Unchained - Uneasy Money: In a World of AI, Are Dino Privacy Coins a Good Bet?

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

Thank you to our sponsor, MultiChain Advisors! Privacy is back on the radar as Monero gets compared to silver. Meanwhile, Vitalik wants Ethereum to ossify, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ NYC token rugs and X's algorithm has crypto Twitter up in arms. In this episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan unpack: Monero's sudden surge, Vitalik's “walkaway test,” why blatant scams like Adams’ NYC token continue to succeed and whether X has been suppressing crypto content. Don’t miss Kain’s story on how he lost nearly $250K in a wild vibe coding experiment. Plus, Is Vitalik's “walkaway test” too “aspirational?” And could X cashtags usher in the next altseason? Hosts: Luca Netz Kain Warwick Taylor Monahan Links: Why the Privacy Coins Mania Is Much More Than Price Action Eric Adams’ NYC Token Crashes Amid Liquidity Concerns Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Says Blockchain Trilemma ‘Has Been Solved’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If this cash tag thing works and Twitter now allows you to buy crypto on Twitter, that's not priced in. I don't care what you say. That is not priced in. Like, you want an old season. That's where your old season's coming from. If every single person on Twitter can all of a sudden just yolo ape into any token. Wait, you're buying alt season cake. Like this seems like a lowerbrow meme coin season. I got to hustle a Twitter listing. That's my new focus. Literally. You got to get a We have this on Twitter. That's the new meta. Hey, everyone. I'm Kay Moric and welcome to Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monaghan, Security at Metamask, and Luke

Annette, CEO of Pudgy Penguins. One quick thing before we start, nothing new here on uneasy money is financial advice with just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at UnchainCrypto.com slash uneasy money. an emerging. Bet, more activated. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game?

Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees? Or... The score bet.

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All right. Welcome back, Luca. Happy new year. Happy to be back. All right. So this idea that like the bad times of December, was all people in America rotating

out for tax loss harvesting or whatever seems to be actually maybe true. It feels like they were just selling for tax losses. It was literally like midnight on the 31st in like Pacific time

and then the selling just like stopped. It was like just like massive every single pump Like you look at the one hour candles, it's like goes up, nuke, nuke, nuke, nuke, nuke. And then that bot got switched off at midnight in BST. So what's been interesting is like what, okay, so Bitcoin's gone from whatever, like 85K to 97 or something. We're about to go over 100K again. But let's talk about Monero because we are getting some alt action at the moment.

We had Zcash before the end of the year, last year, late last year. And now Monero just crossed 680, which is, I guess, the all-time high. No, no. Minero is at 780 now. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Should have aped. Should have aped.

So Peter Brent compared Monero's long-time chart structure to Silver's decades-long consolidation. before it's a stark breakout suggesting that XMR may be entering a similar phase. I love the hopium there. That's made like that's like. Monero is basically silver. But okay, I mean, it seems to be working. So I think one of the more interesting things for me about this is that Monaro and Zcash in particular, both of them have had a ton of issues with like exchange delistings, like particularly Monero, right?

like getting delisted, regulatory scrutiny, all of these issues, as well as like, I think, some internal, they're old tokens, right? So their covenants is a shit show as always, right? Every old token, every dinot token accumulates like crazy governance nonsense. But it seems like the privacy meta is back. It seems like we're really in this mode where people are looking for. on-chain privacy, we're trying to solve these things. There's a bunch of things on Ethereum as well.

It feels good. Like this feels like a fundamental thing that we can rally around that, you know, we have the technology to do private on-chain transactions. Yeah. Yeah. I still don't understand this chart though. Like this is a wild chart. But Zcash was the same.

It was like 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 300. Yeah, but that was like, I guess a bit more. more clear. Like, there was a lot of pumping people. A lot of pumping people. I'll tell you this, in a world where you think AI is going to be, even a fraction of what we think it's going to be, I think these privacy dino coins, either Monero or Zcash are going to be really good bets. I think logically, you're starting to see the sharks that are starting to, you know, swim around these two coins specifically, right? They have, they have the standing of test of time, which I think important when you're looking at like assets that you know you know you want to make a case to

be worth you know a trillion or a hundred billion dollars so i think i don't think like a new player could come in obviously i know a lot of new players are building privacy and there's some change you know zk sync is obviously been doing that for for a while but i i think from an incumbent you know hedge to the ai you know world being taken over and this idea that like the billions of AI agents are going to be running around the internet and everything is going to become exponentially more transparent. Digital privacy tokenized via a fixed supply is actually going to be extremely valuable. So I would take the bet over the course of 10 years. If there was going to be, you know, I would be surprised if those two weren't in the top 10 performers over the next 10 years

in crypto, I'm personally making a really big bet there. It clicks logically. It's obvious. There's a ton of one liners around it that I think sticks with people. And you've got all the right players starting to buy and accumulate this stuff. It's the whole, you know, Naval, Chama. And those guys go to swing big. And I think this is anybody who understands AI understands that like something like this is going to be very valuable. I wouldn't, you know, not financial advice, but this is a bet that I'm personally making. So just like, you know, we've talked about this a little bit, like regulatory headwinds across.

all of crypto, the tokens that were hit the hardest by this are obviously the privacy tokens, right? And like privacy is in its own category of like regulatory, you know, overreach, whatever you want to call it, right? It's always, even when, you know, during the ICO boom, there was still like scrutiny around Zcash and Monero and, you know, them being used for like dark web markets. and like it's just another level like you think defy gets like scrutiny then you know uh the the privacy coins obviously tornado cash then on ethereum uh similar similar issues so it's it's a bit hard for me to imagine even in a world where like securities regulation shifts and you know we start to get some of the the kind of rulemaking process that we expect that privacy doesn't have like

still a bit of a fight ahead of it. You know, like, I think it's, it's not, it's not like a clear thing to me that, like, we are in a world where privacy is just fine now all of a sudden, just because we've got, you know, a little bit, a little bit more clarity around, like, other regulatory stuff. Like, this is its own category. But that's where that energy that I think that, like, Bitcoin and pretty much everything else is kind of lost, right?

like that cypher funk energy. So when like Peter Thiel says, like, I'm selling Bitcoin because like it's lost that cypher funk energy. Like what would he buy? Right? That like would bring that back. You know, they want to fight the good fight. And then like when you're when you're looking at situations such as the United Kingdom

where you're posting on social media and you say the wrong thing and they're going to throw you in prison and obviously the fight in the States at least, you're in Australia came. And I know it's a little bad over there. And the States is a little bad. It's getting, you know, worst ever been. Obviously, I think we're addressing it. But, you know, in a world where censorship and all of these things are actually more prevalent,

at least in my short lifetime, I don't remember a moment in my lifetime where censorship was actually playing such a big role. Maybe, you know, a couple of years ago during the Biden administration was probably pico top, but it's still a bad thing. And I think this is a very contrarian, rebellious category that I think is going to accrue a ton of value to all of those doomers and preppers and, you know, cypher funk, you know, going, going against the grain type of guys. And I think there's huge value that could accrue there through, you know, I'm actually would be curious from a technical perspective, Kane, Tay, you two definitely know

better than me. You know, what's the difference between like a Monero, Zcash, you know, which one do you guys like more, at least from a technical basis? Obviously, it seems like a It might be a little more pure in its privacy approach, but give any insight there, actually. So the main thing that's preventing you from having, like, good privacy with Minero and Zcash is is sort of the same reason that a lot of threat actors don't use it, which is that a lot of privacy comes from liquidity. So if you're the only one walking into a room and then you walk out of the room, whatever happened in that room, I didn't need to see you do it.

it because you're the only one in there. So like if you go in there and you like graffiti the wall or something, if you're the only one that walks in, the only one that walks out, that's still like more than sufficient evidence to say that you were behind the graffiti or whatever. And so, you know, with let's say like retail users or like average people who are just trying to like create that separation, totally fine. Both are totally fine. The technicals of XMR, like the way that that they the way that it operates is just completely separate

like completely technically different they have these things called ring signatures so basically like you're you're just like creating okay I'm gonna like get blown up for describing it like this basically you're just creating like a whole bunch of fake transactions and you're hiding in the mess

like that's where Zcash is is actually like technically it's Yeah, it's a LZK. Obfuscation versus like moon math, right? Like, yeah. Yeah.

And part of the reason for this is that when like XMR first became a thing, like the tech just wasn't there yet. Like the math. The math. The math is hard. It's computationally intensive. And then you have to put on a blockchain. I will also remind people that like most of the ways that your privacy is

un-privacied is these days, like, still less about the on-chain. I know everyone likes the big long, like Zach XPT threads where it's all the on-chain. It's super fun to do that. But the reality is, like, you know, IPs and, you know, triangulating, like, all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're still on your device.

You're still on the same device. That device is still talking to, like, 8,000 advertisers. you still have a huge amount of technology that's tracking everything you do, including the sites that you visit. And then also people are just really careless with their like op-sec in general. So for example, if you're saving stuff in your Google Drive, your seed, your addresses, your screenshots. Turns out that's super not private guys.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter how private your own chain stuff is. So you mentioned liquidity. right and this is something that like i think about a lot um you know building um building infinex because we are going to support zcash i actually uh cooked up my own poskey uh zcash wallet right um and tested it out i had a long thread where i thought i lost like a couple hundred grand um oh my god that thread cane i had it like gave me actual real anxiety reading it so like usually like when you're vibe coding right like you're just doing stuff and like it's like

Like, there's no real risk here. And like, I even have a quarterized machine that's like not on my like, it's like a separate machine so it can't do anything, can't do any damage. And then I'll be like, let me transfer 500 grand over there and see what happens. And like it was actually fine. The funniest part was it was totally fine. The code was fine. It was just like a bug that it couldn't find the note.

Right. But I was sitting there for like four hours. I was like, pretty sure I've nuked a couple hundred grand. But when I burned the dye that time, because I mentioned that in the thread as well, it was like two in the morning. I'd been up for like 18 hours. And I had like five different tabs open on two different screens. And I was like copy and pasting stuff. And I literally, like for some reason, I forgot that there was a burn function on die on optimism.

like it's not part of the ABI on the like it's a different it's a different function call in the like main net contract versus optimism like they rewrote it for some reason and there's two burn calls and they were both like the seventh function and I just like copied the wrong one in the wrong browser and I went to bed that night at like 2 a.m and my wife woke up and she's like what like everything okay like you're like up pretty late and I was like I think I might have burned $10 million. And she was like, huh, okay, good night. Just went back to bed because she was like, you don't seem that worried about it.

I'm sure you'll figure it out. Yeah, she's like, I'm not going to dive into this one. Yeah, she's like, I'm just, I'm not touching this. So, let's move on to, I mean, one of the things with the market coming back is meme coins have come back. and therefore rug pulls have come back because they are intrinsically tied together. So this one was like pretty crazy to me. Eric Adams made an NYC token. This is like the 15th NYC token, by the way.

If someone makes an NYC token, like don't buy it. Like that's absolutely financial advice. Like do not buy a token for New York City. It's always going to be a scam. There's so many grifters in New York City. Like just don't do it. So Eric Adams made an NYC token and it started pumping. Then they removed the entire liquidity pool, which was like 3.5 mil.

And then they made a statement being like, oh, we're just rebalancing, I guess. Yeah. And then they did the like classic post rug pool. We're putting the money back in the chart. now that it's crashed 99.99%. It's just wild. Hayden, it was so bad that Hayden from Uniswap came out and was like, this is just awful and incredibly stupid any way you cut it. Part of what's so sad is celebrities and politicians can easily monetize their fame without

scamming. Like, I don't know, this maybe it was more efficient. Safe moon got 10, the safe moon guys got 10 years for this, so I don't know. What's crazy. You know, but the way that these are structured, right, just so you know, is like, it's a licensing deal. Right. So like an Eric Adams, you know, doesn't really get in trouble, right? Because he's just licensing his IP and, you know, paying for a promotion. Obviously, like undisclosed, like the worst he could get is like an FTC, you know, undisclosed, undisclosed advertisement, right?

But it's pretty fucking nefarious if you ask me. There's a there's a like an OG scam. There's a really good book actually which which has like all of the old scams and grifts that used to happen in like the US. Like literally like every single, it's a super long book. It's like 500 pages. I'll find the name of it and we can chill it next time. But it's super interesting. Like just every type of like confident scam and grift or whatever.

One of the scams is people used to go around trying to sell the Brooklyn. bridge. They're like, oh, it's being torn down, I'm going to crap or whatever. Like, this is the crypto equivalent of that. Like, I'm selling the New York City IP. Like, it's New York City coin, bro. Just buy it. It's amazing. Um, so yeah. I just don't, I don't understand how it just frustrates me again. I may have said this before on this show. It frustrates me that like these like really blatant scammers who are just truly. like there's nothing of value here can do this and like everything's fine and meanwhile that's taking a huge amount of attention and money away from like so many other more valuable things

and there's no recourse for anyone like there's no like like we can all hope that like someone might get this bro in trouble but the reality is like we all know at this point that yeah he's not but the the market the problem is the incentives are set up in such a way that the market doesn't learn because you can make money on this. Like, you can make money on this. In fact, these kinds of, like, scammie griff things that are, like, very transparently going to end. It's just a PVP game.

Someone snipes it, someone bundles it, someone, you know, like there's people basically fighting it out on the charts, but then it obviously spills over because it's like the ex-mayor of New York City, which is fucking wild. But, like, you know, you could imagine like this could just be like an underground knife fight and people are just betting on people like trying to kill each other right like it's the same this like it's literally just a pvp thing and people are betting on it like that's it um and they're all and everyone just thinks that they're

going to get out yeah yeah that's it like it's just like i'm going to buy it i'm going to sell it and some people win some people lose i mean part of the problem is like if you are going to go and play a game like that right and and you know by the time we got to the end of the last meme coin cycle it was pretty clear that it was pure pvp like there weren't even like everyone else got washed out right it was literally like the bots and snipers fighting each other and that's why nothing could pump because it was just a bunch of bots and snipers and bundlers and who could be fastest and then it would unwind in like 20 minutes right but then people are like it's the rest of development meme

Hey, look, there was three weeks there in that meme coin run. That was fucking awesome, though. It was PVE. It was not the fridge. I know some Australians had the fridge. One of our ex-employees made the fridge. That was crazy. Yeah, that was crazy.

A million dollar fridge. Yeah. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. It's also a bad look when it really spills into, like, in real life like this. There's just so many people who are just like waiting for crypto to do things like this so they can point out of it. Like if we keep it to our internal memes, I've far less of an issue with it. If you guys want to go be idiots in the corner, that's fine.

What I'm saying. Stop involving politicians in our nonsense. If you want to have an underground knife fight and bet on it, cool. Don't like bring the mayor of New York to fight. Like, why? Like, what are we doing? the right take. Yeah. All right. Before we, before we go any further, sorry, here's a word for my sponsors. Let's do it. Multi-chain advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped

create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go-to-market, BD, and partnerships, Capital Markets Advisory, PR, media placements, KOLA activations, and more, driving execution from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction today, visit multi-chain adv.com. All right, Vitalik's walkaway test, which is weird. I've never heard the term walkaway test.

I feel like that was invented by Vitalik two days ago. So Vitalik published a post outlining what he calls Ethereum's walkaway test, arguing that protocol should remain secure and functional, even if the core devs and institutions stop maintaining it. The idea being that Ethereum shouldn't rely on humans' emergency coordination or benevolent maintainers keep running. Instead, critical properties like security, censorship, resistance, and finality should hold by design that the change should be able to, like, ossify to a point

where it just works even if we're all dead. Gabe Shapiro mentioned lawyers call this the Bahamas test, which is a bit on the nose. If anything, like anytime I read the word Bahamas, I get PTSD from FTX. But anyway, meaning the tech should still work if the team disappears and stop. supporting it. If only the FTX guys had fled to the bombers and left us all alone. So Vitalik added a stronger version to this, though. Users should remain safe even if the team becomes actively adversarial. And that one, we can get to that. But like, just fundamentally, and I know, Luca, you're going to have a take on this, right? Like, it's, I love Vitalik. I think he pushes us to

be better in a lot of ways. But then I look at the world and I say, given how rapidly changing the world is, like what possible hope could we have of building a thing that is still relevant even in like a year or two years that can alsoify? Like the world is changing so quickly. We have so little information about what the future will look like where you know maybe about to go through a singularity like it just feels a little aspirational to be like we should and and italics not saying like tomorrow right but like i just don't know that the world starts to get any easier to reason about in three years like it's only getting worse so i mean luca i'm sure you've you've got bolts here on this yeah my my take is, I've been saying this for years, but there's two different type of blockchains,

right? There's a blockchain that is a human necessity, one that's important for the future of humankind, something that can stand the test of time, that, you know, if some, you know, if everyone dies, it can still be there and usher that basically that layer of communication so that people can transact because transacting is a basic human right. It's a freedom. And right now, anything other than blockchains don't, you know, personify that freedom the way that, you know, like blockchains do. And I think Ethereum is the only, maybe one of the only, but it is the, you know, blockchain, immutable blockchain that basically, I think, empowers that freedom. On the other side of it, though, you know, I think there's blockchains whose businesses

are to compete with Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, PayPal, and they are borderless, you know, payment rails that anybody can build on top of. And those businesses are performance. Those businesses need huge workloads, super fast transaction speeds and are built to perform. Now the conundrum, and we saw this until Tom Lee and the fucking the Heath Treasuries came and bailed everyone out, is one one is super important. As a human, like I want Vitalik to go on and I'm not like the biggest EF holder in the world. So as a human and not the biggest eith holder in the world, I want Vitalik to go and issue, you know, and to build that vision, right? On the other side of it, I don't know value accrues to that vision in a way that the others do because the others are built to perform like a business

in a way that is predicated on driving value to stakeholders above all else. That's what you do when you build a business. And so the issue is, remember, you know, again, until Tom Lee and Cruz started bailing Heath out, Heath was stinking up the joint, and they were getting a lot of shit. And you could tell the shit bothering it, right? You could tell the shit bothered Heath. It could bother the foundation. It bothered a lot of people that I think I didn't believe they would get bothered by it or they had seen so much. There's only so much hatred you can absorb realistically before you're like this is like we built look at this amazing thing we built you fucking monsters right why do you keep shitting on it like just because the price has been sideways for like two years

like i get it i was one of the ones who was like the price is sideways because we're not like actually selling the thing right like we're not actually going out to the world and selling it and if we don't sell it to the world then the world won't value it that's how that's how the world works, right? Like, we can't just sit here and... But you can't sell it if your competitor is faster, more users, more volume, more things like that, right? And they conflict because, you know, having the fastest blockchain is not having the most immutable blockchain. Like, do they contradict each other? You two would know better than me, but like, they probably do, right? Like, you know, well, this, I mean, the thing that's

super interesting to me about all of this is, like, we are getting close to a, world and you know in 2018 when we're sitting there and it was like the merge is coming and then it didn't come for a very long time like the the the Ethereum technical roadmap felt for a very long time like it was going to be decades long and somehow in the last like two to three years it really feels like it's compressed and we've got some stuff coming that like it could actually be the most immutable and the fastest like they're there like with the largest blocks and the and and then you know so like Ethereum has been cooking the core devs have been cooking like it's great I can't even catch up with I was having a discussion with our

head of engineering and we couldn't remember whether the like POSkey Sepka 256 EIP had been deployed or not it was deployed like six months ago like we're actually behind. It used to be that you'd be like, all right, two more years and we'll get EIP 1559. Yes, two more years. Literally everything. Everything was like just a couple more years. It'll come. And now it's like things have been deployed and no one even realized it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that like, I don't know. I think that when Vitalik is is going to like full Vitalik mode like this, I think it's easy for people to like get into the weeds on what he's saying and imagine that like everyone is operating like this or like imagine an imaginary world where like

everyone is operating perfectly as Vitalik dictates or whatever. The reality is like he's going to say things. People are going to take that but then they're also going to keep operating by like the incentives and the business and everything else. And I think that's fine. And I think that like if you read Fatalix writings as like a pretty sizable influential piece but like it's not going to it's not really actually going to like completely change people's incentives um then it's like in my opinion it's a better like when you imagine the whole organism it's just a better way of operating than when the foundation is pushing for the same things that like you know everyone else is already be pushing on. And I think a lot of people are like, but then, like, you don't have alignment

and all these things. But I actually think that that's good. Like, I think that that you're going to get better outcomes when you have tensions and you're going to have to navigate these things and you're going to have to fight. There's, I don't think anytime you have like a solid, like, one plan and then execute that one plan, I think there's like a lot of danger there. Because, like, if it's the wrong plan, then like you're screwed. So I don't know. I'm excited. Like, I don't, there's so many things that Vitalik says that I'm like, I don't know. But the fact that he says them and the fact that he focuses on things that so often no one else is focusing on. Yeah.

I think that that is super, super valuable because it's just like these little nuggets do stick with people. And in ways that, you know, ultimately will result in them being better, even though they're still focused on like, you know, building actual businesses or, you know, focusing on what user, like any retail users want or whatever. if they like a little bit of italic in the back of their head, I think that's a good thing. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, one interesting thing for Ethereum, right, is like it's not something, you know, if you slice up from 2015 every two years, right, you've had some periods of time where it is like obviously working, right? Like it fits into the world as the world is at that time, right?

And then you've got some two-year slices where it's like not really working. And most of the time those things are like, you know, expectations got too high. Stuff's harder to build, you know, long-term investments in things that have not yet paid off. Right. So, you know, like the whole of 2018, 2019, 2020 was like too much demand. Like the reason why it didn't work, it was like it hadn't. caught up with how much people wanted to use it, right? And then we came out the other side of that.

And then it was like, oh, now no one wants to use it. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Like, there's still the same amount of demand. It's just that, you know, we've got excess capacity. It feels like you take these like two-year snapshots and then you kind of look back sometimes like four years, you know, like, holy shit. Imagine if we hadn't invested the time to do like, you know, the proof of, like the Bitcoin people were like, Ethereum is dead because it proved the stake, right?

And like, you know, and like, there was a period of time where even, you know, people, like, even when I was like a crazy ETH maxi, like everything else is a scam, right? I was like, oh, I don't know about this. Like, we've invested so much time. Is it actually going to be effective? Like, well, and is it going to ship? Yeah. Like, can it?

I was like a big question for years. Yeah. Like, can, like, like, is this? too hard. Like have we, have we like tried to do something that is too hard to like rebuild a network on the fly? No one had never tried it before. But one of the things that I think, you know, we can say for Vitalik and the EF as much as like oftentimes it feels like they are doing things with too much of a long-term focus, at least for me, right? As someone who's like, we want action today, right, is that most of the long-term bets, even if the timing has been wrong, right,

even if it's taken much longer to get there, they have paid off. And like, we're now in a period of time where like it might be the best blockchain without any of the trade-offs. Like, if I just be the fastest with the most block space, with, you know, the most censorship resistant, the most immutable. And then you go, holy shit, like I was an idiot to ever question this roadmap what was I think which you know here we are yeah no and the thing is I think that like people the thing about some of the like these types of posts and like the values of Ethereum and the EF and a lot of the builders is that it's not just that they can be like inefficient they can like really cycle into like some like completely uh like worthless little little echo chambers of like

you know, where they're so, we see this a lot with like security things. They're so in the weeds. And there's like big caping. Like there's a fire right in front of their face. But it's like, you know, perfect becomes the enemy of like, you know, moderately better. Yeah. But I think that like, like you, you kind of have to take some of that in order to keep that that core vision alive. You just have to figure out how to navigate that.

Like how do you make it so that people are always striving for like the most secure and like the perfection in security, even though that that drive for perfection is going to potentially impact your ability to like ship anything that that improves the security or the UX or whatever? And I think Ethereum, especially if we continue to see sort of like the not the EF themselves, but the people around the EF and the people who are building and shipping, as long as we continue to see them empowered, then I think we're going to be in like a really good place. Because then you can let the EF focus on these things that are more long-term and harder core, while everyone else can focus on, you know, the best user experience for users and, you know, all that kind of stuff. It does, it does feel like though, and, you know, I think, Luca, you kind of hinted at this, that there was a period of time where this disillusionment with like our competitors are out competing us, did kind of hollow out the builders a little bit.

And the people who were building that were actually building the businesses or projects or things that were going to take Ethereum to market kind of were like, like, you know, this feels hard, right? Lucas said this on the show. He's like, dude, I went to just Lana and it was like way better. Yeah. And so, you know, there is this like, like, okay, we should give, credit to EF when they get things right and we should criticize them when they don't right and I don't

think for what it's worth that everything we're describing around like the technical roadmap the long-term investment they're like you know very like resistance against expediency and like shortcuts like I don't think any of that stuff is incompatible with also finding ways to like help curate the ecosystem right to like help you know uh drive drive I have, you know, awareness and like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. It's a tough one. It's a tough balance to strike because you had this period where, like,

there was a core builder group in Ethereum. Everyone knew each other. Everyone was really bought in. We're there for like the mission and, you know, all of that stuff. It got so big that the distance between those people got a lot bigger. And there was nothing to kind of tie it together. And then competition from outside. started to, you know, make everyone question the, the, you know, long-term roadmap and,

and focus and all of that stuff. So, yeah. But here we are. All right. So, wait, Luca, did you, did you want to, you want to defend Salana? Working on my Wi-Fi. What do I need to defend Salana on? I can defaic, but, but, you know, to your point, King, because I heard most of what you said, like, Ethereum's putting on a clinic now, and I totally give them their flowers. I wish they had been this way a year and a half ago because things might be different. But, you know, everything that we're doing on the East side, I mean, dude, Eath's given me like three wee tweets in the last three months. I know.

They do it. I like jump for joy. I do the monkey. I'm like, this is great. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Side sorry. I have a video. This is years ago. I have a video. And my, my coworker Jordan was at my house and we were working. And he was like taking a break. and he was recording himself with my daughter. And then Vitalik retweeted me. And I literally screeched like a school girl. And I was like, oh my. And it's in the video.

Like it's captured. It's like it hits so much harder when it's him though. Like, I know. EQ side of what makes ecosystems and networks work. Right? Like everyone I think here is always excelled on the IQ side of things. But like there's like two sides of the ying and the yang.

And like that emotional, you know, TAY, that made you feel so awesome, I bet. I know the feeling, right? Kane, you probably know the feeling as well. Like, that makes the difference. And so they've been doing a really good, great, great job there. I don't know if you attacked any of Salinas technicals. I mean, I'll tell you, I still think from a consumer zero to one, if I'm like a new user, I go on fan of my fun.

Soul, I still think today it's probably still the best experience. But hey, I mean, dude, it metamask is getting a lot better. the gas fees are getting a lot better. Everything's getting a lot better on the Ethereum side. So I don't know exactly what jab you took it came directly at Solano. No, no, it wasn't a jab. It's more like there was a period of time where the Salana competition really kind of created some disillusionment on the East side.

Because it's like we're being out competed. Also, we don't have support, right? We can handle not having support as long as we're winning. Yeah. Like that's fine, right? But if we're not winning and we don't have. support like what are we doing here right but the barbells evening out right like it is evening out i mean dude for a year there just everything was in salon i mean app revenue you know no matter where you skin the

cat you'd have to be a little disillusion to like think otherwise but it's it's starting to play out it's starting to even out a little bit and i still think uh you know who's going to win the blockchain race is yet to be seen right i still i still think we don't we've yet to completely solidify one winner versus the other just like. And this is the thing, like, we don't know what the world's going to look like in two years. We could have like flying robots that are like carrying us around to places and like there's no cars anymore. Like it's like the idea that we can like finalize our blockchain design and be like job done feels not right to me. I'll tell you the place to win is the AI agents.

Right. Because in a world where an AI agent and AI doesn't have a social security, doesn't have an ID, It cannot bank, you know, with Wells Fargo. It can pick up an ID pretty quick, though. Oh, yeah. There's some new ones too. There's some new models that it just changes your face. I know.

It's so scary, dude. It's nuts. It's really nuts. So speaking of bots and AI, so this is an interesting arc, so this is an interesting arc, right? Like the X arc, the post, Elon X arc. We had a period of time where, let's not forget, you could link your NFT, PFP,

to your X account, right? Like, that was a thing that shipped right before Elon. And then Elon was like, nuke these NFT PFPs. It was my favorite feature ever on X that, like, you could just like connect your wallet, like check which PFP, you could switch it easily. It was amazing. Got killed. then cash tags got killed not like stopped but like basically nuked if you use them your post would

get memory hold right then there was like this this uh algo shift right over the last few months where almost every single person who's like 50 100 250 000 followers just stopped getting any engagement right any anyone in crypto and almost all crypto content was getting funneled somewhere. I don't know if anyone was seeing it, but like I stopped seeing it. And the algo really started optimizing, at least this is the, this is like the appearance of the algo, right? And Elon's saying they're going to open source the algos so we'll be able to actually like check this, right? But it started kind of TikTokifying X in the sense of like there were, there was only one topic you could talk about it in a given time. And if you didn't talk about

that you just get zero engagement, right? Like zero, zero, uh, reach. Um, and then at the peak of this, Nikita, um, the head of product, uh, who like is involved with Salon, maybe you know more about this, uh, Luca. I don't, I don't know exactly what the relationship is, right? But Nikita's like, listen, guys, like, this is not our fault. This is your fault. You guys are suiciding yourselves by, like, ruining your own reach by tweeting GM all the time. Now, this taps into like the InfoFi thing, where InfoFi became like, you know, I would see people, people, bots, whether people or bots or people with an account with scripting or whatever automation they were running that had 150,000 posts on an account that was a year old. Mm-hmm. They just reply guy. Like crazy. But it was like, it was like,

Well, hang on a second. Like, what the fuck are you doing? How do you think that that makes any sense? And Nikita's like, if you do that, you only have, you have a finite amount of potential reach that you get. And I think a bunch of people retweeted and kind of attacked him for that. And they were like, I'm not doing this. You're talking about like info five, my guy bots, not me. I tweet twice a day.

I saw like boldly and Idis was like, bro, I'd like tweet a cartoon once a day and no one sees it anymore. And they used to. like walk me through that like how is the algo like what am i doing wrong right um then they're like okay you know it would be a great idea since we screwed up the algo so bad i'm sorry they go we're going to improve how cash tags work guys let's go but then like they showed this like whole thing where you can like buy crypto in the app and and you know Elon's been saying this is going to be the everything app it's going to be all of finance all or whatever right um i don't know make it make sense like it just feels like absolute insanity right now i don't get it um i don't

get if they back tracked it he fixed it right but i think like this is an important part of like i can't tell you how many times they've fucked with that algorithm and our whole business like it really fucked with us bad and so you know we've obviously made a focus to distribute our through a bunch of different platforms, which I recommend any builder and founder listening to, like, make that a really big focus. Because, like, even this month, I was like, I'm just not going to tweet. This is awful. Like, I just already know what's going on. It's another big tweak.

And, yeah, it just goes to show that, you know, you can't be dependent on any single platform. But they fixed it. And now it's back. And now it's good. Now is the time to ship that announcement. That probably also affected your Infinex stuff, Kane. The whole thing. Like, trust me.

You know, like, it was actually fun. right because the the organic reach was almost zero right the inorganic reach because bots don't care bots will brigade everything you do they will find you right like they don't need like these are like hunter seeker bots that are like coming to fud you right um and uh yeah so so i think like it feels a little bit better last couple of days um my barometer for this is gainzy gainsie will always tell me how the algos doing he seems to have a six sense uh on that on the Algo. And yeah, he was saying it seems a little bit better.

So, so I don't know. So maybe it is fixed. I just know that like for a lot, it used to be my timeline was like crypto things. Like 100% crypto things. And then every once in a while, something that was like super big outside the cryptosphere would get out of my feed. But like it had to be big. But even then, even when it did like the response was always like,

shut the fuck up about Libya or whatever you're talking about. We're talking about crypto here. Like, get back in your lane. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone would like shame people. But it's interesting to see the incentives, right? Because crypto stopped actually working, you've got people that are like, well, I'm going to optimize.

They're just pivoting to like everything else. And silver and like whatever, right? It's super weird. Have you seen like Adam Conqueren's entire feed? He's like, actually, I'm not in. He's, he has decided. while ago. He's like, I'm not in crypto anymore. Yeah, good. That's a win. He's just like a political commentator now. I got one pudgy penguin post in the last month and it was a guy basically saying

if you don't pick a side, you're a fascist. Speak on Renee good. Or don't. It's the ones with a pungin when I saw this last month. And it was about I got here with the, I got put in political Twitter, wherever that was. I got dragged. It's so easy. I'm constantly tweaking my, like, my personal little thing. Because the thing is, like, there's two ways to really, like, if you don't want to see something or you want to see more of something, the easiest way is to use the share button, even if you don't actually, like, share it. If you say share, it, like, the weight on that is so heavy or whatever.

Yeah. And so, like, every once in a while I get sucked into, like, political Twitter and be like, like, it's like a feat of, like, ice stuff. And I'm like, I don't want to see this. Yeah, it's crazy. But you couldn't escape it for a while. Yeah. And then the issue is that I'm constantly like, even if I share like crypto stuff, though, it doesn't like do anything. Because I actually do legitimately share crypto tweets all the time. Like I'm copying and putting them into telegram all the time.

The way that I got rid of the political stuff from sneaking in is to to share the little like the cat videos or like the whale who like or like the sugar gliders are a favorite in this house. We love our sugar glider videos. But then like it doesn't. I'm not. actually fixing my feed, right? I don't actually still like get crypto stuff. I'm just like, okay, at least now the ice agents have been replaced by adorable sugar glider AI videos. Yeah, that's bullish. But so, so I don't know. I mean, it's, it feels weird to me that you would have like one of the most like culty engaged subcultures in online, right, in crypto Twitter. and you would ever fuck with that. Like, what is your fucking job, bro?

Like, how, like, how does that one ship? Like, and then, and then, yeah. You write it off with all the other stuff. Like, at some point, you're just like, Jesus, like 90% of our spam, 90% of the scams, 90% of the GMs are crypto, and you just fail to realize, like, there's like an entire population of really, like, good original content. and breaking news and you're like, no, no, it's all GM.

Let's not forget. Remember, the whole premise for Elon fucking getting out of buying X, which thankfully he didn't manage to do, was the bots. He was going to shut down the bots, right? Bots are so much worse now than they've ever been. And like in fairness, right, the technology has gotten significantly better for running bots. Like any cracked like three-year-old at this point can cook up a bot army using Claude code right um so i get it it's it's hard to manage but um it feels like they they have just

given up on trying to like manage the bots and pivoted to this like algo thing which is i don't know it feels it feels weird like surely i get this is asymmetric warfare a little bit right like and the bots have you know no downside and and x has all downside but if you feels like you could solve this problem. Like we like what was he was saying like the algos running on like the colossus data center on like 80 trillion GPUs or something like that like fucking put like train that that thing on bots like. Yeah. But they didn't fix the scandals though. You got to give them that because for years they were actually dropping like fishing. Yes. Fair. Fair. So they did fix that. So now it's just like sloppy, like, retarded AILM running around.

Fair. Which is very annoying. It doesn't inspire. It's what we mentioned an hour ago. Like when I speak to like the fudders, I definitely get inspired by the AI slop. It like gives me the lingo and how to communicate to the bullshit. But there is no fishing links anymore. So fair.

That is the good. We should. But part of that. Part of the reason there's no fishing links was that they basically just gave the, the, the, the power to you, the poster, so you could like hide the replies. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily that Twitter figured out how to like ban fishing links. Like they did make some tweaks to like who would show and how it would show and like,

you know, but they trained that then on all of the like organic hiding activity, right? To like get the model to be able to and then what you know, once. But like on the for example on the metamastic account, right, like we would tweet and then we would just go and you couldn't do anything. We were just hide them. And then they would go, like they wouldn't be on, they reply super, super fast, right? So you just sit there, you tweet, you sit there for five minutes, you hide them all. And then they, over time, they just stop replying to Metamast because they don't get any clicks, right? Because it turns out that like the fishers do actually monitor their campaigns quite closely.

And they stop. They stop on the conversion rates. I always, I love like just imagining, and I'm sure you do this as well, Tate, like I love imagining the like five guys sitting in like a basement somewhere in in Europe right and they're like they got their like giant TV monitoring their stats right and they're like stats are going down and they're like what like our conversion rate is just through the through the floor what are we doing here it's true though they do to a certain extent it's not it's not super well executed in analysis but like if it's not working they go somewhere else and I was I was talking about this

If this cash tag thing works and Twitter now allows you to buy crypto on Twitter, like, it's going to get right now. I don't care what you say. That is not priced in. Like you want an old season. That's where your old season's coming from. If every single person on Twitter can all of a sudden just yolo ape into any token. Define alt season, Kay.

I mean, that seems like a lower brown meme coin season. I got to hustle a Twitter listing. That's my new focus. Literally. You got to get listed on Twitter. That's the new meta. That's the new 500% pump is the X listing. There's no more Binance listing.

It's like way like Hangu's going to get listed on Twitter next week. I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure of it. Great. Okay. All right, guys. Let's wrap it up.

I know we would go to a couple of hard stops. So that's it for this episode of uneasy money. Thank you all. for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you guys next week. Awesome. Bye, guys. Thank you.