Unchained - Uneasy Money: Why the Broken Pre-IPO Secondary Markets Won't Be Fixed Anytime Soon

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Anthropic is voiding secondary market trades. Who gets hurt — WhatsApp scammers, Forge buyers, or the founders? Plus: why continuous synthetic pricing is coming for every pre-IPO company. Thank you to our sponsors!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Multichain Advisors: Get help navigating TGEs, go‑to‑market, BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more at multichainadv.com. Coinbase: Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan at coinbase.com/unchained. Anthropic and OpenAI are moving to void secondary market trades — and Kain, Tay, and Luca think that's only going to work if they're serious about it, which means a lawsuit is probably coming. This week on Uneasy Money they trace the full anatomy of the pre-IPO SPV fraud wave, explain why synthetic perpetual markets will eventually price every in-demand private company continuously whether founders want it or not, and dig into the latest AI hacks. Tay breaks down how attackers are now using local on-device Gemini APIs to construct malware on the fly, and Kain shares the story of an agent that caught a slow-drain attack in 90 seconds that humans missed for 12 hours. Luca explains why Circle's Arc token is a brilliant move for Circle equity holders even if it changes nothing for ETH or Solana. Plus: the Aave/Kelp court update and why the Gerstein lawyers' argument that every victim needs to show up in court is fundamentally incompatible with how onchain recovery works. Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everyone. I'm Kane-Wark and welcome to Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on-chain. Before we begin, here is a word from sponsors that make this show possible. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus million 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. Hey everyone, I'm here with my co-host Taylor Monaghan security expert and Lucanette's CEO of Pogu Penguins. Welcome, guys. How are we doing? Hey, hey. All right. So our first segment is one that is a slightly different angle on the AI floor. So Anthropic and Open AI are now saying that they are going to void the trades that have been happening on secondary markets. So for context, for the last year, there's been this raging, roaring trade of people putting Anthropic and Open AI as well as other free IPO share. but Anthropics has been one of the big ones, right? And they basically put the shares into a special purpose vehicle or some other entity,

and then they slice them up and then they sell them, and then the people that buy those put them into a different SBV, and then they slice them up, and then they sell them, et cetera, and so on. SBVs all the way down. Now, the interesting thing about this is I've been, as I'm sure, everyone in the world has been via email or WhatsApp or whatever offered these opportunities you might say many times and while I am retarded I have a sense sometimes when something is a little bit off and the the reason why this trade felt not great to me is I kind of had this sense that's

like they're selling you something that will only go up. Right. Like, now, of course, there's risks with any, with any company. But like, these pre-IPO businesses are not like the olden days pre-IPO business. They're like post-IPO businesses that are almost too big to fail in some cases. Like, Anthropic, like, has gone in a fight with the government. That's not how pre-IPO things used to work back. in the olden times. So, so like we have this weird situation where many companies are staying private

for much longer than they used to. People want exposure to it and people are satisfying the market. Like there's a bunch of people who want to own Anthropic and people are like, ah, now the funny thing is you can satisfy the market for something in many different ways. You can satisfy it by actually giving the people what they want, but it's far easier and arguably more, more, profitable to satisfy the market by selling them rocks with anthropic written on it, which is, I think I have to imagine what is driving some of this, right, that it's gotten so frothy and there's now like reputational risk associated with the fact that like everyone's grandmother is buying anthropic stock, i.e. rocks with anthropic written on it.

And there's just like so much fraud going on, so many scams, so many things that they have to actually, you know, drop the hammer on this and say like, we are going to avoid these, like stop doing it. Right. So, yeah. I mean, here we are. Yeah. And I think part of it is, I mean, as you said, right, the market is demanding this. Like, people want this stock. Like, there's been some crazy people out there who.

have been going to great lengths to try to get it, right? And so, of course, someone's going to fill that gap. The issue is that, like, it creates, like, in this situation, it's created a whole spectrum of different sort of vehicles, some of which are 100% just outright fraud, like outright scams. Like, yeah. The WhatsApp ones. I mean, Luca, you, you are. are somewhat of an officiant auto great market transactions.

What's your take on this? How do you, if someone turned up and they're like, I have the handle, I don't know, E-Man to sell this movie studio that has like the He-Man movie.

How do you like separate the grifters from people actually doing a thing? So I had a situation like this happened to me. When we first bought Pudgy, we kind of consolidated the cap table accordingly to the $2.5 million purchase price. There was basically four co-founders, as people know us today, but there's actually a fifth. The fifth one, after our seed round, went and started procuring sales for the equity at the valuation that we had recently got.

And he was selling it to like a really predatory group that was like known for being an infamous obviously anti-founder, anti-pro, you know, just dumpers, right? And when I had caught wind of this, he was trying to... Multi-clone, isn't it? I know. I'm jerky. I'm jerky. I'm totally jerking.

He was trying to do this behind my back. And when I had found out, I went pretty ballistic, obviously, as you could imagine. And the flaw was actually in my operating agreement. My operating agreement had it allowed such a transaction to occur. And my question... to Anthropic and to everybody here is, you know, did Anthropics operating agreement allow for such sales? Now, typically they don't.

Typically, it needs board approval at day. If somebody in Igloo tries to sell Igloo shares, it has to get my explicit approval. And if it doesn't, you cannot sell any Igloo shares. And I've had people come to me, you know, I've had other people throughout the years, like try and get, you know, 100 grand of liquidity or 200 grand of liquidity. And I nix it every time. Like you're either here with a ride or you're not, and you're going to get liquidity when everybody else gets liquidity. Then a couple of emperor penguins show up at their door and rough them up a little bit, right?

Rough them up. So it really comes down to this. It comes down to is it allowed in the operating agreement? And if it is, then I think anthropic. But I think even let's assume for a second, right, that it's like totally allowed or even encouraged, right? it seems like something is broken in this market. Like, you know, there's so much demand and not enough supply to satisfy that demand that people are inventing demand.

And you could argue that they might be, like, they might have to stop it even if they wanted it to happen because they have no control over it. And therefore, they're stuck in this weird situation where like the only way to actually legally easily satisfy. the market would be to IPO, which they refuse to do. Yeah. And the interesting conundrum here is if it is allowed, like you going and saying this like Anthropic, I think, will be ultimately liable. You can't backtrack something that was allowed. I think, but to your point, Ame, there is an opportunity here for an entrepreneur somewhere because that whole secondary SBV model is broken. And I can tell you, even if I do allow it, like, you do want to be able to KYC or shareholders. Like, last thing you want is North Korea buying $500 million, you know, even if it is

or like you don't want that. Right. And so it's an interesting situation. My take on it is there definitely was a lot of fraud going on. I mean, WhatsApp groups. I'm never, I'm never going to be put into a group or make an investment based on a group chat if I don't know explicitly know the people and trust the integrity of the person on the other side so that's just like me uh the handles business to the you know a metaphor or to the

analogy that you were making is a very much a trust business so usually have some sort of intermediary like somebody it's very like almost crypto cypherpunk some other guy with a really good handle yeah you you're like all right this guy is legit right yeah well and you ask girl right yeah like it's a that everyone's a scammer in a certain sense. And so you escrow it because, because ultimately you're going to do the transaction pretty quickly, right? Like, there's going to be an exchange of, of two things in a fairly quick manner. The issue with some of the vehicles for these sort of like pre-IPO stock situations, right, is it's a lot of times it's very unclear what the actual transaction is, right like you're buying future stock you're buying future access right like a lot of times the secondary

markets the original investor is going to uh like receive their allotment right down the line they will yeah and then there's like a secondary yeah and so that's certainly how the the interesting part the interesting part about this is not necessarily the group chats that got targeted. It's like you have secondary marketplaces. Like I've used force. I've had estimates on forged. The fact that they're nullifying investments from like forged is very concerning, right? Because like in the spirit of what I said a second ago, which is like there's an opportunity for an entrepreneur.

Actually, entrepreneurs have caught this opportunity and secondary markets do need to be fixed. Platforms like forged, which do, you know, billions of dollars in volume. like are supposed to be the safe place for secondary transactions. If they nullify those, it's a huge shakeup just in general. Like it's going to shake a lot of people up in a lot of different sectors and have a lot of big ramifications because there's no way that you're buying something as credible as forged, for example, you know, buying it. Like, I would go and do, I mean, I would call my lawyer immediately if for some reason

forged and fight this and just conceded and be like, dude, I got a couple hundred of grand in forge secondary transactions, like how legitimate is this and who is liable? It's going to have some really nasty rate. It will be chaotic, right? Also, but the problem is, right, my, my read on this is like, okay, you have a legitimate place, right, that that is offering, you know, KYC, it all, like all about board, legal documents, like it's a, it's a, you know, proper marketplace, right? Two things can happen. One, someone can go onto that marketplace by the, them buy shares and then rewrap them and sell them in WhatsApp right that's the first thing and be like no no no I bought these on the like legitimate place that you know and and you're not really vetting the

buyers uh no offense uh Luca um but you're not really like you know scrutinizing the buyers of these shares like anyone can come on and go through the process and buy shares and then turn around and flip them on secondary right um or tertiary or whatever Yeah. And so, so I think that's the first thing. But then I think that there's like just a philosophical issue of like as soon as there is even one legitimate place means this could be real. And someone's grandmother gets defrauded because she's like, no, no, like you can do this. It's allowed. Like there's places where, you know, and it's like, no, no, go to the real place. And she's like, yeah, but this is in Facebook. I love Facebook. Yeah.

And it becomes plausible, right? Because you hear, like, it becomes like sort of this legitimate thing that you can, you can do this. You can buy them on. You can do it. Yeah, everyone's doing it. Everybody's doing it. Like, I've got a friend of mine who has put so much money in these secondary markets.

I actually should probably do a check on him, make sure he's okay. But like every week, every week he's like, hey, I'm doing this one. He's sending me emails. I'm doing this one. And like, he is very well connected. And I'm sure every single person that he was dealing with was like a legit whole. or like direct shares or whatever, right? That was not the issue.

The issue is that like someone can come and just nuke you from space. Now, let's talk about the crypto aspect because of course crypto is involved in this. We've found a way, crypto finds away. So there are, I think, a couple of marketplaces, but the main one is pre-stocked on Solana. Now, my understanding is pre-stocks was already a bit insane because it was already trading at like a 3x multiple, which again just speaks to the like satisfied demand part of this equation, right? But my understanding is that prestocks was trading at some crazy multiple of the actual anthropic raise that happened. It was like 800 bill and the implied market cap of

prestocks was 1.4 trillion or something. And now it's come back to the actual value of like 800 billion. So, yeah, I mean, you know, again, like, because you'd be probably best to explain this, but the purification of non-liquid, secondary, like when hyperliquid has enthropic

garks, for example, on a max long to the tits, right? Like, is there a bucket somewhere and a piece of paperwork in the back somewhere of like, yeah. No. So this is the best part, right? Yeah, what's that work? So synthetics, and one of, the original arguments against synthetics, right?

Was there were a lot of like OG people that were like, ah, this is like paper, gold all over again, right? So there are conspiracy theories that like there is and there's probably not even conspiracy theory. Probably like it's fair to say. There is something like 10x more paper gold in the world than actual gold, right? You can go and buy gold on a marketplace and it's like not real gold. And Matt Levine talks about this. Like every once in while, they go into one of the storage facilities and try to like pull out some tungsten and it's a bunch of rocks.

Right. So this is like a known issue, right? The interesting thing about a synthetic asset that is not tied, there's not an RWA, right? There's two different components here, right? If I say to you, I'm going to sell you an RWA, a real world asset that's been tokenized. Let's say gold. Tether has like billions of dollars of gold in a Swiss vault that they have tokenized, right? And they're like, no, no, no, we're tether. We're super rich. You can trust us. We've got the gold. Like, we've got the gold and we will give you the gold.

The same way that they have the dollars in theory. And no, they do now. I'm joking. But like, Tether has a pile of dollars, a pile of gold, a pile of pig bellies or whatever the fuck else they're tokenizing, right? They're saying this is a legitimate, real thing. You can't necessarily blame the gold, right? So you can't redeem it. I'm sure that they've got, in the case of Tether, they have people that have redemption rights.

They can redeem for dollars, right, and get dollars in. And now that's why the market stays liquid. But this is a purely synthetic asset, which is a completely different thing. You're basically saying there are two counterparties that are making a bet with each other about a price that is exogenous to the system that they're using, right, about what the value of this thing is. It's a pure like bet either with with a direct counterparty or a bucket shop, right? And a bucket shop is like an olden times thing from like the 1900s where you could go to trade shares because you know, you wouldn't really get access to like a, you

brokerage account back then, right? So you'd go to this place and it was basically like a betting shop, but you were betting against the house. You would write a slip of paper or whatever. So that was, again, a synthetic asset. You weren't actually trading the underlying shares. You weren't buying like the Mississippi Railroad shares. You were literally placing a synthetic bet on whether Mississippi Railroad stock would go up or down that day. Interesting. And so it turns that like it's the like, it's an oracle. An oracle problem.

So I get the Oracle part, but who determines the float? Like, if there's on hyperliquid, is it, is it, you know, does Anthropic have 10, you know, 10 million of these bets existing and then whoever is, you know. Andthropic is not involved. Like, obviously, anthropic is not involved, right? So, so imagine you and I, right, have a bet about the price of anthropic shares, right? I think it's going to be, let's say, for sake of argument, $900 billion, right? So I buy, and you know, you can think about this in polymarket terms of all, right?

Like, I buy a bunch of yes shares of $900 billion. And you're like, you idiot, it's not going to be $900 billion. A.I. scam. It's going to zero. And so you sell the no shares, right, to me. Like, or you're buying no shares from me, right? And so we create this synthetic market where you and I are, expressing a bet about what we think the price will be. But then Tay comes along and goes,

I think it's going to be $2 trillion. Sorry, Tay, you're the idiot in this, or maybe not. Maybe you're the smart person. I don't know. Depends on how it goes, right? And you're like, I don't care what the price is. I don't give a fuck what the price is. I just want as much anthropic as you will sell me and just bids through the book, every single person who's like, it won't go over $1.1 trillion. Tate's like, you're an idiot. Then the next person who's like, it won't go over $1.2 trillion. Tay's like, you're an idiot. It's going to 10 trillion or whatever the hell she thinks, right? And she just keeps buying against every counterparty. And then eventually the price settles

at whatever the last person was willing to sell her the other side of this trade, right? Like call it 10 trillion, right? So Tay's now put like $10 million into this like crazy trade where she's bid anthropic up to 10 trillion. And now we wait. And we wait to see what happens when the IPO happens. And when the IPO happens, the trade will effectively set. right and that's not settled but it's not settled now and it's not even in the future it's not settled with real shares right it's you're just settling the bets it is i think polymarket polymarket is a good example for these like this is polymarketing yeah this is polymark like the synthetic thing is polymarket it's just the difference between polymarket uh is it's two separate

binary bets that are actually detached like it's only arbitrage that keeps them in in in in alignment, but for a purely synthetic per market, it's just who's willing to pay the funding to bid the thing above the Oracle price because there's an Oracle price. So they will kind of anchor it to the lost raise or whatever, but it floats outside of that, right? And the higher it is, you know, or it's based on the skew. So the old synthetic style was like, the more you bid the price up, the more skewed, the market is. This was the Bacchap model, right, where like the market is taking the other side, right? But the market is like, well, you're probably wrong, like over time, right? You're

probably wrong. And you're going to pay 300% funding to bid this thing above, you know, if it's so skewed, I, you know, you've got $10 million bet on one side and there's only a hundred grand on the other side of the trade. You're going to pay a massive amount of funding to the people on the outside. And so there's a bunch of different mechanics that you can use to keep these markets. And on the PIRP side, the story goes that Arthur is the pioneer of these perpetual markets. Is that correct, Jane, or do I? That is correct. Yeah, yeah. The idea of creating the genius of perps, right, was that you could take a spot price and you could create a continuous market that didn't need to be settled, right? And the settlement was that,

this funding mechanism effectively. It's continuous settlement via paying funding from one side to the other of the market. So in classical futures, it settles once a month or once every three months or once a year or whatever, right? So we make this bad. By the way, a lot of futures markets settle in the actual thing. Like you hear horror stories every once in a while of people who get into futures and make a killing and then accidentally get settled on a line.

and they have to like oil yeah yeah they have to set the delivery of like literal oil or like eggs or like whatever whatever market they were they were on yeah so they're their cash settled and and uh and you know things that settle in the asset down the long asset themselves yeah but uh but most um most of the time you know uh those those stories are like apocryful stories right like they're they're not necessarily like But there are tons of the market that attaches. Yeah. But it highlights, that's where. So if you get the concept of like futures in that, right, you're betting basically on like the future price or something, it's going to settle. Right. And you're going to have the eggs, the price of eggs, the best, right? Everything's going to settle out.

Porkbellies are the best because it's like a ridiculous thing. Like what am I doing with pork? Like, there's even, I don't even get it. Fork bellies. It's quite fun. But with perps, it's just forever. it's just but it's conceptually it's very similar um and again it becomes this fully synthetic market right where you you just you're just betting right and it's and it's just becomes this market in itself um

and that's it's just like another layer of of stuff that adds complexity i think especially to situations like anthropic and these pre-IPO stocks right because you you you you you you you You have all these different sort of like deal terms, let's call them, and markets springing up. Again, it's not super clear which vehicle is which in a lot of situations. You have on chain stuff, off chain stuff. You have stuff that's just never going to settle, right? Like if you have perps for these, like you're not, you're not settling in the real. It's all synthetic.

A genius of perps, right, is that you can always exit because it's super liquid. Yeah. That's why that was such an amazing innovation, right? Is that like you don't need a like 30 day settlement period because, you know, it's so liquid that you can always get in and out of the. Right. But like pre-stocks, right? There's a lot of pre-stocks. Those have that there's an actual SPV there with actual stocks somewhere.

Yes. No, no, no, I don't believe so. I don't believe so. I think pre-stocks if I actually maybe I'm wrong here. freestocks might be the one because there's there's one big one that is purely synthetic and one big one. It looks like prestocks

is the SPV wrapped one. Okay, so they and that's where and this is what I mean by the complexity and like it's just right for fraud. Ventuals, sorry, ventuals is the purely synthetic one. So there's ventuals. There's also

there's another Salonah one that's been around for a while that's also synthetic. I can't remember. Okay. So do you think that anthropic, I mean, do you think that at the end of the day, this is going to, let's say, like, come to fruition where anthropic or open AI or whatever, they're going to have to like deal with this? Or are they just trying to curb the frothiness and make sure that they don't end up on the, with the short end of the stick, right? Because that's where we're heading.

Markets are retarded, right? So like if you if they aren't serious about this and people don't believe them, like if there aren't like, you know, someone's going to sue them like to your point. Look at it. Like someone's going to be like, yeah, but you didn't say I couldn't do this, whatever. There's going to be some lawsuit, you know, from like some legitimate person who bought shares who then put them in an SVV that now has counterparties that are, you know, someone's going like there's going to be a lawsuit for sure. And then it'll be interesting to see in Delaware or wherever, you know, for open. it's even weirder right because open AI let's not forget was a charity and then conversion it like you know so there's there's there's other issues there but like anthropic was like there's people who are shareholders who've sold them now have

counterparties that they can't deliver the shares to or you know it's not clear like the other the other interesting thing about this is and this happens in crypto all the time like people buy you know, let's say Athena. This was happening pre pre-TG on Athena and it happens on a lot of pre-TG high projects. People are trying to offload secondary. And the same thing happens.

And oftentimes the founder has to like reach out because, you know, there's like seven investors, right? It's not like anthropic with it. It's like a million people. It's like seven dudes. And you're like, well, which one of you is selling because, you know, someone approached me and said someone selling, you know, 10% of the equity, right? And so it's not too hard to triangulate and be like, stop doing that.

You know, well, and typically, I guess as you sort of like edge closer to IPO, typically people are not super opposed to these sort of like quiet secondary. There's a reason. Secondaries are fine. Secondaries are fine. But you want the team. Yeah. Because this is the thing, right?

It's like if you have investors who've been along with the right, for that long, they're getting, let's say, antsy for liquidity, like really antsy for whatever reason, right? And if there's other people in the market who really, really, really want to get in, that's not the worst thing for like the founder for the company, right? If you have someone that's like really needs to accept for whatever reason and you have people that want in, it's not the worst thing in the world. The issue is that we've gone so far past this, right? Like this, we're talking about like full pre-IPO markets, right, with fraud, with chats, with tokenized on change it, with SPVs. Like, there's so much going on. It's just like, it's a real mouse. And so. So I think

this is the interesting thing to me and the argument for why, you know, again, back in the day, when synthetics first started doing this, were the first ones on Ethereum to create a purely synthetic gold, purely synthetic Bitcoin that just traded, it had a mechanism to keep it in line with the price of Bitcoin, but that was it, right? And the nice thing about it is you didn't need to trust an external party. You had to trust the Oracle that the Bitcoin price was right. But the cool thing about that is, you know, you could look at the Oracle price and the actual price and see historically that it had been quite accurate and go, well, I don't need to worry about this that much. What you didn't need to worry about was that is there the Bitcoin?

coin somewhere and is it safe? Like what happens if it's hacked or whatever? So, you know, this is just the advantage of a synthetic asset. And then when you add synthetic perps on top of it, you know, when you have leverage, it, in a situation like this, it is outside of the scope of anyone to tell you that you can't do it. If you want exposure to a thing, you know, if the market's liquid enough, it will just be a better place to trade these assets. So, you know, there's a...

Again, going back to, like, what's the ideal outcome, right? Having... So there's some people that really just, like, want in on the price, and they just want to bet on the price. Those are not necessarily, especially for pre-IPO companies, not necessarily your best investors. As crypto has learned over the years, right? Like, the people that just want liquidity, they want to make their quick bets, they want, yeah, they want to make a bunch of money. They're not necessarily your best investors. And so having a market for those people is not inherently bad, in my opinion.

Well, I would like, I think it's really good. There is a down. There's a potential downside. So one is you remove the adverse selection of people trying to buy tokenized shares. The real, yeah. The real share. It's like going and bothering people and saying like some of your shares or whatever. And, you know, funnily enough, this happens, right?

Like when Polymarket announced their raise, you know, I'm a known investor in the seed round. And I got like 100,000. emails, most of them, I'm assuming from scammers, being like, we want to buy your shares. And, and, you know, so I had to put like a filter on my email to just like filter out anything from Polymarket for a while because it was crazy. It was like multiple emails a day from people being like, I've got buyers. Like, please sell us the shares. But the thing that just from a market structural perspective, right, the thing that would be

concerning to an anthropic or an. Open AI is the one of the reasons, arguably, that they, they don't want continuous pricing of the asset is it is far better to raise money at $100 million, then raise money at $500, then raise money at a billion, then raise money at $10 billion. And it's a number only goes up. Your investors are always happy. No one's calling you being like, why did the price go down? unless you do a down round, you never have a concern, right?

This is one of the biggest issues with crypto is like early stage companies have a continuous trading price that anyone can point to it be like, you're a bad guy. You're bad and the company's bad and everything about you is bad and I hate you. And like, why did you do this to me? Right. And if you don't have that, it's not a distraction, right? But even more so, your employees also don't have. have a scoreboard, right? Like once every six months, they just get like five percent richer or 10

percent or 50 percent or 100 percent richer, right? And so they're always happy. But if we have a world where Anthropic has a continuous perpetual price that is believed to be the canonical price by the market, right? They raise at 800 billion, let's say. Here's a hypothetical. They raised it 800 billion. And then they get in another fight with Trump, right? And the synthetic market is like doing whatever. Let's call it like a billion dollars a day, $2 billion, $5 billion a day in volume, right? And when they get into fight with Trump,

the price goes down from $800 billion down to $400 billion. And all employees are like, what start, don't do whatever I'm kidding, poorer. Like that is a genuine problem that they would have to deal with because if people start to believe that these the pathetic perp markets are the price of Anthropic, then you don't have this slow ratchet up of pricing. Now you've got a continuous price that you have no control over.

And unfortunately, for Anthropic and anyone else who is pre-IPO, you have zero ability to solve this. This is going to happen. It is inevitable. I'm so confident this is the way the market goes. Hyperliquid will do it or some hyperliquid market. And we will just have continuous pricing on everything. That is the world.

Well, hold on. Not on everything, though. on everything that is in demand enough, right? Like, that's a thing. You might have been liquid continuous pricing. Yeah. But you, like, it might not be the most accurate pricing, but you will have markets for everything.

Because the cost of launching a market is zero, right? Like, so, you know, we, like, we could create a market for the, the statue in Lucas office, the little mouse hard guy. You do it. Like, it might not be that many trades, but it's there. Right. But nobody's going to trust that, like, the two bets on it to be, like, the canonical price. Sure.

No one. No one will. But if you have a market that's doing $10 billion a day, suddenly you're like, the price of the Anthropic did go down to $400 billion. Like, clearly it did. Like, the market's saying, don't fly with Trump. Yeah. Not fighting with Trump, Dario.

And this is, this is, I mean, this is crypto. It's like crypto's leaking into the real world because it's how crypto. This is how just operates, right? Like you do something and then you don't have to just contend with the angry hordes in your discord. But like your employees are also like, you know. Like you pay me in the token, bro. What the heck? So I don't know.

We'll see how it falls out. Good times. Oakley AGI fills us all before this happens. I only know. I mean that so UTIPERS is. to let them is to make it a better situation for them to IPO, right, so that they can just be on the real market. I think this is genuinely an issue. It is unequivocally not a better situation IPO because if you IPO, you have this exact problem except it's now even more real. You're now on

the NASDAQ and the price is trading every day. Like it is genuinely better to be illiquid. Like there's a premium for being illiquid and having investors that are always happy because the price always goes up and having a trading price and having retail investors and all of that stuff, it used to be that you had no choice, right? If you needed a billion dollars to do something, the only place that was liquid enough to give you that billion dollars was public markets. That is no longer true. So why would you ever IPO, right? Unless, you know, the government mandates that you must IPO off. Like something will have to change in this market because the incentive is to never IPO now, which means you have these giant companies that are private

companies. Like it's a very weird situation. Like the Hawkins back to like pre-stock market era of like the 1800s. Yeah. Um, where everyone, it's all private wealth. There's no way for anyone to invest in things. It's crazy. Yeah. But I also, I mean, the reason they don't IPO, it's exactly what you said. It's a lot. It's just generally better to have like a handful of a, aligned investors, you keep happy because the price of your stock gets updated once every couple years or whatever, then have the public market watching your literal every single move, right? Every single day, every single quarter, every single event is going to move the price and it's going to impact you.

And that's good for early stage companies because you need that sort of like that patience in order to you can't have people bringing down your neck because you have to think more to be able to do things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it does get very interesting down the line when, especially for these really in-demand companies who are huge and the valuations are massive.

Like, you know, it's, it's just, it's an interesting dynamic. To the point where the most valuable company in the world is a private company, that will happen. And at that point, that will be like the market is clearly broken. You know, we're loan against, you can loan against. shares now we've got you loan against every yeah ever any private companies came yeah the uh no i haven't i haven't um but like i just think that the the the shift in the marg and again like matt levin has been talking about this for like a decade now right that like the shift away from public markets as the primary place for liquidity that that was the only place you get liquidity

has broken market structure somehow like they There's something that the incentives are completely inverted now. There's more than enough money in private markets and to your point, hey, like, why the fuck would you want to deal with public markets? Why would you want to deal with retail investors? Yeah, exactly. All right. Let's go to an ad break.

When we come back, we will talk about more hacks. Healthy chain advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, Moon Pay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, Go-to-Market, BD and Partnerships,

Capital Markets Advisory, PR, Media Placements, K-O-A activations, and more, driving execution from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction today, visit multi-chain adv.com. Who in the group chat has the absolute worst sports takes? You guys, it's got to be me. I don't even watch sports unless it's a global event.

But Coinbase is giving me a chance to out-predict a pro basketball coach for a share of 5 Bitcoin. And honestly, I'm built for this. I have beginner's luck, energy, and absolutely nothing to lose. Coinbase is bringing in pro basketball coach Lethal Shooter to see if you can actually out-predict a pro for a share of 5 Bitcoin. Get more correct than lethal shooter, split 5 Bitcoin, and get a chance at a private coaching session in L.A. to perfect your jump shot. Coinbase 1 is the ultimate membership to make the most of your money and has been amazing for me.

Zero trading fees on thousands of crypto assets, 3.5% APY on USDC, boosted staking and lending rewards, and up to 4% Bitcoin back with the Coinbase 1 card. If you trade crypto regularly, the basic annual membership can pay for itself. Plus, the $1 million streak prize pool is still live. You can also get 20% off the first year of Coinbase 1 annual plans and a $50 Bitcoin bonus when you spend $100 on a new Coinbase 1 card in the first 30 days through May 31st. Make your predictions and split 5 Bitcoin. Get started at Coinbase.com slash unchained. That's Coinbase.com slash unchained.

Join today at Coinbase.com slash unchained. to start your predictions. No purchase necessary. See rules and other ways to enter. Terms apply to other offers. Futures swabs via Coinbase financial markets. Risk of 100% loss. Payouts event-based, not investment advice, not available in Nevada. Coinbase 1 card is offered through Coinbase Inc. Cards issued by First Electronic Bank. Bitcoin back rates are based on cardholder's assets on Coinbase. All right, we are back. We've talked many times over the last few months about the hack spree. I think we have reached some level of consensus that many of these attacks are somehow AI mediated or supported or something.

Hey, I'm sure you've got some takes here. But apparently April was the worst hacking month in crypto history, 625 million and 30 incidents. I'm not sure on what dimension we're measuring that because there have been higher dollar values but maybe like the number of incidents. It's like an incident in the day. It was wild. It was crazy. And I don't even, I think there's more than that.

I don't know what the real number is. But like it was like every day there was like a sizable incident. And then there were like five other incidents that just like happened. And like, yeah, like just ran. How lucky to be the guy. that gets hacked for like, 10 grand on the day where like someone loses $200 million. And no one never notices.

That's, it's. Yeah. So it's, I think they're just going off like basically like the prevalence of hacks. And it was not just like random people getting fished or like private key compromises. But it was like there were big infrastructure, centralized exchange hacks, defy hacks.

And then there were also like just this like big smart contract hack. small smart contract hacks. Like, there were a ton of hacks where it was like, we don't even know what the heck that is, but it's just got to drain for a billion dollars. It's just disappearing. Yeah. Yeah.

Some unverified contract on Arbitrum got, you know, or whatever. It felt wild. And then that's just on the crypto side. You go to the regular world side. To the regular world as well. So, yeah, it looks like through April more than a billion stolen, 68 incidents. The crazy thing is I was reading. throughout our show notes, right?

And it was like the first one was Drift for $285 million. I had forgotten, like legitimately forgotten about Drift. There have been so many acts since the Drift hack that I was like, I've been much more concerned about Help Dow and old Avey stuff. I was like, oh yeah, drift. I could just completely off my radar. So now Google announced yesterday in their cloud blog and what they identified. Now, I don't know if they identified this through like their own system.

I don't know why anyone would be using Gemini to build software, but maybe the checks aren't as good or something. I don't know. But they found an LLM-built Python exploit the bypass 2FA on an open source admin tool. Google says it disrupted a planned mass exploitation campaign pre-launch. Do we have any, I don't think they released any details. What's your what's your take on this one? Okay.

So I think this one, there was one interesting one. The rest are like, whatever. Is that this one? Okay. Okay. So I think I might be wrong, but let's just go with it because it's cool, even if I'm wrong. Okay. So I think what happened is that in the last year, Google, Android, Chrome, Google Things have slowly increased the, let's say, like, the way that Gemini can be.

accessed and it's not just like you as the user going to like Gemini and like typing things in. Right. It's like it's increasingly like built into the browser. It's built into the operating system and there's APIs like not APIs to like the cloud but like internal APIs. So like one thing that we have been asking about for a long time is can we when we're doing like fishing detection for URLs right now it's like a manual blocklets like and there's all these processes running to identify fishing sites, and then as the URL to the list. Theoretically, if your local device or your local browser has access to, let's call it AI, right, you could, instead of having all these processes running in the cloud and then pushing the outputs

to the manual block list and then users being protected, theoretically, every time a user visits a site, you could run a local, do you get what I'm? saying like you could have it check locally and be like, yo, is this, what's the chance this is malicious? And it doesn't have to like leave the browser. It just like, you know, operates in this little realm. I think what happened was they found someone trying to use these APIs, not in the way that we're trying to use them, but instead to,

uh, like call Gemini locally on the device and be like, yo, go find all the, go find all the attack surface. Go find all their private keys or like whatever it was. So it's sort of like this using the local Gemini as like an aid to construct the malware sort of on the fly, let's say. Right. Right.

Or to the exfiltration on the fly, which is wild. That's wild. Yeah, that is wild. I mean, like, we haven't even gotten to like. you know, there's been prompt injection attacks and stuff. But like, we haven't even gone to a point yet where like there are a sufficient number of like continuous running autonomous agents in systems that can be owned. Like that's going to be one of the next vectors in my mind, right?

That like people will find a way to like get into a system that has an agent. We're thinking about this because like we are like moving so quickly. to this like agentic coding kind of continuous autonomous coding infrastructure. But our biggest concern is like how do you protect the guy who's writing the code from anyone ever talking to him? Yeah. Like you know and like it's it feels the same as like trying to protect private keys right like we have a we have an agent that's running on like a VM right and we have to to make sure that there's no way into that VM because that agent could insert some code and you would never find it. I mean, you find it eventually that someone activates it. But like,

you know, there's no way if you live in a world where agents write 99% of the code for you to review all that code except with other agents. And so like you have to have these checks and balances. and yeah, we're not there yet, I don't think, in terms of, like, you know, the thing that I've sort of proposed, I guess, is like, you know, an open clause is heading this direction, not in a good way, but like you have an agent that owns an open source repo, and it's like a continuous running agent that's running somewhere in some secure environment, right, that reviews every PR reviews all of the things, reviews, you know, every bug fix, whatever, right? And is also in charge of deployment, but you have to like segregate the ownership of that.

And it has to run somewhere like really securely that someone can't get into it because if they get into it, then they'll inject malware and inject zero days and inject all these exploits and stuff and, you know, like, you know, supply chain attacks. there's just a bunch of different attack vectors. The same way that if you like compromise the machine of a team member of someone right, you know, of a team that's writing critical code and you inject code into the code that they're writing,

now all of a sudden you've got this like amazing attack vector because everyone trusts that team. You know, and if it's some, some library, right, they're like, ah, these guys know what they're doing.

Anyway, it's, it's, it's pretty crazy. So, um, yeah. Yeah, we're getting to a point where, again, we talked about this bit last week,

but we're going to have to get to a point where the focus is on basically containing the blast radius at all points instead of trying to, like, secure it upfront because, and we're never very good at that anyways, like securing it upfront. Like, we try it with the smart contract audits and everything. Like, we're not very good at it. Okay. So I think the solution is to, yeah, you still. want to like try to keep things secure obviously but like the the blast radius and mitigating and

having like these external things that can press pause or stop or whatever it is to prevent exfiltration to prevent theft to prevent whatever it's going to be mandatory um and it's going to be you know everywhere so that you basically like you're just expecting something to be wrecked at all times. But even if it's like wrecked, you have like at the very last second a dude like step in and be like, ah, just kidding. You can't, you know, you can't have that. But yeah, it's going to it's going to take a minute. So one thing that I think is one thing that I am bullish on though is like continuous monitoring with agents. Right. So we have this annoying thing, right? Where we, we in like various ways sponsor ATAs for Salana tokens, right?

So people have found over the last near two or three years, right? Like really annoying slow drainer attacks where they like set up this attack, like fund a bunch of accounts and then like get like thousand bucks or like two thousand bucks of like Salana like gas from us from like opening accounts and then closing them, whatever it's like the most annoying thing and it'll and they do it over like two days and happens really slowly and whatever um and we had one that happened over the weekend and it was going on for like 12 hours and it just fades into the background in like normal activity you know like nothing spikes there's nothing like too crazy um and we just don't have enough monitoring for like those those things

and so myself and one of our engineers sat down for a few hours and we like sat down with an agent and said, okay, here is all of the data. Like take all of this data. Like, here's what's happening. Here's our best guess that's like how to have an early warning sign. And the agent came up with a scheme to like track this that is so much better than what we would have thought up independently. And we're like, oh, that's way better. Like, like, and we just sent this agent out to like do research, whatever.

And basically it found that like the easiest way to detect is like a price discrepancy and the input output. And we didn't even know we were tracking that in the database. And it was like, yeah, the database like, should. And it's like, you can just have that agent running. And now it's in Slack. And it'll be like, hey, someone's doing something weird. And it just like alerts you. Like within like, and then we were like, okay, go and back test this.

This is the funniest part of this, right? So we're four hours in. It's like, you guys are idiots. The way that you're going to solve this problem is not the right way to solve it. It's all right. And we're like, okay, cool. And we're like, all right, if you're so smart, go and back test it. And he goes, okay, here are the four most recent incidents.

And I've sent an agent to backtest each of them. And it goes, so the good news is that this detects every single one. You know, there's no false positives like this metric finds every single one. It goes, unfortunately, for two of them, it took approximately 90 seconds. and we're like yeah that's you're gonna have to do better than that bro like we're like it was going for 12 hours and no humans noticed it like it took us 12 hours to notice this and it's like yeah like I would have called it but it would have taken me 90 seconds and it's just like you're on a different level so yeah like these these the the biggest issue I think with like smart contract hacks is like it's not like 90 seconds is actually too slow like you need to detect it in like the mempool and and block it right or like detect you know it's often one transaction that's bundled or whatever so you can't just like it's not like it happens in slow motion over over days or whatever but it's not selection it's yeah it's one it's literally one transaction and like

yeah especially with like the flash loan aided ones it literally since forever now right those are all single single transaction ones um which means that we're going to going to also have to probably re-architect things to not have a single point that, right? Like if you want to, if you, if somehow you're hopping from here to here, like, you just can't have that in a single bundle. But it's definitely, it's not going to be easy. It's going to get worse before it gets better. But the supply chain attacks are that, that, you know, more kind of slow motion thing where like someone gets in and they do something it's only bad while people are like updating their

software so like there is a genuine window where the faster you detected if you detected in 90 seconds maybe only a couple of people it stops the spread etc so you know there are things that are like much more kind of a matter to this early detection continuous monitoring yeah the supply team ones like what's happening originally is that they're getting in like let's say that you miss and the AI and whatever, the magical beans. They all miss the initial implant, which in like the latest TAN stack case, the initial entry point was via like a GitHub action thing that was quite complex. But the next thing that happens, right, is that then it goes and grabs everyone's environment

files, API keys on and on and on forever. And then it'll go and it worms via all their repos and all their things. And it'll exfiltrate stuff. It'll take stuff from individual devs devices, but it'll also spread on and on. And that's what we're seeing happening over like the last, it's been like two days now. Nonstop, just like this slow warming out. Theoretically on like your individual device, when it lands, it lands on your device and then it runs all these processes. And one of those processes is to like grab all your secrets and send them to the Cs.

too. The thing is is if there are already like today there are already things like CrowdStrike right where it'll attack this down and then the processes start spinning up to do certain things. Oh it's

touching your key store. Oh it's grabbing your environment files. Oh it's grabbed right? And they'll just like say like yo stop and definitely don't just stop but like definitely don't talk to the network. And so it stops it right before it exfiltrates which means that even though you got Even though the malware dropped onto your computer, the hackers don't get anything.

The issue, of course, is that, like, you know, not everyone is running this stuff. And there's other, there's, like, a lot of things. But they use, like, trashdark obviously is a paid service, right? Like, are there, are there, like, open source tools that, like, you can wrong if you're poor? You're poor. So there's, like, Objective C, which is, like, um, uh, it's like objective and then SE is like one for

max. It's just like a bunch of open source tooling that can like, it's not quite the same as like crowds right, but it's like there's all these little things that'll detect like persistence or detect like weird network calls for Windows, I think like Microsoft Defender

or whatever. They have somewhere you can like crank it up. Feels like an okay job. Yeah, you should have them be running these. and especially like companies like just get CrowdStrike. But yeah, we're going to have to get way better at this type of stuff. And I think that what we're seeing with open source and like these GitHub actions and these worms,

I think someone's finally realized that like, oh, hey, the decentralized nature of open source maintainers is basically the same as crypto people. They're just running around on their personal devices and not a secure, like, like crowd strike running organization with formal processes. Like most of the stories coming out of a lot of these are, especially like the open source maintainers, it's just like crypto. It's like bro was woken up because his friend called him in the middle of the night. Like your shit's gone.

Yeah. Your shit's gone and it's like warming in everyone else and, you know, everyone's reacting. Yeah. So it's going to be tough. Those are definitely going to be tough because we, yeah, we often forget that so much of the software today relies on these low, like, just these open source maintainers who are just maintaining this open source software out of the good of their hearts. And, yeah, the incentives are a bit, a bit screwed there.

It's, yeah. This is where the black swans will come from, though. It's not going to be nuclear bombs. Maybe some crazy, some crazy hack. I feel like we just also like we keep dodging bullets with these. Like I, this one's like pretty bad. But like, I know. Even this one could be so much worse.

And like should have been so much worse. But like luckily this happened, luckily, you know. We just have to keep getting lucky, Tay. It's easy. Easy, piecey. I don't know what you're worried about. Hey, you guys should make Seal 911 agent. charge

3999 all you guys to just to just run all right let's we got another like 10 minutes

left here so let's let's smash through another couple of segments so this one completely called me by a surprise Circle did a $220 million ARC token drop

this was not on my radar at all So yeah, I don't know. I'm so honest. Like, I thought the whole point of the IPO was to not need a token. Luca, what's your, what's your take on this? You, if you can, if you can, you will at the end of the day, like the circle buyer is not the arc token buyer. And so go create some tokens out of thin air out of the balance sheet, eat earnings, or show a good quarter.

balance sheet asset value going up somehow, some way. And if you can, why not? And if you're Jeremy, look, he is a ducier responsibility to accrue value. And look, the crypto buyer is not the Tradfai buyer. I underwrote this just one of the things that we're working on, at least on the abstract side. It's just very clear. It's two different cohorts.

And look, I'm not surprised, frankly. Obviously, I didn't know he was doing it. But, like, what is the business sense of it all? like the business sense of it is like, you know, Circle is one cohort of, you know, investment. And if you have leverage and pull in another cohort of investment, like, you know, why not pull the lever if you can? Yeah. I mean, John Charbonneau said saying that Stripe and Circle building their own L-1s is bullish Ethereum because their EVM is crazy cope. These chains will just be bullish for circle and strap equity holders if they're successful. Not everything is bullish our bags, which I agree with.

It is weird to see this like kind of proliferation of we because we saw this, you know, the like blockchain not Bitcoin era of crypto, you know, was like corpo chains and basically like consortium databases. not even blockchains, et cetera. We've seen this play out before. Maybe this time it's different, but it does feel like this is competitive with the EVM, you know, and Solana. I'm still bullish both Ethereum and Solana in the sense that I think that they

have a much more clear, like, plan for scaling and how to make the change. chain like you're kind of more globally useful than just like a stable coin uh transport layer i just don't know if that's sufficient um for a chain to be valuable um but we will see it works for tron i guess so um maybe it's isn't it's isn't it's going to create a conflict at some point if it hasn't already because this is the arc the arc token isn't isn't even like well is it can can I go buy arc right now oh I don't know no I don't think so I think I think I think there's a yeah it's just a raise yeah it's just the race for now I got I don't think the chain hasn't launched yet so presumably the token will launch with chain they're going to do some

of incentives or whatever. So, yeah, it's a bit strap. It's kind of like a way almost like, no, it's a way to incentivize more USDC. I mean, it's just so bullish on the stock. Like, I don't know if you're a buyer of Arc token, but as long as there's market makers in the books, you know, some sort of bid somewhere, right? He can just take that whole supply and just more USC, more USC. And then they start to hit, you know, break earnings, et cetera.

There's probably also another take here, which is, you know, bagholder syndrome. you kind of see like there's a strategy amongst some token founders where it's like okay get people to align with your bags like this is just like I'm going to get more people on the cap table more people bullish Jeremy and you know what I mean like yeah yeah good I just thought that I don't know I feel like we've I feel like it's a bit like we've been doing for a while now where you have like the equity right you have the company of the equity of the builders you have the dev team whenever you want to call them and then you have the token and they become disjointed and weird things happen. This is just even weirder because Circle is already a publicly traded company, right? But that's the equity, right? That's the, that's the, that's that market. Yeah. And then you have this, now you have this second thing.

It's bullish to stock. I don't know. I'm bidding that token, but I'm bullshod stock. Yeah. Stock. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's his job, right? Like, he did that first. He's shown his car out like that. Like, he's in the business of occurring. as much value as possible. It's like Coinbase and base. And they do tell different stories. Like I think a chain is a story of network effects. Sure. Right. And like in a world where AI agents are really swarming in the trillions, like I can see a world where that catches a bid. Right. And then, you know, versus like stock is

also, it can, it can, it's a double ed sword. It can be a catch 22. Can play on both sides. Today it plays on the side of stock. Right. But there is a world 10 years from now, five years from now. another 2020 alt coin season, right? It will bode, you know, it could owed really well. Yeah. Also the, you know, token holders. So. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it feels right right right now because the token is just, it's just a, it's a fundraise.

Let's be real. I mean, I think it's a fundraise plus it's a new chain, right? And so it's like the, the theory is every stable coin needs its own chain now, which was not a theory a year ago, but like it seems. seems to be like tempo and you know there's all of these like you know if you go to tradfai right like one of the most profitable things is having a payment network like the the original idea for haven like my my you know what became synthetics was to build a decentralized payment network where people could transfer money like it's a very obvious play it it you know you can capture a lot of value if you own the rails that people are paying each other on

And so I think that this is like, we own the token that is transporting all this value, but we don't own the chain. Therefore, it's harder for us to capture value. If we own the full stack, then we can capture the payments. And like, it's, it just makes sense. Like, it's a sensible approach. It's just very antithetical to our, like, OG hearing roots, I think. But here we are.

Yeah. I mean, it does, it presumes that you can make it valuable, right? that the chain and what is built on it. It presumes that value will accrue to the chain and, you know, et cetera. All right. We got time for one more segment. Let's close out. Close out.

That's very aspirational. The Ave helped out situation. Our AVE update. Yeah, our weekly Ave update. So the court has said they, that Arbishop can send the money to Ave for the RSE recovery. So. Yes. So basically.

But, but they are bound by the like future decision or something of the court. Yeah. So basically it takes the, it allows the Dow and. and all the arbitrage people who are in the process, right? Because these things, these processes take like days and weeks. It allows them to release the funds. Well, it allows them to vote, right? Without thinking about the courts, which was the situation before, right?

It was like, you were asking the Dow to vote on something, but the Dow sort of had been served on the forum by these lawyers. And so what this does is it allows them to vote. the DAO still has to make the decision to, like, move it to this place. But that was in the process that was already happening. And so the court saying, like, okay, all the arbitral people, you can keep doing what you're planning on doing and figuring out that through the normal governance. But then AVE LLC and where those funds basically end up, that is still bound by the court. And so

So the court decides to give it to the North Korean victims That's going to be the battle It's like now But it does It makes this the case a lot It makes it a lot simpler In terms of Who all is involved in their standing

And their interests Because before Again you had this like All these different parties that were involved And then you had arbitram Who actually had the funds Yeah And but they weren't

It was very weird in like legal court terms. It was very weird because basically the Arbishop Dow theoretically was like the only one that could stand up and try to defend and fight this this absurd court case, which is a hard thing to do because it's a freaking Dow. This eliminates this. So now Avey and their lawyers can like continue to fight the bottle for all the people and figure out. I'll this. What the hell is going to happen? Figure out of the DPRK gets actually as an ownership of funds that they steal. Like there's all these,

there's all these questions that are going to come up in court. And I think they're still trying to like the, the Avey guys and also the GERS steam lawyers are both trying to move pretty fast, it seems. But I still think it's going to take time. But at least they're now not stuck in this world of like all of the AVE people can't be made all. Yeah. And it also like, again, because it was like this, this, the governance decisions that for arbitram, they're like a long process.

It's like 40 days or whatever. And so when the, when the court, when the restraining nose dropped, it was like everyone has to pause the governance process. And so then theoretically, if like, like. the court is like, yeah, this is an absurd thing and throws the case out, you then have to like restart the governance process and carry on and, you know. And then obviously it was just complex because like what is the arbitram now how do they stand up in a U.S. court? And what do they say? Where now it's just, yeah, now it's just Avey and their lawyers are going to fight this and hopefully prevail, which I think. And like, you know, if this would go hardly wrong and the court says, no, that wasn't your property. It was someone else's. This effectively now puts Avey on the hook for coming up with that heat, right? Like they've already distributed.

Like everyone's got it. You know, they have no recovery up to get the ETH back. It's not like they're going to, I mean, maybe they will. Like it would be pretty funny if they ask everyone who. is going to get this distribution. But like as it says now, the ETH should just go back into the ETH market and then everyone can withdraw their ETH.

Like we're back to school a lot. Like they're not going to ask you to like show your passport, hope hopefully. Like, you know, this is going to be a thing that comes up in the court because we already thought in, in the oral arguments that happened last week. One of the things that came up was

the Gersdy lawyers were saying like, what the hell? You don't even know who these users are. you can't make them whole how they need to come to court and they need to prove who they are and everyone in crypto was sitting there like holy crap no no no no because it's wild but it's true you can do a perfectly fair distribution distribution without getting on ownership like based on the same ownership that sort of got them into that position you can do and we've done this many times there's been many emergencies that have done this, it is actually more fair than the court situation.

Because if you try to make everyone stand up in court and prove their like tradfai ID, you're actually going to rule out a lot of true owners. It's not perfectly fair. And that, I believe, is going to come up in court and it's going to get very, very interesting. And I think if the judge rocks how on-chain recovery flows work, meaning it's a perfect one-one map based on facts and based on the ownership that got them into that position in the first place. I think it could be very interesting because like you're it's it's really hard it's really hard for people to imagine that that's possible but once they realize it's possible. They're like oh this is good tech.

Yeah. Yeah. Because we got into all of our recovery distributions on Jane. if you can prove the ownership sort of like the distribution based on that ownership right and it's like a perfect fair transparent like it's so much better than every other situation in the world but yeah

whether or not what the Gerssey lawyers are trying to say like to be clear they're trying to say that no every single person that has a ownership claim needs to come to court and fight with us because we have an ownership claim. Like that's what they're essentially doing. And that's why this argument is like so fundamentally absurd for everyone in crypto because we're like,

no, no, we know who the owners are. We don't know literally their names. We don't know literally their addresses, but we know they're on-chain addresses. It's cryptographically verifiable, et cetera. But the Gerstein lawyers are literally, they're cutting in line and trying to like, basically game the system and put their ownership rights, which they don't have, but trying to basically edge in as if they were an owner of this money and then screw everyone else because they want, they're going to try to force everyone to come to court or whatever.

Right. Well, I will tell you, I won't be coming to court. Yeah, exactly. I expect my money to be delivered on chain in a timely fashion. I will be taking it up with Sandy personally. I mean, yeah. And he'll tell you to take it up with Girstie. All right. I think that's it for this week.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember what happens on chain never stays on chain. We will be back next week. Until then, do your own research before aping in. See you guys. Bye, guys. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial. advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain and we want you to

always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money.