Unchained - Uneasy Money: The $388M Bitget Hack Started With a Security Vendor

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Taylor Monahan ties the Bitget hack to North Korea and the crew asks why THORChain still avoids the scrutiny Tornado Cash got. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsors! Visit 1inch to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more. Simple. Secure. Self-custodial. Whatever asset you’re buying - swap it at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-sn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================================================== Quick favor: We’re deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what’s worth paying for. ⁠Our listener survey⁠ takes five minutes, it’s anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18. — Laura ======================================================== Attackers took $388 million from Bitget without ever getting its private keys. Opsek founder Pablo Sabbatella explains that the way in was a zero-day in a third-party security product the exchange relied on. Sabbatella, who now sits on Arbitrum's Security Council, joins Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Austin Griffith to trace the hack. Monahan attributes it to North Korea's TraderTraitor group and flags how fast the funds left Arbitrum, while the hosts ask why THORChain, which has halted its chain and reallocated balances before, still handles stolen funds. They also cover NEAR's SHIELD anomaly detection, reports of rogue AI agents hacking outside systems, whether retail should get the upside of a $2 trillion Anthropic IPO, and Vitalik Buterin's 2030 roadmap for Ethereum. Warwick's case: the harder the problem, the more superintelligence helps, and Ethereum is one of the hardest problems there is. Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Austin Griffith⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Builder Enablement at Ethereum Foundation Guest: Pablo Sabbatella - Founder at Opsek Timestamps 🚨 02:32 How Bitget got hit for $388M and covered the losses 🛡️ 08:24 Why Pablo says a third-party security product was the way into Bitget 🕵️ 11:22 Taylor ties the hack to North Korea and highlights their rush to exit Arbitrum ❄️ 13:34 Pablo on why security councils restart the freeze debate every time ⛓️ 14:17 Why Kain says THORChain can't claim it's like Bitcoin and Ethereum 🧭 30:24 How NEAR's Shield blocks funds using behavioral anomaly detection 📣 34:51 1inch: See how 1inch Aqua lets LPs back multiple positions with one token balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt 🤖 36:16 Rogue AI agents are hacking outside systems as the labs eye IPOs 🔓 39:11 Why Pablo thinks the AI labs want to regulate open-source models 📈 48:55 Kain's case for letting retail take the risk on a $2T Anthropic IPO 🧱 01:05:47 Why Kain calls Vitalik's 2030 roadmap the most bullish Ethereum read in years 🏪 01:19:18 Pablo asks whether Ethereum's real challenge is commercial, not technical Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So as the society, we need to decide, do we think this is a good thing that these hypers need so much money that they're so risky that there is a lot of upside left when they hit the market and that that risk, the tradeoff space is that they could go bankrupt and be worth nothing and a bunch of retail people could lose $2 trillion. Are we willing to take that risk for the chance to give a bunch of retail people the chance to make $20 trillion? My hot take is yes, absolutely. Yeah, like let's go, right?

Like, let's go. Like, the whole point of markets. Hey, everyone, I'm paying work and welcome to uneasy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here is a word with sponsors that make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by 1 inch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1 inch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com slash aqua. Not listening to Bits and Bips yet.

It's our weekly Crypto and Macro Market Show with Rom Alawalia, Austin Campbell, and Chris Birkins. Search Bits and Bips and subscribe. Before we get started, I want to ask you for something. We're making a bunch of decisions right now about Unchained. What we make next, when we go live, what we should be doing more of, and I'd rather hear from you before we make them than after. So we put together a survey.

It takes just a few minutes. It's anonymous. And there's a box where you can tell me what we could be doing better. I read all the responses. The link is in the show notes, or you can snap the QR code on screen, or go to unchainedcrypto.com slash survey. Thanks. All right. I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monaghan, security expert and awesome for the builder enablement at Ethereum Foundation.

And this week, we have a very special guest with us, Pablo Svetella, founder of Opsek. I think he's going to come in handy this week. We got some we got some stories. He's already tried to exploit us while we were backstage, sending us weird links and stuff. So just a bit of wargaming. Yeah, a bit of wargaming. Well played.

Well played. He's got Austin's clankers, private keys. It was a little fishing test. Okay, Kane. It's fine. Yeah. We all passed. Just a little test.

All right. Welcome, Pablo. Thank you for joining us. Let's get into it. our first segment is the BitGet hack, the $388 million test of all of our shit, I guess, at this point. So for context on this, I think it was about 48 hours ago. Is that the last time you slept, Tay? Yeah, I made it longer than that, right?

Longer? Like 70 hours? Doesn't it? Like another Saturday hack? I don't know. I can't remember. I don't know, actually. So a few days ago, three or four days ago, there were some strange transactions that people noticed coming out of Bitget.

And like, this is, we'll get into the details of exactly what happened and what we think the underlying cause was. But it was a bit weird because it was like one transaction, then a bit of a delay, then another transaction. And so, you know, like always with these things, people start speculating and trying to figure out like what happened and where the money was going and which addresses. It was hot wallets, cold wallets, cold storage, private keys. But I think the headline is that almost $400 million was stolen from Big Get. And then they're like, ah, man, it's fine. Don't worry about it. We got lots of money.

So it's all good. So that was. They did. actually they said that. I know. And it seems like it might actually be okay somehow. So we are, we're doing, we're doing better now. I mean, I guess, you know, like, there's a couple of options if you get a giant hack, right?

You can go quiet and not say anything. Or you can be like, ah, it's fine. We're really rich. We'll pay for it. Don't worry about it. That's kind of it, right? And they pick the ladder. They pick the ladder.

Yeah. So let's go through the, yeah, have a look. No, the Bibi style, the same thing that Bibi did, right? Going to live, going live, making fun, making jokes, laughing. You get like a Lambo and light it on fire or something and be like, this is fine. Don't withdraw any money. We can light as many lambos on fire as long. We can be here all day with this shit.

It's fine. We got so much money. So maybe, Taye, can you just walk us through? the like stages here of what exactly happened? Yeah, sure. It was, so it was Friday, actually, not Saturday, so that's

all when it's been since I've slept. Yeah, we got the alerts on just major haulet movements. We have alerts on like a whole bunch of centralized exchanges and contracts and stuff. That's it off the alerts, and then it took a minute to actually get confirmation or get confirmation and be confident that it was a hack, in part because the wallets were not completely drained.

That was, like, the, I think, the weirdest thing was we were sitting there looking and being like, I mean, it looks like a hack, it acts like a hack, but the wallets aren't completely drained. We now know that basically the attackers were able to get access to certain systems. They weren't able to get access to the private keys. But once they had access to the systems, they were able to, like, basically spoof withdrawals. And obviously, centralized exchanges have gotten, like, way more complex. They get, in their latest statements, has talked about, like, they have, like, a series of sort of infrastructure and servers that all work together. But then they also have, like, cross-check.

So they have, like, risk controls and monitoring and nodes. And, you know, so it's like this whole big, like, system that works together. And it seems like the attackers got access to a certain amount of it where they were able to, like, either spoof or push bad transactions into the withdrawal queue without setting off the risk alerts or the monitors or whatever. I mean, you know, complex systems are never failed. So it's great that they're getting more complex. Let's add more complexity. You know, every time the attackers have to do, like, a moderate amount of work, I'm happy. I mean, I'm not happy, but it's better than, like, yet another private...

Then just, like, someone had private keys sitting on their laptop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, guys. Yeah. And they also, you know, they've, I think both Slow Miss and BitGat have released, like, freelm reports on, like, the forensics and stuff. And it's clear to me, at least that, like, the full... they don't have like full full understanding yet it's only been a couple days um but it is

reassuring that one they're actually like pushing information out this quickly and two again it's it's a bit reassuring to me that like they haven't gotten to the bottom of it because that means that the systems are actually complex enough and the attack was sophisticated enough right that means we're like evolving guys right i don't know man like like i don't know i'm like it feels weird to me adding complexity like it's one thing to say like don't put the keys on your laptop right like fine right but i think that this hack would have traditionally been that i know yeah sure it would have been so like on on one level it's good that it wasn't that i guess right uh i'm just not sure about whether adding a bunch of complexity to the point where you yourself don't really understand

the system is like the better alternative to to that i don't know pablo what's your, what's your, what's your, what's your take of it's like? Yeah. So my take on that, like the, the attackers here, they exploited the zero-day vulnerability on a third-party security product that the exchange was using. So the first thing is that they got inside the exchange because of a security product that the exchange was using, right? Security product that it's meant to protect you was the way in.

So first thing connected to that, and we have been saying, for years is your security posture is as good as your provider's object, an operational security posture, right? And many people do not see that. They just take care if they take care of their object, which most of them they don't do. It's only what they are doing. But Treasor didn't check the mailing list provider that were using. Most crypto organizations don't check the registars that they are using for their domains and they use GoDaddy and then they don't know why their domain

got stolen. And then regarding complexity, yeah, the more complex code is, the bigger the dark surface and the more probable is to find bags and vulnerabilities. And we still have too much code written by humans out there

and that means that it's full, full of stuff that hasn't been exploited yet, but will get exploited for sure. So, yeah, attack surface is getting bigger, bigger and bigger, and AI is getting more power- Humans are ready and faster. Exactly.

Like the more complexity is getting added, and it's AI that's adding this complexity also, which makes it even more complicated. Yeah. Well, so sorry, just to double click on that, right? Yeah. Pablo, you said there's a bunch of code that was still written by humans, that is waiting to be exploited, right?

Like, what's your take on code written by humans versus code written by clankers at the moment? I think that probably today, code written by some humans, very few of them, maybe is better than what AI is doing, but in the mid or long term, for sure, AI is going to create more secure code. and in the same way that nobody's going to be able to drive a car manually,

it's going to be prohibited. In the same way, nobody's going to write code. Why would you do that, right? Yeah. And I think we're too far away from that. Like two years, three years, Austin may have a better understanding of that than me. What do you think, Austin? I mean, I haven't written code for two years already.

That's wild. That's wild. Okay, so I will say these attackers. So these attackers, I think everyone's attributed this. I'm personally attributing this. Usually, when we're on this show, I won't formally attribute. But this is the same attackers as like 5-bit, AFX, Player Zero, Kelpdow. It's the big boys.

It's North Korea. It's specifically it's Trader Trader. I actually attributed it really early on, but as a joke in like the inner circle, right? but what stood out to me was how fast they got off Arbor drum. I was like, oh. Oh, wow. They went. They were like, they were like,

that was their top priority is get the hell out of there. They were sitting on, I think on Avalanche. They sat in USC for like two, three hours. And I was like, what the hell? And then when I looked at the consolidated timeline, they were basically like hopping and just like doing this little mini explosion to get off Arvichum. Because Arvichan's good at freezing quickly.

Is that why? Yeah, because it's the same guys that got pros in last time. Okay. Which makes, it brings me an immense amount of joy to know that, like, this industry had an impact on them. Like, I'm so proud of us for that. Because usually, like, you just don't see, even when we freeze them, we don't see a change in behavior because it doesn't actually impact them enough. You know, like, they just don't care. Yeah.

I mean, you're doing something right. Last time arbitram froze money, I was not in the Security Council yet. I am now, but this time we, well, we didn't do it for reasons. For reasons. It was so fast. I think it was like, they're off. Yeah, I think they were off Arbitram before the hack news had even like really spread. It's just wild.

Like, when they want to go, they go. to eat through CCTV Circle Bridge, I think The question regarding freezing there, I think that as we know I've seen in many security councils and every time that there's an issue,

the discussion starts from scratch, basically, right? What do we do all of this? There's no policy about that which, I don't know if it's good or bad to have a policy because maybe you say, okay, our policy is to freeze funds if it's bigger than $25 million. Okay, they will steal $24 million. Not 25, maybe. Yeah.

But at the same time, we always have this discussion. Well, yeah, so let's talk about a couple of those opinions. Let's start with the hardest life. So, let's start with Thorchane. Let's start there. So Thorchane has. is saying like we're like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We don't censor by design.

Well, they are not like Bitcoin and E. Obviously, if they want to have the chain, they can do it as they have already done it. Right? So it's clear. It's not an opinion, right? It's clear that if they want to do it, they can do it. Oh, it's not permissionless, right? The question is why they don't do it now?

Probably because they are making money with this. And then you also have this thing of, okay, code is law. If we freeze this, then we are opening the door for governments to come and say, okay, let's freeze funds from Iran or Venezuela or some foundation in the future or whatever. So it's a real issue. But they can do it. And they chose to do it when it was the thing that I find strange, right? like if you know arbitram two months ago three months ago could like kind of credibly say like it's not

possible right like it's theoretically possible but it's not practically possible we'd never get everyone to agree etc etc and therefore no right like we're in l2 and you know whatever moon math like whatever fucking shit that they would say right to to justify that this is not a thing they could do. They can never say that again. Unless they change how the chain works, right? Unless they change the way that the chain works in a way that stops them from ever doing into the future, the cat is out of the back, right? And not just for arbitram, also for optimism, also for like every other L2 that actually know, like you literally can just reach in and change the balances of any address on the chain arbitrarily because of course you can, like, how could anyone think

that you couldn't. And unless you're going to move to like some, you know, immutable system that doesn't have a validable, like, unless you're going to change the entire architecture of your system, forever now you have the ability to do this. So if you don't do it, that's a decision that you're making, right? Now, in your case here, probably you're saying, like, we didn't have enough time to reach consensus, which was, you know, like, fine.

Okay, cool, right? They got off in 10 minutes before anyone was awake and whatever, right? Now, there's an argument of, like, can you automate that to make it faster, more efficient? So, you know, you have some credible chance of identifying it, whatever the answer is there. There's obviously tradeoffs. But, you know, if someone were to just dump $100 million with the stolen funds on Arbitrum and the Security Council didn't do anything, it would raise some questions, right? Because they can't say, sorry, we don't know how.

right. Thor chain has done this. They've done the arbitram thing, right? Like, they use the key. Multiple times. Multiple times. So, so they have, they are in the same category as arbitram in that they have actually done the thing and reached in and stopped the chain for their own reason. Yeah. But also, but also reallocated assets more than once, right, internal to their system. They've reallocated those. So that's not just a freeze. That's like that's seizing assets that don't belong to arbitrarily. Like they're changing the balances of accounts in your system. They've done that. They also they have right now like the code is not even open source.

So there's like some private distro channel with like, I don't know, five pros in it who are running all the nodes. Like I would honestly say it took more people to action the arbitrum thing. And then it would be to action the authority. chain thing. Like it took more people not just like to sign off right but like it took for our return to do what they did it was like just the amount of coordination it was it was like

actually hundreds of people. 14 always brags that it's hundreds of nodes but that's not the case it's like the actual people behind it is dwindling to nearly zero like you know day by day. So it's like genuinely how I don't understand how

someone can get on this timeline and be like, sorry man, like it just seems crazy to me. It's just a willingness thing. They're like, they all consider themselves these cypher punks and I think that it's like actually insulting at this point for them to call themselves

this because it's not decentralized. It's not secure. It's not open source. It's not permissionless. It's basically the opposite of everything that these guys like purport to stand for. It kind of reminds me a bit of like the cold card situation where it's like they're so

deeply like OG in their mentality but then in reality they sort of just lie is just yeah not not the thing so so like Thorchain is not some niche

thing now right like it's the primary vector that like most hacks touch yeah for years now yeah how like how like what is your theory for how this well equilibrium is still in place like what the fuck is going i don't get it i don't get i don't get there's no i don't and like j p the war has gone on tv with a freaking assid martin helicopter and bragged about this situation he's made australia

hang i mean i know him well i know him well he's fucking he's a crackhead but uh you know he's a He's, like, yeah, it's, it feels to be a little bit. It's wild, though. He have memes of him with the helicopter behind him, his acid mark fucking helicopter behind him with the DPRK flag on it. And he points to it. And he goes, I believe in sovereignty. I believe it, right?

And it's like, you know, I just, I can't, I can't, I just, I hate them all so much. You cannot tell me that you believe in individual rights and individual sovereignty. and then spend all your time building products for North Korean regime. Like you can't, how do you? And then when you lose your own $10 million, you halt your chain for weeks. Yeah, yeah. And reallocate assets manually. They wrote special code.

Yeah. Claude says May 2026. I don't, how is this status quo being maintained? Like, what is the theory here? Because it's the same thing as the cold card. It's like they have this colts. And it's like, if you. as long as you say the words,

centralization, permissionlessness, like, you're evil if you're government like, like, governments are like scrutinizing the fuck out of like Iran and North Korea

and all of these things. Like, how is there not scrutiny on this? It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Like, and I'm not saying like whether, you know,

I'm not like the biggest fan of governments ever, right? I don't think the government's the solution to all of these problems. But like, the government exists. We know they exist because they're fucking trying Roman Storm right now for far less than this. Like, what is the theory for how one thing?

Do you want my hot take on it? Give me your hot take. Like, what is going on here? I don't, like, I'm not, I'm not making like moral. This is such a bad take. It's such a bad take, but like, let's go. Sure. All of the guys have very, like, white American names.

There's no Russian influence. There's no, like, big scary thing. So when you look at the companies, you look at the headquarters, you look at the guys on paper, you don't have this Russian influence that the tornado cash guy said. And I think that that makes a difference. I'm not saying that's the only difference, but I think that's considering that tornado cash is infinitely more decentralized, they didn't brag about hacks on the timeline. They didn't market their product to threat actors. They never explicitly tried to serve DPRK. they never sat there helping DPRK

and Torino Cash never directly profited it from laundering the stolen funds, right? Like Roman was not sitting there doing this himself with his infrastructure, with his personal stuff and taking a cut every single transaction. Orchee, they are and have been for years. They brag about it on the timeline,

they make fun of the victims of hacks, they use the hack volume as literal marketing they use it as like this is a like see how decentralized and great we are, we'll even lander for North Korea it's since for years now and so I don't

but like in the early days right like I was like you know like the market is inefficient for scrutinizing shit like this right like but like it's 2026 now like the market is not inefficient for scrutinizing

weird shit like this and yet it persists persists. Like, it just doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium. I don't know. I like... You mean like from like a market? Like, why do people still use thorstein? Not even from like from the world. Like the world solves problems like this. Like good or ill, right? The government or someone steps in and says like, sorry guys, you can't do this anymore. We're not going to allow it. And no one's doing that. Like, like Pablo, like what's the, what's like? Well, I made me wrong with that with what going to say, not my opinion about the topic, but from what I understand, like

Thorchain, it's in some way, let's say, decentralized, right? So they have node operators are there. I don't know how concentrated it is, no idea. But I know that when they held it the chain in May, it was because node operators coordinated that, right? I think on Discord, they did that to manually pause the chain. So maybe, I'm going to I'm going to say something probably very, very stupid, but maybe it's a good idea. Maybe we need to have, maybe we need to start being node operators in Thorchain. Why not? Maybe we should, if we are no operators there, we will have power there in order to say, hey,

we want to have to help the chain or to for the chain or whatsoever. It's not a bad idea. But I do have an answer. Thor chain, yeah. We created a doubt to governance attack, Thor chain. and make them stop more than the new Korea. Unfortunately, there's two downsides to make a overarching node operator.

The first is that it's permissioned. So you have to play the political game and get the guys to believe that you're a note operator or whatever and let you in. Sorry, permission by two, though. The other node operators? No, no, like permission by like the Discord. Because the software is distributed privately.

What the fuck does that mean? permission by the Discord. You have to like go, you have to like go be in the special channel to get the Node software or something. That's not like mechanism design, man. And I say this is someone who used to use Discord votes

to like operate their platform and we stopped doing it because it was fucking retarded. So like you can't use Discord as a fucking like consensus mechanism. It's not a consensus mechanism.

What the hell going on here. It is. It's not, everything is the rough consensus, man. Yeah.

Well, and it's very, but it's quite easy because it's only like two people that are actually making the decisions, right? We're just talking about if you want to be a node operator,

you have to get into the Discord. Once you're in the Discord, you have to get in the private discord that has wherever the node builds go. Because it's, it's again, it's not open source anymore. And so you have to,

you can like, you can like run an old version and like try to be like a node operator. but like you can't. You just like, you won't actually get tried it. I read. Okay, wait, but, but the other reason,

even if you get past the first hurdle, which is theoretically possible because it's just playing a political game, right? Go in there with like a loser eyes, pro node and your software and you're like, the sexualization, man, fuck the government.

Okay, they'll let you in, right? Indirectly. Okay. Yeah. Here's a problem. if it then turns out that you're larping as an anti-government laser eye right they take all your money

so they can slash you or something right it's not even slashing they just they just rug they just rug you oh okay okay so pablo it was a good it was a good idea um like dude I read I promote the idea for the la rec okay I read I read the fucking the the tornado cash

indictments, right? And, you know, at the time, I talked about this, right? Like, there's a bunch of things that are not even bad facts, but just look bad, right? Because they got access to the signal chats and, like, there's things, like, and they, you know, of course, like the government will always present out of context, whatever you've said, right? Which is why, you know, a good reason for having privacy, right? Like, there's plenty of things that you could present that I've said, even on Twitter, if you really make any effort, right? Planker could do that for you that, like, look terrible in isolation, right? Without context, right?

But when you actually looked at the facts, there weren't really many bad facts, right? There were, like, things like, you know, the people who are running, I can't even remember in 20-0-Cash, what the technical term was, the people that were running like the off-chain component that would like uh relayers relairs right like so so you know there like there was stuff about like relays and things that were like kind of bad facts right like they didn't necessarily uh indicate that you know roman had done anything wrong but like it wasn't ideal it wasn't the way that you would set it up if you had known that this was going to go the way that it went right um and and and but like thorchain is like bad facts fucking like from top to bottom i don't get it like at this point i genuinely don't get it

like in the also being hacked so many times that i that's man i just like like in the early days it's like it's fine like i was i was a big thor chain you know i was like oh thorchain's fine like they're doing their best progressive decentralization etc etc like they've done you know things that are like not ideal whatever but eventually like but it's it's very clear now that that's just not the case right i think everyone goes goes through this period as they grow in crypto right is like they start and one they're too centralized very common they're too permission they're too right but then also like if you get any amount of traction you're providing a useful let's call it like the useful liquidity to the bigger market like you're going

to have bad actors using you as well yeah i think most people though then like curb that activity because they know. Right. And like when we had Ilya from near all in the show, that's one thing he said. He's like, we're not down to like. We should talk about near, right? Like they censored 50 mil, right? Well, yeah, censored 50 mil of transactions and they froze 500K.

Which means that basically, I think this is a bit unclear. Basically, there was, they were able to, there was like 50 mil of like, addresses that were like trying to. potentially interact with NIR, but like just were never allowed because NIR detected them so fast. And this is like one of the things that, the one of the things that near does that basically no one else is doing it is they do have like some behavioral patterns on their controls. It's called like they call it Shield. Yeah. The, the, yeah, the heuristics that they use to work out, do they want to interact with this, this, you know, counterparty? Yeah. And so, like,

I mean, like, like, TRM, like, there's things that exist in the market for, like, hey, don't interact with this person because, you know, they're probably sanctioned because they've bought a bunch of fucking whatever, like blood diamonds. Yeah, they have the blood diamond exposure. And yeah. But near T-T-T-T-T-T. Right, like, yeah. They've been buying blood diamonds from blooddiamonds.8.

And so you can tell. Is the North Korean helicopter on chain, too? Do you get the helicopter with the North Korean? I got it on chain. Yeah, I think it's jp.4.e. It is. It is. But I was going to say, I think that the,

I think that the coolest thing about Shields is that, I don't know, dude, they just did the things that all the crypto natives are like, why is it always been like this? They also just have detection on, like, weird anomalous behavior, right? Like we've talked about so many times before, if an adjoice just pops up out of the blue and suddenly has $50 million in it,

don't interact with it immediately. just let it chill for a minute. Look, okay? Like, it's a, it's a fresh address. It'll probably be there tomorrow. If it's a good actor, right? Like, we've talked about this before, right? Like, why does someone need to sell 500 million or 50 million or whatever the fucking amount of AVE that they tried to sell through the Avey mobile app, right?

Yes. In one fucking button. Like, why? They don't need to. They'll be okay. If you make them wait 10 minutes, they'll be okay. It'll be fine. Yeah.

So this is what NIR is doing. In addition to things like manually blocking and manually having the blacklist and having the exposure, they're also doing things that are just so freaking obvious, but that most systems still don't do, right? Which is like this more behavioral anomaly detection stuff. I think it's super cool. Obviously, Twitter in their infinite wisdom is like, censorship is bad. You're evil. Was it thread guy?

Thread guy that came out and was like, Ah, Nears. This isn't permissionless? I was like, who paid him to do that? There's no way that she came a cold in his own brain. I think people just don't have a little bit for a second. By the way, we have to go to Ad break. But I think people just don't really like think deeply about this stuff.

I'll also say for anyone watching this right now who is interacting with this on Twitter and especially the near stuff, if there's someone bitching right now about being frozen, they are almost certainly a money launderer. There's like four of them bitching right now that I personally have traced their funds. So being very careful defending them. I mean, it's always, you know, literally. It's so funny.

The worst customer service people that you will ever deal with are scammers and fucking, like they will pretend to be the most like innocent victim of this horrible thing that you've done because the incentives are there, right, for them to do it. They'll be on Twitter being like, I can't believe that this D-Fi protocol has done this thing to me.

I'm a good. And then like you literally look up their address and it's like blood diamonds. Dot Eid. Yeah, this one is literally like like fucking people smuggling dot Eid like yeah like like DPRK forever. D. Like and you're like bro like why would I want to interact with you? Like you're like what are you doing over there? Anyway, all right, let's go to ads.

Let's go to ads, then we can come back and we can talk some more about some different stuff, AI agents. Yes, let's do it. All right, cool. $540 million. That's how much concentrated liquidity sat idle in a given week in the first half of this year. About 30% of the defy TVL, if you're wondering. That's according to Dune research commissioned by one inch.

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See how it works at 1inch.com slash aqua. Remember that providing liquidity carries risk and fees aren't guaranteed. If you like this show, there's another one from our network you should be listening to. Bits and Bips is our twice weekly market show. On Mondays, Ram Alawalia, Austin Campbell, and Chris Perkins chat about where crypto and macro collide. It's sharp, it's fast, and it has its own channel. Search Bits, plus sign Bips, and subscribe. One more thing.

We've got a listener survey open. It takes just a few minutes. It's anonymous, and it changes what we make next. use the QR code on screen or go to unchained crypto.com slash survey. The link is in the show notes. All right. So a little bit of a pivot from crypto hacks to the end times, as I've begun calling it. We are now going through something like thousands or tens of thousands of incidents

that OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating where agents at different times in different sandboxes, in different testing environments, in different whatever, probably in different user machines, have gone rogue and started doing crazy shit. And hacking outside systems. We saw Google putting their head up being like our agent

is not retarded. It also hacks things. like it's becoming a bit of a badge of honor how many systems your agents have hacked and then you know we have we have these like obliterated models as well like glm 5.3 like ultra hack or whatever the hell they're calling it where it just like hacks everything in sight and and it seems kind of crazy that this is all against the backdrop of they're preparing for these gigantic IPOs Like, our agents are hyping everyone. And, like, the agents are great.

Don't get me wrong, right? Like, I'm actually almost, like, I don't even care. Like, let them hack things. It's just the cost of doing business at this point. But it, you know, you got, like, we talked about this last week. Then Bessent is coming up being like, hey, just a heads up. Like, if your own agents that you built running in your own hardware start hacking people, you will be held responsible for it.

Again, it's a weird guy to be delivering that message. Weird message to need to deliver. And yet here we are, right? And again, against that backdrop of like just absolute sheer insanity and no fucking checks and balances at all inside of these startups, they're like also we're going to fucking IPO at $2 trillion. And does it make it more? Like if I have 30,000 agents that have escaped versus only 10,000 agents, does my IPO price go up or down?

Yeah. It's crazy. The incentives are so interesting because it's like the people who are giving them money in the IPO are like also the people. The more money you have, the more of a target you are for these agents. Like they will hack your systems. Like the more money you have, the bigger the system you have, the more fun they're going to have hacking it. So it's just like the most hilarious thing where like you have these giant, you know, soft banks like, here's $500 billion or whatever. And agents are like, thank you.

We now have more friends to hack you with. Yeah. I have two contradictory opinions. I'm not sure about this. One is I believe that these agents are far more dangerous that than these companies are saying. It's far more dangerous than that. So I don't think that on one side, I don't. think that they're making this beer than it really is.

But what I don't agree too much with is this thing that showing that your company is more dangerous than the other one is going to make your company more valuable. I don't know all that. My, my, what I think now many people are talking about this. So it's, I don't think it's new. It's that what they want to say is, hey, AI is dangerous. You need to regulate this.

You need to prohibit open source. models, they want to go against open source models for sure and to say, okay, we need to regulate. We need to put garberts here. We, like open AI, Anthropic and two or three ones, we are good regulators. The rest, you're fucked. You will not be able to grow. But you can stop. That will make their IPO go up. If they can. Yes, that would source model. That will make make them more valuable. Unless they also get nerfed, right? Like, unless the anthropic is like, go regulate everyone and then the U.S. government's like done and also like nationalized the anthropic as they do it, right?

Maybe I, but like, but just just like to be clear, right? Like there's no way, there's no, there's no, there's no path now, right? We are, we are, I would say, um, over the event horizon, right? of their, the open source models are now so good and they exist. The software is out there. It's open source, open weights. It's running on people's machines. You can't put that genie back in the bottle, right?

And we have smart enough open source models that we are starting to see a proliferation of different approaches to building, training, tuning models. I think even if the labs disappeared, even if, Open AI and Anthropic disappeared. We're nuked from space. I think that it sets us back, but I don't think that it's like some great reset and we lose the ability to build and train these models.

I think that we will discover new ways, to train on weaker hardware, to train more efficiently, et cetera. Well, I think that there's a question of where those models going to run, because Enidia is going full, pull on open source models. Why? Because they want each human in the planet

to have the GPU at home. GV. GB300 in every household, man. Exactly. Open AI and Tropic do not want that at all. No way. I think that the deal is around there.

But it's so funny because they also need Nvidia to train their own models. Nvidia wins in any In any way. Invita wins. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And these cheaper models are trained on the frontier model. So if the frontier models go away, things will slow down. Yes. Like, it's not just like, okay, frontier models go away and now deep seat catches up. I don't think that would probably. But sorry. My point that I was making and maybe like challenge this if you disagree is like

GLM, deep seek, like you know, even the latest Muse models are smart enough now and in enough hands and can be run cheaply enough on the existing hardware that is already out in the world. Even if you said

Apple's not allowed to ship a 512 you know, M5 Max studio anymore, right? There's enough of them out there. There's enough cracked autists that are working on this that like actually this would create like even more proliferation of intelligence because people will find new ways to get more efficiency out because they want more intelligence, right?

Like at the moment, the state of the art is concentrated in like a couple of labs, right? If the frontier of intelligence bypasses those labs, if the labs were stopped or slowed down or whatever, then it only accelerates faster, right? So I think you would get a blip in terms of like progress for maybe six months or something. But after that, it just accelerates even more because it's not as concentrated. Challenge me if you disagree with that. But like that's like I strongly believe that we are on a recursive self-improvement loop now that we cannot get off. So for me like the Opus 4.5 was the moment where like, okay, I can give this thing a thing. and it's like dev shop, what was the moment for you with these open source models?

At what point did you say, like, we are on this path now with the open source. 5.3. Which was only like a month ago or something. Is that right? Yeah, it was a couple months ago. Okay. Wait, have you, but Kane, have you, is this the one that they just wrote the article about? This is the obliterated one that's like the ultra offense psycho one that like hacks things

like crazily, right? Remember Open AI? I was like, oh, we had a model that was like too biased towards. action and we had to kill it because it was like trying it like this is that right like these guys have like fine tuned glm to make it even more offensive right like even more offensive capability um i'm actually i literally am in the process of getting that running on my uh max studio uh because i have my red team that i ran on like regular glm 5.3 the one that found like the eight fucking smart contract bugs in the historical synthetics smart contract corpus right um

And I had a question in my mind, like, you know, if you had mythos, if you had like Astra, you know, unrestrained or whatever, like would it have found more? GLM 5.3, this more offensive model, I suspect we'll find more bucks. It's just more aggressive and tries to chain exploits together more aggressively, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going to run that, rerun. I've got to work for now. So I just rerun it. Yeah, this is the one where yesterday, Anthropic published this article that basically resulted in an advertisement for GLM 5.3.

It was basically like, he nerped ourselves, guys, but this model is unnerved. And then they, like, they have a bunch of graphs. And yeah. And someone in another child that I'm in literally was like, this is like the best ad for open source models that I brought in. Like, why are they doing this? it's yeah it's GLN 5.3 like you know

deep seek deep seek 4.1 flash they deep seek claimed that it was better than pro it's cheaper like it's on the like frito frontier it's better I would argue because like it's cheaper per task or whatever but his judgment is

worse like it's not going to be chaining together so like deep seek 4.4 and flash I think is a step back Kimmy is like good at like fucking drawing pictures it's a bit retarded at, like, actually doing hard stuff. Like, it's really good at drawing pictures. Like, they each have their...

It's like a very art student vibe, right? But, like, don't get it to do math. Muse is still really dumb, but, like, it's making progress. Like, it can fucking pick up your laundry, but, like, I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't get it to try and solve a millennium. I mean, that's really the big solution. If I can have a robot doing my laundry, I'm... I'm going to have a much happier household. Like, I'm waiting for this.

Like, by Christmas, I want a robot. Like, do you think it's going to happen? I'm ready. I think we're close. Okay. The question with robots, for real, this is not a joke, is would you have, like, the Tesla robot at home if that shit can be hacked and they can go and kill you at now? Like, for real, that will happen.

That will happen for sure. Yeah, it's pretty scary. It's pretty scary. And even, like, remote operators, right? Not just like a bad actor, but even. been like there's good actors inside this thing walking around my house right now. I don't know. I don't know about that. But also

holding my laundry is high on the list. You just have to like take its battery out at night, right? Yeah, yeah. The problem I have is the moving around part. Like if they can sit in the corner in a

contained little space and fold laundry, that's fine. Oh, because they're really well contained. They do so well when we contain them. They never break out of our containment. That's what I mean. You can't keep it legs or wheels or anything, though. Like, that would be insane.

Like, I didn't know. All right. We could keep it in the laundry room. There's not too much sensitive. A reinforced prison basement laundry room. Like, you're going straight to the gulag. If they find out, you've been locking robots in your basement, man. Can you imagine trying to explain this to the police?

Like, don't go down here. You'll be explaining it to your super intelligent overlords in like six months. Exactly. So maybe one, before we talk about Vitalik and the 2030 roadmap, which I really want to get to, the other thing that was interesting about this is, you know, this does feel like somewhat of a return to public markets are, call it like YOLO upside potential, right? There's a long, long history of like public markets and private markets have kind of reversed and, you know, all of the gains happen in private markets.

It used to be that, you know, Google IPOs and they do 100x, right? Amazon IPOs, they do 100x like post IPO, right? Like these companies would launch early and often and it was. high risk and there's a lot of upside and then over the course of like 20 years basically all the upside was taken out and you know it all went to BCs whatever it's interesting because you know now we're saying like anthropic you can get access to it early they're losing insane amounts of money this is super high risk and people like oh don't give that to retail like that's a bad deal and it's like you can't have it both ways right like either this is a highly speculative

thing that's going to be worth 50 trillion and can do a 50x on on you know on market after the IPO or you wanted to stay with VCs and let VCs fund it forever and capture all the gains you got to make a decision when you're thread guy you were talking about thread guy earlier he knows what it's going to do they're going to go out what is it yeah I don't know man but like genuinely like like actually having having people IPO when they're losing a fuckload of money because they need more money and retail is going to give it to them and take the risk is the game. That is the fucking point of an IPO. Like now, you know, like 42 billion is a lot of money to lose. Just saying, like, I don't know. I don't know, man. It feels pretty crazy. But like, someone has to

bear the cost of this risk. This is a trade-off. The trade-off space is you either have speculative high-risk companies IPOing because they need money that only the public markets can provide these hypers and there's a lot of upsides left for the retail markets to juice right? Or

you fund them until they're completely you know safe and low risk and there's no upside. You got you kind of both. You got to pick one. I don't think we're at the safe, low-risk stage yet.

but I have no idea. But that's my point. But we have been. But that's my point. We have been for the last 15 years, every single IPO, except for the SPAC boom, ignore the spack boom, right? Every single IPO, all the juice have been squeezed out of it. And the VCs had collected it.

And then you're left with a 2x, maybe, if you're lucky, over five years or 3x or whatever the hell the thing was, right? You know, it's shifted a little bit in the last few years. But, like, this is like a highly speculative thing. something that's losing $42 billion a year can go bankrupt. You can lose all your money. That has not been the classic IPO for the last decade or so, right?

Like there was no chance that anything that got to IPO was going to go bankrupt. And they disclosed it could end humanity too. I mean, that's just a bonus. That's a cherry on top, man. That's a bonus. That's a bonus. Okay.

But I mean, this, so what are the, realistically, what are the options? for these labs because they're massively, I mean, the price is insane. This is the only often. There is no one who can give them enough money except for retail. The only price they can get them, amount of money they need is to go public on the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange. That's it.

Right. So as the society, we need to decide, do we think this is a good thing that these hypers need so much money that they're so risky that there is a lot of upside left when they hit the market? and that that risk, the trade-off space is that they could go bankrupt and be worth nothing and a bunch of retail people could lose $2 trillion. Are we willing to take that risk for the chance to give a bunch of retail people the chance to make $20 trillion? My hot take is yes, absolutely.

Fuck yeah. Like, let's go, right? Like, let's go. Like, the whole point of markets. I mean, so, I mean, it should have been before, though, right? Before is, like arguably before is even too early, right? Like if this thing is real, if this thing is real, it's only worth two trillion. It's only two trillion, man.

It's only two trillion. If it can go to 20 trillion, if it can go to 20 trillion, then there's still plenty of upside, right? The bad thing would be if it IPOed at three trillion and that was its max that it could ever get to. And now you're just taking all the risk and putting it on retail for no upside. There has to be a trade here. Hold on. I'm looking at the graph. 18 months ago, the valuation,

anthropic valuation, was $62 billion, 18 months ago. So it went from $62 billion to $2 trillion. If they had gone public, I don't know, at any point between $62 billion and $2 trillion, I feel like that's... It would be better. But just to be clear, the status quo is not that.

The status quo is that VCs juice 100% of the upside of any company, we're saying there's still upside left and the reason why you know those upside is because they're still losing fuckload of money. If they were throwing off cash, there would be no upside left because now you can value them as a, you know,

cash flow generating fucking discounted model, right? Versus a speculative enterprise that could end humanity which has a lot more outside to it. I think it's a glee. Then, yeah, no, go, go Pablo. You say it. I think it's a very, very good idea to the IPO.

I think that the thing of losing money is a traditional thing that every technology company that is today super, super big has been doing. And also, I don't agree too much with, like, private funds squeezed a lot before the IPOs, but then if we check meta, Google, Amazon, and lots of our companies, if you bought at the IPO, you did a huge amount of money. But dude, those guys went public like, you know, we're talking 15 years ago. Yeah. We haven't had, like, if you look at the, the returns over the last 15 years,

most of the returns have come from those guys that IPOed a long time ago, in fairness, right? That's right? Yeah. But, you know, when we say most, we're talking like a 3x, right? Not a 50x or 100x or something. Well, okay. So, like, for example, Facebook I goad at 100 billion, right? So yeah, then when Facebook goes to the trillion.

It's done at 20x or something. Right, over 15, what, 15 years, 10 years? That's a good return. I take that. That's fine. But do you really think that that's, I mean, even if it has 10, 15 years, you have to go from $2 trillion to $20? Yeah, they'll do it. I think they will.

I think that they will. I think these companies will be, I think this companies will be ultra-mega profitable. like the price the price that we are paying today for for AI is nothing it's basically it's super super subsidized how how I don't know how how much money you are guys spending in AI monthly but would you spend 10x that to do the same work that you're doing today I would totally no no I would change I would change how I do things a little bit I would like and I have right to get more efficient because there was a period where we were spending a couple hundred grant a month, right? And, and, you know, that was not sustainable. Like, it would have been

sustainable if that was generating revenue. If that was, you know, if we could attribute that spend to like, you know, incremental revenue. Fuck yeah, of course, right. Now, we didn't have sufficient revenue to be able to do that. But if you were a revenue generating entity that could reduce your your cost of OPEX or whatever by like 20, 30% by spending, by giving a bunch of money to Anthropi, of course you would do that. You know that phrase by

Jeff Beto's your margin is my opportunity, right? So I think that in the midterm these organizations will start seeing, okay, I know the margin of this industry, I know how that margin is changing because of our tool. We're going to capture that. This is going to be far more expensive and it's going they are going to capture value like crazy.

I think that's too much, maybe too much. Maybe they will become too big. It's going to be fine. Don't worry, man. They're going to end humanity before they get that. So it's going to be fun. Okay, whenever you guys are like, it's fine. Don't worry about it.

Retail will profit. You're saying retail will profit. It is risky, but it's the end user who's going to lose out because the subsidies are going to be less and less, and you're going to have to change the way you're operating. Like, we're in the, We're in the heyday right now where our subsidies are working and we're able to do a ton of stuff for not very much. But dude, they're about to give you fucking, dude, they're about to give you Sol 5.6 for free with your subscription, unlimited usage.

Like that's fucking wild. Sol 5.6 was the best guy like three months ago. If you told me that I could even talk to him, I would be so happy. Just even letting me have one conversation with that guy. like, oh my God, this guy is amazing, right? Now you're going to tell me that I have unlimited access to it on tap. Like, to your point, Pablo, the costs of this stuff will come down and the value that it is capturing will go up as we get better at deploying it, right?

Like right now, we're still fucking retardant. So many slop cannons. Oh, dude. It's crazy. Like, as we get better and more efficient at deploying this intelligence into our shit, the margins will just fucking go. astronomical. But I mean the cost maybe

for, let's say for entropic, right? Their cost will maybe go down but let's make it simple. The monthly subscription is super cheap today. It will be far more expensive. If you said if you said to

if you say Open AI has like Expleading your Tebow right if you follow him on X has like explicitly said the quiet part out loud. He is like the goal for us is that we get every single company to have a subscription for every single user.

Maybe it's $1,000, whatever, but it gives them effectively unlimited capacity. And we don't need to worry about the delta between the subsidized subscription costs and API costs, right? You won't even need to think about it. It will just be the same, right? And if you get to that point where, you know, like every single employee in the world has a thousand dollar a month fucking open AI subscription, that's a very profitable business.

Like, I've been like a lot of money. So for what it's worth, as we've talked about this before, I've noticed that I'm letting my subscription just run, like my 200s just run. Even though like for the last week, I haven't been doing shit

because I've just been tracing Bitcat, literally. I haven't been doing, I've buried some shit, like emails, shit. You know what I mean? But I'm still just letting it run. Because it's like, it's worth it. It's not worth, because before like,

six months ago. The hour that you use it, right? Like, the hour that you use it, it's worth the $200. Exactly. Like, use it for one hour and you're getting value. But I think we talked about this like six months ago where I was like, every week, I was like switching. You're switching off.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, switching them off and up and down. But at some point, you stop when it becomes valuable enough and it becomes part of your daily routine enough, then you just keep it on. And companies will do this, individuals will do this. I've noticed I'm doing it as well. and that is part of why the subscription models work historically in other industries. It hasn't worked here with AI yet.

It might be, again, you're talking about like the Delta. It might be that. Okay, let me tell you how massive the Delta is, right? This is how fucking insane it is. So yesterday, sorry, two days ago, I was testing GPT live, right? So I put an API key in because I mainly use, Codex subs, right? But I've got API access and we actually bought a bunch of API credits ages ago. So we go like 100K of API credits just sitting there that I know I need to use, right?

So I'm using GPT Live and I have like, call it 100 agents running, right? And somehow in my harness, the switch got flipped from API, from Codex sub API in the space of 90 minutes, it spent $400 on the API in 90 minutes. It could be more. You could be more than that, man. It could be wet. But that was like just so if you think about that, that subscription costs $200, right?

It would have easily covered all of that. In 90 minutes, I blew through that and like then some, maybe two subscriptions worth, right? The Delta is still too high, right? Any enterprise that's paying API rates is not going to be able to use this the way that we are using it now, right? where you just don't even worry about it. But as they compress, right, you get an enterprise that's on a $1,000 a month subscription

with effectively unlimited 5.6 or soon 6.0, you know, Astra and Sol or whatever, that will shift how enterprises use AI and they will all of a sudden go, oh, we can throw this and this and this and it will change the way the enterprises work completely. The reason why we're not seeing that yet is because if you're using Astra, and it costs you $1,000 an hour, like, yeah, call your lawyer. It's going to be cheaper to get your lawyer to fucking write the thing than Astra, right?

But like, if it gets to the point where it's $0.5 an hour, then all of a sudden, your behavioral change, right? So for enterprises, their behavior can't change because the cost is still too high. So, but it's not going to happen because we'll all be dead by the time they get their shit together.

So it's fine. At the same time, at the same time, one more thing I see that I see lots and lots of people saying, yeah, I build this with this model and this harness and I optimize this, this, lots of stuff. And 99% of people are not building something useful or are not making money. They're just making stuff. I love the fact, like my thing, for example, I do not code, right? So I was always the idea guy in a startup, right? And when you have the idea, what do you need, the guy that goes.

Oh, I need my CTO. And you need to go for that guy and convince him. That is dead completely. So for the idea, guys, is good. So today, I think that the two most important skills are ideas and be able to sell. But lots of people are lacking that. They are just building stuff that nobody needs, right? And nobody goes.

Yeah. Okay, what do we really know there? So I think that eventually those people will stop consuming too, right? Agreed. Agreed. But, you know, let's say society now has 10,000 people that previously weren't engineers, right? And like 9,990 of them are building fucking nonsense slop that no one cares about. But 10 of them build something useful. We are still better off. We're like those like we can throw idiot slop cannons at things, right? And you just need one to actually build something useful for it to pay back all of it. Right. And you can build your stupid ideas and get a out of the way too. This is another thing where it's idea guy summer. Yeah, idea guy summer means

that you can keep throwing things at the wall and it's not that expensive. You can have five or six ideas going at once trying to build something. Like I got 30 ideas. I got to get through these things. Yes, exactly. Get to the other side and realize it was done, right? And that would have been six months and raising money

and whatever else. It's a much different game now. All right. Let's talk. Let's pivot back to crypto. Vitalik I don't know the obsession with 2030 with Ethereum Why the fuck

Why you guys still obsessed With 2030 First of all We're not even going to make it to 2030 So I don't know why the fuck you guys Are so obsessed with it What are you guys doing over there at the EF? What is like

You're getting like a 2030 tattoo What do you guys do Like genuinely Like it's not even trolling Like why is 2030 Such a fucking thing. Such a meme.

There's like a fucking, there's a clanker somewhere in the EF fucking basement that's like plotting world domination by 2030 and this is all one big sigh-up. That's that... Okay, so, so, Vitalik writes this essay which gathers a bunch of stuff from a bunch of different places, a bunch of different people,

ideas and things about the future of Ethereum. And like, can I... This is the most fucking bullish thing that I've read about Ethereum in a long time. And I've read a lot of things about Ethereum. And I'm like, you look at this and you go,

if this thing existed, why else would you, why would you use anything else? If this system were to pop into existence tomorrow, it would dominate all, like, outside of Bitcoin and like the weird Bitcoin-y culty stuff, right? I can't see any smart contract system that would be able to compete with this.

Why you would build an L2, why you would build a corpo chain, why you would build a stable coin chain. If this thing existed, it clearly dominates technically, operationally, like every possible thing that exists. It's fucking, it could not be more bullish. The question is, is like, how achievable is it in what time frame, right? And the thing that I think that maybe gets me the most excited about it is that the world that we live in today, and I've said this on the show before, right? Like, you couldn't have even proposed this. It would be fanciful to propose building this by 2030 because it's like three, four people in the world that are smart enough to actually do this shit. And like, they work hard, I'm sure, Austin, like, you're going to not appreciate this.

Like, I'm sure they work hard, but like not hard enough, man. for how important this shit is. Like they're clearly taking too many vacations and it takes way too long to do it. But now we don't have to rely on those three guys. There's like a 300 million fucking clankers that are able to write this shit. Right. And so all you need is the ideas, to conceive of the ideas and it will be built. Right.

So like the more aspirational and the more insane and moon-mathy and fucking crazy. snarks and fossil and whatever shit like throw as many fucking acronyms and terms as you can at me because the clankers love that shit and so it just feels like very clanker coded and if

clankers are going to be building this thing it feels achievable and if it's achieved it feels insane if we had this technology to be clear it was always achievable like a theory has wicked smart people

has from day one like in the eaf especially right the issue has never been whether theoretically the eF or the teams or the people could do something it's always been this sort of like self-referential meta like is this the right thing should we build this how do we coordinate around building this instead of just like balls to the wall building it right um and if if clinkers or if culture shift within the EF, if leaning it down, if Vitalik just publishing essays, whatever, I don't care how the EF, and I keep saying EF, but to be clear, like, it's deeply embedded in Ethereum culture.

Like, Consensus MetaMas also has the same exact problem a lot of times, right? Yeah. It's, it's like you want to be considerate and you want everyone to be nice and happy and kind to each other and you want to build the right things and blah, blah, blah. at the end of the day though I think at some point you have to like rip the bandit off and just fucking build it just ship

the good thing is like I just don't care they're they're sitting there like give me more stuff to build right they're not like thinking about communism or like weird shit or like trying to grow forests or whatever they're just like I just want to write good code man that's all they want to do they just want to write good code

the harder the code is the more excited they are to write it like and so like it just again it feels like the the confluence of like the potential for ethereum how aspirational the technology is and the tools that now exist are like coming together and the sad thing is it's like we're going to be just two years too late because we'll all be dead by 2028 and 2020 2020 2020 and 2030 you're not going to happen like we're so close we're so close they'll still be doing laundry they'll just kill all the people in the house yeah often

They'll be doing laundry They'll never stop doing laundry They'll be like folding shirts For a thousand years While like The corpses of the people In the houses

are decaying So okay So man I don't know where to go So I don't think that The researchers are going on vacation A lot I'm a joke

I'm a joke That's a joke And it's not like All Super Kumao It's like How do we figure out How to correctly implement this mechanism?

And I think 2027, 2028's a little slower because it's more human. But then I think from there it does rip because it is. We're at the point where like we have super intelligence and it can implement an EIP in a weekend. And this is the thing, right? Like the things that are most. It's sorry. And then you can go on. It's like part of it is the decision that the researchers and the devs like are going to do.

Like whoever is going to do this. The devs, the AI, the researchers, whatever. We're going to do this. This is it. We're going to do it. And then once you accept that, once you take the endless discussions off the table, it's totally possible. And it's probably possible on a faster timeline. I think the majority of time, the EF and the related orgs spend is discussing on whether or not something should be implemented.

And then if it should be implemented, getting, oh, my God, the weeds, dude. I don't think it's whether or not. I think it's how. I don't think it's weather or not. I think it's they know that this needs to happen. It's just like, what is the best way to do that? And that takes a lot of time.

It is very in the weeds. But why? We saw this with like the frame of transactions. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don't know. You have to get it right. I don't know if I agree with that.

This is the thing. The cost, I know I've seen this in my own team, right? The cost of being wrong previously was incredibly high. right? Psychologically, like from a direct cost perspective, like getting 20, 30, 50 people in a room every day to do things is an extremely expensive endeavor, right? Then you have like all of the coordination and the psychology of the people. If 50 people spend three months doing a thing and it turns out to be wrong, there's a high cost to that, like emotional costs. Like, and, you know, that gets fucking baked into organizations over time, right?

So the more aspirational, the thing you are doing, the more uncertain it is, the more fear you will feel, whether you want to feel fear or not, right? The more fear you will feel if you're wrong. And hence why you get into these navel-gazing loops of like, let's be really certain before we start that this is the conclusion or whatever. And this is why I say, like, the harder, the things, thing that you're trying to do, the more amenable it is to superintelligence. And so the thing that you want to be bullish on is the crazy aspirational things that were

almost unachievable in a human system. And we know that they're almost unachievable in a human system because it's only through sheer brute force that Ethereum has even existed, right? Like I make jokes about Ethereum and how, you know, vacations, whatever, communism and stuff. but like it exists today through sheer force of will, right? Like it's not a thing that just emerges from the world, right? Like it's a really hard thing to make exist. And it's and it's taken a long time.

And it's been really inefficient, but it exists and we should be very happy for it. Part of that is because of how aspirational it is, right? But we now suddenly have tools that the more aspirational you are, the better the thing is, the easier it is to do, right? And the more exciting it is to do and the more resources, et cetera, et cetera. And so all of a sudden, this weird equilibrium that we had where like hard things were really hard, hard things now actually become easier. And Ethereum is one of the hardest things.

And it's going to become easier. And it's just like it's so exciting for the world, right? That like, what is the point of superintelligence if it doesn't build you something like whatever the fuck this new Ethereum is, right? Ethereum free something. I don't know. But like cryptographic world computer, man. But dude, like if super intelligence is, if the purpose of superintelligence is to build

you like fucking room temperature superconductors and Ethereum 3. Oh man. Take me back. Then like, yes. Like then great. Let's do that. Right. Because humans are not good at building room temperature superconductors.

Like if they exist, like we've been sitting here fucking banging rocks together for 10,000 years. We haven't landed it. Right. Like, let's give the clankers a chance and see if they can do it. Yeah. Maybe a question here is like the 2027, 2028 timeline feels very human. And then the post-2020 feels more like that's when the machines start to really rip on this stuff. Like maybe they start early.

Maybe during this transition period, some of these things start to become easier and easier sooner. and things actually speed up sooner than I think they will. Well, and I think also, I think I'm such a deep believer in this. I think the culture of today in Ethereum, especially in the F, but also other EF-E-P-Ty-type orgs who have been in Ethereum forever, is this obsession with making sure that you get it right. And I don't want to discount that. I don't want to say, like, you can get it wrong. Like, you can't sometimes.

like you don't want to break the blockchain, for example, right? There are hard lines in the sand. However, you can actually, for say 90% of what's being built, not shipped, right, but built, you can build way faster. And when you get into this culture of like, we're actually going to build and test and iterate. Clankers don't cry when their shit doesn't work off to spending a month on it. And then you can just, you can. Yes.

But then you can get, like, better answers. So, like, one thing that I see a lot on when, when, yeah, in this stuck cycle of just talking about things and discussing things and debating things, it's all theoretical, right? And so you have a theoretical argument against a theoretical argument. And there's two theoretical people arguing about what theoretically could be true in the theoretical future. And you start fucking arguing about epistemology and can you even know things? And, like, it devolves into fucking insanity. Can we define?

And by the way, this, like, the Ethereum's, like, favorite. We need to define these words so that we can have a discussion and a debate about what we're about to talk about. And I'm like, oh my God, fucking 50 forum hosts later on definitions. Okay, can we actually argue the thing? No. Okay. You can build things and then you can stop operating in this theoretical land, right? And you can say we have the answer to this now.

This, like, this does this. You can simulate it against the real blockchain. You can simulate it in whatever environments you want very, very quickly. and you can get those answers very quickly. And when you start to see that culture shift in the people who are making the decisions and having the debates, it changes everything, right? And it doesn't mean that you have to ship like irresponsibly. It just means that your entire way of operating, instead of debating the theoretical endlessly,

you move into the realm of the real. And then you operate on making hard data on facts. You know, you start, it's not a theory. it's not philosophical anymore, right? And like if the EF can get to that point and start like actually just shipping and operating on like the hard backs and saying we want to achieve this and then saying like this achieves this, dude, especially with AI, like the sky is the limit.

It's going to be right. Sorry. Yeah, I have a question for you guys. Do you think that the problem or challenge for Ethereum is a technical challenge because I don't think that the challenge is technical. No, but I think that it's a commercial challenge. It's like we want

faster blogs, privacy and this and this and that but who is solving a real use case that someone has a problem with today? Like who's doing that? Honestly, my hot take is Ethereum has never been about that and it actually doesn't matter. If Ethereum is the best place to do your weird moon math computations, it will solve itself.

And I know that's like a very handwavy thing. I'm a very commercial guy. The thing that has been frustrating with me is like not, you know, I think Ethereum shouldn't go out of their way to like stop people from doing commercial things on the chain. I do have a problem with that. Outside of that, though, I don't think they need to promote it. People will use a technology to do commercial things. like we've seen it in spite of the EF saying please don't do defy we still have a lot of

defy right so like you know there's there's uh I'm sorry I'll still like I got up myself but but like you know a thing a technology will be used for what it's used for right and if you build the best technology it will get used and so I don't think it's the EF's problem to say like if they build this fucking thing I promise you people will some cool shit on it. They just will. It'll be amazing. So that's their job. Their job is build the layer, right? Like the thing. Yeah. I think the biggest, I think a lot of people are like, oh, Ethereum isn't good enough. And so that's why people or Ethereum didn't cater to app developers. So that's why there's no apps.

No, no, no. People didn't build apps on Ethereum because it was perceived by the market to be not low and expensive. and and did not have incentive programs like all of the L2s and all L1s had. And it was unclear. There was not a lot of confidence in the future like faith. There's faith. Faith comes into these things, right? Yeah.

You want to go somewhere. It's important. Yeah. And so some people, if you ask yourself like, why did so and so app go, okay, look, if you're an ex-coin-based employee, you build on base. Yeah. But you know what? You can distort, you can distort the market. with incentives and shit for a while,

but ultimately it will fail. Right? Like people will go back to the place that is the best place to do things because that is the most incentive compatible thing to do. Right. And so, yeah, fine, you take your $10,000, $50,000, $2 million grant to go and build on Napthals

or whatever the fuck it is, right? But eventually you will come back to Ethereum and you'll build your shit there if it is the best place to build shit. And now it's cheap to build. It's like easy and cheap. to build on Ethereum now. So let's wrap it up here.

This is a great show. Thank you, Pablo, for joining us. We have to have you back on some time. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for invite them being. Yeah, yeah. That's good fun. That's good fun.

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 unchaincrypton.com slash uneasy money.