Unchained - Uneasy Money: Monad Soars After Launch. Was Its Slow ICO an Advantage in the End? - Ep. 963

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Thank you to our sponsor Uniswap! In this episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan discuss Monad's mainnet launch performance and how its ICO strategy may have proven solid in the end. They also delve into MegaETH's botched TVL campaign with Kain explaining why scrambling is bad for projects.  In addition, they dissect Polymarket's CFTC greenlight, Klarna's stablecoin launch, Cardano's chain split and Berachain's secret Brevan Howard deal. Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Links: Unchained: Monad Co-Founder Defends Token Sale After Slow Uptake MegaETH Aborts $1B Cap Raise After Multisig Error Triggers Chaos Polymarket Gets CFTC Green Light to Operate in the US Klarna Launches Stablecoin Built on Stripe’s Tempo Chain Cardano Founder Contacts FBI After Dev’s ‘Careless’ Test Splits Chain Uneasy Money: ICOs Are Back and Why Airdrops Are Instantly Dumped Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction 📈 2:08 Monad's post-mainnet launch performance 🫣 6:57 Will Binance regret not listing Monad? 💡 12:57 How Monad's ICO strategy impacted its launch 🧠 16:00 Lessons from MegaETH's botched TVL campaign 🫠 21:53 How the MegaETH TVL campaign could have been worse  💥 22:32 Why Polymarket's CFTC greenlight is a big deal 🤔 30:32 Why Klarna's stablecoin launch raises eyebrows 🤯 36:35 What happened with Cardano? 👀 39:33 Will AI kill all our chains? 😕 48:24 Why Berachain's Brevan Howard deal is weird Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All things told, yes, it was messy, yes, mistakes were made, but it could have been way, way, way worse. So we go to lunch and Shane turned up and he was there for like an hour and just is just an insane person. Like even by crypto standards, like his level of like reality distortion field that he lives in is like insane. And so, uh, so then he left and and all my friends were like, that, That guy is insane. Like completely insane. I'm like, I know. That's why I love him.

I realize that the majority of venture vesters are really just retail with a large check size. Like a lot of these guys are not the brightest. So, you know, maybe it did just get away from everybody. And that's like one of those areas in, and there's probably one of those stipulations, like first right to refuel. Probably one of those things you have a conversation on. And, and, you know, one VC is talking to one guy. And they're just like, screw that. You know, he's leading.

Hey everyone, I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to the third episode of Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with Lucanette, CEO of Pudgy Penguins and Taylor Monaghan security at Metamoss. Here's a reward from our sponsors that make the show possible. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product? The Uniswop Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-and-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto. It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity, less complexity. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more.

One quick thing before we start, nothing you hear on uneasy money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain. And we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money. All right, guys, episode three. Let's get into it. It's been a busy week, as it tends to always be. How are you guys doing? Pretty good. It's a, yeah, pretty fun week. Yeah, it feels like there's a lot of stuff going on.

So first thing we're going to talk about is Monad. Monad hit Mainnet. So Monad is a chain that has been around for a long time now, almost four years, and just got to Mainnet. So it was probably one of the longer pre-endet. main net chains that we've seen historically. It's kind of wild to think about the fact that like, you know, Ethereum was like maybe a year, 18 months before the Genesis block between like the ICO, like the thing, not even 18 months between the ICO and the Genesis block. And the first four years of Ethereum history was like insane, the amount of stuff that happened. But, but yeah, Monad finally went like

finally went live. The interesting thing is Mona did a ICO through Coinbase, through Coinbase's new platform. And the token dipped a little bit, but I think it's over four cents, which is, I think it implied FDV of $4 billion. But there's not a huge circulating supply. It's only, it's only about 10%. I think, Luca, you're probably scratching ahead of that one. What was the circulating supply of Pengu when you guys went live? Like seven, micerson. 70% yeah. Yeah.

Different time a year ago. So yeah, I think it seems like it's been a pretty good launch so far. There have been a ton of different platforms that have supported the chain. I know you guys are supporting them on day one, right, Tay? We are. We did. I'm very proud of our team. I, uh, it's been, I don't think people realize like, Manumask has been around for so long.

We also have like a huge amount of tech debt and things happening. And yeah, we, we ship monad support on day one. And I'm super proud of us for doing so. we also have like i don't know we have a new network page that actually like i don't know wild right it links you to the things that you can do on chain who'd have ever thought um but yeah i'm pretty happy with it and the team is obviously really happy with it but i'm just mostly impressed that we i don't know we shipped it on day one yeah shipped it on day one and we also like i don't know philosophically we go back just for context right you shipped salana on like day

1,000 or something like that, like day like day 3,800. So it's definitely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I'm sure you've got some thoughts on this, Luca, but like the, the meta of launching a new chain, right? You know, for I think a long time was like go out to all of the defy projects, you know, pay them a grant or something or if they wouldn't do it, find some cracker. 20 year old to fork it and just Yolo to play it.

And so, you know, Monad has really leaned into that with the combination of like defy and meme coins. What are your thoughts on that launch strategy? Yeah, I think it, it's, yeah, I, you know, I can't really, I can't really speak to it just yet because like, you know, I don't think there was that many big meme coins on the chain just yet. I think the DFI stuff I played around with. But, you know, naturally the ecosystems have to be relatively holistic. I think nowadays, or, you know, or at least most people think I have a, I have a contrarian take. I think people should be more purpose driven, meaning like go after a specific function,

whether that function is, like, I'm not actually a general purpose believer. But I think all in all, you know, give credit where credit is do. they executed well. Obviously, they didn't have the finance listing, which I thought was interesting. But, you know, tokens at the end of the day, there's plenty of chains that have nothing going for them, that tokens go up and community rallies behind it. And I don't actually like that side of this part of crypto, but it is just the unfortunate reality. And it's a reality that, you know, at the end of the day, if you have bag holders and people are making money, then they're bullish and you're doing a great and you're an amazing builder and the entirety of everything you've built is so amazing.

And they don't really look at anything else under the heart. So just maybe let's talk about Binance for a second, right? Like this has to be one of the biggest launches in years that Binance hasn't listed very quickly, except for hype. Probably like Hype and Mon are the two that I can think of in recent memory where it was like a huge hype launch and Binance has faded it. Seems weird. I don't know what's going on there.

Does it have to do with the Coinbase? The fact that they did, they were like the big coin base thing. Because like historically, Binance has, you have Binance, you have the listing, you have alpha, you have, right? You have all these different incentives and reward programs. But historically also, Coinbase doesn't have any of that, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So is that, was that a factor in this? I don't know. I don't know, but I think there's been obviously a lot of discussion about Binance, the cost of listing on Binance, the cost of listing on all exchanges, right? You know, there is an expectation that finance gets pound of flesh from projects, you know, one way or another, right, for listing, which like, you know, my hot take is like markets are markets, right? If someone has a useful service, i.e., a bunch of

you know, D-Gens that are sitting on their platform. I don't have really an issue with people paying for it. I know that there's been like a lot of debate about this. There was a bit of a bit of kind of contention on the timeline between Coinbase and finance about listing should be free versus listing be paid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you've been through this process.

Like, I don't know. If you build a big business, it feels like weird that you'd be like, no, no, let me give that thing away, right? The problem, I think there's a whole bunch of things to get tied up in this, right? Like, if you monetize your ability to put a token in front of all of your users, that can get dark very quickly, right? Where it becomes about extracting versus, you know, so, but on the basis that you are genuinely filtering out bad projects and only allowing good projects to come on the platform,

then I don't really see an issue with charging a fee for that. It's just that it gets, it drags in all of this stuff around. Like, who gets the fee? Where does it go? What is it for? What are we doing? But, you know, like exchange fees and listing fees, it's hard to see a way of getting around it.

I mean, of course, someone can just come, like Coinbase can go, well, it's zero dollars to list on Coinbase. And, you know, if there is a large market participant that crushes the margins on something, then, you know, maybe the price goes to zero. I don't know. I don't know if that's, that's something that we see as sustainable, long term. I mean, what's the, like, I don't know, I think the conversation on the timeline about the listing fee specifically was like slightly disingenuous because it's portraying the entire. You're saying the time was disingenuous. You're saying there was a sigh up going on?

I don't believe it. That's crazy. It's like, I don't know. The whole thing was like just put in this pretty little package of like this listing fee. Where in reality, I think it's pretty rarely the case where it's like just such a simple situation and such a simple deal. Like, give me X dollars and we'll list you. Like that's not actually happening. There's all these different things going on.

And, you know, how those are packaged up and what they're called and what the money is and what. the team gets value out of, what the end users get value out of, what the exchange gets the value out of. I just think the conversation is usually like very, it's very simple. It's black and line, right? It gets reduced down. And I mean, you know, talk finance, right? Binance has like four or five different programs that, uh, project can go through, right? And, um, you know, one of them is basically turning the token into yield for B&B holders. Mm-hmm, exactly. Which like that, I'm, I sit here and go, So that's the job of Binance, make B&B go up.

Right? Like that is literally their sole job. So if they're saying, hey, you know, I mean, there's on-chain examples of this. Like, Aerodrome is a really good example of this. Like take everyone's token, you know, add liquidity, but then inject it into the aerodrome token effectively, right? Sell everyone's token and put money into the aerodrome price, right? Yeah, I don't know that I like. like see a huge issue with that.

Of course, no one's got a gun to anyone's head saying you have to list on finance. But the interesting thing about this is you have to imagine that Monad has been like, whatever, which you didn't used to be able to get away with. You couldn't say no to finance. Yeah. So.

Well, and at some point, finance users are going to be like, wait, what the heck guys? Yeah. Right? Like,

like how do we not have Mon? Right. Especially if it goes up. Well, this is the other thing, right? If the token goes up from here and they're like, wait a second, you didn't give us this token when it was, you know, 20 cents. It's now $2. You have prevented us from having generational wealth. Like that's literally into the conversation, right?

So, you know, but also there is something interesting about the dynamics of this where, you know, this is one of the few tokens that we've seen, maybe excluding high. where like at least in the first 24 48 hours, it hasn't been a down-only chart. So there's something, there's something interesting about that as well, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And there is. John and his drunk trading experience, I think in hindsight, that was pretty obvious. Keon wasn't going to let that thing go out of the gates and stink up the joint.

Yeah. Yeah. And I is like, oh, that was probably an easy trade. I did, you know, try to max fill on the coin base. It seemed at least relatively somewhat free. Yeah, but they didn't fill you. They basically, what they did is they basically put like the ceiling almost at $50,000 and try to give as many people $50,000 work because I, I max submitted for half a million bucks.

And then, you know, my friend who, a bunch of friends who only submitted 50 to 100 grand, all got 50 pretty much. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So they were maxing. So there wasn't any like big. It was actually a good strategy though. So like not one big person where there wasn't like a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

a constituents of like dumpers like big whales yeah that bottom up fill structure right the way that they did is they kind of did this round rob and fill everyone from the bottom up um so you know everyone who bid up to 50k got their full allocation which is interesting compared to mega eth right where they were like hey you know picking and choosing um i think with us we've said we're going to do uh a lottery um there's no real good you know, every single solution has tradeoffs, right? Like someone's going to be unhappy, you know, for the who wins the lottery, is like, this is the best system ever invented.

And then people who lose the lottery, like, this is the worst, this, you know, uh, war crime, basically. So, I mean, but, but with these, right, one of the, there's different, I guess there's different things that you want. One of them is distribution. Like you want the most amount of people to have it, But you also want those people to actually presumably care about it and use it and not dump it and stuff like that. Right. So it's like you can weigh those tradeoffs based on the larger sort of long term goals of what you're doing.

I don't know. I have some amount of respect for Monad. Again, just going back to like last week what we were talking about where they just seemed completely unfazed by the fact that it hasn't sold out on Coinbase. And like it just to me points to them being. confident in their long-term goals. And, like, that's something that we don't see a lot of in this space. Long-term goals are confidence. I think we see confidence.

I see long-term goals. Oh. So, Luca, did you have anything else to add there? No, no, no. I was going to say, to be frank, I actually liked their approach a lot because I was a little upset for like a minute that I didn't get filled for the full amount or close to it. But if you think about it, if you try to weigh all the different options, the bottom up option is actually a good way to like make, you know, everyone's kind of happy. Like everyone has a meaningful amount of, you know,

allocation where, you know, like I'm not, I'm not, I was mad for literally 30 seconds and then I was like, happy, right? So, you know, it's actually not a bad one because, you know, what you really want to optimize foreign scenarios like this is mad. maximum happiness amongst the most amount of people, right? Like, that would be your objective. Great. Right. As much good vibes and goodwill across as many individuals, this probably fit that.

If I'm being frank, I don't think many people were upset. You know, I didn't see. Yeah. I think it does require having a lot of allocation, though, right? Like, if it's, you know, they, they raised 200 mil, right? So it requires having a high enough, uh, FDV and a large enough, you know, percentage. If they had done like a 500 mill sale, right, you would have had a ton of people. It would have been massively oversubscribed and everyone would have gotten filled for like $2,000.

And then everyone would be unhappy. Right. So there's like, it's just, it's hard to know, you know, exactly how it's going to play out before. But I think to your point, hey, like they're confident. They're like, no, that's fine. We're going to do 2.5 bill. It's going to be cheap. Yeah.

And everyone was like, this is so expensive. And they're like, it's not. It's just a different vibe. Like, I'm sorry. Like, everyone else is on, you know. But should we talk about Mega-Eath, though? Yeah, let's talk about Megh. Because that's a different vibe right now.

This is a different vibe. Look, so Mega-Eath had a TVL campaign to kick off the chain because their chain launches in like a week, I think, right? So they have a deal with Athena. We talked about Athena last. week the stable coin issuer that does this kind of basis trade where you get a bunch of yield for holding the stable coin they've gone out to networks now and said we will give you a white labeled version of athena effectively that you can run on your chain and so for mega-eath it's it's usdm

and so megith was like okay let's let's go let's get some tvl on this chain and get the party started And it was a bit of a mess, unfortunately. So there were two fairly unfortunate things, I guess. The first one was that they were a bit delayed, which is like classic crypto, right? Like, you know, who hasn't tried to launch something and been three hours delayed when they try to actually ship it? And yeah, so then the second thing was they did all this stuff,

It started going, they started filling it up. And then NOSA Safe strikes again. People do not know how to use NOSA safe. And they staged a transaction without realizing that once you stage your transaction, anyone can execute it. And so they had this executable transaction that was sitting there to bump up the cap on this TBL campaign. And some smart, enterprising young autist who was watching the chain was like, wait a second, I'm just going to execute this transaction.

And then the cap was raised and then people were depositing again. And then it got up to like 400 and then they paused it. So just all around kind of crazy stuff, a bunch of crazy things in a row. Yeah, just like a, and this was, it just reminds me of like 2017 era, which is like this series of things that just keeps like falling onto one another. And it just sucks. Like it sucks for the team. It sucks for the people.

It's a mess. It's not a good look. It's not a good vibe. You know, on the plus I. Scambling in crypto is never good. As soon as you start scrambling, like pencils down, stop everything and like go back to first principles and figure out what you're doing. Like in crypto being like, all right, here's the solution.

Let's just quickly stage a transaction on our nosis safe is not the answer. that's never a good answer um it's a good way so i actually i actually like that no yeah if you catch yourself scrambling take us that never yeah never scrambling crypto i scramed before it just it just gets it just gets worse right like it's like oh shit um and there's so many footguns in crypto like there's so many things you're like i'm sure it's fine if we stage this transaction so it'll just be a bit quicker when we want to do the execution and then, you know, unattended consequences. I think the good thing is I actually spoke with Namik yesterday. They've got a bit of a plan that they're putting together and they might have already announced this to kind of try and make good with the community.

You know, this is one of the other challenges, right? You're trying to launch a chain. I'm sure, Luca, you get this. You're trying to launch a chain and then you're like, okay, we're launching a chain, but we have to do this campaign. So you send like two or three people off on this like little side quest, right, to go and like launch the campaign. And you're like, I'm sure this will be fine. People have done TVL campaigns a million times. And then they never come back.

And you're like, what happened? And you know, like they've been massacred out in like the wilderness somewhere. And you're like, oh, okay. Next time we'll put a little more thought into that side quest. That's such an act. description of my crypto in general. Their bodies are like orange threads and you're like, oh, man. Like, we never see that.

What happened with the dudes we said on that side quest? They never came back. Yeah, no, exactly. I do. I like the advice. Don't scramble. I also want to point out, it could have been way worse. Like, all things told, yes, it was messy.

Yes, mistakes were made. but it could have been way, way, way worse. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, we should just take a moment to appreciate, like, no one got completely hacked, no one got completely wrecked. It was just a little bit messy as crypto tends to be. So, you know, blessings. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, I think take the win, which is no one lost money. People are just a bit annoyed and a little bit of waste of time. So, Polymarket. We've talked about Polymarket a few times the last few weeks. They finally had this CFTC green light for a relaunch in the U.S. I should say I'm a polymarket seed investor, so I'm a big fan of Polymarket and Shane, and I've been following this journey. I think it was like, call it eight figures, low eight figures, something like that.

People at dude, holy moly. Yeah, well, so it is interesting, right? So I've got a funny story about Shane. So in, I want to say it was like 2020, it was ECC in Paris. And I was like, hey, Shane, I'm having like a lunch with a bunch of friends, like come. These are crypto people, like, you know, OG crypto people. So all completely insane. Like every single one of them completely insane.

And I was like, hey, Shane, come and meet some of my other friends. Like, you know, I'm sure they'll be super interested in what's going on with Polymarket, whatever. So we go to lunch and Shane turned up and he was there for like an hour and just is just an insane person. Like even by crypto standards, like his level of like reality distortion field that he lives in is like insane. And so then he left and all my friends were like, that guy is insane. Completely insane. I'm like, I know. That's why I love him.

He just does not care. He's going to get the job done. Doesn't matter what anyone throws at him. Like, this is a guy that the FBI raided his house. And an hour later, he tweets, new phone, who dis? like just like levels of like not giving a fuck that are insane so i'm very happy to see the cfTC that came off to polymarket like four years ago has capitulated and said actually this is fine you guys can do it everyone yeah 100% as they should because you know this is

i mean it's it's probably going to go down as the greatest use you know one of crypto the greatest cases and innovations, right? I mean, it has to be the prediction market. There's some good narratives around that it's going to replace the financial infrastructure. I mean, who knows? But, I mean, it's hard to say that like without crypto rails, prediction markets wouldn't be possible. And it is completely changing the paradigm of the worlds. And he was one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer. I mean, Joey Krug won. the kalshi guys. Those kashi guys maybe deserve a little more credit than they get because they've been around a lot longer than I think people think.

Though it does feel like they're just like totally grifting or on top of polymarket's hype or at least like the whole marketing beef is just so lame and loser-esque. But nonetheless, like those guys are there. No comment on that one. No, I'm not touching that one. Okay. Those guys deserve some credit though, right? Because they've been around a while. So, you know, kudos to them.

but I mean wow what a fumble I mean I remember looking at that I wish I just really understood I think I was buying the whole political Kool-Aid I don't know why I was being so naive but they just hit me like a couple months ago I was like holy shit wait this guy this business is going to disrupt all the businesses right there's like eight businesses where that thing disrupts and and the tan is it might sound insane but it's trillions I mean it is so so I'm geez, what a fumble. I wish I would have gotten any point. Well, you know, so this, so maybe we can speak to this as well, right? This is an interesting dynamic and this kind of was surprising to me. Most of the investments that we do at Bodie are like token warrants, right? Like we do equity, but usually it's a token warrants or like SAFs, like literally like direct token deals. So for context, there's a whole bunch of ways that you can invest in a company. You can just invest in equity and hope that at some point something happens, right? That the equity

is worth money. There's a buyout or something like that. You can invest in equity and then get warrants for future tokens. So if a token launches, you pay like a nominal amount of money and you get the token when it launches. Or you can do a SAFT, which is this like, a collative crypto capital formation innovation, where it's a simple agreement for future tokens. And it just basically says, all I want is the tokens, bro. Like, just put the tokens in a bag. I don't want equity. I don't want any other nonsense.

Just like tell me when the token is launching. The interesting thing is when you do a SAFT, typically the tokenomics are already kind of locked down to some extent. Right. So you know how many tokens you're going to get. There's usually no deletive. right? Like it's a percentage of the network, the future network that you're going to get. Whereas with equity, there is dilution. People issue more shares, right? So, you know, when in 2020, when we invested in Polymarket, there were, let's call it 100,000 shares, right? Then they did a round and then there was like 150,000 chairs. Then they did another round, there's 200,000 and another and another and another. And they did, I think, maybe four or five rounds between the seed and where they are. are today. And so the dilution is actually like pretty high, like 75% of something like that

versus a SAFT where it's like, I get 1% of the tokens and it doesn't matter what happens between now and then. So yeah, equity deals versus versus SAFs, definitely different outcomes. Still a good outcome, but like very different outcome. It's still going to be great, dude. And that thing is going 50-bill plus. Now every token is going 50. Bill, whatever it is. I just want the tokens. I've been waiting for the token for all. Give me the tokens.

Put it in a bag. He's got a double dip. I mean, he's a business that has to double dip. And when I say double it, I mean like, you know, telegram it or, you know, you got to do the token and you got to do the stock. There's no way you're not double that. Yeah, 100%. I think it's a, it's a good one as well, right? Because there's different, different audience.

There's like crypto DGens using polymarket that want the token. And then there's like TradFi that's like, help us figure out what the prices of things are. So, you know, very, very different audiences. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about Clarenis Stablecoin launch. But first, quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Hey, founders and developers. If you're looking to bring on-chain trading to your product, wallet, or platform,

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Get access to the same liquidity that powers billions and swaps through one powerful API. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. All right, Klarna, so Klarna, which is a fintech company, we won't troll them too much for that. But they're getting into stablecoins, so we'll give them a little bit of credit. I think the founder of Klarna once was like crypto was a scam or something like that and now he's like actually stable coins are pretty good so we're getting there slowly so they have launched a USD backed stable coin um RWA back stable coin um there's a bunch of people involved uh so bridge stripe paradigms tempo blockchain is where it's going to be launched probably the most

interesting thing to me that i am struggling to get my head around and maybe one of you guys knows is they're launching it on Tempo's test net. Are we launching stable points on test nets now? Like what? Yeah, it's fine. You just launch it on a test net? Who cares? Like, what's, I don't know, it feels weird. Why? Like, we have so many networks. Why are we launching on a test net? I don't get it. I mean, it just, it feels like what consensus grew up doing, which was these big, huge things with big traditional companies, right, that were on not Ethereum, like on a side chain or all or partially on Ethereum or it was like, you know, a little experiment that was on Ethereum that was going to

be huge or whatever. And well, I think we all know how those worked out. Give us an example of one of those. I mean, we had, there was like a JP Morgan one. Yeah. Right? There was also early days consensus. There were so many different little initiatives, right?

Because this was like when the world was waking up to blockchain as the technology, not as like the ICO, not as the coin, but as this like global distributed ledger. And so. That whole arc. Yeah, exactly. In the same way that like in a lot of ways companies are doing with AI, right, companies are like, how do we use AI to improve our business? The same thing was happening back then with the blockchain. And some of these things are worthwhile experiments because you learn a lot of things and you grow from them.

Some of them are just, you know, a lot of people like try to patch on something to their existing business. and then at some point everyone looks around and goes like, wait, why are we doing this? My question for, like, obviously the industry on the whole is in a different position today than it was back then. But we're talking about, we're talking about Klarna, we're talking about Strait. We're talking about tempo test net, right? What's the trajectory of this, like, realistically, right? Are they going to bring all of Klarna's everything on chain? Like what exactly is the goal and how does this improve their traditional business?

What does it unlock? You know, those are the questions that I always had. That's more yield to more customers in probably different regions that they probably couldn't access. But the Klarna business, I never understood it. I don't understand most of in tech businesses. Klarna is a 20% defaults right now, right? So 20% of all the money that they're loaning out is defaulting. That's good for crypto.

But yeah, I must feel like, Those are some good numbers to bring across the crypto side. Look, and it's publicly traded. So maybe it's a narrative thing. And they're just trying to insert themselves in the stable coin narrative and, like, you know, distract people from the 20% default. I just don't know how a business sustain when you're basically giving away 20% of all of your revenue. It's basically just defaulting, right?

That by now, pay later never made any sense to me. But so there and 10 for billions of enterprise value created these businesses and So I'm still like maybe I'm a kind of overfitting here, but I'm still trying to get my head around. How do you launch a stable coin on a test net of a chain that's not going to launch for a year? What the fuck is going on? Like that doesn't make any sense to me. Test sets go down. Test sets go down.

They lose blocks. Like weird stuff. Like what? Like because obviously the whole traditional business and rails are not actually. being powered by the test net at this point. We are in a transitional state, let's say. Where we are exploring things and seeing if this is possible and pushing the limits on evolution and, you know.

I don't know. That's funny. We'll see. I also, I just, I really don't understand what, again what like in order for this to be something that is a real unlock right there has to be some amount of like new value created or unlocked somewhere and i'm not that's that's the missing element for me if you tell me what that is okay then i might be on board with this but hey welcome to the world of narratives this It's bright partnership and it's stable coins, right? Klarna is innovating. They're thinking ahead, right?

So the AI agents can just use, you know, Klarna seamlessly. And then that's going to add billions of their market cap. That is the great unlock. You should do a promo video for them. That was actually, that was very well delivered. I like that. I reckon I put a suit on you, get you on CNBC. I reckon we could add a couple of zeros to them.

the clara market cap there um so speaking of test nets um cardano uh um so there's there's i love trolling charles i can't i can't help myself whatever anything cardano comes up i can't help myself i'm supposed to be magnanimous about old chains um i have like a contractual obligation now to do that uh with infinex but there's some that i'm just like i can't um so so this I love this because there's so much going on. There's like Charles on the timeline being Charles being insane. This for whatever reason, so someone apparently vibe coded or vibe coding was involved in this exploit or a chain halt thing where they targeted the consensus mechanism and actually Charles's own proof of stake. position, which is like, like the irony levels just keep going up and up and up.

So, so the weird thing was this happened. The chain went down. Nick Carter described the incident as someone vibe coding an exploit, which brought down the entire Cardano blockchain. And then Charles said, so Charles is a founder of Cardano and erstwhile co-founder of Ethereum as well. maintains this characterization is false and undermines Cardano's decade of formal methods and high assurance engineering. But like the chain went down, bro.

I don't know what's like is the issue that it was vibe coded or like someone wrote code that took the chain down. Like that very clearly seems to have happened unless I'm mistaken here. Before we even get there, I mean, Kane, maybe put a young buck on game. How does this even happen? Right. How does this like, because there's dino coins. There's guys that are early.

Like how, because it, to me, it's been ridiculous since I've been in the space since 2017. But I don't know the lore. And obviously, he sold the whole Ethereum. That Ethereum co-founder badge, man, straight shot. If you didn't make billions on Ethereum, you made more billions on the other thing. Yeah. But like, how does this even, like, how does this nonsense even stick for this long? You know, this just received like, the obvious that it's nonsense.

So, like, what's going on here, Tommy? So I think there's a, I had a very interesting conversation. with Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound, about a year ago, right? And he had this very interesting take of this thing, especially in the Ethereum community, that he calls chain racism, right? And basically, it's like all of the OG chains that are kind of what we in Ethereum would call nonsense chains, right? Like chains that don't do anything.

They used to be called zombie chains, whatever. Like, they don't produce blocks or like there's no transactions in the blocks or whatever. And he was like, XRP actually works now. Like there's a whole thing and you can do stuff with it. And I actually went and had to look at it. I was like very surprised to find out that it does work. And I think for a while, Cardano had this, you know, it was like perennially unlaunched. It was like, it's just about to launch like just one more month of development. And then it kind of launched and like a lot of chains didn't get much traction, but like it is live, which is why I think going down is, you know, because someone, you know, did something with their consensus caused a

chain split. I mean, we had, we had the, uh, the balancer hack that we talked about last week, where there was some theory that like this, you know, hack was maybe, um, augmented with like, uh, some AI coding tools. I don't know, like, what, what's your, what are your thoughts on like AI down blockchains? Are we, is AI going to kill all of our chains? what's what's the deal? No, no. Unfortunately not. No, I mean, like,

specifically in the balancer situation, the, like, the story that was being told was that because the, because the hacker left comments in the code and the comments sort of, like, had a bit of a vibe code, like, or around them. People were like, oh, the hack was vibe coded.

I, personally, I don't even, even think that the comments seem like they were AI comments. I think they're human comments. I have no idea why the hacker left them in. That's unusual. But, you know, then the second story was that was all the AI companies who are trying to show their product or service were like, we detected this. We would have spotted this.

Balancer should have. That was the worst. And that's always the case. Like, you will always have this, like, vendor ambulance chasing thing. Right now, it's just so centered around AI. And because there's actual innovation happening in AI and things are actually being done, it's a bit harder to discern when the AI is actually being useful and when it's like just more vendor slop, right? And they're like, we would, okay, if you would have detected it, like, you probably should have done that, bro.

Yeah, why didn't you do something about it? Well, I think the, so yeah, for context, one of the, one of the, uh, AI security vendors, right, was like, oh, this balancer hack is like so unfortunate. We told you guys about this. It's right here. And everyone was like, what are you talking about? You didn't tell us about it. And they're like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

We didn't tell you about it. Fine. Sure. That's not what happened. But we could have told you about it if we had known. And then it was like, what? Like, you could have told us about, but what are you saying right now? But you didn't.

But like, in theory, we may have, like, in theory, our software could discover this hack. That's all we're saying. We're just saying in theory, we could have prevented it. And maybe we chose not to. We don't know. And then it was like the homer, like, fading into the edge. They just disappeared, feel like delete your account and pretend like. As they should have.

By the way, I ask, I ask chat GPT. on day one of the drama, I, like, dumped a bunch of the tweets in and the reaction. I was like, what should I do? This is my company. What should I do? And chat dptu was like, 72 hours do not go on the internet. And that for the nexus. That's, it's like crisis.

So I was like, and then it had a little rationale, but that was like, it's number one advice. It's like, let me bring it down for you. And I would. And then, of course, but I think 72 hours they kept coming back on Twitter and trying to, like, defend their position. No, no, no, didn't I get it. What we're saying is we couldn't have worked this out. That was, it was the opposite of what we were saying.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I will say, though, that there is a whole portion of, like, vulnerabilities and of coding and, like, a whole spectrum of work that can be, that can happen, like, way faster with AI. So you still have to have, like, everything. the right positions. You still have to have people. You still have it. You still have to have all of this, right? But it can really, uh, like, just make the turnaround time and the iteration time, like that feedback loop. Uh, whereas, you know, with a lot of technical things, historically, like, you're sitting there alone looking at this code or, like, trying to figure out if there's something there. Um, and like,

one of the techniques that you learn when you're doing this type of work is to, like, talk to yourself or like go for a walk and talk to yourself or like pick up the phone and talk to someone else. The AI almost channels that in like a way more efficient way. And also in a way that vibes with a social engineers a lot better. Just having a conversation being like, hey, show me this. Like what do you think about this? Right. And so that's that's I think what like with this bug or the with this this thing that happened, right?

It's not that the AI like went out on its own and like figured it out and then broke Cardano. It's like this guy that had like deep expertise and deep experience and understood the ecosystem and had all this stuff, like was able to successfully execute this thing, like actually do so with the help of AI in various parts of the process. I think also one of the reasons he's saying this so loudly that he was like saying like, yeah, AI was part of this is because his, like part of the base of his claim is that he, they didn't really realize that it was actually going to break all of Cardano. Which there was there was a vibe of like DevOps 199. Yeah, it was 100%. So there's this story from like, I guess it's 2018 that this happened, if I'm not mistaken, where there were maybe even 2017.

There's 2017. Yeah, 2017. We had multi-sig wallets, right? There was this multi-sig wallet that had been built by parody. And basically, this is kind of similar to the Meggy thing, right? Like you have three people who sign a transaction and then someone executes it and it's sent on chain. But the way that the parody, and you're jumping here, Tay, but the way that the parody,

hack happened or freeze effectively is this guy was just playing around submitting transactions like testing stuff out and basically bricked all of the wallets with like hundreds of thousands of eath in them like every single parody wallet got bricked yeah and then he goes into the github and he goes oh god i'm going to mess up the quote but i think he goes like I accidentally killed it. And that was like his own. The smiley face of like, like, uh, did I? Yeah.

And then, yeah. And then of course, the Gitter, because back in the day, all the GitHub conversations were like mapped to the Gitter channels. So then everyone on Gitter was like, oh, my God, he actually killed it. And it was a big debate. There was like a lot of, you know, it's still to this day not 100% certain how, how knowledgeable. the actor was, but it doesn't really matter if it was, you know, I mean, it matters to a certain extent, but like for the parody multi-sig wallet to be in that position in the first place was a big problem in the same way that Cardano being in this position in the first place is a big problem.

The fact that it's even slightly plausible that someone did something truly accidentally is a problem. Like your system should not be. mentally take down chains. You know, and then I think it's a separate conversation if we want to talk about the people behind these and their intent, that's a separate conversation. But in terms of like lessons learned for big protocols and things that hold money, yeah,

we should avoid people accidentally killing our things. Yes. That should be definitely one of our primary things to avoid. All right. So next topic, bear a chain. It feels like we're just talking about chains. It's chains all the way down here. All the chains have been getting involved in some shenanicals.

Protocols are due some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So Barra Chain gave a $25 million refund right to Brevin Howard, to Brevin Howard's fund. So Nova Digital, they got this refund clause on their Series B investment, letting it reclaim cash post-TG. And if I'm not mistaken, it goes for a year. They had this one year clause of post-TG refund.

I'm not sure exactly how this works, if the strike price, tenor of it or whatever. But I don't think I've seen this before that I can remember. Right. That was my question. Because there's two different sites. the conversation that is happening on Twitter right now. The first is whether or not this clause is legal, is fair, should there have been transparency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then the other

part of the conversation is like, which isn't really, you know, there's like a bit of speculation, but I wasn't able to find anything really hard on it. Like, are these types of side deals in series rounds normal? Because when I raise my rounds, that was. definitely not a thing that I mean like there are no special terms given if anyone wants to take my money under those terms just ping me I'll give you my money I will say I actually want to try it in on this one um wow I feel bad for smoky because I think he's incredibly bright I don't know if you've ever interacted with him came yeah no I love smoke he's he's a good guy he's a super good dude so and he's gotten some bad beats you know bad beats obviously you know turn people into

into savages so hopefully he he turns it around and and he takes him on the chin and comes back bigger and stronger i'm rooting for him to do that because i think he deserves it one of the few one of the only people i've ever been on a panel with and i listen to him i'm like oh finally there's like a dude that's like really that i'm like impressed by listening to usually most of the time you sit on these stages and there's like ah it's fucking go it's it's horrible conversations smoky's one of the few where i'm like i'm on a panel of smoky i'm super happy because i know we're going to have a good convoy. So I think he's incredibly bright.

And then on the Brevin Howard's side, I mean, you know, if you can pull it off, pull it off. I mean, at the end of the day, their fiduciary responsibility is not to anybody that they're investing in. Their fiduciary responsibility is stay within the legal guidelines and return capital to Brevin and Howard, you know, and, and yeah, it's a shark of the deal. You know who, well, shock, you can pull it off. I'd do that deal any day of the week.

Anybody wants to ring you for some money. Right. You know who we check in on here. Kyle from multi-coin. Because I reckon he's had a rough 24 hours going, wait a second, you're telling me that I could have been forcing people to give me refund rights.

Like Brevin Howard comes in and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to cook something really spent. No, but there's a couple guys, Brevin Howard being one of them. Kyle probably also being another that could yield that if they wanted to, right? Like, I do you think there's some reputational blowback, right? Like, obviously some people look at that strange, but to be frank, this is business. And if you can do a good deal, do a good deal,

Kyle could do the, you know, Kyle probably actually in the last 24, he's like, that's a guy who could do deals like that, if you wanted to just because of his cachet and what he's been able to, you know, at least in the eyes of a lot of people. Okay, but are the other investors in the round?

I'd be furious. Like that's, but don't have, I mean, these, these, it's a, it's an agreement, where you have agreements around the April's. And then, Mop. Do they bring me like $60 million. I'd be full in it,

dude. Okay. So like when we did our series A, right? Like there were terms in the series A that were clearly, like it was boilerplate English, but it was like there were clearly terms that was one making sure that if I did anything funky with anyone else, they knew about it.

Yeah. And then also terms that said like if I, if I somehow, if something came up where I made a future offer to basically anyone under any terms, I would have to extend that same. First ride of refusal. Yeah, all that stuff. Exactly. Right. And the reason for that, in my understanding, is so that it's like a forcing function. So that I can't, you can't, you know, and it makes the whole process more efficient because if every single investor in a round has to basically be like running around making sure they're getting the best possible deal, deals don't get done.

Whereas if you're like, look, okay, we all agree this is the deal as long as we know all the information. that's on the table, like, you know, and if you're going to, if something happens and you somehow end up in a situation where giving someone special terms, like, you have to make the offer to me. And that's like such broad coverage. I don't understand how that wasn't, how none of the other investors in the round had those terms, which would then make the offer, like the special terms given to Brevin Howard at least have to be disclosed, right? Yeah, exactly. At least. So, look, I don't want to sound too crazy here. But what if we had a system that was transparent and we could put a contract like this on some kind of a chain so that everyone could see it and there was no way that like

literally like meat space law is like so adversarial, right? And and you know, the whole point of smart contracts is like here's the contract. It does the same thing for everyone. Put your money in. You can inspect it and hopefully it doesn't lose everyone's money. But aside from that, Like, you put your money in, the terms are clear, it's transparent, everyone can see it. Like, there is very much an argument for like, do an ICO, bro, and everyone can see the deal. Like, when you're doing, you know, these equity deals, side deals, weird stuff. Like, at the end of the day, you can't really stop anyone from doing anything. Like, it's the law, right?

Like, the only recourse is like going, and I'm sure that some of the other investors are like, well, let's go get some lawyers and sue these guys. You know, but then it's a whole thing. It's a whole, like now you're in this whole, you're suing like a founder. That's really bad. Yeah, it's really bad. So. Yeah. And that's why I'm just shocked that, I don't know, I think, I think there were like a couple

lawyers on the feed who are like, and even the ones that commented in the story were like, they kept prophesying, assuming that we see, that we know everything, assuming that this is like the full collection, right? This is weird, et cetera. I'm in that same boat still. What, like, how did, you know, these are all people who are pretty sophisticated. We're not like the other investors in the round aren't retail, right? How did, how did this happen?

I'll tell you exactly how this happens, right? This is founder psychosis. And again, I don't know anything about this, right? But someone comes to me and says, hey, I'm going to give you 25 mil, but all I want is this refund right in case the price goes below a dollar. And as a founder, you're like, well, that'll never happen. So this is fine. This will never be a problem. The end. And then you write the thing. You're like, whatever I need to do. Sure. And then two years later, you're like, oh, okay, fuck. This is bad. Like founders do crazy stuff. And they're like, this is just,

it's like a little, you know, there's a fine line. Matt Levine talks about this all the time, right there's a fine line in founder land between like crime and you know just like irrational exuberance right like the line is very gray and it's like no no like this is it this is fine like i just need to do this these guys are asking me for this unreasonable thing but it's never going to happen so it's fine and and i think i can empathize and put myself in the shoes and like tell myself that story and be like yeah we got it right like i can see that one and thought like i i can understand it like the way that you just framed up and be like, yeah, like, yeah, we just raised at 1.5. What do you mean?

It's crazy, like, as if it's going to be 200. Like, this is not a real, this almost isn't even real. Poor Smokey. I hope this is the bottom. I really do. That's a talent. That's one of those talents who don't want being like pushed away and do it like, you know, you know, you don't want that.

I mean, I'm hoping that. I'm really hoping that some, there's some piece that's missing to the story that gives a little bit like that explains how this all happened because because by the way luca even if you did that right your lawyer would then be like yo luca you can't do that right like you have you have responsibilities and agreements you can say no to lawyers you can say thanks for the advice like a lawyer will be like this is my advice and you can be like cool but like i don't care my lawyers are too aligned they'll quit my lawyers are on my cap table right so oh players would be like we're not going to jail for you, man.

It's not happening. We got it. Yeah. Why you have lawyers with some equity so they can, you know, so you guys can fight. That feels negative. Yeah. I don't know. I think, I mean, it ultimately comes down to like whether they're, right, if he had terms

with other investors that he did have to disclose or extend those special terms, then they like were firmly in territory where you're literally like. Maybe, maybe, I'm going to be honest, the, the more I stay in this space, the more that I realize that the majority of venture vestors are really just retail with a large check size. Like a lot of you guys that have the brightest. So, you know, maybe it did just get away from everybody. And that's like one of those areas in, and there's probably one of those stipulations, like first right to refuel. It's probably one of those things you have a conversation on and, and you know, one VC is talking to one guy and they're just like, screw that.

You know, he's leading. You know, this not being a legal thing and, you know, this being carved out. and then one guy coming in with a $50 million check being like, I'm leading him figuring out those terms with Smokey, then Brevin and Howard piling in, you know, I can see that happening, right? You can imagine,

you get much as the Brite. B.C.'s being like, sure, given, like, you know, like, okay,

talk about a founder being like, uh, this is fine. It's not going to happen, right? You can even easier, imagine a VC being like, yeah,

like, that's never going to, like, give him whatever. Here. Reven Howard Morris are going to be all. Yeah, screw that clause. Let's just get more names a part of this.

You want some more big names. Get some more big names involved. All right. I see. Thank you for the reality check, guys. I appreciate this. Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone involved is like, this is fine. This sit fine. Also, like, I don't know exactly the timeline. But like, it was like once you're in, if you're in like 2023, 24, even 25, 2026 is so far away. Like, we don't, little cross average when we get there. Like, so. It may not even happen.

We may not get. to 2026. Like it's it's like not even not even a real real time. So yeah, I think I think that is pretty good for this week. I think we can probably wrap it up if you guys are okay with that. So that's it. Good episode. A lot of stuff. Let's hope we have some more chains doing crazy stuff. This week. Seems like all the chains are doing crazy stuff, so I'm here for it. So thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next week.