Unchained - Uneasy Money: Is Jupiter Incompetent or Evil? And Is Hyperliquid's ADL Flawed? - Ep. 976

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Thank you to our sponsor, MultiChain Advisors!The beef between Solana dapps Jupiter and Kamino has taken a new dimension as Kamino has accused Jupiter of lying about contagion risks. In this episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan dive into whether Jupiter misled users and raise questions about Kamino's response. Plus, after Tarun Chitra’s paper on Hyperliquid’s ADL, they dig deep into the exchange’s design: did they cause unnecessary liquidations on Oct. 10?  At the same time, they break down Lighter's 0% fees model. Does it resemble Robinhood? And how smart is it actually?  Plus, what Farcaster's big pivot means for the future of Web3 social, and what Taylor says it would take to crack it. Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Links: Unchained: Jupiter COO Says Vault’s ‘Zero Contagion’ Claim Was Not Fully Accurate Uneasy Money: Did Solana Dapp Kamino Break the Golden Rule of DeFi? Uneasy Money: Hyperliquid’s Dilemma After 10/10: Protect Itself or Its Users? Linda Xie on How Mini-Apps Are Helping Farcaster Take on Web2 Social Media Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction 😬 1:18 Did Jupiter mislead users? 🤔 9:19 Did Kamino really block Jupiter over contagion risks? 💡 11:15 Why Kain says Solana is in its “post-DeFi summer growth” era 🧐 12:38 Should Jupiter even care about its lending business line? 👀 18:06 Whether Hyperliquid's algorithm screwed users during the Oct. 10 crash 🎯 21:29  Luca reveals why his Oct. 10 losses on Hyperliquid weren’t so bad 🫨 24:54 Why Taylor says DPRK traders got saved by Oct. 10 💥 30:38 Why Kain is optimistic a rival HL model would emerge ⁉️ 32:02 Are Lighter users the product? 🧠 33:26 Why Kain thinks Lighter's model is genius ⚖️ 39:10 Whether Lighter resembles Robinhood 💁‍♂️ 44:47 Farcaster’s pivot: Is Web3 social DOA?  💡 50:53 What drives VC investment in crypto and why decentralization is not enough 💥 56:46 Kudos to Dan Romero for not launching a token, and whether more founders would be better off abstaining 👀 1:04:46 Whether having too much money is bearish for projects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The thing is just lending is where everyone's blown up in the past. That seems to be like nine out of the ten blowups come from some sort of lending mechanism. That's the one place in crypto I'd be afraid to build. Obviously, people should have business models so that they can build like sustainable business and create a value. The Ethereum Foundation says it's a car. I know. This is super controversial at Ethereum, by the way. Like, you should not have business models.

Unfortunately, in crypto, once you have a token, price becomes like the only signal. of success, right? You can release a feature. If Bitcoin randomly drop 10% that day, it's suddenly a bad feature. Hey, everyone, I'm Ken Warwick, and welcome to the fifth episode of uneasy money, because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with Luca Net, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, and Taylor Monaghan Security at MetaMask. Hey, Luca and Tay. Before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible. Multi-Chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus billion dollars in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news.

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One quick thing before we start, nothing you hear on uneasy money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research. search before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at onchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money. All right, guys, let's get into it. It's been a very busy week this week. I think the first thing that we're going to talk about is a little bit of Solana warfare between Solana defy teams, Camino and Jupiter. So Jupiter land is a lending protocol within the Jupiter ecosystem.

Jupiter started off as, I guess, a Dex aggregator slash decks and has expanded vertically, horizontally, diagonally into other dimensions over the last like four years. And I think has done a very good job at kind of dominating the Solana. DeFi ecosystem. Basically, like any evolutionary niche that is available, they will go in and occupy it. As you can imagine, Camino, that is a pure lending protocol, maybe hasn't loved that. It was cool when they were just a Dex aggregator, but now they're like a lending aggregator. And so it's created a bit of tension, I think, within Slana ecosystem.

In particular, there was this conversation about this zero. Contagion claim made by, which anytime anyone in DFI tells you zero anything, run, because it's going to be some kind of sci-op. So the claim, I think, was that there was zero risk of contagion within Jupiter land, within their pools. So the idea here being that, you know, you have these isolated lending pools within DFI. the design is supposed to protect someone who's in one pool from having risk of someone else doing something crazy in another pool, right? So, you know, if Luca and I are borrowing against Pengu in one pool and then someone else is borrowing against Saul in another pool, they don't want us to be a risk for them, right? And Jupiter was like, yeah, bro, like, don't even worry about it.

Like the pango pools are totally isolated. And it turns out not so much. And so Camino is like, guys, like this is creating re-apultication risk, right? Like people are borrowing from one pool, putting into the other. They're like looping and cross-contamination risk. Interestingly, multi-coin, which it wouldn't be an uneasy money episode. without multi-coin appearing. But this time it's too sure.

It's not, it's not Kyle. But there are two possible explanations here. Explanation one, the Jupiter team truly did not understand what isolated collateral means, which is the brutal. And two, the alternative to incompetence is that Jupiter team was actively misrepresenting a core part of their protocol in order to mislead users and attract deposits, which is worse. which is like a classic multi-coin false dilemma that they love creating. This team we didn't invest in is bad in this way or bad in this totally other very

worse way. Now, I'll say I'm an investor in Camino and I really like the Jupiter team. So I kind of don't have a worse in this race. But yeah, what do you guys think? Option one or option two? There's no option three. There's no option three. I mean, I always go with incompetence because I'm actually like eternally optimistic,

even as angry as like how I'm at the world in general. Like, I'm still, yeah, I'll always go the incompetent route. But I think there's probably something else going on. Like is that, is that cynicism? You say optimism. I say cynicism, right? No, it's optimism because the altruiting is that they're deliberately screwing you. But sorry, I guess my question is like, you've seen so many teams over the years say like,

oh, this is how this thing works, right? And it does not work in that way at all. They don't understand what they built. They forked something or like copied something from like some other chain or whatever. And like, no, no, no, you like, you don't know. We built this. Yeah. And then it blows up and you're like, no, you guys didn't know.

So, like, obviously you got some battle scars from seeing people on the timeline being like, this is how this thing works and it completely is wrong. Yeah. Well, and I also, I do get it wrong because there are people who are acting like deliberately and with intent to deceive or worse. I don't know, Luke, how you go. Yeah, I'm glad that we at least got clarity as to why they did it, you know, versus I think maybe my initial hypothesis of like, you know,

trying to just see a competitor winning and trying to halt that grows. So I'm glad that the Camino team, you know, gave an explanation. I'll probably actually say it's number two, but with a caveat, I think when you get to orgs of that size, And I know the Jupyter team is very big now. And I think when you look at all the product offerings, I think what kind of like my interpretation of what I think happened when you get to a size like that. And I experience it sometimes at Pudgy.

And I think I see more of these problems today than I saw them two years ago and we were a lot smaller is the delineation of information. Right. Like the marketing guy, you know, communicating that information in an ex post, right, has gotten the information on how it works delineating. probably through two or three different channels. And I don't expect that guy to know how it works, right? I expect that guy to actually not know how it works because. But I do expect the person, you know, the engineer who made it to know how it works. But if the engineer who made it said, you know, it's isolated collateral, you know, something.

And then the marketing guy on the other side of it, you know, got an interpretation of what it was. And is that engineer like, you know, fat checking tweets? like you're you know cane you probably understand this but like there's a point and when you're founding and i talked to you know brian pelegrino from la zero told me this and i was really stoked because i thought i was the only one and i'm sure a lot of kate you're probably the same like a lot of the tweets at a certain point did go through me but at a certain point it's not like there are now tweets that don't go through me anymore yeah right and they're always dangerous me every single tweet is dangerous yes and so i think that's like the issue and then so when you have like jupiter

Lend and Jupiter Purps and Jupiter Swap, like the business is huge, right? And they have like eight core, you know, you know, Jupiter Lent is now a new product. Obviously, it has momentum. A lot of DFI builders would love to have that momentum, but like it still isn't a huge part of their business, especially from a money making perspective, right? Like, it probably makes the least amount of money for them, right? And so like of all the things, you know, the top guys are looking at over there, does that mean it's okay? No. Right. And like, obviously there's things that need to be fix. But I do think like there's a little bit of grace to be given because like this to me feels

like just the way I like Jupiter backtracked in some of the things that did like deleting tweets. Like it just feels like a delineation of information mistake and somebody fucked up. Mm-hmm. My question is. So when we were talking about this last week, we were in the very early throes of the drama. And the drama was basically like Camino. So Jupiter launched this thing.

and it made it really easy for people to move from one place to the other. And then Camino was like, whoa, whoa, we don't like that. And then they blocked like the one click migration or whatever. And then the reaction was like, hold up. That's wrong. You're like trying to keep people to yourself. What the heck. And then after, like a couple of days later, then Camino came out and was like,

okay, let us explain to you why we did this. Yeah. And then it was like, hold on. And then it sort of the whole story just like completely sort of fell on its head because suddenly it was like, wait, there's actually a risk here. And like was Camino actually doing this for other reasons? What I'm confused about is was Camino actually doing this for that reason from the start? Because they do hardly make that clear. Yeah, you come out of the gates and you say it that way, right?

Especially if it's a risk for the Solana ecosystem, right? Right. But Camino Salon of first, that is very strange to me because usually what you should do, and I think there's some fault on Camino side is if that's the case, like what I would do as a commas, guys, I'd be like, we are shutting down deposits here because there's a misrepresentation of how these deposits are made. They're clearly not isolated. There's clearly contagion or potential for contagion, you know, this, you know, we hope Jupiter thinks so we can, you know, continue our partnership with that.

Right. Like that is how you frame that. I thought it was really boring. Yeah. So that's why I'm wondering if so and I'm not gone and looked and like rebuilt the timeline because I don't care that much. But I'm wondering if they sort of like latched on to this narrative. Like once people started talking about the fact that the vaults weren't as isolated, Camino was like, yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's why we did that thing. Because that's what it feels like. Yeah. Due to the, the post hoc rationalization of like, let's find a reason to. And, you know, I think to your point, Luca, like, someone in Camino may have been like, these things are really dangerous. Let's just block it. Like, this won't be a big deal.

We'll just block it and, like, no one will really notice and it'll be fine. And then it blew up. And then there's like a comms guy sitting on the other side. It's like, why did we do this? Like, why would we block this thing? They're like, what effect? The timeline's melting down. So I think, you know, there's probably, as you say, like a little bit of grace to be given on both sides.

But I think the larger thing that's kind of interesting to me about this is like within the Salonah ecosystem, we are now at that point of growth where like hyper growth where you can do any, you know, D-Fi summer growth where anyone could turn up and do anything and it all worked out fine for everyone, almost, ish. you know, that that kind of early 2020 vibe then became very competitive post defy summer. The next six months, people were tearing themselves apart. And I think that we're seeing a little bit of that in Solana where like it's not just money falling from the sky. You actually have to be competitive.

And so now, you know, there's some tension that's arising. I have a question from either of you guys, if you guys could answer, just like school me on like the defy business. But if I had like a, if I'm jupe, because I'm just trying to understand like how big is juplend to the Jupiter business. Just like this is I'm just trying to understand it a little bit. Like if I have a Jupiter pool, you know, a jupe lend pool is $500 million in USC. Like what does jupe lend make on $500 million in deposits in a year? Because they're giving five, six percent, you know, call it five and a half percent to the user.

You know, obviously they're making some margin there. Like are they making one percent on those deposits, two percent? Like, can I just get like a, either of you know, like, I don't know for Jupiter, unfortunately. Like, but I mean, my, my understanding historically on, uh, the margins for lending protocols is it's very thin. Okay. Like once, once money goes out to, you know, LPs, right? Because you've got, it's like peer to peer, right? There's a small slice that goes to the protocol outside of the peer to peer lending.

Um, you know, Avey, the margins are, are very thin, but it's $20, $30 billion. right so you know it's okay if you're making bips on on that what is thin 10 bips 20 bips just give me rough it's based on like your understanding yeah like 20 bips like 20 bit net i think it's it's not much um and but it varies as well right and and then there's like where does the money go does it go to buybacks burns is it go to insurance etc so like do you count insurance as net margin or is that like retained earnings they're like it's not it's not super easy to unpack this i think which is why we struggle to value these. Honestly, though, like, just you telling me that, like, Jupiter's got way too much to

lose, right? In terms of like, you know, they're making like on hoops and swaps, like, you know, some of these trades will make, you know, a couple points. Yeah. But why they're making way, one thing I'll say definitively is they're going to make like 50x more on, uh, on swaps than, then they will be making on like 100%. Like, it's a much better business. So, why they keep coming up with ways to like bother other people in this lot of ecosystem not 100% sure on that I don't stay away from this one if I was in if I'm being yeah this one doesn't make too much sense yeah if I had to if I had to guess it's less about the direct revenue and more about um like keeping user retention right like keeping it

Yeah. Because historically, when you have swaps, you have meme coins, you have that whole thing is the thing that everyone's doing, you're fine. When the market shifts, though, and people aren't swapping back and back and back and forth and back and forth all the time, you're going to lose your users unless you have something else that they want to do. And when the market shifts, a lot of times you go from like the aggressive mooning every meme coin, etc. to more like longer term, passive or just more complex positions, right? Which is where the lending ultimately is going to fit in. But yeah, it's, I don't think it's necessarily like the revenue driver. I think it's just sort of like another thing in the ecosystem that they expect to be able to

push their existing user base to attract new users. And then from there, you know, try to get them to do other things. Makes sense. The thing is just lending is where everyone's blown up in the past. That seems to be like nine out of the ten blowups come from some sort of lending mechanism. That's the one place in crypto, I'd be afraid to build. No leveraged pengu loans on the horizon. Not in house at least.

Yeah. Yeah. I also, I wanted to just call out, I thought Lowy did a, she had a tweet, Lily Lou. She had a tweet where she basically was like, hey guys. Hey, both of you guys. I love you both. Can you please stop big right now? Because like, in the grand scheme of things, like, you two going head to head on this is like absolutely like just the most worthless thing you can do.

Like pick your heads up, look around. Ethereum devi is so much bigger. And then everything else beyond that is so much bigger than whatever this little, this little tip is. And I thought that was just, I don't know. One, it reflects, like, how I feel about these things. Like, zoom out, guys, what are we going for? But it was also just, like, the timing of it was quite hysterical. And, like, her being like, okay, guys.

It's like the mother coming in and being like, suffice. Like, let's just settle it down. I know. We could use one of those. Like, why are you fighting with each other? Yeah. You'll fight the Ethereum people. What are you doing?

If you know what I love, though, because if I was multi-coin funded, I would just have that energy, though. I would just be ready. Because if you just know Kyle's personality, he's just ready to go at you. 100%. I feel like if I was a multi-coid funded, I feel like it would just come with, I'm already like a competitor and a fighter. I feel like I'd just be that much more bold to just fight. You know you've got to, you know, you've got a like a thousand pound gorilla behind you that you're ready to jump in. If you get into a fight, you can't handle. You're like, ah, Kyle, help me out here. And then like just nukes the other guy. So, yeah. All right, let's move on from Solana to Hyperliquid.

So Turun from Gauntlet and Robot Ventures, who's a good friend of mine, published a paper, I guess, like yesterday or something. I didn't know we're still publishing papers, but I guess he likes that kind of thing. It's his style. Arguing that the auto-de-leveraging on Hyperliquid, during the October 10 crash, the 10-10 liquidation event, created unnecessary liquidations. And that the Algo is using like a Bitmec style 2015-era greedy heuristic, which over-penalized winning traders to backstop bad debt. Jeff responded, which is kind of unusual.

He doesn't usually jump in. So that's always interesting if Jeff's on the timeline. I saw it last night, I was like, oh, Jeff's gotten involved in this. So basically saying that ADL had nothing to do with HLP or backstop liquidations and called Turun's claims misleading. Terun is proposing a risk-aware ADL algorithm that adjusts haircuts based on the leverage, aiming to improve fairness, solvency, and long-term exchange health. I think, you know, this whole debate about ADL, the trade-off between protecting the venue and protecting traders is something we've been talking about for a month now, right, ever since October 10th. My kind of takeaway from this, I guess, right, is that I think models in crypto are often useless in the nice possible way. And that like empirical data is

far more valuable. The problem is that the cost of acquiring that empirical data can be you are dead. So, like, you go out and do stuff and gather empirical data, but the empirical data might be that, like, you've made a mistake in your calculations that now you're dead. And so you become a data point for future people doing things empirically because you no longer exist. And so there is this kind of like very tight sort of tension between coming up with a model. and actually just like trying things. The challenge with hyperliquid, obviously, is now they are providing empirical data to the market. Like they've got a system.

It's been through multiple large de-leveraging events and it worked. And so it's easy to turn up and be like inefficient, like and take pot shots at it and, you know, propose alternatives, et cetera. But your alternative model that you're proposing didn't necessarily. go through the same empirical conditions that the actual system did. And so I'm always a bit skeptical of like, oh, my model is the trapezoid. And, you know, it does all these different cool things that yours doesn't do. And sorry, like, so, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what your take on this is, guys. But like, I'm always a bit of a skeptic when someone proposes a new model that's, like, isolated from reality. So I'm too stupid to really give that much feedback here, but I will give you an interesting anecdote. I actually thought I lost a lot of money on 1010, and I kind of believe this for a couple weeks. And then I actually did the math. And ADL, so I hedged. I wasn't Delta neutral per se.

I was more net long, but I did hedge with some shorts. It did close my shorts at an absolute like pico bottom that like I couldn't have closed myself. So I will just say, as bad as like everyone claims it was, at least for me, like one of my shorts closed, like a robot couldn't have closed it better. I closed the absolute bottom of the bottom of the wick when it closed it, which turned out to be great for me. And so like I actually recruited a little more losses than I thought. That's my only point to that. I can't speak on this. Sorry, how, Luke, how do you not know if you lost money or not?

So I had multiple accounts. So I have one account that shorts and one account that longs, right? And so I was looking at the P&L. I thought I had lost like way more than I had. Oh, yeah. And then I was like, I was like, oh, the ADL, like, there's a million dollars on this short I could have made. And then I looked at it and I was like, wait, it actually closed me at the closing price. I just looked at the P&L and I thought I, you know, I had made what I made.

But the actual closing price of the short was quite literally the me-co bottom of the way. Like, I probably had 10% more downside, which, like, you know, it's basically the bottom. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You're right.

It is great good to you, but like, perp traders are not the best at keeping track of their profit and loss. You may be shocked to hear this. But like, also, it gets not super easy, right? Like, trade on hyperliquid. Oh, it's, dude. It's not super easy to keep track of your P&L. So yeah. Yeah.

No, I know because the, there's like a few these individual DPRK guys who like to trade on hyperliquid. And so we have to track them. And in part, when they trade, we have to track their P&L. And let me just say, if you think it's hard for you to do it with your own wallets, it's so much worse when you're like trying to like trace and backtracing connect these other people. Are the PRPK guys good traders or they have like profitable PNLs?

So they are Overall They did pretty good I'd say like in the last three months Like when they Because they do a bunch of things They switch in and out of stables And from Eats to Bitcoin

So like even if they don't necessarily go Full Bitcoin They'll go to like RAPT to Bitcoin One guy Decided that he was going to like Do some wild stuff on hyperliquid In like August

And I'll just say that it was like, for a while there, it was like, oh, he's just like us. Because like, he would short, he would short Eve. And then Ethan like just moot. And then he's like, oh, that was a terrible idea. And then soon we were in Long, Heath. And then Ethan crashed out. We knew this guy in the synthetics trading competition.

I know, right? The RK, the North Korean, the North Korean trading challenge. Yeah. So, yeah, they definitely do battle. with like the longer term place, I would say. They did. The only, the only money they were cooped on their hyperliquid was on 10-10, though. They did get auto-de-leverage, which made their, they're sort of like, because they were still down overall, but like they were up.

They made like a million dollars on 10-10 with their positions. If they hadn't been, you know, like how much margin did these guys slinging around, right? like our friend Wyatt that guy like is like how how much cash of these guys got squirled away that their handlers are not aware of? So right now we're tracing from this year it's like they've got that hasn't been cashed out they've got maybe 200 mil just like sitting around on Bitcoin and Eve that's like ready to be laundered what they'll do is they'll take like a million to five million chunks and then go.

But sorry, so just for context, right, there's a guy who, who pretended to be Wyatt. Yeah, Wyatt and Nick, right, from Castle Island Ventures, right? And I had a whole thread where, like, I was trolling him and I was like trying to get him to, I can't even remember. The threads, but we'll find it. We'll find it. It's hysterical. But basically, Kane, without realizing it, completely trolled Lazarus guys.

Like, just completely trolled him. And it was like the funniest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. So the first thing was that the guy was like pretending to be Wyatt. And I was like, or no, pretending to be Nick. But his handle was still Wyatt. And so I was like, oh, isn't it sad that Wyatt has died? And I had this whole thing of like, anyway, I'll find the thread. We'll post it.

It was like a year ago. So back to Hyperliquid. I think the conclusion here is like people are trying different things. Hyperliquid is pretty resilient to, you know, three, four Sigma events, like 1010. And it's easy to like take pot shots with some model and, you know, make a claim that. and Turing loves models, let's be honest, right? So, yeah, I'm, I'm skeptical on this one. Yeah.

And, okay, I will say this, though. I think that Jeff's response, like his tweet opens with, those who can't do, or those who can do, those who can't fud. Like, oh, stop. Like. But you know what? I'm here for that because there was a period of time

where Jeff was like a little too aloof in my opinion, right? Like I'm here. If you're a founder and you're not willing to like get down in the mud with us and on the timeline, then like I'm, I'm bearish on that. I'm here for the Jeff arc where he's like fighting people on the timeline. And Tay, I will say to that point, I used to feel exactly the same way with you. As I spend more time here, I get a little more jaded. And I will tell you that like there's too much.

there's too much too much bitching and let like and not enough like people stepping up and problem solving and so like I actually am more I feel you 100% but I am more I'm leaning more towards that energy as I get older and working in crypto because it's like it's like it's too many times too many people feel really bold to say like really insane things and then like not even be willing to like go so like I do feel probably take the other side of that and like to today I'm probably you know not the guy that's antagonizing and picking fights but I will say some of these people on the timeline just need a need a little rude little passive aggressive messaging it might do them some good I yeah and I don't disagree and Jeff and the whole hyperlico team have proven that

they are they do like that is 100% their focus and they'll do things that are not necessarily like quote unquote like how you should do them or whatever according to traditional crypto tradition or whatever um how longstanding hundreds of years of tradition that we think of me like it is we're just gonna actually do things wild okay however i don't know maybe it's just me personally like i think that it would i think that hyperliquid would be better if they continue to evolve their models i'm not saying that they should just drop everything and do what Tarun says. Absolutely not. Like, they know their protocol and,

and their sort of priorities and their risk tolerance more than anyone else. But I think that there's probably something in Tarun's research that could benefit them. And, like, the way that I always think about this is, like, you want to take that information in and, like, carry it with you with all the other things and then continue to build. Like, a lot of times, especially on Twitter, it's, uh, people. are like, no, no, no, no. I don't understand your protocol at all.

I've never built anything in my entire life. I'm going to tell you exactly what you should do. And I'm going to get very upset when you don't do it. That's, like, you should. The highly opinionated retards problem is like very, very frustrating on Twitter. Like, let me tell you, you don't know. You don't know. You don't know.

Yeah. So, so I think like fundamentally though, right? Like talking about zooming out, the thing. that I love about crypto and the thing that I think is the most valuable part of crypto is the fact that Turun can publish this paper and there will be some enterprising young orcest who's like, this is the solution and I'm going to go and build it and they can go and build it in a vacuum and then release it in six months time and be like, hey, I've got a new perp engine that does it in this different way, right? And like,

Anyone can try it. Anyone can do. This is so different to TradFi and even like the fintech ecosystem where you cannot just build a new exchange permissionlessly and launch it as like a 16 year old engineer. Right. And here anyone can. Someone can turn up and say, well, we've got a different model and the model works this way. And this is why I love the space because it would be theoretical otherwise. But actually, like, this will become not just a theoretical exercise. Like, someone will actually implement this and tweak their model and we will get to see,

do they die? And it'll be really fun. Do they die? True, true boss. We'll find out. We'll find out. So speaking of tweaking designs, so the lighters, zero percent fees have come under scrutiny. I feel like this is the third or fourth time that they've come under scrutiny.

The first wave of scrutiny was like, zero percent fees doesn't make sense. And then there were a lot of people that are like, no, it makes complete sense. Like fees are a race to the bottom and therefore all fees will go to zero, which also is a bit insane. Right. But interestingly, there's a hyperliquid community account or affiliated account that's saying that Lider's 0% fee tier is actually more expensive all in, right? Like the cost of trading on Lider at zero fees is more expensive because the latency is 200 to 300 milliseconds. So basically the article, you know, makes the argument that like if something's free, you're the product,

which is a bit of paraphrasing of, you know, a Web 2 maximum, right? Like if you don't know where the kind of money is coming from, then it's probably coming from you. And so this idea that like slow execution leads to adverse selection and worse bills, et cetera. And I think someone else compared it to like payment for water flow. So this idea that like the worst thing that you can have, and I think this is really interesting. And I don't know if this was the kind of unique insight from. lighter as to why they did this. But the theory is that the worst thing that you can have is a

trading venue or as a market maker on a venue is toxic flow. So informed flow, toxic flow. There are a bunch of names for it. But like the worst thing, you don't want to be trading against Luca if Luca is trading Pengu. Right. Luca has more information about Pengu just picking a random thing, right? Or me about SNX, right? Like, you don't want to be trading against the guy who has the most of that token and has like some insight, right? You don't want to be trading against Zuckerberg selling your meta stock, right? If he's like selling blocks of metastock, he probably knows something and you don't want to be trading against that guy. What you want to be trading against are a bunch of DGEN's smashing buttons, right? Like a million monkeys on a million typewriter sort of thing.

And what's interesting about this lighter situation is only retail would trade with this much latency. And so you create this very interesting filter where it's like you're choosing zero fees, but you're getting worse fills in theory, but you also don't understand the dynamic that's actually a play, which means you are definitionally uninformed flow. Only uninformed flow would choose zero percent fees. A market maker would never choose zero percent fees and 300 millisecond latency, they would always choose lower latency and just pay the cost of whatever that is, right? And so it is quite interesting, I think, as a model where they have this two-tier system where they are manufacturing uninformed flow for the market makers to trade against by

creating this latency. I've never read anything, and maybe this is the quiet part out loud, maybe they'll have to kind of come out and talk about this. I've never read anything from anyone at Lider as to like why they did this. this. But if they did do this, it's kind of genius, uh, is my, is my hot take on this, right? Like, they can say to the market makers, anyone who's choosing zero fees, like, you don't need to worry about them because they're just sitting there getting picked off by you guys. Pretty genius. I'm telling you, you know what I learned? All you have to do is just tail founders fund. Just founders and invest. You just got to tail them. Because they just are hidden out of the park.

I can't really speak to this other than like, dude, you, you, you, you, you, And I say that because they recently just, you know, they probably had visibility to this. I mean, yeah. I mean, I mean, dude, like, did you, I don't think people realize how much, how many people make money on your just regular swap. Like, once I started to learn, once I understood how much money, you know, some people don't know, you swap a low liquidity little mean coin. Sometimes you'll lose 5% on the swap. Right. And like, there's like couple guys.

players making money on that. And so it's just like you guys happily marched into photon getting photon 1% on buys and sales and like Bull X and like the rest of the bunch. And you know, at the end of the day, like you guys were paying NFT projects 5% on buys and sales. It's like as long as everyone's making money, they're making money. So I think that's what it comes down to. I think this is one of those like problems that's here today, gone tomorrow, you know, and like good for lighter for having a hug for champion and they have a different way to making money. That's like, I could give you like 10 examples of 10 different businesses in crypto. I bet that like the end user does not know how that company is making money,

but they're making a lot of money on that end user. This just seems like, again, a problem that's here today, gone tomorrow. And, you know. Yeah. Yeah. The 0% fee thing, I always was, I was kind of squinted at it. I looked at it as like more of a kind of growth hacking marketing scheme, right? headline thing of like, hey, it's zero percent fees, but it's worse, slightly worse,

but the slightly worse thing's buried. The zero percent fees is at the top of the headline, right? Yeah. And this, by the way, this is how it's always been, like 2017 ShapeShift, no fees. Yeah. No fees. Right? No fees, guys.

They have no fees. And they would advertise that against all the other competitors. And, but when you look at it, right? okay so then how are they making money? Oh, well, on the spread. Yeah. Duh.

So it's not that it's no fees. It's that they're making money on the spread. Okay. Now is that better or worse than no fees? Well, you know, for most of the people that have this sort of business model, it's better in two different ways. One, because they can advertise it as no fees, which is very attractive to a huge portion of people in this world, right?

But the real reason that they do it is that they actually make more money, right? Because as long as they can get the calculations right, because there's always like this little gap and then they have to take the spread, there is risk there, right? Like there is risk that they, you know, the user doesn't complete the swap or something else goes wrong or whatever. And then they do have to eat the loss. Um, but so long as they, they do it correctly, they're going to make more money than they could with a fee.

Right. I have a great. And so that's so interesting to me. I have a great take here. Anybody who's offended at the lighter stuff, I encourage you to download Robin Hood and buy an options contract of Robin Hood. And it's what rape looks like. That's what rape looks like. Basically, they'll denominate you, uh, at the ask when like, if you just literally like, don't do the fucking gen.

Gen Z dopamine Fastway and actually just like edit the number to the bid, you'll save like hundreds of dollars on the contract. But that's where Robin Hood makes all their money, right? They make her on little Gen Zer like me, throwing 10 grand on an options contract. In reality, it's filling me at the app. They're filling on the bid, but they're auto pricing me on the ass, right? And so they're making money on all on, they're really paying the bid. and then I filled on the ass.

The threads are wide on options contracts as well. Unbelievably wild. And like, but that, you know, at the end of the day, like, I actually think that's bullish for lighter. Like, they can champion a zero percent hook, obviously a little disingenuous. Like, I don't like disingenuous framing, right? But, you know, they're probably going to make more money through this mechanism, I would think, right?

It's kind of like the Robin Hood model. And trust me, Robin Hood gets insane. Anything that's retail that's trying to hit that mass, that's how these guys make the same amounts of money. But yeah, I think fundamentally, if you can if you can say to market makers, I guarantee you that these guys now, of course, right? Like, you know, do people then work out like the toxic flow go, ooh, I wonder if there's a way that we could like hedge out this 300 millisecond execution risk and look like retail and, you know, like this. This is a multi-round game, right? Like, round one, great. We've filtered out all the toxic flow.

Round two, the toxic flow comes back through the 300 millisecond latency and finds a way to exploit the market makers. But that's finance. Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, like my concern here is, I think, obviously, people should have business models so that they can build, like, sustainable business and created value. Like.

Ethereum Foundation says it. I know. This is super controversial at Ethereum, by the way. Like, you shouldn't have business models. But I also just like, again, optimistically hope that the business models that we, like, that we, that we choose, but then also that we, I guess, like, shill philosophically are not like rapy ones. Like I prefer if, they're like bringing market efficiency, right? Yeah, exactly. Make the more open and efficient and, like, people have to eat, but let's not make it, you know, ripping people's faces off. Yeah.

And I think if we continue to just, I think there's a possibility that you race to the bottom with zero fees in the sense that everyone goes to a quote unquote zero fee model, which in reality just means that the way that people are making money is more opaque and is more convoluted and it's more hidden away. and that it's less clear who is losing. And ultimately, that will lead to more inefficient markets. And also it'll lead to sort of like the most retail users are going to be the ones that lose the most. And ideally, crypto is supposed to correct that, right? Like, for way too long, the masters of the universe have been the ones who get all the benefit at the expense of the people. Crypto does have the ability to flip that. But it'll be interesting to see if we actually manage to do it over time or if we'll return to,

if we're just going to, yeah, take the long way around to end up in the exact place. Reinvent the exact same mechanism, which we tend to do in convoluted ways. I mean, I'm optimistic for the same reason that I said, which is that like anyone can come in and say, okay, you know, there's a zero fee model. Here's the zero fee model. Here's why ours is better. You know, competition just begets more efficiency, right? Like if someone has a model that's like ripping people's faces off,

someone else is going to come in, you know, your margin is my opportunity, right? The Bezos quote. And someone else will come in and be like, hey, we have zero fees, but our latency is like 30 milliseconds. And therefore, you know, the fills are better and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it's very easy for someone to just literally fork lighter, but make the latency lower. And hence crypto. So we'll continue with a discussion on Farcasters' pivot and the future of Web3 Social after a message from our sponsors. 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 TGE's, go-to-market, BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, K-O-A 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.

Okay, so Farkaster has has shifted focus, pivoted, away from Web3 Social to a wallet, which is exciting for all the people building wallets on this show. So I think this is pretty interesting because Farcaster has been around for a long time. The original intention was like build a decentralized social network, right? kind of break the back of the, call it Twitter, you know,

behemoth, right? And, and offer an option outside of this like centralized social media thing, which is a very Ethereum goal. And I think that what it's maybe, there's probably two takeaways. One is like network effects are really, really hard to break, right? Like Twitter is bad for a whole bunch of

reasons yet we all kind of squint and close two eyes and just deal with it because it's the least bad option right there's this obviously you know blue sky and uh truth social and a bunch of other people that have popped up to try and like uh kind of undermine the the twitter network effects the x network effects but it's really hard network effects are the one of the most powerful forces in the universe and so um far cross are up to 4.5 years is like actually what about a wallet. And I think this is kind of interesting because almost it's harder if you're trying to fork an existing social network style because you're too close to them. Right. Like at least Frentek was like, what if we do this weird monetization, private group

bonding curve thing? And then obviously we know how that ended with race or running off with everyone's money. But, but yeah, I. I guess my take from this is like this kind of felt inevitable to me that this is where it would end up, which is a bit unfortunate. I'm a little bit surprised that they're like, we're just going to build a wallet because I'm not sure what the, they obviously have to build something. They've raised like hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. So they can't just shut it down and return funds. But yeah, I'm not sure that a wallet with social features is necessarily going to be the win that they think it will be. Yeah, I mean, I've probably got like two takes here. I think the first one is,

no, kudos of them for understanding that it's not going the direction they want and having the balls to pivot, especially in the space like crypto. I think like pivoting is part of being an entrepreneur, but like pivoting your publicly traded startup that like people have spent, you know, hundreds of hours, you know, participating in, you know, indexing some future reward and just dealing with that, like obviously never easy. You know, Dan and, crew are probably some of the best builders in the space, so they'll figure it out. I'm kind of surprised they got here a little too late. Like when we did the whole abstract product, you're familiar.

Like we have the portal that lives through everything. Like we kind of knew it all had to be while at first. I think if you kind of look at Phantam's playbook and you were talk to Brandon, like he's going to go and try to build some social feed and they're going to go. They're already planting the seeds for it. Like any product guy can look at Phantom and see that they're going to go in a cash app S-style direction and try to build, you know, some Venmo cash app, PayPal, you know, pseudo-social feed and maybe open up the grounds for that. I do believe that if you're looking

at like one of the greatest, you know, opportunities in crypto, if you believe that crypto rails are the future of the internet, an analogy I told investors for a long time was if Python was a token and Instagram was a token, which token would be worth more. Obviously, Instagram is written on Python. I would argue that Instagram would be a more valuable token than Python. And so in that vein and in that spirit, I actually think these huge social apps in this next generation of the internet with AI agents running around, like the Tam and the upside for who cracks that code

is, I very much believe, a trillion dollar business and opportunity. Obviously, those don't come around very often. And so it's going to be incredibly hard to execute on. It was clear that, you know, fire castor didn't have that killer feature that I think would, you know, was necessary for something like that to take place, you know, all in all. And then my other take on it is just like, you know, part of me is a little, I wouldn't, I don't know, I wouldn't know what the right word is. But like when I see that, I get a little like frustrated.

And I don't know if that frustration is like deviated from like envy because like, I haven't. insane product market fit. And if I had $100 million, like, why isn't Paradigm ever reached out to me or any of these guys who are cutting $100 million checks on things with no PMF? Why don't they reach out to the guys with serious PMF who are like, you know, growing year over year. And, you know, and so like I have just to be candid, I have like a part of me that when I see that, I think two things. Like, good for Dan. He's going to figure it out. He's best in class builder. They have tons of money. You know, they should have probably come to this conclusion sooner because, you know, other people have come to that conclusion and there's a good barometer as to where to go. It's a huge swing,

so can't fault him for failing. Nobody's going to only one or one or two people in the entire history of human history are probably going to be a pull off this Web3 crypto social network. So no fault to him. And then the other side of me is like, damn, how did paradigm underwrite giving you guys close to 200 million bucks? Because, you know, fuck, there's a couple guys that I know, myself included. It's like if you give me a hundred million bucks, it'd be, you wouldn't get, it'd be insane and be the nail in the coffin. I'd place the IPO two years from now, guaranteed. So, who knows?

I think, you know, there is an, there's a question of like, why do VCs in crypto do what they do? And sometimes it does feel somewhat inscrutable. I mean, I love the fact that you still have a chip on your shoulder. You're like, fuck those paradigm guys. But, but I think that, like, the one of the, one of the. the components to this, right, is they like Greenfield's opportunities. They like to go in, you know, this is, we talked about this last week, like multi-coin turned up, having invested in

ETH, the asset for a long time, faded ETH, and then they're like, well, this defy thing seems to actually be working. So let's build a bunch of projects that are going to compete with the existing ones. Because they want to own 10, 20% of those things, right? Like, you couldn't come and buy, ETHLand, which became, you know, you couldn't buy 10% of Eithland slash AVE, right, in Dify summer. It was too big. So it was like, well, I'd rather just go and, you know, invent something new that's going to come and take them down. So I think there is that, that kind of element to it as well.

I also think, like, more broadly, this is, this is super bearish for like one of the core crypto tenants, right? talking about the Ethereum Foundation, like we're going to decentralize all the things. We're going to make them free and open and transparent. And yet we have like utterly failed to be the largest centralized incumbent in history in this vertical. Meanwhile, there's other centralized networks that have actually gotten more traction while we've been trying to build the decentralized one. It, you know, like not amazing traction, right, but like blue sky has their own like weird little needs. and people have tried to kind of attack Twitter.

Like, Blue Sky did better than Farcaster, I would argue, right? You know, by having that niche. And so this idea that like decentralized tech will win because it's open and transparent and and and and, like maybe the time frames are long enough here and we just didn't get it right. But just being decentralized is not, is clearly not a lot. enough. Yeah, exactly. It's not.

And especially when we're talking about social and like something like Twitter, right, you have to go back to what is the actual value that decentralization actually offers? Because the centralization on its own, like, really doesn't matter at all. The value that comes from that is potentially things like, um, uh, like, I guess you can't. Resistance. Yeah.

But I mean, but what does that mean for the end user, right? It means like, oh, so Elon's not going to ban your Twitter account or censor your words or okay. But we have a decentralized social network that's fortunate. So you go see how that. You can see how that one. And that's the thing is like, you know, most of the competitors that crop up are the ones that have gained traction or the ones that, like, they either were or were potentially successful. scared of being actually censored, right? Like truth social is the one where it was like all the people that actually got kicked

off Twitter during that era went to their own little network. Trump included, right? Because he was actually kicked off Twitter. Yeah. Okay. Now, that is valuable to those specific people. Yes. However, is it valuable to anyone else?

Because social network is both giving and taking, right? Like the only reason that I would go is because I want to read those people. And the reality is, when you have such a niche narrow, like, user base of people that are pushing content there, it's very quickly it can devolve and be just a really bad echo chamber. And that's what we've seen with true social. That's what we've seen with blue sky. It just, you filtered out the people. I mean, the Trump thing is interesting, right? Because, like, you say, well, Twitter's centralized.

And it is, obviously, but like, it's not that centralized. Like, it's not like there's like this panopticon and like they know everything that's going on. There's like trillions of bots running around. People just syndicated the Trump truth social posts on Twitter. You didn't need to even go to shoot social. You get them on Twitter and just follow some of the accounts that like screenshot it every one of his posts. Right. Like Twitter didn't shut those accounts down.

They're like, oh, whatever. Like, we just didn't want the guy. Like we can have his messages. Like it's fine, right? And tactically, that's like a way better, you know, and state for Twitter anyway, right? They're like, we don't want people leaving, but also we don't want that guy. So we get the best for both worlds. We get the guy's stuff and we don't have him on here.

Yeah, exactly. And by the way, that was also like a very interesting period of time for Twitter where they were in my opinion. And I think in Twitter's opinion, like I think Zuckerberg has come out and talked about this too, like the post-COVIDs. social era for U.S. companies. I think most of them are like, we didn't take censorship resistance seriously enough. And we probably should have. Like, we probably should have had internal policies that really had some layers of accountability and policies so that we didn't have individuals

running around banning, banning Trump or banning whoever just because our friends that, you know. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, some of the leaks have shown it's like literally because, like, the friend that was part of the admin was like DMing people that worked at Twitter. There's a great. It's wild. At least on the farcaster side, I think it's like a little more interesting little back and forth with Kobe. And I think it was carbon around like this, the whole token side because it's like interesting.

You know, kudos to Dan because there is a lens to this that I think it earns at least deserves everyone's respect, which is at a certain point there, he could have launched it to multi billion dollar token very easily, right? And could have made a lot of money from it, you know, depending on how like he, you know, yeah. And he did it. And he said, and in crypto is very far, there's very few builders who have the integrity to be like, I am not going to launch the token just because I had put three and a half years into it. Right. And I deserve to see some upside and realize some of my gains, right, for that effort. And instead took the high, high integrity path and said, I'm going to go build something completely new, a wallet based

off of these learnings. That's a very high integrity decision that almost nobody listening to this. I promise you would make. Right. Is that something to do with like Dan having made it already, right? And like, you know, obviously being early crypto and whatever and him being like, he kind of reminds me of like, like, Brian, from layer zero on that point where like, you know, you know, Kane, you give me that vibe to you like you made it. It seems like Infanax is like super like you're trying to do it. no matter what, obviously you guys have a token element to it, but like, if it was very clear to me early on that you were just trying to build the highest integrity product possible, it's interesting because like, but to be honest, like, I, if I can go back, like, I might not have an Infinex

token. Like, like, I'm, I'm not 100% convinced that that was the right call in the way that I was, say, two years ago when I was like, I am 100% convinced that it is better to have a token than not have a token. I think today there is, and maybe we can talk about this next week, right? Like the debate about tokenization versus not tokenizing, you know, there have been a, I think even just like from a pure founder incentive perspective, right? The downside of having a token is infinite. Like even if you do make some money from launching a token. right but whether you whether you do or don't the downside is infinite right like the people will look at whatever the highest price that token ever got to and like i have this conversation

with synthetics all the time right synthetics the seed round was like eight million dollars it's 200 million dollars now if you go back to 2017 like mid 2017 it was 8 million now it's 200 it's 200. The problem is that it went through $5 billion at one point, right? And so people go, yeah, but that's the, that highest price that it ever got to, which as a founder, you have very little control. People think that like, oh, I just painted that chart and like made it look like that, right? Like, you can't get people to trade hundreds of millions of dollars of a thing at a $5 billion valuation through like sheer willpower, unfortunately. And the market will do what it does. And so I look at that and I go, okay, so, you know, it's 98% down or whatever from all time high.

But it's like 10, 20x up from where it started. Like, crypto Twitter is like, you're a monster and any other rational investor would be like, that's a great outcome. You got a 20x. And like, it doesn't, the path kind of doesn't really matter. The interesting thing is, if you remove the token element of it and you didn't have a token, and it was a pure equity play, right? And someone did invest in 2021 in DFI summer in an equity deal. And you, you know, did some secondaries and like sold 10% of the company at that $5 billion, you know, Vow and someone put $200 million or whatever.

You would be so much better off on the timeline. Like so much better off. One guy would hate you and his LPs would hate you. Yeah, but yeah. But you know what? The funny thing is, I don't think that even the person would remember. Like, you write text. Sophisticated investors as part of their game.

He writes, you forget about it. And you're like, they wouldn't even remember. You're like, in fact, they're like the incentive structure, actually, as a VC with LPs is to memory hole that $5 billion now you underwrote it 200. You're like, yeah, that never had. Like, you're never mentioning that on the time. line ever like why would you bring it up for the incentives are completely different whereas like every single person who ever bought uh the s next token above 10 dollars is like you're the worst

founder in history and i get like i get it like i get it on on the level of like yeah like that was not you know was that the right price was it the wrong price like is the price now wrong like um i don't know but like my my my mindset is definitely sure shifted lately, you know, over the last like six months as to whether or not tokenization, which is pretty wild. Like I was like one of the biggest advocates of tokenization. But from a pure founder perspective, if I was talking to a founder, delaying tokenization until you know that the thing has worked is probably my default at this point.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've always agreed. It's like, so I'm not saying that. I still agree. I still agree. No, I mean, my biggest thing is that once you got a token. What's the meta token, say? Put the meta token in the bag, bro.

Come on. So once you have a token or thinking about a token even, right? It shifts basically everything and especially like priorities and product and value. and I think it makes it, especially in crypto, where the data that you have to operate on is already like, sometimes it's like very weak. Sometimes it's like very biased. Sometimes like it just doesn't even exist. Once you have like that, yeah, that's sort of the hype and the expectations or the token incentives itself, you can start operating on a really bad mix of like assumptions and bad data that takes you down a road. that isn't, you know, the best for anyone in terms of value creation.

And it takes a lot longer for you to like, you know, figure that out. I think that you really have to have incredibly strong, like, product people and leaders to be able to like keep that, like, keep the priorities. Well, because unfortunately in crypto, once you have a token, price becomes like the only signal of success, right? You can release a feature. If Bitcoin randomly dropped 10% that day, it's suddenly a bad feature. You work for six months, you release a feature and Bitcoin drops, therefore it drags

everything else down because your token has high beta to Bitcoin. And now it's like, look at these idiots releasing this terrible feature that they worked on for six months that the market clearly says is bad. And it's like, what? are you talking about? But that's, that's unfortunate. Lucas just like, one of my own brains out.

So I do, I might be curious though, because Forecaster didn't have the token, I feel like they still, I don't know, I feel like they took a long time to reach this conclusion. But, you know, the funny thing is sometimes putting yourself in a bubble

and having infinite money is actually really bearish, right? Having too much money is, honestly, from a market outcomes perspective, my view is that, like, if you gave, if you just picked 100 random founders and gave them $100 million, right, the outcome would be far worse than if you gave them a million dollars. From a market perspective, the market would get better outcomes from those people having to actually make due with a million dollars and figure things out. Like those guys would light that $100 million on fire, 95 out of the hundred of them within like 20 minutes.

And then they'd be like sitting in a smoking crater being like, oh, man. Like what how? That was a mistake. So. Oops. Yeah. No, I agree with that. And you do.

Here's the thing. You have to be to build something like Farcaster and really go like 100% balls in the wall, right? you do have to create a little bubble of insanity to operate within because otherwise you're just never going to believe in yourself, right? You need a reality distortion field to go and do that. And also, you need to hire like expensive people. This is one of the things that's been like very interesting to me with Infinex is only in the last six months did we actually start to like go out to the month.

market and say, give us your most expensive people. We want the best engineers, senior engineers, and pay them the most. Prior to that, we were focused on bringing in, like, crypto Dgens who were much more incentivized by token grants than they were cash. And, you know, they've got a lot of experience in crypto, but we're not necessarily like senior engineers that had been through like multiple cycles of like, you know, technology changes, like no different architectures, like really well. We brought in, I would say, like 10 or 15 engineers over the last six months that are like just incredible relative to like the baseline of crypto engineers. Now, they don't have the crypto knowledge in fairness, right? Like they're just pure engineers. But they come in and, you know, they're like,

hey, there are like some risks here that you guys are taking that like, and there's one guy who just like wanders around. It's like, Tay, you're like, you're like, love this, right? It's like, imagine you're building a house, right? And you bring in a guy and, and the guy's like, um, so you can't plug the wires into like the load bearing like metal pole there. Someone's going to electrocute themselves. And they're like, I'm just going to unwind this and like plug it into the right. Right. Like, and it's just like, and he just walks around all day long, just unpicking like these things where he's like, I see. And, and, you know, this is the biggest difference with senior engineers versus, you know, a junior engineer, junior engineer sees a mistake

or sees like a thing that exists that is not optimal, right? And they get mad about it. They're like, ah, fucking idiots. Why did you do this? A senior engineer looks and goes, I understand why you thought it was a good idea to like, you know, plug this into this thing. I'm not even going to, I'm not even going to criticize you. I'm just going to unplug it quietly and plug it into the right place and we'll move on with our lives. And it just is a completely different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's, well, it is. So we've had, there's been similar things where I've been like sitting there banging my head against the wall being like, I know there's a better way to do this, but I don't have like the technical expertise to like even figure out what it means. I just know that this can't be the best way.

we did it with releases once and it was like yeah sat down with a guy who I didn't even know had history doing like release management and he starts like

telling me about like what he does and stuff and like no joke this guy had been basically optimizing the release flows for like

huge software projects for like 15 years and he starts and I was like I just don't know how we could ever do this and this and this and he's like

what that's like the most basic he's like no no no we should be able to do that like instantly and then also if there's a thing or if there's an issue or if there's even a potential issue then you have a whole thing over here that just and i're sitting there like back and freezes things and i know yeah i know and he was like yeah this is like basic and i was like can we do this place like what are you doing it's also like part of the crypto bubble is like i'm not going to hire the guy with 15 years of like, you know, release management, like dev sec ops because he doesn't know what Pengu is. And so he's a fucking idiot. And so like, how could I hire that guy? Like, he's going to be like, there's a penguin token. I don't like what like, and it doesn't do anything. I'm confused, right?

I'm like, get out. Get out of my office. All right. Well, that was fun. That's it for this episode of Uneasy Money. Thanks for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed. on X slash Twitter, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you guys next week.