. And there's money in them. And so the issue historically is that like if there's no incentive to hunt for it, except to hack it, then you're only going to hack it. If you can lower that barrier to entry, meaning if AI can just go out there and like look for these things, there's a potential that you save people's money because it's the cost of like finding these things. I mean, all it's so expensive, right?

Like, and not, you know, not fault free. Right. Like every, all, every one of these things, like, balancer had like, some crazy number of audits. They're like 10. Right. Yeah. So, you know, yeah. And I mean, as someone who's done a lot of audits, I'm sure, I'm sure, you know, all three of us have been through the audit process many, many times.

Like, you know, like, you can do an audit and then you can send it to another auditor and they're like, here's a high stuff thing. It's like, oh, wow, we went through three rounds of audits with the other guys. And it's just like different set of eyes, different perspective, different, you know, different priors about how things hook together and all of a sudden someone goes, wait, and then as soon as you show it to the other team, they're like, oh, wow, yeah, we really miss this. Like, wow.

Like, holy shit. Yeah. It's like, it's not like they're like, no, we don't think that's real, right? They're like, it's always like, oh, yeah, that was a thing that, you know, we didn't think through. So I guess in theory, you throw, like, AGI at all of our contracts and it takes all the money combines ways. Yeah.

And that was, I mean, that's what this anthropic research is pushing forward. It's definitely not like 100% there yet in terms of like finding a balancer. But you can definitely imagine that it's like, again, it's another tool in the tool chest. It's another thing with different incentives and different motivations that can go out and find things. And that ultimately will help protect people, right? Ultimately, well, and it can also be used by bad guys to hack more things. but, you know, we'll deal with that. If you lower the cost, it becomes, it becomes better.

Yeah. All right, guys, I better run so I don't miss my flight. I'm about to head on a plane. So, yeah, this has been, this has been fun. That's it for this episode of uneasy money. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And I'll see you guys next week. Later. Awesome. Thank you.