Unchained - Uneasy Money: Why the AI Singularity May Already Be Out of Our Hands

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

MegaETH's Namik Muduroglu joins the Uneasy Money crew to discuss how the industry can fix token incentives, the continued escalation of the Aave civil war and more. Thank you to our sponsors! ��⁠Fuse: The Energy Network ⁠ – Shift your energy use and earn rewards. ⁠⁠MultiChain Advisors -⁠⁠ The Growth & Capital Markets Partner You Need ⁠⁠Crypto Tax Girl An article from Boost CEO Brian Flynn sparks conversation about whether tokens are dead. The Aave civil war continues to escalate. China is trying to reverse engineer Claude even as Anthropic faces off against the U.S. government. In this episode of Uneasy Money, hosts Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan are joined by MegaETH founding team member Namik Muduroglu to discuss how to fix token incentives, whether there is a happy ending in sight for Aave.  They also discuss the geopolitical risks that come with AI and the technology's rapid rate of advancement. Is the Singularity already out of our hands? Plus, ZachXBT's teased announcement and Ethereum's “strawmap.” Don't miss Kain's plan to fuse Claude with his Unitree dog and why Namik is a closet AI doomer. Hosts: ⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix ⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠, Security Expert Guest: ⁠Namik Muduroglu, CSO & Founding Team at MegaETH Links: Unchained: ⁠Uneasy Money: Why Token Holders Have No Rights & Why Every DAO ‘Has Failed’ ⁠Why MegaETH Is Delaying Its Token and Rejecting Credible Neutrality ⁠Aave Governance Fight Escalates Ahead of $51 Million Funding Vote How Aave Labs and the DAO Should Split Ownership of the Brand – Uneasy Money Uneasy Money: Why Peter Steinberger and Non-Crypto People Hate the Crypto Mob ⁠Ethereum Researchers Outline Seven Forks Through 2029 in New “Strawmap” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The most funny thing to me was like, Anthropic was alleging that it's like Deep Sea, Minimax, Moonshot, used over 24,000 fake accounts. And when I read that, I was like, only 24,000? Like, they need to get some crypto font. Yeah, it's like 20,000 accounts is not that impressive. I'm a very big fan of Avey Dow. So I think it is a, it is a shame to see these service providers clash heads. But yeah, I don't think there's a negotiation.

that I don't think there's a happy way out of this anymore, which is not good for Avey token holders. I don't know if you guys saw Morpho Flip to AVEA FDV, which is insane. Hey, everyone, I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to uneasy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co-host Taylor Monaghan, security expert, and we are joined this week by NAMIC founding team member of MegaEath. Welcome, Namik.

As for having me. Of course, I'm very happy to have you. It's going to be fun. We're going to dive in into it all in a minute. But 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 it. You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money. Before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make this show possible. The energy network is an intelligent, decentralized grid that coordinates smart devices to balance supply and demand. Energy Dollar is the native token of the network from one of

Europe's fastest growing energy startups. Follow at Fuse Energy on X to find out more. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus billion dollars in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multi-chain adv.com. If crypto taxes feel overwhelming, you are not alone. That's why Crypto Tax Girl, a team that's been helping crypto investors since 2017, is offering $100 off on one-on-one crypto tax help. To get $100 off your crypto tax services, go to Cryptotaxgirl.com slash unchained. Again, that's cryptotaxgirl.com slash unchained.

All right. So our first segment this week is make money by holding, which is quite a concept. I think we've forgotten that technology. So Brian Flynn this week wrote a viral article where he argued that most tokens are structurally broken because you make money by selling, not by holding. That turns alignment into a race to the exit. It's not alignment. It's just. erase the exit. So lockups, vesting, burns, buybacks, all of that stuff. He basically says it's kind of, you know, Band-Aid solution doesn't actually solve the underlying issue.

You haven't aligned incentives. You just, you know, built a game of musical chairs. And his proposed fix is, I thought it was going to be 100% unlocks at TG, but no. His proposed fix is 100% of protocol revenue governed by token holders with direct distributions voted on transparently.

Therefore, you don't profit by selling, you profit by holding. And this basically shifts competition outwards. So it's not your PPP. It becomes more protocol versus protocol or business versus business. And he also points out the equity token convergence that we've seen from a lot of lot of projects lately, Arbamorpho, uniswelf, etc.

are kind of like, you know, half measures towards this, this idea of like, oh, here's a fee switch or like, you know, 20% of fees or whatever.

But it's still a weird misalignment. And we've talked about this on the show many times, right? This like misalignment between token holders and equity holders

or token holders and some random guy down the street that has some, you know, incentive in whatever the project. is. So Namak, I know you and I have talked about this a lot and I know you've thought about this

this problem, particularly when it comes to your own token. We've talked about this a lot in relation to I-X as well. So yeah, I'm really curious your thoughts on this. What's your hot take here? I mean, I think it's pretty accurate, I would say, the piece. Tocons are broken. It's because founders and investors have double dipped for too long. You know, you have a token. Token doesn't do much. And you still somehow have be worth billions of dollars while value accrues to equity. So, you know, foundations or someone somewhere gets a bunch of cash. I think that generally Brian makes a lot of good points. I will say it is a bit of a misnomer. You know, misnomer to say that no one's tried

some sort of revenue-based relationship in the past. So we've seen a lot of protocols effectively give fees to stakers. It didn't work last cycle. We also saw people try to do buybacks last cycle. It didn't work either. None of it mattered.

Hyperliquid obviously caught light. Sorry, just as checking the set. What do you say last cycle? You mean like December, two months ago, right? Oh, I mean, Jesus Christ. I guess we're already in the bear market. Yeah, I meant black, black cycle.

Okay. You know, back when people remember the thing called Kodmos, which is basically Ethereum now, I guess. But yeah, I think that there's a lot that, you know, Brian describes, which is accurate. I think that he says basically there's two points for why this hasn't happened. One is, again, insiders were eating too good with the status quo. That's gone now. And the second point is people are afraid of going to jail or getting fines for securities laws. And that's a bit more of a difficult thing to approach. I don't know how much better buybacks are compared to Revshar's. I'm sure that there's a way to do it.

If there's a will, there's a way. But I do generally like the idea of creating a structure where people don't have to be sellers to be able to get upside in a protocol success. that does sound nice. Yeah, I mean, I think like some kind of fundamental level, you know, and this is what we've talked about a little bit, is like everything is gone from being an investment to a trade. It's all just a trade, right? And trades typically timeframes are shorter. So it's like, oh, you need to do in the fee switch. That's a good trade for 48 hours. And then I'm going to

rotate out of it and, you know, do something else. Right. And I think that. that has come a little bit from like the memeification and purpification of everything. Right. Google perks for everything. Memes, 48 hours is a long time, right? Like 48 minutes is probably like average holding time. And so when when, you know, tokens switch to these like very short term trading incentives and, you know, holding for a few days,

it kind of breaks all of the structural incentives, right? And the only way to solve that is figure out a way that people want to hold your token. Give people an incentive, give them some upside or whatever, such that they want to hold your token. And we haven't seen a lot of great examples of that. I probably hyperliquid, you know, as you were going to mention, it's like the best one that we've had this cycle. I would say. Yeah, it's just difficult to underwrite tokens after you've seen what happened to every single one before. This time will be different. And it's really a question of like, okay, where are my equity like rights? How do I know that the team that I'm backing, and it's always a team bet, in my opinion,

how do I know that they are going to do what they need to do? I think that Kirby had a really good article that he posted today. It was about like Ethereum and how he's like upset of Ethereum. But it highlighted how much he loved Hyperliquid because he felt like there was a team that he could really back and really believe in. So until we have clarity on the equity token difference, I think we're going to continue to have a scenario where people just aren't willing to underwrite tokens. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think like it is, it is interesting when you look at some of the kind of directional things that we're seeing

super state these ideas of like just make it equity which people understand but just put it on blockchain right and if you can figure that out maybe you get the best of both worlds and I think there's something to be said for the benefits

of like having clarity for someone who's holding an asset that they know what will have happen, right? And, you know, we, we, I think all went through a period of time where we were like, well, a Dow will solve that. You don't need the law because, you know, there's a governance structure and a multi-sig or whatever. And it just hasn't worked out to your point, right? Like, it just hasn't worked out that well. And there's only so many times you can do that and have it not work out well before you're like, actually, I don't want to play that game. I, you know,

let's, let's play a different game. Yeah. So, I guess, you know, we'll see, we'll see how this all converges. My hot take is that, you know, bear market's where you get more experimentation. And so people will buy more things than they've tried over the last like 18 months. We'll see, we'll see how that goes. And I do think that, you know, Leshner and some of the people out there that are like, hey, let's try something really radical, at least from like a crypto anarchist perspective of like just put the equity in the token.

I think we'll see people you know, really kind of open up the Overton window of like how you can structure this. But I think the core thing is like the jewel, the jewel model

of like equity in tokens. No one, no one's related thought about it. You know, you made a joke earlier. I'd love to get your opinion. Do you think the answer is 100% unlock? on day one because a lot of smart money

doesn't want to bid tokens of such structural overhang. You look at any of these tokens that say that market caps like 200 mil and FDB's like 2 billion and you're like there's no world in which we're going to be able to absorb this amount

of new liquidity in the market and it becomes very difficult to price it becomes opaque. Sophisticated players are able to do all kinds of hedge in retail gets screwed, smart money doesn't touch it. I guess, is there some truth in the joke you made? Honestly, no.

I think 100% unlocks it, like, the dumbest possible thing that you could do. And sorry, it was kind of like a joke at the expense of, like, people who are like, oh, here's a bad thing about tokens. The solution is give me my money straight away, right? Like, you know, it's kind of the opposite of what Brian's saying, right? Like, instead of locking people up, and, you know, this is an interesting. thing, right? And, you know, full disclosure, I fully locked my mega allocation for a year, right? Very happily, because I was like, I want as much of an allocation as possible. I know it's like

eight trillion times oversubs. So, you know, I'm just going to like make sure that I maximize my, my exposure. And if I wasn't planning to sell it for a year anyway, then like, that's positive you be for me, right? And I think that the people who are like 100% on locks, no structural overhang. That's not how startups work. Like, you know, let's talk about equity, right? Equity, two people, gosh, they own 100% of a company. Someone comes along and buys 5% of it for whatever, $10 million or something, right?

A billion if it's an AI startup. And then, like, they're not worried that the two founders are going to dump on them 10 seconds later, right? like they like you know they have to kind of grow into that valuation that's priced into the whole structure of the thing right like no one would give someone a hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation if they thought that that person had like a liquid exit the next day because those people would take that right they'll be like i got a hedge a little bit bro like come on you know so so i just i think like there's something we said for you the the issue is not so much that a project or a business needs to grow into the you know it can be a really high

multiple and it needs to mature into the liquidity that will you know eventually come on on market it's it's just that like if you if you were to have a hundred percent liquidity no one's still no one's gonna want to buy it right it's not gonna actually solve the problem no one's gonna buy it and the same is gonna be terrible so it's better to lock people up and give yourself a chance to grow into that valuation later and, you know, actually, like, deliver some stuff, which is the whole idea, right? But this, you know, this comes back, I guess, to the regulatory overreach where everyone's like, oh, we're not trying to deliver anything.

Yeah. We don't, like, we're just hanging out. It's in Discord, right? Like, there's no plan here. And, you know, to your point, like, people want to invest in a team. They want to back a team that's going to work really hard to do a thing. That's how incentives work, right? And the idea that like, we're just friends hanging out in a discord and, you know, we don't have any responsibility to,

I think is a fit nonsensical. So. Yeah. If you want to hear like a super cute story, like back in like the early ICU days, I legitimately ask people around me. I was like, some of these projects are clearly like,

going to make it and like the what they're what their uh pitch is is like completely absurd like you think they're going to go whatever uh build battery powered EV cars on the moon and return dividends to you like I'm sorry what like why are people buying this um and the first person that I talked to was like well it's like a whole other you know there's like a lot of reasons to buy things it's not just because you believe in them or whatever and I was like but why Because that's a silly idea, right? And the funniest thing of this is like, I have a front receipt to all this because they're all using my wallet, right, to buy in. I'm seeing the customer support tickets.

I'm saying everything. I have, like, very good indications of, like, what's going to make it and what's not. It took me, like, more than one, like, sell out ICO to be like, oh, they're buying because if you get in, they can sell it 2x 10 after 100x, the following. day with like no risk, like the littlest amount of risk. And when I realized that I was like, uh, shit, like I don't want to be here. Like I don't like it. Like it was like my idealism and like optimism was ruined. Um, but I was surprised. I mean, okay, so that itself was not surprising to me. The fact that we've like gone so far down like just the nihilism rabbit hole over the subsequent decade, it does surprise me. Like,

Like, I'm, I'm praying that at this point. We finally hit rock bottom and been like, okay, like, can we actually create value here? And like, not every project is going to be successful. But when you only, the market is only because of those sort of like low risk guaranteed returns, you can't, there's no, what are we doing? Right. Like, you're not going to have the long term thinking. You're not going to have people trying to build stuff. It is always going to be a race to the exit.

You know, the funny thing is, though, right? Like you look at ICOs and you go like all the people who flipped like ETH land or Link or whatever, you know, they bought it in the ICO and they flipped it, right? Those people are, I'm sure they wake up every day and go, oh my God, like the ETH ICO, right? Like there are a bunch of people who flip things because they thought it was going to be like, you know, a quick short term, you know, 2X or whatever. and then the thing went like 2000X and they have to live with that every day. So I think you know it's

it is like unfortunately just part of the game you know and incentives are the thing that drives behavior right? So you know if you have a scarce resource that people know is going to go up in price and they have

liquidity straight away it's going to exacerbate the situation And more people are going to run towards that. They're going to run towards the fire and not away from it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and obviously.

And, you know, if you have projects that are trying to do the long term, great. Like, that's fantastic. That's what, like, you know, the thousands of ICA projects, we did have things come out of that that were valuable. And that's good. That's great. The meme points, though, are not really trying, right? At all. Yeah.

So, you know, thank goodness we have, like, some people that are experimenting and doing some, some different things. But I just, yeah, the, just the ecosystem's desire to sort of go full bore on the flipping of tokens. I don't know. I'm not surprised when I'm surprised. And I'm also. I think it's just like, it's partially a momentum thing, right? Like, you know, trading gets shorter term.

People's time horizon gets shorter term. then people are like, what if we make it even easier to do shorter term things? And then like it just, you know, there's this spiral. Yeah. Well, and you're insane as a founder. If you're going to do a token, you're kind of insane to like think about long term, right? Like at some point, like that's where you start getting like this nested shittiness. Right?

Because then how are founders being incentivized to not play that game when everyone around them wants to play that game. Yeah. But I mean, you know, kind of the same thing, right? Like, there are a lot of founders who did an ICO and raised 5 mil or 10 mil or whatever and like blew it on, you know, parties or whatever they did. And it probably was like a fun year or 18 months or whatever. And then there's straight back to being poor again.

And, you know, the founders who are like, well, I'm going to stick around and build something here. And it didn't work out for all of them. There were plenty of people who stuck around and built things and it still went terribly for them. They got hacked or whatever. You know, I'm sure we can think of a few that got hacked multiple times that were around in those days that were like very earnest and trying really hard. And they just kept getting hacked every month.

And so, you know, it's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I think kind of a similar to thing to like the ICU flippers right like short-term people can do short-term things and like okay you put a thousand bucks in you make a thousand bucks great um but you know like you're not going to end up being stanie you know who's built a thing over a decade that's worth you know five eight dollars right like that's a that only happens with long-term games and and um long-term thinking um yeah which i guess leads us into our next segment uh that maybe, maybe long term. I don't know.

So, so, we've talked about this a few times, Aves Civil War. I guess that's what it's escalated into now. And this one is kind of crazy. I was, even I was pretty surprised. Like, I've seen some, some shit in the Dow Insanity Wars that we've seen over the years. And this one was like, I don't know where these

guys go. So BGD Labs is not going to renew its contract. Even that is like kind of funny, right? Like who what person ever has been like, stop paying me money, Dow? Like it usually goes the other way around. But, um, but they're like, listen, we're just not. Yeah. That's. It's crazy. What? I'm sorry. What? Like. It's always, I was, I was pretty surprised about that. So they, they were like the lead engineers. They built a V3. Uh, And the governance tension over the future of the protocol and V3 versus V4, the brand, the ownership, the distribution, all of that stuff, who owns the user, et cetera, has just like continually escalated until these guys. And my hot take is that this is much more about V3 versus V4 and like the thing they built versus the new thing. you know, pushing what they see is like a lot more risk, etc.

Mark Zeller, who has been on the show, who is, leads another Gao delegate, Avi Chan initiative and has been one of Labs Fierces Critics recently, said that it was devastating. His take was that it was devastating. And most of the revenue V3 generates a day is driven by the BGD code and their innovations he wrote. They saved Abe more than once.

They've been the most productive engineering team this ecosystem has ever had. So, yeah, all of that is not amazing. And I think this came out like three or four days ago, and there hasn't been a retraction yet. So I guess maybe this is the thing that's going to happen. So, yeah, what's your, what's your take? on this? You know, I'm a big Dow guy.

So it's very sad to me. I don't know why, but everyone thinks Dow's are stupid. I get it. Like, everyone wants a benevolent dictator. But I've always been, at least ideologically, really big fan of Daos. And we didn't have much to show for it. They all failed, except Abe. So it's very painful to see this happening.

I have a lot of respect for like, Mark and Stani and, you know, I've interacted with BGD a bit and they're absolutely integral to labs. I'm just, I'm just sad because I think this is almost like the nail in the back or the coffin of doubts. You know, with the new regulatory environment, you're seeing what's happened. Why on earth would you go and create a doubt now? So, yeah, it's very messy. I somehow found itself somewhat involved in it, which is a bit, you know, an ideal, an ideal, but I don't know, dude.

Bad luck. Bad luck. No, I, dude, I totally 100%, like I'm not the biggest fan of Dallas, but I find this to be just tragic on so many fronts, because it just feels like it's theoretically avoidable and then everyone can go back to making money and being happy. And I think like,

Kane and I talked about this early on. And then we had Mark on the show. We kind of all assumed that it would. We were like, okay, there's drama. But, you know, they're all like, calmer heads will prevail. It'll be fine. Everyone's going to be fine.

And then this past week, I feel like, wait, maybe not. Like, maybe we're not going to make it. And that just, that just sucks. Like, it just sucks. More for flip. Yeah. There's some brink, there's brinksmanship going on that, like, feels like negative EV, but people, like,

clearly there, like, there's, like, emotions going on in the background here where, where people are, like, I'm putting my foot down this time. Yeah. I mean, one, one interesting thing, there was an audit, and I don't know how accurate this, this was. I guess it came from Avey Chan, so maybe it's very accurate. My assumption is that Mark knows what he's talking about, but I don't know. That claims that Avey's been granted $8,6 million to date, granted, or that's like their fee revenue or whatever. I mean, like on one hand, it's a lot of money, but it's a big org, and it's a big org, and

presumably that's over five, six years or something like that, right? So, you know, it's not like an insane amount of money. There's crypto projects and companies that spend that like, you know, every month. So, so, you know, it's, I don't know. That to me didn't feel like a huge concern. but the fact that their core engineers left, that was a bit, I wasn't aware of that. That's kind of surprising.

So, yeah, it's, you know, unfortunately, everyone's, like, airing their dirty laundry at this point. They're just, like, going to town on each other. So, yeah. I think to me, the 86 million, like, especially over the time period that we're talking about, not like I don't have a problem with that number.

I do think it's interesting that he's framed it though that because like a lot of different people in the Ava ecosystem or get or have gotten money under different conditions and stuff. But it sounds like the labs 86 million was sort of just like a free for all. Like they, you know, like everyone else sort of had to go through these processes and do reports and stuff like that. Um, but I guess labs maybe was, uh, had to. a different set of sa. You know, in fairness, right, the founders there, they're in a privileged position. There was a period of time, I would say, where labs, you know, and I take Mark's point about, you know, BGD saving AVE or whatever.

Like, there was a point where Labs was the only thing that existed for ABE, right? Like, there was no, now, there was no anything. It was, like, standing in, like, a couple of people in a room. and they managed to grind their way through 2018, 2019, and come out the other side, and very few other people did, right? So, you know, again, I think, like, there's just stuff on all sides of this,

and everyone has a probably fairly reasonable perspective that's just been, you know, more and more fuel, thrown on fire, and it just keeps escalating. So, yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. The situation is actually quite nuanced. So out of the 86 million, Ferti Mill came from the Dow,

while the rest was from, you know, the ICO as well as, you know, Alvara, I believe Venturaas. So what I find interesting by this audit is like, it obviously highlights that, you know, AVE Labs has a ton of tokens, right? So, you know, a quarter of the token supply is sitting with the AVE team, I believe.

So Avey Labs team. So I think that is a pretty important point. And then I think the second point, point that ACI was trying to make is that a lot of the successor on V-free over the past few years was a function of BGD and ACI's work while Avar focused on multiple business lines. I think that's the crux of his argument. I think it's obviously tensions are high, but I think some of it is valid. I also don't think the $86 million number is that crazy given how important AVE is

and what Albi's been able to achieve in crypto. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. What's the, like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's the wave of magic wand, like, outcome that's, like, the best for everyone here? Not, like, ignore the Dow, ignore the drama, right? Like, if you could wave a magic wand, like, where do things land that make it perfect, happy everyone wins? Do we know?

Is there one? At this point? At this point, it doesn't seem like it. There were points in this timeline where there probably was a chance to wind this back. It feels like at this point, there's no out here. Everyone's just escalating and, you know, pushing things further. And, yeah, it doesn't seem like there's a negotiation that's on the table here. Yeah.

I think the mental model is that Labs believes now, the time to kind of act aggressively to take Ave to the next level almost. And I think that, you know, a lot of the pain points traditionally service state of Dao's and like working with a bunch of stakeholders, it's definitely, I think, creates frustration and agitation. But yeah, I mean, I'm a very big fan of Avey Dow. So I think it is a, it is a shame to see these service providers clash head. But yeah, I don't think there's a negotiation that I don't think there's a happy way out of this anymore, which is not good for Avey token holders.

I don't know if you guys saw Morpho flip to AVE FDB, which is insane. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, I think one thing that's interesting to me about this is like there is an element of like family feuding sort of thing here. like, you know, the Abedal has actually been like so close. People are friends. And also, you know, when that goes badly, it's like, can get really ugly, right? Like, you know, family, families starting to war with each other. So, you know, I think that's also part of it as well.

It's like people feel a sense of like betrayal and, you know, you were my friend. And, you know, I thought that we were aligned and all of that stuff, which, which, you know, I think. also kind of exacerbates the situation. I actually believe BGD founder was the previous CTO Dave. So it's really it's a really a complicated situation. Yeah. Guys, you're supposed to tell me there's a magic wand.

It's going to be fine. What the... Aye. Maybe AI will come in and solve the problem about it. If you have a look. Cloudbock, get in here, dude. Fix our shit. Yeah, they need more cloudbots. All right, before we continue, here's a word from sponsors that make this show possible.

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All right. Speaking of AI saving us, there was news this week or yesterday, maybe, of this new AI distillation pack on, anthropic. So it's, this is a bit of a strange idea, right? That like, you can kind of reverse engineer a model by talking to it enough. It's not that strange you could think about it. Like, if I spend enough time talking dynamic, I'd eventually be able to, like, get a good

sense of what you might do, right? And so, you know, people, people have been people. China, apparently, has been creating these bot farms, botnets to effectively create fake accounts, interact with Claude and try and reverse engineer the models. Now, there's been some anecdotal things that I think some of these are like apocryphal, some of them are like semi real where some of the distilled open source models have been coming out lately like think they're clawed or like think that they're uh you know some some uh like mid journey or whatever um and uh and so you know there's probably some truth to this i would say um i did find it funny probably the most funny thing to me was like um anthropic was alleging that it's this like deep seek minnie max moonshot um used over 24,000 fake accounts. And when I read that, I was like, only 24,000?

Like, they need to get some crypto bot pharma. Like, crypto ballpots in seriously. It's like 20,000 accounts is not that impressive. So I think, you know, there's a whole bunch of considerations here. And I know that there was another thing that happened right before we, got on, which is this kind of standoff between the U.S. government and Dario, where he's like, we're not going to let you build autonomous war bots or whatever it is that they wanted. And, you know, the interesting thing is that like these distilled models and open source models

can strip out a lot of the stuff, right, protections, whatever. Now, you know, some people are very anti-AI protections and some people are very pro having projections built in. But, you know, there's no question that like, I mean, I think I said this last week, right? I went down this rabbit hole of, you can plug Claude into a robot now. You can just get like a Raspberry Pi and plug it into it and I've got a robot that's walking around. I haven't done it yet. I've got one. of the Unitree robot dogs. So I'm hoping to find some time over the next couple weeks and plug Claudian to that.

So here's the thing, right? Like you get one of those robot dogs and they're cool. They can like stay up on their hind legs and like roll over and stuff. But I have a real dog. Like my real dog's cooler, right? And also you like to do it, you've got to hold the remote. There's like a remote control and you've got to like be doing the road control all the time. Right. So, like, after like 20 minutes of that, I'm like,

all right, I'm done doing this remote control thing, like walking around the house or like walking around the office or whatever. But if it was just like walking around itself and rolling over and like opening cabinets, that would be, that would be mad. And so, you know, my hard take is that we'll see the intersection of like LLM inference and robotics hit us like really. soon and it's going to be crazy. It's one thing you're talking to Claude or Codex or something like that, right? And it's like doing crazy shit.

Like Tay, you were saying how it like solved some thing for you, right? But like, it's still in the computer, right? Like it's in the computer and you're talking to it and, you know, you feel a sense of troll that it's trapped inside of the machine, right? If it just like grew legs and started walking around, right?

fucking weird really quickly I think so but that's what's happening yeah well and there was I had a fear so me and me and Kay were talking about this before the show but basically there was a there's a security incident last night

and it like sort of figuring out what happened required going through basically a huge code base but like the output code base right so like the bundled compiled code base which is like 500,000 lies and I was so impressed because the AI just like went to town.

Normally this takes multiple security researchers going through the lines, trying to find the patterns, you know, decompiling it, de-offie skinning it. It was just like zooming right in and did it all super, super fast. The crazy thing, though, is that when we're doing some of this, there was at one point there was like a possibility that um that like they had accidentally bundled some some keys that they shouldn't have like some authentication keys that they shouldn't have and I had this I had this moment where I was like wait if I keep telling Claude like keep going right like figure out if that's the authentication key what's the chance that he's going

and just go try to log in and like just accidentally like hack their server like I was like okay like do I have any controls on this thing um but you can imagine if then you you do that in real life bro we're all cooked we're done no it's like it's like literally like walking around like moving shit around your fridge and like oh I think I got you some new food and it's like Like, it's going to be fucking. You know, one thing that was interesting to me, I've got my, I've got my like open floor machine, which is in one location that I'm often comes remoting into it is this week, Claude CLI stopped working over SSH for me.

And I was like, huh, I wonder, I was able to get it working again, but like, I felt like they had some kind of detection that you were like not on the machine, that you're like remotely accessing the machine and forcing you to log in all the time. So they've clearly started to tighten controls on this. But I don't know how you can stop this realistically. Like this feels like an intractable problem to me. Sorry. I was just going to ask,

do you guys do the Lunar New Year's thing in China where they had the road. ball string backflips? Yes. Yeah, I didn't see that. That was insane. Yeah. If you look at last year to this year, it is insane. So yeah, dude, it's like it's over.

Just enjoy, enjoy life for the next six months. That's, yeah, I feel, I feel. No, because you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're at your house or on a vacation. You tell you a little robot at home to like check if your front door is locked. Like, pray that he fully understands you. and doesn't go like do a durability test on your front door or whatever like it's going to be parking insane yeah yeah um but yeah i think the geopolitics the geopolitics of this is super interesting

because ultimately i think that there's a lot of people who kind of assumed that this would go in a somewhat similar way as like the internet did we're like yeah there's geopolitics in it but like I don't think people expect it's it's so much worse yeah

and it's already so polarized every way like you could be concerned about a technology right and I was talking to my team about this this week right like a lot of them were born this century right like

which is crazy to me at least right and and it's like they didn't go through that transition of like these new form factors of like desktop computers and then laptops and then you know they saw mobile phones but like maybe they were like four or something when the iPhone came out or whatever and you know I think when you've been through because time is compressing right when you've been through in your lifetime multiple radical transformations of form factors of interacting with machines this is another one of those right like it's another transition to a new form factor like this is how you will interact with the machine you're not going to you know type on the keys right you're going to like just talk to it or whatever um but every analogy just falls flat

Because like a laptop to a phone and then the thing is smarter than you. Like there was no risk of like the phone's going to get too smart. Right. Like or like, you know, like laptop is going to start doing weird shit. Like they're deterministic machines. And now all of a sudden we've got this like non-deterministic bold math that's like running around doing shit. It's very different in every way. And like, it can make itself smarter.

You know, the thing that everyone who I know that's been, like, deep, deep into, like, agenda coding over the last six months has worked out that they need to do is, like, build their own software. Like, build their own harness to run the machine. Because you start doing stuff and you realize really quickly how much you are the largest impediment to this loop going faster. Which is so bearish for people. It's like I need to get myself out of this loop as quickly as possible so that this thing can just cook and I need to like just let go. And it's crazy. Yeah.

But I mean, and that's why I think people are scared is that people have a solid understanding that at some point it's just going to, it's really going to have a life of its own. And then, yeah, you're like, wait. but also China is going to have that. Also, like, Russia is going to have that. Like, also, we're going to have that. Like, is that a good thing? Even if you think the U.S. is great, like, you still are going to ask the question, right? And I think it is, it's scary.

It's scary for people to, like, to think about this stuff. I think, like, specifically the distillation conversation is, like, a bit, a little bit overblown. but I think like what the conversation points to meaning like wait are we sure that we want to have people that already have a huge amount of like power and influence and like might end up doing bad things do we really want them to also have autonomous agents that can do these things as well

that's the that's the question yeah the problem is they're going to everyone's going to it's just the way that it's going to be and so you know there's an inevitability to it I think, you know, one of the ways that this is playing out, right? Like the people who are on the bleeding edge of AI stuff, there's a lot of crypto people, you know, unfortunately for the AI people, there's a lot of crypto people,

the bleeding edge of this. And so we've already started seeing people kind of seed control of funds or like a meme coin treasury or whatever. So this AI trading bot mob star wild. which is amazing built by an open AI employee which is also crazy like how that guy's 100% getting fired

but accidentally when the trading bot actually sent this entire mean point treasury to a random X replex I guess it was like giving out money on X also Nikita is going to nukech this thing he hates bots right

so now that like it's just great like crypto and a bar that's giving out money on X, like that thing was probably good that it gave the money away so that at least it didn't get newt. But, yeah, this... I mean, that was... Or not. It gave it to a random buy on X.

You wouldn't like, go on. You're skeptical? You're skeptical, day? The guy on X was begging. He was begging. for the money and the bot just wanted to help him out because the amount that he asked for was actually a reasonable amount. What ended up happening was that the bot messed up the decimals.

And that's why I'm way too big. A little bit in there. And we have all been there. They are just like us. Is this 18 decimals or six decimals? I can't remember. It's probably six. It'll be five.

So, yeah, I think, I think, like, this is the way that people are going to interact with crypto. It's the way that they're going to interact with their computers. It's going to be the way they interact with, like, all of this stuff is going to be through agents. And agents are not deterministic. They do weird shit. It's going to be crazy. There was two interesting things on my radar when it came to, like, all the AI. situation this week.

First was like the Cetrini article. I'm sure you guys read that. It's just like very, I'll have to tell you guys a bit of a secret. I am a little bit of a AI tumor. If I could click a button to like, you know, pause or like slow things down globally,

I probably would click that button. I think everyone's going to hate me. It's every listener while parking him crazy. So that was, you would be interesting. Because I'm Talic. Yeah, me and Vitalik. Vitalik, I'm also going to

add there. You know, you guys were talking about how scary it is to have all these crazy people have power of AI and, like, you know, bombs and nukes or whatever. You know, Metallic did propose this thing, which everybody hated on the timeline, which was like anti-data center populism. It was like nimbie, but for data centers. I thought it was quite an interesting visceral reaction. I will say one thing, which, you know, I get the general sentiment on CT, which is, you know, Oftentimes, V is right after the fact. You know, when it came to all of the, like, politics stuff, you know, everyone before he was, like, being very foolish when he was saying,

we have to kind of not make political bets in crypto. So that in hindsight was very correct. I am very tired of winning, please. We need to stop winning still much. I also think, like, you know, the guy is, like, quite post-economics. So, you know, I don't necessarily feel. I think a lot of us are like bag aligned, right? Like, we all want to make a bunch of money to not be in the permanent underclass and stuff.

So, like, you know, AI might meaningfully disrupt the world. But as long as we all did the anthropic series, Cajillion, right? Like, we're fine. So I don't know. I think that I thought it was quite interesting to see just this insanity in what's happened in one week. Right? We have Cedrinis saying the economy might literally go to zero. We had, you know, today, Claude and Phropics said they're being vampire attacked by the Chinese.

And meanwhile, Vitalik is saying, let's riot against the data centers. It's kind of a ridiculous timeline. It's insane. It really is. It really is. But I think, I think it's, you know, the thing that I've been saying to my team for, I did like a two-hour symposium. last week, right? Where I was like, guys, you need to understand the arc of this, right?

This has been going on for 30 years. It's been going on for 60 years. But for 30 years, we've been like, holy shit, these things are going to fucking kill us. And it's just been a slow burn. And like the burn just started to get faster and lost like a few months. But like when you're in the middle of a complagration, like it should just starts getting crazy. People are running around everywhere. right so that it feels like that is genuinely like the acceleration of the angst and like you know smart people being like

what is my purpose and you know all of the stuff that's going on like um it's going to get worse before it gets better uh is is my hot take like i'm i'm not i'm not i'm not a i'm not a i doomer um although like you know i I think that there's like a 30% chance of a fast takeoff. And once there's a 30% chance of a fast takeoff, like, you know, fast takeoff is, is this idea that, uh,

the machines start to be able to improve themselves. And there's like a recursive self-improvement loop and it just goes, like, and a fast takeoff, you know, there, it can be 10 minutes. Like,

literally it gets to a level of how smart it needs to be to improve. itself and then does one loop and gets 1% faster and the loop gets 1% tighter and then 10 minutes later it can control time. Have you like 2027, the fault piece that was circulating like last year? Yeah, I just keep thinking about it. Have you heard of it, Taylor? Yeah. I mean, okay, so my, I'm a weird one because like I am partially.

a doomer. Like, I think that we're all, like, this is going to end terribly or not end terribly. It's going to be terrible. That's all right. Insane. Well, I love that. Okay. But I don't think that there's any reasonable way to, like, stop it or meaningfully slow it down. And so given that, I think the best approach that we can take is for, the people that are not insane and like sprinting brainlessly and accelerating

you know like the the Dumers basically I think the best place for them to focus their energy is on basically sitting there not trying to stop it but trying to contain it and react to the stuff and like maybe foresee some of the bad things and get ahead of those

rather than like these two divided sides where some people are like trying to stop the entire thing and the other people are just increasingly running faster without any regard. So that's my, I definitely don't, I'm not a AI should, I'm not a person just going to say like AI should like hit that recursive loop and go to the moon right now. Like I don't think that. But if it does, like I would rather have people. Yeah.

Well, I think like it's out of our hands. This is the problem, right? We have no ability in the time frame that AI is going to exceed our intelligence, whether you believe that that's one year, five years, 50 years, right? We have no mechanism by which to reel them in. Once they reel themselves out, we, like, it's out of our hands, right? And so there is a sense that I have at least of like, they'll be aligned or they won't be. And we have no way to reason about what a super intelligent machine may or may not do.

And so we just have to hope because we're not doing shit about that, unfortunately. like people have these weird kind of silly like narrow views of like you know it's like a magical thinking of like oh the super intelligent machine that's a thousand times small i'll be able to reason with it or like i'll be able to like cajole it into doing things or it might love me or like what like no bro like none of those things it has like it just is not a thing none of that is a real thing and that is a real thing you won't be able to talk to it. Like, you'll be lucky if it talks to you, right? And so it's just, it's like, and that's almost inevitable. Like, it is almost inevitable that there will be beings wandering around that are a thousand times smarter than the smartest person who ever lived. And we just have to fucking hope that that's okay for.

Yeah, it's like the ultimate malloc case, right? So, you know, in an ideal scenario, everyone just like pauses and, puts a bunch of work into like alignment right like aligning these ayes but you know capitalism plays a role and everyone's just trying to be him everyone's trying to build the i make the most money and you know if it if it doesn't work out like oh well you know it's over so i do think it's a bit there's a bit of this irony where the the there's like this feedback loop of like human greed, which prevents us from pausing to try and

align the AIs that may cause us a lot of problems down the road. We'll see what happens. I'm also kind of like, I've just stopped thinking about it. It's not up to me. I don't get to give Vint Sam Alkman to like

align the AI. So I just like try and build a real time blockchain. So they have a fast chain for a naked few bathtub. They're letting you live inside the blockchain. They'll be like, we like this blockchain.

You can wear that. It's not. I can sit in there. They'll have me in my room because I built their infrastructure. They're like, I own what. We like infrastructure. You're a good guy.

You're a good fit. We're going to look. So, so speaking of good kids, Zach XPT is doing an expose tomorrow. So on Monday, he teased that on Thursday, which I guess is in like 12 hours or something,

that he's going to release a report alleging prolonged insider trading at one of crypto's most profitable businesses, but with no names. And some people were like, well, a lot of crypto projects are going to be relieved to hear the words profitable businesses. So it really narrows it down, though. There's not that many of them. And so people were like immediately pump, hype, meteor, and weirdly, and weirdly also, like, a lot of those projects sold off as well. With the idea that, you know, if there's going to be some kind of insider trading scandal there, Polymarket, as they love to do, as they've gotten very good at doing, immediately have market up to let people bet on who it was going to be. They didn't add themselves, though.

No, they didn't add themselves. Maybe they just will complicate. I feel like you... No, I found out the polymarket is not profitable. Did you know this? they only heard the switch on like a month ago or something don't touch fees bro how are they going to be proffin all it's the problem

I think of the problem like probably going on before yeah no yeah and then well and then today call she released an article

saying that they they found two insider traders and they have the sole investigations unit I was dead how she laughing I was like Front trans, Zach, Hexsabiti.

They will just find a way to get in the midst of whatever fuckery is going on and be like, we are, we will do more fuckery. You thought there was fuckery going on or we will hold down on that every time, every time. Someone does something dumb in Kashi's like, we can be dumber than that, watch. And then like 20 minutes later, they're like, we've done it. The right girl, we cheat you this. So do you guys think it's going to be on-train or off-train? I mean, it's weird to say profitable business.

Like, I feel like, I feel like Zach is not an idiot, right? Like, he wouldn't say Jupiter if he met a business, I don't think. Like, you wouldn't say uniswap. Maybe not, though. Maybe it was just an off-the-cuff thing. But, like, business to me means, like, C-Fi. My assumption is it's a C-Fi thing. Maybe that's C-Fi.

I don't know. I hope it's C-Fi. We really can't, like, you know, I don't think it's going to be hyper-liquid. I think hypes too like just too goated but yeah

if it was hype we'd be like cooked it would be such funny if it was ABE oh my god what is

what is inside you're training Abe though like that's what I don't I don't I don't know it would be funny if it was

I don't know what it would be in their training but it would just be funny so we've got it yeah we got the chart up here

so who's winning right now? All right, where are we at? Okay. Well, so it flip, because Meenaura, like, a few hours ago, I guess, released, like, a big article saying that they've, like, you know, that when they, it's been like...

They never have been a big blow up. So they're like, we take this stuff really seriously and we're no longer doing the things that we used to do because they used to be really in bed with, like, all the tokens. We no longer commit insider... We've learned our ways It's not like we're doing Basically

They were like we're just focusing on being Permissionless and we don't even talk to the deployers anymore Which is like I mean it was really bad I don't know how true that is but they did release An article which shot Meteora down it was like God what 50%

For a minute there Now it's down to early a few percent Yeah Yeah Yeah I'm also just shocked at how big this market is. I don't think Zach expected this. I think, well, okay, so I have some insider information. Typically, when Zach teases something, it's not because

he's actually trying to build the anticipation for it. Historically, it's because, like, he has an investigation and it's going to take, like, it's already sort of done, right? He's already done it. He already has the answer. Right? But then you have to, like, write it up and present it and make the graphics and like do it in a way that the general public can understand which is sometimes taking like a huge amount of disparate information and packaging it up typically or historically I won't say typically historically when Zach teases things it's to like force him it's like to give himself a deadline he has no boss right so it's like sort of like a self which is how I take his post I was like oh like he's got he he's got a good one but he's

He needs to murder up, so we'll see in a few days. And then it blew the fuck up. This is wild. There is something. The volume's like 20 mil on following market. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. It was just like that.

It would be funny, though, if there was insider trading by the project that knows that it's them. That would be pretty wild. I feel like at that point is you're like Yeah, yeah, someone explained me that the reason

so when Meteora like started to uptick the reason why people thought it was meteor and then it sort of shot up was because people were basically like well whoever it is is going to insider trade it and therefore if it's like therefore it is meteor because obviously

meteor people like very insider traded it. recursive recursive thing. And I was like, oh, is that what's that? Oh, I didn't really like, I mean, it makes sense, but I don't think that that's happening. Um, okay. I think we got, uh, we got time for one more story. Um, so Ethereum has released a straw map of acceleration or wish costing. I don't know what, I don't know what hell.

What is this about? I need someone else. I love Ethereum to bits, but like, who the hell came up with the name Straw Map? Like, it sounds like you're purposely like a straw manning, the idea of a roadmap. And like, who picks the name Straw Map? That makes no sense. Outside of that, it sounds like 1 million TPSL2s, 10K TPSL1, Super Bowl-ish. You know, the future's never been brighter.

But, yeah, I don't think the name is great. So, classic. Yeah, classic a theory. I mean, my Star Man map. It doesn't make sense. Sorry, go ahead. Just go ahead.

It doesn't quite make sense. Is it, like, is it supposed to be fake? Like, I don't get, like, I really don't bet it. So, so, but the interesting thing. No, no, it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be, like, you know, like a straw man argument where you, like, battle it up. Well, I, I, I, I, yeah, I get it. It's just, like, Like, they won't...

For a nap. Like, a... Yeah. That's not how... I think that's... I get it. It's just to make its nonsense. I do like...

I agree with Namik here. So, something we haven't talked about, and I think we should... We should get someone on. The thing... We have talked about Ethereum and... Ethereum acceleration. And the tech getting better

and... efficiency and all of that stuff, which when you then look out at the two, three year roadmap of like ZK EVM and like all of this stuff, it starts to feel a lot more real that it would have two years ago. And, you know, two years from now, you have like magical moon math Ethereum that can do like a trillion transactions a second and gas is super cheap. genuinely it is hard for me to imagine in a world where that exists, how there is any other blockchain that is going to be able to compete with that. Like the network effects and if this actually works and they're able to pull it off, it feels like it's going to one shot a lot of things. I mean, like, Namik, obviously you've got some takes on this, I hope, right?

Yeah, just to clarify, you're talking about the theory of roadmap or? Yeah, I'm talking about. about the Ethereum roadmap. Like, like, there was a period of time where it was like, Ethereum will eventually do things.

We don't really have a timeline, but like, you know, in the future, it will be different. And then it started to really, like, actually,

like, do some stuff to the point now where, like, the technical roadmap it feels much more credible in a, you know, I don't know if we're all, you know,

get turned into paper flips by AI before they get ZKUBM. But like, it feels like it's close now. And when I wouldn't have, bet on that a year ago. Yeah, I mean, I think like the EF is just like in the best place has been in so long. And I'm like unbelievably excited. I think why did they fire their best guy? Yeah, that's that was a bit problematic. But he didn't go to Tempo. So hey, we call it that much.

No, but all all his jokes aside, I don't know. It's just, I think that the problem that Ethereum has had for the longest time is it's had a big marketing issue. It's not a bit of big comms issue. You know, they made some mistakes, right? Like, Fatalcad has like L2 roadmap article where he was like, you know, L2s as they are today are like kind of stupid. Like they are not getting what they're supposed to get done. We're making a lot of big moves of Ethereum L1.

I think we did not have someone similar to like Mert almost, right, who can come and champion the roadmap, the technical ambitions of the chain and the larger community. but I don't think like Ethereum has been in such a strong place in a very long time and I am consistently very grateful for Ethereum leadership. You know, I think there's very good people who are here for the same reasons I'm here and I'm just genuinely quite excited. And, you know, they bring a lot of young blood.

So I know a lot of people who have joined Ethereum that are like, you know, in their 20s helping out the marketing division, Bingy, Sophia. It's really awesome to see. And I feel like there's this great resurgence. And there's a new blood into Ethereum. The old guard is being nuked. The old Ethereum guard is being nuked. And a new generation is emerging.

So I'm really excited. Yeah. I'm quite keen. I also think it's complimentary of Meg Eve. So I'm not worried. But we might have. launch Terry for something given this new straw man roadmap who knows all right um i think we can wrap it up there um if you guys are are happy with that um thank you very much

for thanks for having me yes that was very fun um and yeah hopefully we'll get you back on the show uh in the near future uh that's it for this episode of uneasy money thank you for tuning in if you like the episode follow us on Unchained Feed on X YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.