Unchained - Uneasy Money: ICOs Are Back and Why Airdrops Are Instantly Dumped - Ep. 947

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

In this first episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Luca Netz, Kain Warwick, and Taylor Monahan dig into the Balancer hack, Berachain’s centralized response, the sudden return of ICO-style distribution, and why some new drops give away so little.  Luca explains why he thinks generous airdrops are essential for building a real “army,” Taylor breaks down MetaMask’s own thinking on token incentives, and Kain questions whether any of these models still make sense in a sentiment-driven market. Plus, Uniswap’s fee switch proposal and the tea on Velodrome and Aerodrome. Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Timestamps: 👏 0:00 Intro 🛑 1:23 The Balancer hack—and why we need more guardrails beyond audits 🐻 10:18 How Berachain’s centralized response raised deeper questions 🚀 19:19 The return of the ICO meta 💰 21:26 Why Luca says big airdrops are essential to building an “army” 🐧 24:24 How Luca designed the PENGU airdrop—including the goal of surpassing DOGE 📉 37:11 What’s the point of airdrops if everyone just dumps? ⚖️ 39:50 Are ICOs actually better than airdrops? 🦊 43:41 How MetaMask designed its rewards system—and what Taylor thinks about incentives 🦄 47:19 Uniswap’s UNIFICATION proposal and what it showed about what drives prices 🔀 49:42 Velodrome + Aerodrome merge—and why Kain says the move is “weird” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I ended up realizing in hindsight, it's been a focus of ours as recent, it's like, defy kind of powers the chain. And so I was like, you know, go deploy your device. Can you give Vitalica heads up on that one? I've been fascinated by some of these distributions because I'm like, man, you guys got some big balls on you because I would not have the balls to give my community so little. Hey, everyone. I'm Kane Warwick. And welcome to the first episode of Uneasy.

money because what happens on chain never stays on chain this is a show where we dig into what's really happening on chain every week i'll be joined by lucanettes and taylor monahan as we talk to plummics dows yield security and everything in between from people actually building the space we're here to make sense of the on chain economy and maybe have a little fun doing disclaimer one quick thing before we start nothing you hear on uneasy money is financial or technical advice maybe technical advice uh you can find the uh the website Explosures at UnchangedCrypto.com slash uneasy money. All right.

Let's do this. First episode. It's been a while. It's been a while coming this episode. Tay and I have been on quite the journey. I think it's been almost a year. I got a message by one of our former guests, actually. Yes, Faye.

It was like, oh, it's finally happening. I was like, yeah, we're doing it. I think we're going to start with Balancer. I mean, it's funny, actually. It's been so much this happened even in the last like 48 hours. that I think people have forgotten about balancer. But yeah, so about three or four days ago now, Balancer, which is one of the oldest Dexes, I guess,

that was around kind of DeFi Summer was hacked, but not the current version. So they've had a few different versions. This is Balancer V2, which I think launched in 2021. It's had like billions of dollars in volume and TV. for years and years and years and years and has been forked, unfortunately, for the forkers many, many times across many chains. And something happened. What's your hot take on this day? Yeah, something happened. It got exploited. It was a pretty technical exploit where they,

I mean, you might have to fill in the gaps. But basically, the way that all of the, these sort of like types of smart contracts and liquidity pools and treating things, how they like work is there's like automatic things like get adjusted perpetually over time, like every single time there's a trade. And so the logic of the smart contract code handles all of that. ideally you can't like trick it into giving you a better price or a worse price than sort of like the broader market. In this case, they're able to use this like one set of functions that allowed calls to be like combined. They able to do that and then combine it with a rounding issue.

So like we're talking about like at the very tail end of the decimals. Yeah. So there are two things here that I think were interesting. One, this whole batch function thing was about saving gas, right? So it's like, you know, especially go back to like 2021, Ethereum, gas was super expensive. So it was like, hey, just this one small tweak and this will be super cheap from a gas perspective. So there's that element to it as well. Yeah.

And so basically there's like, let's just say, dude comes along and finds this thing. that allows him to make a, like, a very long stack of calls that sort of, like, go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and exploit this rounding issue, these, like, very, these decimals. But, like, combined with everything else that he was doing, he was basically able to end up manipulating the current state of the contract to make it believe that, like, the attacker basically had way more money. money than they actually did. So that was the very first transaction. Basically, deployed the contract, did this whole long series of stuff that, yeah, that impacted the state. And then the second part of it was that then they just withdrew that money. And because the smart contract state had like a bad number in it, the attacker was able to just withdraw all the funds, right? Yeah, a huge amount of money. And so I think we have, it was like 70 million on ETH, and then a few million on things like

base and Polygon and Arbitrum and Sonic was a big one. Barrechain was a big one. There's 13 million on Barrechain. There's a whole Baratane arc that we can get to as well, right? So it was like it was over 100 million that was stolen. I don't know other than Baratrain, which we can talk about in. second. I don't know if much of it was recovered or, or, you know, where, where that kind of sad or if people have any idea as to who may have been behind it. But it's definitely, I think the

scary thing from me with this, A, I was a big LP and balancer v2 back in the day. So that was a bit petrifying. But also, this contract's been on. main net for four years. Yeah, and that's the big thing. So I saw a bunch of speculation around like how can something be on Ethereum for four years with a bug like this and not get exploited until now? Like what's what how does like what's your hot take on like how does something just last that long and then someone stumbles across it?

Yeah. So I think there's like a combination of things that like specifically for these types incidents where it is something where the team is actually security conscious. It's been on chain. There's tons of forks. It's been audited multiple times. And presumably the forks have been audited as well, right? Like, it's not like this is just, you know, them yoloing a few audits in 2021 and then

forgetting about it, right? No, no, repeated audits. Like, over time, the forks, you know, there's just like so many different things. the first thing I think that contributes to it is that you have over time like the sort of the knowledge that people have and expertise that people have and the assumptions that people make both on the security side and on like the blackout side evolve and so these precision rounding type issues like they've always been known about but it's only been really more recently that people have realized that they can be like way more dangerous than it was previously thought. So like the assumption before was basically like, as long as it rounds in the protocol's favor, it can't be exploited because, you know,

even if they do the exploit, the protocol is going to profit, not the attacker. However, over time, you realize like because of the other mechanisms that are within the contract or adjacent contract, or whatever, even if it rounds in the protocols favor, you know, in one place or both places or whatever, yeah. I think it's happen.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy. It reminds me a little bit like the kind of evolution of this of MEV. So, you know, back in the day, so mev is like minor extractable value or we call it something else now. I'm too old. That was the validator or something or other.

I don't know. Anyway, it's like the ability for people to manipulate the order of transactions to make money effectively. And pre-uniswap, the first like uniswap front end, right? This was like a theoretical construct that people were like, you know, eventually maybe miners might do things to like change transactions and extract value. but it was like this theoretical thing and people were like, it's never really happened. So it's probably theoretical and not likely to happen. And then one day Uniswap turned up and it became like sandwich attacks, like changing the order of transactions and manipulating the state of the contract on the way in and the way out to extract value

became a thing. And then everyone was like, oh, it's not a theoretical thing. It's actually real. And then here we are today. Yeah, exactly. And that's like the, That's, you know, I think in such an adversarial environment, you're just going to have, like, there's so much money on the table. You're going to have these evolutions happen really, really quickly.

I think all of us are still asking the question, like, what do we do about it? Because we're not quite convinced that, like, you know, forcing these teams to just do more audits is necessarily going to. I mean, clearly, audits didn't solve this problem. Like, if audits were the solution, then this would have worked, right? And it didn't. So, yeah. So, like, obviously, a lot of the bug bounty and contest companies are pushing bug bounties and contests, saying that those are the solution, maybe they are.

Like, maybe they help. But I think that, yeah, I don't have, like, a good answer at this point. I think that there needs to be, there has to be like another layer of mechanisms to help prevent these massive loss. Well, speaking of other layers of mechanisms, Barrow Chain had another layer of mechanisms that they used, which was coordinating the validators.

And Luca, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this, right? So, you know, as someone who runs a chain. So Barra Chain sold this happening, coordinated the validators because there was about $13 million across a couple of balancer forks on Barra Chain, coordinated the validators, halted the network, and then basically did like a precision validator update that brick the funds and returned them, which is aggressive. I mean, I tweeted about this and said, like, I'm here for it. I think, you know, if you are centralized enough to be able to coordinate something like this, you should. But, you know, Luke, I'm curious your. So Abstract didn't have any balancer v2 forks on it or wow, wow, dodge a bullet there. How did you, how did you match that one?

Yeah, I mean, well, in hindsight, it ended up biting us in the butt a little bit, but we were so anti-D-Fi, right? And so like consumer focus, when I ended up realizing in hindsight, and it's been a focus of ours as a recent, it's like, DFI kind of powers the chain. And so I was like, you know, go deploy your D. Can you give Vitalica heads up on that one? Yeah, it is super imperative for a chain to really run efficiently and functionally,

at least for the end user, that DFI is present. So I was actually so negligent and pushing DFI builders away and trying to bring consumer builders in that when the consumer builders came the liquidity machine wasn't churning as efficiently enough and then so now we're doubling back and getting the defies that was actually one of the few times where i really kind of fell on my sword on that one and i was just like oh shit but i kind of take the stance just in regards to what barra chain did i think there's really two types of blockchains there's one which i think serves as a decentralized network state

which i think is important for humanity and its function and its purpose is to be alive and functioning no matter what, right, during the apocalypse, during, you know, a world war, like it just needs to work. And that to me would be like Ethereum. Ethereum is the decentralized network state. And I think there's very few that are that are close to being what Ethereum is. Then on the other side of it, I think I look at blockchains like performant payment rails, right, stripe and PayPal competitors, right? Ones that are borderless in being able to attract borderless liquidity and borderless composability. And those to me, every single time there's a hack that I think has involves a meaningful

amount of money. You should, you know, I don't know if the terminology for Barrow chain was a rollback per se. It sounds like they did something clever with the validators. But in my case, you roll it back. You edit the validators. What anybody you need to do if you, I think, are trying to be, you know, a perform in payment rail. Like I am not selling abstract or building abstract.

And I think most blockchains are not trying to build a decentralized network state, which is supposed to be immune, you know, I'm trying to compete with PayPal. I'm trying to compete with Stripe. I am a better medium of exchanging value than I think those centralized venues. And though, you know, most L2s and most chains are centralized. I think we embody a decentralized ethos in the sense up until I think users' funds are compromised in which I think you take a very centralized approach every time. That's my opinion.

Yeah, Tay, what's your? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I always have the stance. Like, it's for a long time now. Like, if you can do something, you absolutely should. But I'll also say, like, you probably shouldn't be able to, right? But that's, you know, it comes with time. It comes with other tradeoffs and security and where you're sort of at in your go-to-market. And so, yeah, like,

If you can, you should. But ideally, I think that people would be better off if, you know, if they're building these robust networks where you couldn't be able to do that. I think most of the chains like Barrowchain, for example, you know, it's pretty fresh. They're still able to coordinate the validators. They did so. I don't really see a problem with them. I also don't see it as like a long-term, a long-term, like, you know, they're going to pay this.

Yeah, fair. I think it's just where they're at on their journey, right? Yeah. Rather than being, you know, more of a testament to like who they are. But yeah, I mean, especially with- The fact that they did it, though, right? Like most, you know, how many chains were hit with this? I would say, you know, there's like there's a little bit of like coordination effort there, right? but there were maybe 10 chains or something like that that had balancer forks on them. So the fact that they were able to like respond quickly, coordinate to do it, you know, and didn't LARPA's like, oh, no, sorry, like the validators, you know, we don't know who's running them.

They're not in our basement. We can't do anything. Like they just, you know, they just did it. So yeah, definitely interesting precedent. There is also there's also. there's also the kind of and this is I think a lot of times certainly in like OGDFi days right a lot of the the pushback from teams that could have done things and didn't do them was like unintended consequences okay we roll this back what about the people who had trades that get unwound or you know like how do we

weigh up it becomes like a you know network trolley problem right of like one one balancer hack versus, you know, three people that get run over by a train. Like, what are we, what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so that's what for me, if I'm working with a team who like theoretically could do something, I do try to respect that I have no idea, like, what their, their situation is in terms of like the protocol or the product or the RPCs or whatever it is.

And it's always going to be a train off, right? So if you freeze the chain, it is going to have an impact elsewhere. If you can take a more precise action and intercept the funds without impacting anything else, you know, in a lot of senses that's better because you don't have that, you know, potentially like a contagion type situation happening. However, those mechanisms are usually limited to teams that are just really centralized. And it also like introduces a huge risk because. Well, exactly. Like if you can freeze the bridge, right? Then someone can unfreeze the bridge and then it, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Or take other actions. So like we see all the time we see with hacks where X bridge gets hacked, X, uh, yeah, X protocol gets hacked. And then, you know, you dive into it. And it turns out that like, you know, one dude ran Mauer on his computer that compromised the special key that was just living on his freaking computer.

And now everything's compromised. And so that's why I'm always pushing people to, you know, like, if you can do something, do it. But at the same time, like when you're building your protocol, you need to understand the risks and the security precautions. And yeah, and really. Speaking of bridges, I don't know if this is still an ongoing. Is this an ongoing thing, this hyperliquid bridge?

Are you getting an update? No. So, so, I mean, one of the big concerns that people have had with hyperliquid is there's a bridge on Arbitrum that, you know, is secured by stuff, right? I wish I had that, the like Cheeto door lock meme thing, but like, you know, it's hard to say what is actually securing that bridge, right? Like, you know, what's the obsec around it, et cetera, et cetera. But obviously it's freezable because it's.

appears to be currently frozen. So the bridge the bridges are the scariest part of everything, unfortunately, I think is the TLDR there, but maybe we can't comment any further. So let's go on to ICOs. We got, well, actually, I think there's, there's probably a whole thread about token distribution. And I'm sure, Luca, you have many, many thoughts about this, right?

So we have had an interesting period of like Megath and Monad and their various distribution methods that they are they are kind of employing at the moment. And the tradeoffs between them and airdrops. And then we had Haseeb from Dragonfly jumping in saying, you know, airdrops are I guess kind of a scam, maybe. but not sure who was being scammed. Maybe centralized exchanges are being scammed by airdrop farming, etc. So maybe we can unpack that. So Coinbase has got their own ICO platform now,

and they also acquired Sonar, which is the Echo ICO platform that Kobe built. So it seems like we're back in the ICO meta. We've had plasma. Meggie just did their ICO. on Sonar. Now Monad is doing an ICO. Yeah, Luca, thoughts on the ICO meta coming back? I'm super stoked for it. I mean, as long as we don't rule the day for it, four or five years from now, for God forbid, the administration stance changes. And they start going after everybody.

I think that'd be my only fear with it. But in principle, right, there was a statistic that I read the other day around like just regular IPOs, you know, IPOs back in the 1990s, early 2000s, just made everyone rich if you held them for a relatively good period of time because the prices were so good. That has since dwindled, at least in the traditional markets. Obviously, ICOs kind of brought a little bit of that back in 2018, 2017, obviously with a lot of harm. There's a lot of scamming going on with those ICOs, but also a lot of great case studies came out of there. I do functionally, I am a believer of putting money where your mouth is.

And I do think that I don't think air drops are bad. I actually debated this stance at the Harvard debate club like literally four days ago. I took the stance of like air drops are good just because I have a really good as to why they're good and I can defend it. Obviously being off the backs of one of crypto's biggest air drops in Pengu. But I do think there's, I think the problem. problem with airdrobs is actually not the mechanic, but who it services and who it attracts, right? The demographic and the type of user and community member, I think it's more of a

demographic problem than a functionality of distribution problem, because I would argue. Okay, so just to jump in there, because, you know, with Pengo's, it was a kind of multifaceted an air drop, right? So there was an air drop of tokens to NFT holders who held the Pudgy Penguins NFT or little Pudgies, which at the time were like $50,000 each or something, right? Like, this was not like a everyday person's JPEG that they were running around with, right? Like, it was mainly OGs and ETH whales who were holding them. So those people got tokens, but then you also gave tokens to a bunch of people who had done various things. Like what are some of the examples of like ecosystem token distribution that you guys did?

Yeah, it was like Uniswap, buyers and holders, Jupiter stakers, open C users. You know, I think there was a list of like 50 different proto friends, right? Like certain layer zero users try to target. In hindsight, there was a whole business scheme that I could have done and I didn't, which was like, hey, I'm an air drop your community. Make sure you air dropped mine. But we had done this. And hindsight, we gave away so many tokens.

And I actually ended up ruining it because what ended up happening probably two, three weeks later after the drop. And Kane, I know you called me out on it. And I, you know, I didn't mind it. And I appreciated it to take regardless. But what we were starting to see was we could, because there was so many eligible wallets, we started to see people that were connected to a couple of,

like centralized wallets that had thousands that were claiming. And it was clearly Sybil's who had, you know, put one jupe steak and gone through. And we hadn't filtered that. It was a proxy and a mistake just on how quickly we basically went from, hey, we're going to launch Pengu to it actually launching, which was a five week time frame.

So we ended up closing the claim a little early, which obviously created a little bit of backlash. But nonetheless, yeah, that's how the just, it was basically 50 plus percent of the supply, 25 percent to NFT holders. and then 25% to active crypto participants. Right. And so the big one, like I air dropped.

People don't know this, but abstract users got like $100 million, you know, prior to farming on abstract. So it was a, it was a tool. When you're doing the mechanisms for these and you're like, okay, well, let's like grab the uni holders and whatever. Like, what's the underlying thing that you're going for, though? Like, because there's like a goal, right? you're not just trying to like throw, you're not literally,

you're not literally just trying to give random people free money, right? Those like goals and demographics or something. Yeah, so it was a couple things. I think when we filtered the actual data, we were methodical in trying to attribute who was a loyal user on each of those respective platforms and what defined a loyal user. And so each loyalty was defined differently across the different platforms that we were rewarded, but you have to understand that the story and the

motivation for Pengu, outside of the NFT holders distribution, the thought process was at least in our mind that nobody was going to buy a token where 25% of the holders were just dumping on everybody else's head. So we had to make this, it was, I wouldn't, right? So I had to make this a group thing. And, you know, the whole idea around Pengu was actually to go and eventually flip Doge. And like, what does that story act? How can you actually tell that story? Well, the story for me, me is Pengu's the face of crypto, it's the mascot of crypto, it's the people's coin. And if it's the people's coin, it has to be distributed as such. It has to be for everyone.

Everyone has to win from that airdrop and has to contribute from it. And so we went initially like who supported us, right? The layer zero's, the uniswops of the world, people who have like, you know, shown us value, went and tried to index them the best of our ability. And we missed some. Like I, in hindsight, should have hit up all the Infinex patrons. Again, it was such a fast sprint, but. But you actually did. So funnily enough, you guys did. You did. But so you gave us, you gave us a block of tokens and we were like, huh, how do we distribute this? Because you just, you were like, here's your tokens. And we're like, oh, man, now we've got a job to do. And so we actually like figured out a way to do this. But this was crazy. This was like a very interesting insight from me. Because we, we, we.

didn't get the tokens for like a month afterwards, right? So, you know, there's like an argument for someone doesn't air drop. There's a bit of a race condition of like people trying to rush to sell as quickly as possible when the price is still high if they believe the price is going to go down, right? You know, and so there's like this kind of dip that that happens. But this was a month later. So the price had stabilized, like there was no crazy volatile price action. There was no reason and whatsoever. We then got the technology to airdrop things to people, did the Pengu irdrop finally to both patrons and non-patrons. And we watched this in real time as like 85% of people just sold it straight away. And we were like, what is like, and it wasn't like this

was even a huge air drop per person. It was, it was maybe something like $15 to $20 up to like $300 dollars per person. But we were just watching this stream of activity as people sold it. And I was like, okay, like that is a very, very good lesson in because you couldn't argue that like there was a rush to the price was fine. It wasn't that many tokens. There was no there was no reason to rush to sell it. But people were like climbing over themselves to try and sell this thing.

And I was like, this is just a bad. it was it was kind of like the realization that like giving someone something for free means they're probably not going to value it. And, you know, that I think has been, you know, if we talk about Monad's AirDrop, there were a few things about it. One, it was a bit strange and hard to grok, right? So Monad was like, okay, guys, we're doing an AirDrop. We need you to connect all your wallets.

your socials, all of this stuff. Then we're going to calculate the distribution, and in four days, you're going to be able to do the thing, right? So everyone connected their wallets, did all the things, and then these boxes appeared. And people were like, okay, boxes, weird, cool. For the record, my daughter loved the boxes. My daughter was fantastic.

So my kids who have pudgys, right? They both have pudgies and they, they, my son every morning for the next like four days, who's six was like, are there more boxes? Yeah. So like it works for kids. Yeah. The kids loved it. But my daughter who's nine on the second day got a lot less tokens than a brother.

And she was like, literally she's like, I'm going to throw this computer out the window. She was so mad. And so I was like, wow, this is a very interesting representation of expectation of expectation management here because the first day she got way more tokens than her brother and then the second day she got less and she was not happy about it so that yeah the sibling rivalry fairness was probably not on the monad priority list uh yeah no my daughter she yeah she's still wants open boxes like yeah i need that front and everyone everyone on crypto twitter's like no more boxes and the kids are like more boxes so so i think the the weird thing was though it was like hey boxes right

And then so everyone opened their first three boxes. And then they were like, come back tomorrow for more boxes. And we were like, what? Okay, cool. And then we came back the next day and the boxes were like kind of empty. And it was a bit weird and a bit disappointing. And then we had the third day of boxes. And I think everyone was like, it just built up too many expectations.

And I think the fact that it was like ended up being with, you know, the tokenomics were 3% to the airdrop. And I'm sure Luke is like, what the hell is going on here? 3% is not enough. What were you guys doing? Because you guys did half of the supply, right? Yeah, 52%. Yeah.

Jesus. Three percent. Mind you, I think I'm probably the biggest air drop percentage wise on like a billion dollar plus token ever. Yeah. So I was, but I was going and I'm going for a different story. and a different history and it's a different type of token. But, you know, I will tell you, the last couple of months, I've been like,

I've been fascinated by some of these distributions because I'm like, man, you guys got some big balls on you because I would not have the balls to give my community so little. It's been interesting to watch. I mean, you know, there's a couple in a couple case studies. So it, but I will tell you, it's maybe a very needed paradigm shift. I can tell you for the builder and the entrepreneur, this paradigm shift is, a lot more advantageous, which I think is obviously I'm not complaining. But I'm telling you, some of these distributions, I'm like, man, if I underwit that with my guys

and we had maybe different companies, different thesises, but I do believe until crypto matures, we haven't crossed that chasm of maturity yet where it's still sentiment and narrative. Right. And like I'm still, my argument at the Harvard Debate Club was, you know, in a world where this stuff is majorly, driven by sentiment and narrative, you need champions and you need your army. And to galvanize and to create that army of champions is to reward them and to be generous and to align them in the most lucrative and grand way possible, right, which an airdrop can be a function of doing that. And then my argument was is that if you air drop so little, it's because of your inability to

galvanize and rally the troops of champion. Because though people do sell, I would also make the argument, right? Like Pengu is evident in the chart. We had that massive drawdown, you know, off the backs of the spy, Melania Trump bullshit. But we also had one of the biggest run backs up of the, you know, last 180 days. And that reflexivity, I think in part was because of that generosity and that goodwill. And who really hates Pengu, if you ask around? I mean, I'd be remiss to find somebody who says, I hate that coin. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think there's many people. I don't I think there's many people. And so this is an interesting, so Haseeb, Haseeb had this long thread about airdrops and, you know, what, what they were trying to achieve and air drop farmers. And this is,

you know, it's an evolving space, right? Back in the day when, when we did our air drop in 2017 for Haven, right, the point, which, like, it's definitely dating me. But the point of air drops back then for ICOs was to be a proxy for the demand for the token when the ICO happened. It was a way of signaling. If people were willing to jump through hoops to get this token, given that there were an infinite number of tokens that were being created during the ICO era, that something must be good about this project, right? It was like a signaling mechanism.

So you did a big air drop and people would do all the things that you asked them to do to get the thing. And it was a way of kind of signaling it, but it was very organic. There weren't yet at that time like giant civil farms and industrialized farming and all of that stuff. It's changed today. Today it's like industrial farming activity and civil farms and stuff that try to capture the value from air drops. And Haseeb was sort of saying, you know, the metrics, like, you know, basically the farmers come and say, we pump your metrics for you, right? There's a paid service. And then Haseba was like, okay, well, if you're pumping the metrics, who are you pumping for? Like, who is that signaling to, right? He's like, it's not us. And like, you know,

cool story, bro. I don't know if I 100% believe that, but like, sure. But like, it's not, you know, like someone is benefiting from industrialized farming, right? And this was, The interesting thing for Pengu, I guess, for you guys is that, like, this is all retroactive. It wasn't like you had like a four-year campaign of GMing in the Pudji's Discord or like, you just have to hold the thing. Like, so, so you guys didn't actually maximize that like metric side of side of things. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm, I'm a, the metric that I maximize for is mind share and marketing and an event where, you know, Pengu launched, mind you, there's an important fact in all this because the distribution is

actually probably, and no one's actually really, I've never talked about it, so I do think it's worth 30 seconds because the magnitude was so massive. I mean, you can't point to many coins, if any, that had that much of a liquid float given to the people. And everyone always complains and underwrites the huge drawdown. The people are forgetting that air drop for the first four weeks before the market imploded was up into the right. Right. And so there's this argument that air drops lead to down only. But I would also argue that because that air drop was so massive, if you remember in December,

we had like eight videos with 10 million plus views. Everything we were dished out was getting insane distribution. I mean, I've never seen a crypto company get more views and impressions. And we did in that December sprint, like every one, I think the biggest video got like three. 30 million views, right? And I don't tell, you know, I want to see the real data. So we didn't touch that or do anything to that. Like that is just pure off the backs of,

but it was the distribution number that would attribute to that. And it wasn't until Trump, you know, extraction event and Melania and then the tariff nonsense, did we draw down and we were the first thing to sell? But it's actually really interesting. Like, what if the tariff nonsense didn't happen? What if the liquidity black holes and the Hayden Davis special didn't happen. Maybe we still go up into the right, which when you think about it, every other VC, any capital allocator would tell you 52 plus percent air drop. You're a madman. That thing gets smoked,

but it actually didn't. And it didn't because everyone was galvanizing around it. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was promoting it. And something that should have, you know, mathematically been down only the second it released. Yeah. So I think this is an interesting question as well. And like, you know, T, you guys are, uh, claiming to do an air drop. No comment, huh? So, like, if we assume that 90 something percent of people sell the air drop, right?

What is the purpose of that exercise, right? Like, you know, if the idea was get tokens to people so that they like the project care about it or whatever, you know, let's assume that nine 95% of people are going to sell the Meta Mosque tokenirdrop that they get, right? And I'm telling you, if I don't get a big air drop, I'm raging on the timeline. Me too. So it's like, but if everyone's going to dump it, what's what is the point of the exercise, right?

Yeah, yes. Yeah, what's the point of exercise? And, you know, we've been dealing with this for a good minute now because we did it last cycle as well. Everyone wanted us to air drop. And everyone was like farming metamask as if we were doing an air drop. And it was really interesting because I kept trying to figure out why, like, what was it that people actually wanted? Right? Because everyone would like, dude, we would tweet and it would just be like just piles of, like, like one token, one token, one token.

And I never really figured, like I never really got to the bottom of it. There's like a huge, just this like massive people that are just like around. And like now it's all the AI bots. But back then it was it was very similar. It was like these robo human reply guys. I'm still curious. Like what is it that people, that people want? And like for the most part, my heart take is it's, well, we don't have ICOs.

Yeah. Like if Metamask said, we're going to do it. Yeah. But even still, like, you know, people want to speculate or own or, you know, have exposure to the MetaMosk brand token, whatever. If you don't sell it to them and, you know, my guess, I mean, I don't know, like ICOs are back. Maybe you guys do ICO and sell tokens to people. Who knows? But if you don't sell it to them, then the only way to get access to the thing is to farm it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. I'm sorry, I interrupt. I do like the blend, though, of the ICO with the irdrop. I think that is like a pretty fair medium where like you do have loyal power users who contributed to your network and that have given you tons of value, you know, to your product. And there should be that. But I also think that, hey, if you want to, you know, play this game and be a part of this ecosystem. Like I do like, I do like the combination of the two. I just wanted an interject. I'm so sorry for it. Yeah. No, I think, I mean, I think the question is like, okay, so what do you want? What do what do the, what do the users want, right? What are they trying to get? And then like, you know, as a builder of a product with users in an interoperable decentralized ecosystem with so much going on, like what are we

trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish? And a lot of like our like highest level priority. are basically just like creating value, like for people, or even sort of like broader. It's like we're trying to unlock people's ability to interact with all these different things and create value in all these different ways. And so that's always been the big question with like a theoretical metamast token is what exactly would this token do? If you ask Twitter back in the day, they would just say, oh, just take the revenue off the swats and redistribute it through the token. And I was like, okay, if we want to redistribute

all of the swaps fees to people in like a fair way, we would just get rid of the fee. Like, right? Like, why would we do this convoluted mechanism of having it like route through this token? Like there has to be something else in order to create value. Otherwise, you're just doing like a little weird value loop where things get lost and like allocated in a weird way. I think Meta Mosque is an unusual, you know, market participant, right? But you can imagine, okay, imagine a world where MetaMask said, we need money, right? And, you know, you don't. But let's imagine a world where like normal startups, you want to expand to Solano or something, right?

But you already did that. Sway, you want to expand to Sway. So you're like, all right, we need a billion dollars to expand to Sway because we need to rebuild all the technology. or whatever. And so you do a big ICO, you sell a bunch of tokens, and then people own the token, and it's like, well, how do we return value to token holders? Then, sure, it makes sense, right? Like, you know, take fees off from the thing generating, you know, revenue or whatever and put it into the token. You know, there's many good examples of this cycle, I think, of that. But when you're already established and profitable and working, you know, it feels, it does feel weird to then go,

let's do a token, but everyone wants the token because they want to be able to speculate on it, right? It feels, it almost feels like MetaMask is ripping people off by not having a token. Yeah. And that's, by the way, like we have internal conversations about this as well and like mad disagreements. Like, it's not, I don't know, I think a lot of people have misconceptions about like metamasking like what we do but um yeah i mean for years we've like talked about yeah like you know like wave a magic wand type stuff right like what would what would it look like um and then we've also talked about just like yeah realistically like um again like how do you get that how do you get sort of the economics to again not just sort of weirdly redistribute existing value

but actually, you know, do something to unlock value or empower people or, yeah. You guys did the M-System style rewards, which I thought was clever. Everyone gave you guys shit for it. But that's where it has to go, right? Like, you can't just subsidize just to subsidize, right? At the end of the day, a lot of my Metamask volume was because I only knew how to swap through MetaMask at a certain point. You don't own you.

You don't either reciprocate that, those fees that I gave you because I did that. provided a product that allowed me to make money elsewhere. There's just like the problem is the brain rot, it's created, right? It's not actually the function. It's the brain rot. It's like a woke mind virus that's just like plagued its way through like this cohort of like crypto users. You know, it's like, that's what we have to figure out. But the Amex style reward system, I'm totally aligned with, right?

Like that's where that's where we sort of arrive, right? Like we're still. There's a lot of things happening. Okay. Consensus. that I'm asked you twice. I don't know all the details. There's things happening all over the place. I do know, because I played with it, the new rewards is super freaking cool. And in my opinion, the boxes, tell me it's boxes. There aren't boxes, but I might have to go into Slack and tell

them that we need boxes. But basically what it is, is that you, it's built in, I think it's only on mobile right now, like extension is rolling out soon. But basically you, you take certain actions and do certain things, most of which you would already normally be doing if you're a metamask user, and then you get little points, but then you level up and then those points unlock things. And so we have stuff that's happening on Linea. We have stuff that's happening. Like if you get to like a super high level, you get like super premium free 24-7 instant special customer sport, which is like, I don't know if anyone values that, but like I do.

And like the team is super happy to be like, they're like, ooh, we're going to have like a new group of people that we can help out. But there's also like lower fees. Yeah, there's all sorts of things. And obviously over time, they're going to evolve. We're going to see what people, you know, respond to, see how else it's going to work with the product and stuff. But that's in our opinion, like, a lot of like sort of the downsides of a token was like the

question of like, then what do you do with it? And so I think that's why we ended up focusing on like this rewards mechanism. first and then go from there. And yeah, again, there's a lot happening. We'll see where everything lands. I think it's, you know, Luca, you said earlier, TradFi has shifted and lost two decades from, you know, private companies IPOing early, you know, like Google was like four years old or something

when it IPOed, like Amazon like three years old, whatever. And all of the value creation happened in public markets, right? You know, it's actually interesting when you look at Meta Mosque as what, like nine years old or something? Yeah, nine years old. And you guys have an IPO. You're ripping everyone off by not having a ticket. Imagine if you guys did an ICO in 2017, how happy everyone would be. I'm not convinced that's true, though.

But you can see how people get themselves there, right? You can see how, like, you guys are super successful. You've done all this stuff and no one, like users didn't get a chance to own it, didn't get a chance to farm it, didn't get an air drop, didn't, you know, whatever. So speaking of fee distribution and fee mechanisms, Uniswap has proposed for the 28th time now, think the fee switch being switched on. Jokes.

I think it's only the third time, which is still pretty dire. But I think this time it's real. Yeah, of course it's real. It's hidden this time. Like insert the founder wants his yellow Lambo meme. Yeah. So I think, I think, you know, this speaks to a couple things. One, like the regulatory shift in the U.S., right?

that Hayden even feels comfortable proposing a governance change. But maybe the fee switch and all of that stuff was super interesting. I think the thing that maybe was the most interesting to me was the price action and what happened around the announcement and subsequently. It's been three days now. and I think it's almost completely round-tripped the announcement pump, which is kind of weird. And I think it speaks to the fact that like everything in crypto now, all price action is driven by perps these days. Which is, yeah, it's kind of crazy.

You were getting into it before this call, which you basically were, alluding to like all the volume being perps volume and I've seen the same thing just like doing all the data and looking at whatever what's going on across the board which may I think makes like 10 10 that much more scary right because it was really perps you know all that perps liquidity that got smoked and it's a it's a different even venture I mean so much of the landscape that's changed because a lot of people have gotten burned and they've lost so much money but I think 10 10 is going to have a lot more ramifications than I think people think people think And I'll leave it off on that.

Cain, I know you guys are going to wrap this up. I just am five minutes late to something and I mischeduled something. So I'm going to let you guys take it from here. All right. Well, bye, Luca. And we'll see you next week. See you next week. Yeah, but I just saw aerodrome and velodrome emerging.

That's crazy. Well, so my story about Velodrome is back in, I guess, 2020. maybe 2020, 2020, 2021. Synthetics Discord was still like the place where basically everything happened, right? You know, any kind of, like there were so many projects that launched out of there that people were in like our DGEN trading channel. And one day these Velodrome guys showed up and they're like, we're the best decks ever history. And we were like, yeah, we're the best. We're like the best guys.

no one can touch us. And we were like, oh, okay, cool. And they were like, no, no, no. Like, we're fucking serious. Like, you have to use us. And they just, like, hammered our Discord for weeks and weeks on end to the point where I was like, these guys are insane. Like what?

Like, this is so crazy. And I basically got to the point where I was like, I just faded them completely. And they did like a big air drop of Velo to like S&X holders because we had eventually had like an S&X pool or something. And then I sort of forgot about it because it was on optimism, right? Velodrome was on optimism. And then base launched and they forked their own protocol, which was a bold move and put it on base and called it aerodrome. and it became like the dominant decks on on base and then base became maybe the dominant L2. I think at this point you probably say it is.

And so they became like this dominant decks. And I guess now they're merging. So I probably need to go through my wallets and find my Velo tokens. I'm sure I've got some sitting around somewhere. Yeah. And I know I'm like scrolling. So I don't have all the details on like what exactly is happening. But that's it was always weird to me.

the the like no one had ever well yeah like no one had ever tried that before like it would be like synthetics you know we went from main net to optimism if we had just like forked the protocol which in hindsight probably would have been a good idea right like just forked the protocol new token new name new everything um instead everyone did it for us and for synthetics on every chain on bSC and everything so we probably could have captured some uh some value there if we we had thought about that. But yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So there's numbers. It says aerodrome holders get 94.5% of the new token with Velodrome holders getting 5.5%. That sounds right. That, I mean, it sounds right for Velodrome aerodrome. So the other, so the other fun thing about aerodrome is there is this ongoing what I can only really describe as a sciop from them about why their tokenomics are the best. best. Yes.

And like, but this is kind of like very on brand for them, right? Everything they do is the best thing. It's why I actually think they, they do so well on base because base has a little bit of that like, kind of, I don't know, American exceptional. Yeah. Shameless exceptional.

Like we're so exceptional and amazing that we can do whatever we want. And it's like, wait, what? It's like, no, no, we can do anything. because we're the best. So like nothing we do. You can't criticize us. So, so they they have this, this like locked tokenomics thing. Yeah, because that's that's what I know it from. If you do certain loops on base, then you get the emissions are wild. You get the emissions. Yeah, the emissions are wild. But a lot of the projects on base have complained about this because effectively what happens is you bribe, you know, and this was this was curve who kind of invented this V token locking thing.

But Curve did it, like curve was like, okay, we're doing this for governance reasons because it was 2020, so they didn't want to go to jail. So it was all about like governance power and what have you. And then Arrow drone was like, hold my beer. It's not about governance at all. It's about like token emissions. And so all of the Arrow, uh, uh, uh, kind of incentive loops are about basically projects bribing aerodrome holders to put liquidity towards their pools, which ends up selling the tokens of the projects. And so a lot of people have criticized them about that. And then their response is kind of like, you're a bad person. Like, how can you criticize us? And it's like, it's pretty hilarious. So, but they've done really well. And I think they're now saying

they're going to combine to take on uni on Mainnet, maybe? Yeah, because that's what I saw them, they went to town on the Uniswap. Oh, yeah. They were. Them and Michael from Curve. Yeah. I told Michael, I was on the timeline, I was like, just sit this one out, bro. Like, just this is in bad taste coming in over the top being like, we're better,

like our fee switch is better than your fee switch. I was like, come on. We do like to do that in crypto. Everything is. it's very very pvp like the second that anything going happens to anyone else you're like no it's no pay attention to me exactly i know um yeah cool all right well let's wrap it up this has been fun yeah no super fun and uh i think we're going to do it again next week and hopefully it'll be unless they cancel us it would be pretty dire we've been we've been planning this for like a year

Right. So if we get canceled after our first episode, I might, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take it well. At least don't cancel us. All right. That's our first episode of Uneasy Money. Thank you all for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We will see you next week.