Unchained - Uneasy Money: Why Tokenholders Have No Rights & Why Every DAO ‘Has Failed’ - Ep. 984

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Thank you to our sponsor, Multichain Advisors!What rights do token holders have? Is everyone getting rugged? In this episode of Uneasy Money, Ethena founder Guy Young joins hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan to interrogate the lack of clarity around token expectations and rights as Aave DAO goes against Aave Labs and Circle acquires the Axelar team. Do centralized exchanges hold the solution? Plus, does MOVE's Rushi Manche deserve a second chance? And how can you stay safe from the fake Zoom scam? Hosts: Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix Taylor Monahan, Security at MetaMask Guest: Guy Young, CEO & Founder of Ethena Labs Links: Unchained: AAVE Holders Question if DAO Quietly Redirected Revenue Away From Treasury SEC Ends Four-Year Probe Into Aave ‘Poison Pill’ Proposal Calls for Aave DAO to Take Over Aave Labs Jump Crypto’s Firedancer Goes Live on Solana Mainnet How to Trade Prediction Markets Without an Opinion on the Event MetaMask Adds Native Bitcoin Support Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction  👀 01:39 Who owns Aave? 🤔 5:42 Is the DAO and Foundation model faulty? ⚡️ 11:29 Why tokens need clarity ⁉️ 16:23 Is the SEC to blame for the lack of token clarity? 💡 20:03 How lack of regulatory clarity arounds tokens boosts scams ⚔️ 22:00 The Solana client diversity debate 📍 25:48 How Circle's Axelar acquisition highlights the lack of token rights 💥30:20 How centralized exchanges can help secure rights for token holders 🧠 33:25 Luca explains why some tokens should not confer rights ⁉️ 39:48 Should Rushi Manche get a second chance? 🫨  47:01 Taylor unpacks messy details of Movement Labs’ MOVE token deals 💫 50:28 How the debate between Tarun Chitra and Dan Robinson provides a base for unraveling 10/10 ⚠️ 53:10 How Guy believes the crypto industry can prevent another 10/10 🚨 1:00:20 Why new fake Zoom scams are particularly dangerous  📽 1:04:04 Kain reveals how his domain registrar was socially engineered  🧏‍♀️ 1:08:20 What to do if you are a victim of the fake Zoom scam 👀 1:09:41 Is adding leverage to Polymarket “pure insanity?” ⚡️ 1:11:47 What to know about MetaMask's Bitcoin support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guess is if they had been forced into acquiring this team for the outstanding token FDV of 100 million, they would have been like, guys, like, there's no way that's happening. Nothing is unhackable ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And if someone tells you that it's unhackable, run. Run so fast. Yeah. Dow's are notoriously inefficient. How dare you?

How dare you say that about that beautiful DAWS? The open interest in like size of dollars, I think, on these prediction markets is actually just not that big. I think relative to the mind show that they've got. Hey, everyone. I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to uneasy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with Lucanette, CEO of Pudgy Penguins and Taylor Monaghan security at Metamask. And we have a special guest guy from Athena. Hey guys.

How are we doing? All right. Before we get started, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go-to-market, BD and partnerships, Capital Markets Advisory, PR, media placements, KOLA activations, and more, driving execution from, from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction

today, visit multi-chain ADV.com. One quick thing before we get started, nothing you hear on the uneasy money is financial advice. We're just four builders about talking about what's happening on chain and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com slash uneasy money. All right, let's get into it. I feel like it's actually good timing that we've got you here, Guy, because we've got lots of interesting governance debates within DFI. So, yeah, I feel like you're going to have some takes on that.

First one we're starting with is AVE Civil War and a question of who owns the protocol. So one of my favorite trad-fi guys is Matt Levine from Bloomberg. And he talks about who owns a company all the time. And so it feels pretty amazing that Defi has finally invented that same question, but for Defi, who owns the protocol? A governance debate kind of emerged because Ave, so we have Ave Labs and the Ave Dao. And the Ave Tao is this like loose collection of people and token holders, token voting, etc. And then Ave Labs is the kind of labs entity that does a lot of the engineering, work, marketing, et cetera. And there was a deal with KowSwap, a Dex on Ethereum, where the integration fees appeared suddenly to be going to AVE Labs, not the AVE Dow.

Now, you could be confused and be like, but wait, isn't it the same thing? And it's like, no, actually, it's like some different people with different controls, et cetera. And this was different to a previous deal that was done where fees were going to the Avey Dow. That was a deal with the power swap decks. And this basically created a debate about like privatization of fees and who owns the fees, who owns fee revenue, who owns the protocol, who owns the IP. Mark Zeller called it a diversion of 10% of the Dow. income and a potential breach of alignment. And then a few days later, another token holder proposed a poison pill where the Dow will

seize Ave Labs IP trademarks and equity to turn it into a Dow controlled entity, citing a pattern of unilateral monetization. Obviously, Stani, the founder of Ave, stepped in here and said, no, no, no, guys, Avey Labs is entitled to monetize its own front end. This is our front end. We built it. And prior to that, the revenue was a voluntary donation, which I thought was pretty amazing. But he acknowledged that Dow should have been consulted.

So who owns AVE? Oops. Yeah. Like my hot take as a former 8th land holder, right, is that like the token holders own the thing. But this comes down to like a question of rights, right? If the token holders own the thing, do they have a right to all revenue or compete? people who are not necessarily aligned with the token holders monetize the Ave IP via front-end and keep that money for themselves. That's kind of the fundamental question here.

Is it okay for the IP holders of Ave? I think one thing when this is all going on that I thought would have been the most entertaining outcome. So for anyone who followed the WeWork debacle back in the. the day, Adam Newman famously, when they changed from WeWork to We, sold the name We, which he had trademarked to WeWork for $5 million. And obviously, Ave means ghost and finish, right? So clearly Stanley was the only one who would come up with that. So I thought it would be quite entertaining if Sandy was like, hey, you know what? I'll sell you the name Ave and the IP for like 50 million That would be next level evil.

Okay, so if we talk about who can do the things, obviously, what's going down right now is highlighting that perhaps there were some unexpected parties that could and would do things. If they can't do those things legally or technically, then we wouldn't be here, right? Right? This wouldn't even be a debate. I think a lot of people are having a debate around like who should, like how should this have been structured? And I think there's a lot of lessons learned there. But these aren't lessons that we haven't learned before, right? Like, DOWs have always been very, the DOW Foundation model has been very weird since the very early days. And it's mostly been to avoid any accountability and regulations and laws.

And that has some downsides, it turns out, you know. The whole structure is meant to basically remove liability from all parties, which also removes accountability and internal accountability as well. So, I don't know. I, it just kind of sucks, I guess. Like, really, we're going to do this again. But, you know, I'm just, I've never been bullish on doubts. And I know. Yeah, I probably take a similar stance, right?

Like at the end of the day, and it actually, it gives me a question. I actually have a question to ask after this, but like, like, dows are notoriously inefficient. How dare you? How dare you say that about a beautiful dows? Yeah, they're extremely inefficient. I remember they tried to make me, they wanted, after I bought it, some, after I bought Pudgy Penguins, some big holders wanted me to like take the money that I used, like, They wanted me to put everything into a Dow.

And I was like, what would happen to my money? They'd be like, look, everyone would respect you. You'd make the money back. I'm like, that sounds insane. Not only that. Not only that. It's insane from the perspective of like every Dow experiment has failed. And at the time it was trending in that direction.

And so, you know, when you have a front end, like correct me if I'm wrong, like AVE is defy infrastructure, right? like the AVE token is powering that. Obviously, holders of that token can participate, I guess, in the infrastructure side. But it sounds like this is like a front end debate. And whenever you're trying to push the boundaries of a front end, I think like push having a Dow in the middle of that is a huge mistake. And you're looking at things like they did. Like I thought they just had one of the most amazing consumer app launches

from like an experience perspective of all time. It's like one of the great. consumer apps that I've ever felt and experienced via crypto app. They're clearly not being negligent or pocketing that money. Like they're clearly building. And then my question to maybe you guys is, you know, I actually got really bullish on Ave when they released that app. Is that app a part of the token of cruel model or is that defined in the whole front end

bucket? That'd be like an interesting answer that I would like. Okay. No los dos. Like it's, it is. both in the thing and not in the thing, right? And this is the weirdness because it's like, okay, you got this amazing mobile app that's powered by Avey, the protocol,

but uses Avey's IP, which is not owned by the protocol, it's owned by Labs. And Labs is, I guarantee you, if you look at what the App Store, you know, company that released this app is, it's going to be Avey Labs, right? You know, so there there is this weirdness of like who actually is getting the benefit of the thing, right? I would say AVE holders regardless, what do they want? Like the money to go into some inflated super big treasury that's not getting spent anyway marginally. Like what extra revenue is that going to do to the $500 million balance sheet that probably is Avey's, you know, Dow balance sheet? what's the couple extra million dollars going to do, right?

It's the principle, sir. It's the principle of the matter that like, and, you know, it's interesting like ACI, right? So, so Mark Zeller, who I know guys had some interesting interactions with him on the timeline back in the day. But I've kind of gotten to know him, right? And like, he is an Avey soldier. He's in one of the group chats that I'm in. and he's quite active. And like, he's an ABE soldier.

Like, he's just there for the Coles. Like, that's all he's trying to do. And I think that the view is that, like, no, AVE is actually a pretty good Dow by, like, most measures. And we shouldn't, you know, kind of paint the Avey Dow with the same brush as, like, other, you know, dows that have failed or whatever. Like, we are actually kind of maintaining this. And, you know, if we just start siphoning off.

funds to labs then we're basically in like a similar situation to uniswap and and i think the the view is like they're this is going in the wrong direction not the right direction from the from the dow side of things um but yeah it's it's a it's a tough one i don't know guy what's your what's your what's your yeah i think it's um not even specifically with arve but like broadly been a point i think in the last few weeks with um we saw the axelar news this week with uh circle we saw um Tense are selling some bit of the business to Coinbase. And then I think there's another one with Pumphon where there's a bit of, I guess, people upset with the fact that like you own a token and then the IP and sort of

of equity of the businesses are just being sold out entirely separately. And I think that's sort of part of a broader theme that's going on here to your question, Kane, which is like factually if you own the token, you don't actually really actually have the rights is kind of like what we're kind of seeing pretty consistently across all of these different events. I think as it relates to the RVE piece this week, I personally think it's much easier as like a single structure. We never have any question whatsoever that cash is going to a separate entity, different developers who are doing different pieces and trying to sort of extract a margin out of doing that. I think especially when you sort of consider just like the size of the cash flows that are coming out there are just pretty insignificant.

I think compared to like the size of RVA, the valuation of RVA and having like this negative sentiment that sits around it. It's like does $10 million sitting in a different side pocket really move the needle for someone who owns hundreds of millions of dollars in this token. That's worth billions on the other side. So I think I've always been of the view that you kind of want to keep these things extremely clean and simple, which is just like if there is cash flow being produced, it's just one entity or one sort of bucket that's receiving that. And I obviously think that like people increasingly are sort of converging on that being the token. And I think Uniswap and what Hayden did a few weeks ago with that. proposal, I think I had a lot of respect for the way that he sort of changed direction

and almost 180 from what they were doing historically. And yeah, I'm sure that Alva guys will work it out. I was with Stanley this week. And I think we both know that this is not like a nefarious thing that he's doing. And he's like the most aligned person behind Alvay, you know, the foundation's like eight years later. So yeah, I know that he's got like the best interests at heart for what they're doing and that they'll sort it out. I think the interesting thing is like, you know, organizations though are made up of people, right?

Like even if you have a semi-benevolent dictator like Stani, right? Like it may not even be the case that he was across this, right? Or like you might have been like in a room and someone's like, hey, we got this CalSwap deal. Like where do we throw the cash? And it's like, uh, chuck it in that bucket and not really thinking that this would turn into, you know, pitch a pitch battle. But I mean, I think like more broadly, you know, talking about unyswap. We've spoken about this a couple of times. Like, you know, there is this movement towards clarity of token ownership and token holding and, you know, what do you own?

What rights do you have, et cetera? Which I think, you know, is kind of coming from, it's not like Hayden was like, I don't want to say he was anti-token or whatever, right? Like they released a token that was somewhat forced upon them by sushi, right? But they released a token and then they were like, oh, shit, like this is going to have consequences. Like, let's not let's kind of get out of the way of it. Right. And then, you know, now we're in a different regulatory environment. And so they're like, actually, let's fix this problem.

You know, I think Hayden the whole time has wanted to kind of have more clarity, more certainty for token holders and anyone else involved in uniswap. And I think that's the same thing for Stadney. Like, you know, Eatland was a pure Dow, like Avey's gotten huge. And there's been, you know, all of these different things that have kind of emerged over the years. Like, yeah, I think everyone involved wants clarity, but it's hard to kind of see a path out that's that's super clear here. Yeah. And I think ultimately this is all around expectations, right? So the token holders, the, okay.

So the reality is that tokens were created for a variety of reasons. A lot of those reasons include basically like avoiding the legal situation that was in yesterday, right? Or in the case of Uniswap, like literally because sushi came out of nowhere and was about to vampire them. So even though people have these expectations around these tokens, I'm not sure that they've ever been super logical. on the realities of the teams, right? Like, none of these teams ever came out and said, like, these are what these tokens are going to do. You're going to have, like, full ownership and voting and fees.

You couldn't say anything about the token, right? Like, you had to just be like, oh, there's a token over there. Make of that what you will, right? And so I think that that's one thing that I would say is actually a failure of the SEC, right? even though they were actually going after enforcement against Unoswap and against many, many others, ultimately what it did was it created a huge amount of uncertainty where the expectations were not clear. And ultimately, you could argue that if token holders had expectations and believe certain

things about the token and then got rugged, part of that is a consequence of people sort of dancing around and trying to avoid. 100%. Like, it's a direct consequence. Yeah. Like, well, I mean, the most ironic thing is AVE came out finally this week, the same week, and it was like, hey, the SEC has finally capitulated and said, actually, you guys are okay. Yeah.

Like, like, you know, six years later or whatever, right? So, you know, the unintended consequences of six years of SEC investigation, you imagine, you know, you know that there are these lunatics, like, looking over your shoulder at everything you do. And, you know, there's no question that creates, like, perverse incentives to obfuscate things and, you know, and also, like, it's not like you have this regulatory regime that's like, hey, here is a bunch of clarity about what you can and can't do. And we're going to watch you really closely.

They're like, hey, everything you're doing is bad. And, but we're not going to tell you which things, like, good luck. to you, right? Like it's, yeah. And so when I think about, so I would like to zoom out and like, let's think about like best outcomes. Like if we could go back in time, like what's the best outcomes? In my opinion, the best outcome for uniswap, for for Avey for everything, right? Is that from day one, the token expectations and the alignment around those expectations was clear. Like nobody's getting rugged. Nobody has false expectations. Yeah. You know, if the token was designed, to catch all the revenue from all of the front ends.

Let's define that. And then let's do that. And then if you fail to uphold that, that's going to be problematic. And obviously, when you have that clarity, then you also have accountability that can come with it. Right. If someone, if, if Avey were to have said previously explicitly, like all the fees from all the front ends are going to the Dow and then wakes up on running and rugs that, that's a problem. Right. And it's a clear problem.

And there's there's paths to recourse for. adjusting those problems. That's one of the worst things that happened from the regime is just like none of that was available. And so everyone, uh, everyone sort of gets rugged all the time because they're all operating on these undefined, unclear expectations. Also, there's, there's no norms, right? Like if you go into trad, there, there are norms that, you know, and I remember guy, like you and I talking, uh, early on when you were designing governance and like, you know, literally every single thing that you did, you sort of have to design. from first principles, you're like, what is the optimal thing given my circuit?

Like, that's not how Tradify works. Tradify, you're like, I'm starting a company. I go to Delaware. They give you a thing. You write a couple of points in there. And like every single person who's interacting with that company has really clear expectations. If you do something weird, like Adam Newman, we work style, everyone goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here, right?

But tokens, it's like every single token has their own weird, idiosyncratic. bizarre structure because everyone invents it from whole cloth every time. Right. And it's not just of a uniswap and, I mean, basically, it's not just everyone that has like a legitimate token, right? And it's operating in good faith. This also creates a huge opportunity for, you know, malicious people and scammers to deceive people, right? And that's what, you know, ultimately my problem with sort of like the legal and regulatory approach to this ecosystem is, is it just makes it so much easier for people to be scammers. And then it also just confuses the heck out of everyone who's actually trying to operate in good faith

and innovate and deliver good value. It makes it really, really hard because now in both the uniswap drama and the Avey drama, there's strong arguments being really heavily debated on Twitter right now that are calling both of those like basically scammers, right? and if you're like average retail, I don't know, it's going to drive you to actual scammers. Yeah, yeah. If everything's a scam, then like you get this false equivocation of like nothing, you know, everything's a scam.

If Ave is a scam, then like shut the whole place down. Exactly. So, I don't know. It just sucks. I hope that the coming years will improve the situation. And, you know, I hope Avey, I have faith Avey will, you know, work through this. But I hope that this is like a new era of figuring out what actually works with regards to foundations and DAOs and token holders and rights and expectations. And we actually just, you know, get back to innovating, not avoiding laws.

All right. Let's let if we don't have any more. I'm sure this is going to come back. We've been talking about DAWS. This feels a little bit like bare market things like, but it's going to get so much more interesting if we do get into like a prolonged fair market here. for sure. The Dow warfare is only going to escalate, I feel like. But let's move on to Solana Fire Dancer. So Fire Dancer is a Salana client, a validator client that has been in development for like three decades now, I think, made by Jump Crypto and is finally being released or was finally released. The interesting thing is, you know, this is my, my favorite thing about Salon is how they get to, like, have the same fights that Ethereum did, like, but like three years later or four years later. So now there's this client diversity conversation going on of like, you know, how

many validators should be running fire dancer versus this, you know, versus the, the OG validator client. What, what I think is also interesting, though, and this is, and this is, you know, versus the, the OG validator client, This is a conversation that kind of brings up Fogo as well. The SVM chain that is going to come up next year. It's kind of out, but in like a closed alpha. So Fogo runs on FIREDANCE client only, right? Whereas Solana has like backwards compatibility with the OG client. You can't just switch to FireDancer.

So even though FireDancer is a lot faster than the old client, there is some tension between like, you know, which client do you use and, and, you know, what, what are the potential issues of like having this new client, which is much faster, but also having to maintain backwards compatibility and holding Solana back. So I think when Fogo is fully live running on this pure fire dancer client, it's going to, you know, create a little bit of tension in the Salana ecosystem, is my expectation. I think there's already been a little bit of tension here.

But, you know, overall, I think it is bullish for Salana to have multiple clients. Like, it's taken a while, but we've finally gotten there. I'm bullish. Bullish? I'm bullish. I'm bullish fire dancer. I think of somebody that I'm not going to docks, like that I think is the smartest technical person that I know in crypto says that it's not going to go.

It's fire dancer on Solana is more of a pipe dream than I think people think. That's what he said. And I actually spoke to him about it last week, believe it or not. And like, why I got brought up, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I've, the discussion that I've seen many times is like, okay, you've got a much faster client, but you've got an existing network. You can't. And this is, you know, go back to like Ethereum times, right? Like we had, you know, we had proof of work and we moved to proof of stake.

And I think there were four or five validator teams that were funded by the EF, by grants and various other community things, various forms of communism. And those clients went out and kind of competed with each other. And I know a couple of those teams quite well, the Sigma Prime guys are in Australia. and so, you know, Lighthouse and some of those clients, there is a bit of tension because they're like, our client is better and therefore people use it. This is where all the Lido conversation came in of like you have an obligation to have client diversity, et cetera. So it will be interesting to see whether or not the Salana Foundation steps in and kind of forces

people to use these different clients or incentivizes them maybe through some non-communist form of incentives. I don't know. It's the Lata, so you never know what they might do. All right. Let's move on to this Circle Axel Ardeal. So, Guy, you brought this up in the discussion about AVE. This is even more wild to me, like from a Dow bearishness perspective, right? So Circle. So I think there's two things. One, there have been more acquisitions, like mergers and acquisitions in crypto in the last two months than like maybe in all of history. I don't know what that means if that is like some indication that we're maturing as an industry. But like we are actually finally seeing mergers, but it's crypto.

So the mergers are going to be fraught and insane. And I think this is one of them where Circle has acquired the influence. Interop Labs team and IP. So the equivalent of acquiring Ave Labs, right? But leaving the token and protocol behind. So the core developers, they've acquired, they've acquired that team, but not the AXL token or the network. So Axler fell like 15% off the markets, realized that it was kind of being left behind

in this deal and that there's no direct benefit to token holders. but the network is now going to continue independently under community governance. Now, the reason why, my hot take is the reason why we have so few mergers and acquisitions in crypto is because the premium that a token commands in the market usually is so insane that no person would ever, like I don't know what the market cap of axler is. Maybe someone can tell me. My hot take is going to be like hundreds of millions, right? It was a billion a year ago.

It's $100 million today. A hundred million today, right? So it's $100 million today. My guess is Circle did not acquire the Introp Labs team and IP for $100 million. My guess is it was more like five or 10, right? And if they had been forced into acquiring this team for the outstanding token FDV of $100 million, they would have been like, guys, like there's no way that's happening. Even though Circle has a lot of money, right?

So instead, they're like, why don't we just acquire the team and you guys can basically like move on and leave the network behind, which is pretty wild. I don't know. Speaking of like what rights does the token holder have? Spoiler, they have no rights. None whatsoever. The builders, the creators of the token have no obligations whatsoever. If they want to go join circle, okay. like what's what are you going to do about this is it right do i think it's like the best outcome for

everyone like no they freaking they built their entire thing from the from the token right on the backs of the token holders and then they're like okay sweet bye like it sucks but at the same time like i don't there's just there's no structure for accountability here um and i don't think that um it's sort of a lose-lose. Like if you were to force the structure so that Circle would have to buy out all the token holders at the market value, Circle wouldn't. They'd go find another team. And that's the fundamental problem, right? Like that right there is the crux of the problem is that like the market and acquire, looking to acquire, and you know, you have these issues in TradFi, right, where it's like there's a thing that's trading at like, you know, a premium.

The shares are fairly illiquid and then someone comes along and makes an acquisition offer. And it gets rejected by shareholders because they're like, if the token holders had the ability to reject this acquisition, they absolutely would. They'd be like, no way. Like, Circle, you pay $100 million or. And then it's like, well, it's not worth $100 million. It's like, I think there's a lot of token holders that would say too bad. That's the price of the token. And we'll see you next year when it's.

were 20. Yeah. And that's the most interesting thing about the tokens is that it's not, we call it alignment, but it's actually not aligned or creating alignment in a lot of cases. Yeah. And I think there is like a sensible middle ground here, which isn't like full security law disclosure type stuff, which I think is probably too onerous for, you know, the speed of which like crypto moves. But I do think that like we can point to something like this and just say it's obviously just not a great situation for people who are buying into these things when you have like absolutely zero claim or right on anything. This to me feels like a pretty basic thing that most people should be getting if they're buying into something, which is like

the team that's actually built this isn't going to turn around the next day and walk off. But it hasn't obviously been crystallized in any formal way now. I do think like the gatekeepers who could actually drive change here are probably only the centralized exchanges, which is like like if you're going to get a listing on a finance or a Coinbase or whatever it is, you need to agree to X, Y, Z in terms of what actual claim and, like, rights people buying into this token would actually get. I don't know exactly what that looks like across the industry, but I think if it is going to change at all, it probably has to be done at the centralized exchange level

because I think they're sort of gatekeep, you know, people getting access to these products. The problem with, like, sex listing conversations, right? and I may or may not be having some conversations like that at the moment is their their motivation and and concerns are like all about liquidity and vesting structures and like it's not then like token holder rights it's basically not even in the conversation. There's no conversation whatsoever about like what obligations is you know the protocol have the team. the Dow, etc. Which is kind of what I'm suggesting, maybe we should revisit and change because, like, you can kind of ignore it for so long,

but if even the centralized exchanges, right, are incentivized for their users to not consistently lose money the whole time, and if people are coming to, you know, gamble in the casino and they're consistently losing, they're going to stop at some point in terms of coming back. So, yeah, I think for, like, long-term health and structure, I think something like this does make sense in, like, a light form.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it just, you know, it goes back to partially just how fast things were moving, partially the regulatory regime around such things, right? Like doing any of those things, like giving token holders rights, like, you're going to go to jail. Yeah. Yeah, without some regulatory, well, I mean, the interesting thing is, like, Luca, you can just be like, it's a meme coin, bro.

Like, and, you know, obviously your situation is, is quite a bit different to, you know, most, most defy protocols where it's like, this is a representation of the IP. I mean, how do you think about the Pengu pudgies, little pudgies, rogues, dichotomy? Like, it's an interesting one because if you actually think about the problem, it's a lot more complex than you think. So like, for example, the line of thought came around at one point where we were like give equity to NFT holders or token holders. We've thought about that. But if you actually think about the strategy, right? Like you can put an insane ceiling on where these things all of a sudden the speculative ass that doesn't become speculative anymore. Right.

And so like you almost kill the fun. Like from a strategy perspective, like you could kill a lot of the fun. I actually think guy is completely correct in terms of like the thread that he's. pulling. I think like step number one that's like every exchange can implement that is if a team does this, it's like auto delisting. Because if you actually think about it and look at the charts, they're actually getting rewarded for doing this. So like tensor is a perfect example, right? So like tensor is trading a lot higher than it was pre the acquisition in which the team completely left the project, right? Like at a minimum, if these things happen, these things have to be like

auto delisted within 48 hours because like, because they're, you know, if I'm in, if I'm a team and I'm looking at the tensor chart. I'm like, this is great. I'm going to have more liquidity if I do this, right? And I'm going to get a cash out. And at the end of the day, like, you have to understand the human element of this is like, traders, like, you can see, you can have this like very, like, purest approach. And, and I remember, I felt like over the years I've gotten burned for having this

approach. And I'm a little jaded on like this stance. But like, when it's all. set and done everyone's out there for themselves right and like right now this thing is this thing is looking like the best thing for a founder to do who's has like a failed token and i think it starts with at a minimum delisting i think for my take like there's a lot of pros and cons to this and i think the biggest one is just putting a ceiling on the speculative asset because all of a sudden if my token is a proxy for equity you know you are now you're not you're no longer

the story that you're telling yourself is no longer the story of, you know, we're getting a billion impressions a day. We are the mascot of crypto. We're the biggest consumer brand that's ever come out of crypto. You're now then looking at my revenue and my EBITA, right? And you're like, you're doing the math on that. You're not doing the math on the memetics and the culture and comping it to a Doge and a Shiba. I'm now like a standalone brand coin. And that's like all I am. And I better like hope I can fucking, you know, five X revenue fucking next year. If not, I'm cooked. So I think like it's a, it's a catch 22 that I think like everybody would love some Pudgy Penguin equity. But like, if I have my take, and this is, I have a very unorthodox stance here, you know,

I think all tokens are a proxy of mine share. I think if you index them for anything else, I think it's a big, fat, giant mistake. I even have a really compelling take on buybacks and how that thing is a complete giant farce. As somebody who's put $20 million into the books before, it really does nothing, right? It's, it's, it's all just proxy of mind share, right? Like, and if you don't like, you know, Bitcoin has won because it's proxy the mind share of digital gold and digital gold

and the mind sure that that's been able to capture has increased over time, right? And people have believed that I actually just think like a lot of people me to understand more of what this stuff is, which is, again, a proxy of mind share. And that's, that's a blessed, it's a catch-22. It's what makes crypto so great. And in cases like this, it what makes crypto, you know, awful and feel immature and feel, you know, lacking in substance.

But no one's, no one's crying when it pumps a thousand percent. So it's just like, it's, it's really. Well, I think this, like, I think that's actually, that's very interesting take. And it sort of aligns with one of the, the. views that I have around like token prices expand and and compressed based on like people's time horizon. Like at the moment, people's time horizon is like next week, right? And so everything gets compressed because everyone's like, how much will this thing be worth next week? Like, what is it going to do next week? How much better will it be, et cetera? And so everyone starts to become super

bearish because they're like, this thing was worth so much money. This token was worth so much money when everyone was looking out to like 2035, right? In 2035, if crypto is, you know, the rails that all finance works on, and this thing has the mind share today and it maintains that mind share, then it's obviously going to be worth, you know, trillions of dollars or whatever the math is, right? But if we're looking at like what happens in, you know, two weeks in January, then, you know, probably it looks a lot more bearish, right? So it's almost like early stage companies in a nascent industry.

Whoever is the dominant one, you go, well, if this industry expands 100x, then the dominant one, the one that has captured the most mind share, attention, traction, whatever you want to call it, is going to continue to dominate. But if everyone all of a sudden goes, actually that industry is a joke and is not real, then having the most mind share doesn't really help you, right? The problem here is actually quite paradoxical because, you know, in times like this, the trader becomes an investor when in reality, like a majority of liquidity sloshing around in these things are quantitative traders, right? And a quantitative trader is not an investor. So it's like you're a quantitative trader when you want to be. And then like when things are not going your way, you're an investor and you want investor rights and all the things that come with it. You've got to be like honest with what you're with a lot of that these people are doing. I promise you a majority, 98% of the people come. complaining about this are quantitative traders, you know, trading the chart and trading whatever, you know, analysis and RSIs they add going. You know, it's not, again, another catch-22 with

crypto is like, it's one of the things that I think like. Same thing with farmers, right? Like, farmers become your number one user very quickly when like the farming, when the fields become barren. All of a sudden, they're like, I'm your best user and you're treating me badly. Like, how did this happen? All right. Let's, uh, let's move on. on to Rushi. So Rushi was the founder of a token called Move, Movement Labs, which was a new L1, shockingly. Can you believe it? It was an L1. So Movement Labs is going to build a new L1, and it was going to be based on the Move language. Now, my favorite part of all of this, and I don't think we've talked about, That's yet, hey, so I'm waiting for your head to explode. But the best part about move, if you're not aware of this, right, is that as a language, it's unhackable.

So that was the claim to fame on why move and movement-based chains were going to be so good. And Rushi sat there at one time and said to me, like, the thing is, like, the move language is so good that it's not hackable. So if you're using any other language, you're basically you're in GMI. Nothing is unhackable ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And if someone tells you that it's unhackable, run. Run so fast. Yeah. So Rushi's come back and there was a whole drama.

He was ousted from movement labs because there was. It was this market-making drama of tokens were sold right off to TG. They had token locks, et cetera, you know, talking about like token and send a misalignment, token holder misalignment, right? The, whether he controlled the tokens or labs controlled, someone had a bunch of unlocked tokens and dumped them. And yeah, we ended up, we ended up with him coming back running now. a VC fund, I guess, which is extremely on brand for someone who's dumped it.

I think it's liquid. I think it's a liquid fund. Oh, it's a liquid fund? It's red as a liquid fund. Okay. Is that better? Does that make it okay? Yeah, well, no comments.

I mean, in fairness, like a liquid fund, their job is actually to dump tokens, right? Like to just buy and sell tokens. So, you know, to go back to your point, Luca, like, they're just traders, right? Like it's, but I think the claim was they're going to like help scale markets or something like that. So, yeah, I'm not going to lie. This, this next group scares your shit out of me. I can't imagine anything good is going to come out of this. I just wish, and this is super idealistic, okay?

But I'm just going to say it anyways. I just wish that when someone royally screws up and screws over everyone, that they wouldn't be able to come back. like there are so many talented legitimate builders and people that are innovating here that deserve that mind share and that chance to thrive. And instead, we just keep doing the same freaking broken record of these stupid scammers. And the amount of money is just absurd. And I just wish it wasn't like that. That's all.

Yeah, I think my, I share a similar line of thought. I think my problem is less like, I think like obviously people deserve a second and a third chance. I think that's always important. I'm more frustrated with the fact that, like, you know, he, you know, people can come back and go raise $100 million. I think that I think the raising of the $100 million is the bigger problem, right? Like, who are these capital allocators? But what I've learned, I think I mentioned this in the last podcast, you'd be surprised how

stupid some of these guys are. The more that I, like, maneuver around, I'm like, dude, you manage how much money? You're like a big retail trader. You know, you're no better than that, than that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, guy, you know, sitting in his mom's basement on 4X, you just have a couple hundred million dollars in size. You'd be so surprised how many, like, of these guys I speak to. And I'm like, I just told you what you're, you know, some, some guy will like message me and be like, so what are you doing? What's, what's the big, what's the big buy? I'm like, look, man,

Pengu's the face of crypto. You know, I've talked about you like five times around this. You know, look, I'll tell you, I was a move investor. Rushi was a young founder. I was friends with him. I thought he was a good dude, you know, materially. I can't speak to what he did. I don't know that much about it. I was a stoked move investor, too, up until, you know, the whole drama and nonsense. Yeah. Who knows?

I mean, look, he's, yeah, who knows? I don't have much of a take other than that. All right, guy, if you've got nothing to add. Yeah, I'm not sure I do. Yeah, I'm not sure everyone deserves a second chance to come back to the space. Sometimes we just need that. I mean, it's a good point, right? Like, you know, should people get a second chance, third chance, eighth chance, whatever?

Like, in this case, I think it's fair to say, like, Rishi turned up, things happened. This is his second chance. Like, does someone deserve a second chance? Part of the problem is that no one has any clarity as to what actually happened. Like, there's, you know, I'm sure. there's people who know, but like if you're on the timeline, like, like I'll say myself, I don't like I wouldn't, you know, hand on heart say like I am 100% certain that this is exactly what happened and this is what this person did, et cetera, et cetera. Like there's, it's so hard

to know in in crypto sometimes what actually has happened. And, and, you know, I mean, I go back, I think I've mentioned this before, but like when Doquan got the subpoena in, in, in, in, whenever it was 2020 or 2021. It just happened that he was on stage, I was on stage, and Gav Wood was on stage. Those are the three people that were on stage at that time, right? And someone tweeted, someone just got a subpoena as they were walking on stage to speak. And everyone was like, who was on stage? And they were like, it was these three, right? And I was like, guys, it wasn't me. And everyone was like, sure, it wasn't. And then like, Gav Wood didn't say anything. And then everyone's like, it's definitely Gav Wood because he didn't say anything.

And if he didn't say anything, then we know it's him. And like, Doe Kwan, meanwhile, it's like, it's 100% not me. And everyone was like, oh, Doe seems like a good guy. It's fine. It probably wasn't him. But like, genuinely, for months afterwards, people would be like, it was really you, wasn't it? Like people, it's so hard to know. Like, this was like hundreds of people watched this thing happen.

And yet crypto Twitter could not figure out what actually happened. How are we supposed to untangle who, own the tokens, who sold them, whether there was a market maker, et cetera. Like, without some investigation and report of something like that, which is never going to happen, you know, it's easy for someone to just be like, no, no, no, it was all a mistake and then raise $100 million. But yeah. Yeah.

And by the way, so the move thing was actually, I've seen some of the documents regarding the stuff that came out. It is extremely weird. The deal is terrible. Like, it's a terrible deal. obviously, right? And the weirdest thing that I, that I kept going back to and I kept, I was like, someone please answer this question is like, okay, so you have movement labs, you have Rishi, you have the tokens, you have these market makers, you have market makers that are sort of known

to be like shady, sketchy, right? Like, finance like kicked Web3 port off. But the deals were with these like entities that like, some of the entities were like Web3 port, but it was like a, like a Gmail address and then you have like other entities that just like don't even exist. And I was like, there was a point when I saw the first like couple documents that I was looking at them. I was like, wait, did someone at move just get like like business email compromise scam? Like is this or were they intending to do this deal? And I think they, I think that final outcome was that they intended to do this really sketchy deal. But for a minute there was like, did did they get, did they get scam?

Because like there's a really common sort of like Nigerian-esque scam where basically they they'll compromise an email or sort of get in the middle of communications and then like change the right. So you think you're doing a deal with or paying an invoice or whatever. They sneak in. They divert the flow of your funds to a new place, which is the scammer controlled address. For a minute there are is literally like, can someone clarify this? Unfortunately, it seems like the clarity was that they did intend to do a deal with a no-name entity where this other entity was on both sides of the deal and was a real mess.

This comes back to the exact thing of like. It's a complete disaster. But we don't, we like, you know, this wouldn't happen in Tratify because you have like structures of how an IPO happens and there's particular people and yeah, it's inefficient and yeah, you know, there's a lot of costs and transaction costs and whatever. But, you know, you can't just invent your own way of doing everything because people will be like, hey, let me see the docs. And then it's like a crayon, you know, investor and Gmail address. And so, so, you know, no, everyone would be like, all right, like, obviously I'm not like dealing with crayon guys, right? But in crypto, it's like, yeah, like maybe they're like smart kids. It might be fine. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Because we keep giving them $100 million. Before we continue, here's a word from our sponsors that make the show possible. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go-to-market, BD, and partnership.

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. All right, welcome back to everyone. So, Turun and Dan, we talked about this last week, they have made up. Tay posted in our channel, the Mike Tyson holding the... two doves now kit um so uh yeah that was uh that was pretty hilarious um i i wish we could share a screen so i would i would put that uh meme up maybe we'll tweet it later um but yeah they

they seemed to have backed away from uh the brink uh which is good um i don't know tay what was your what was your take in the end uh of all of that i'm i'm so happy that they made up first off uh because i I think that it was a really common situation where the specifics that Dan was taking issue with and the specifics that Tarun was like the point that Tarun was trying to make was they were all ultimately like not that out of alignment. Like Dan was taking a lot of issue with the headline and the way the research was done and the technicals of the research. While Tarun was basically like, wait, but there's definitely like a better way to do this and there should be some formal research on. ADL and the harm that it caused and like especially if there's like a better mechanism. I appreciate the debate because I learned so much about the different mechanisms. And I think it was like two or three episodes ago.

I was like what what would reduce the harm? And we did get a lot of answers out of that. I mean, it's not we don't really have the answers, but the conversation is there. So we could potentially have answers someday. And all in all, I hope that both Dan and Turun. because here's the thing. Ultimately, I believe, even though I do not have the technical expertise and understanding of this stuff, I believe that there's probably a way where 10-10 could have been less harmful for people, while the protocols could still remain, like the risk

to the protocol could be about equivalent, meaning that the protocol is not going to blow up. Like, I truly believe that. And I hope that hyper will liquid and all the others, you know, keep trying to improve that so that end users so that we reduce the harm that can come to end users. And I think that this conversation is part of that is. Well, I mean, Guy, we've got you here. We talked, you know, a month ago about like 1010 and ADL and, you know, Athena's position and and, you know, centralized exchanges. So if I were you, this would be the thing that would be keeping me up at night.

So like, what's your take on this? How do we solve ADL? Yeah, I think it's also probably worth clearing up pieces I saw on the timeline around Athena having like special treatment and stuff on ADL contracts with the exchanges, which isn't correct. So you're confirming that Athena does, right? You've got some side deals. That's what you're clearing up. No, it's probably opposite, which we don't. I wish we did.

And if we did, I think we'd be talking about it more and making that clear to people. but I think generally the way that the waterfalls work is that they tend to like ADL accounts that have the highest amount of leverage and like unrealized PNL that sits on the account. So the idea is that if you're going to be transferring wins from one user to cover the loss of another, you tend to sort of start with the riscous accounts, i.e. the guys are the most levered and in the money. Because Athena doesn't use any leverage and tends to just be on A, the largest exchanges, but BTC and E, You haven't actually seen ADL on BTC and ETH on the four largest sex venues in the last six years. So all the ADLs that we saw, even on 1010, were basically like really illiquid, old coins and then hyperliquid. That was kind of like the buckets of where they fall.

So that was just a very intentional, like, risk decision that we took, which was like, you can make more money doing the basis on a liquid shuddy L coins. But we just think it's safer through the cycle to be doing this on BTC and Eath on the large exchanges. So yeah, just to address that piece, there were no side deals. It was just kind of like a risk management type of decision that we took early on, which obviously paid off on that day. I think the one piece that I think the industry should like consider to try and improve the way that this sort of like ripples through is basically like some traders actually want

to kind of be closed down during an ADL like when the markets crash. So like a lot of people who are short on hyperliquid on the 10th. When you're getting closed out of your position, like ADLs tend to be pretty close to where the bottom of the market is. And in some ways, it is actually like a self-reinforcing mechanism, which is like when the ADLs are occurring, it's kind of actually causing a bottom within the market while that is happening. And there are some people who would like to actually be closed out quite close to the bottom

by the protocol itself. And I think a lot of people who are short and hyperliquid on the day kind of made like a perfect exit basically from their position while that was happening. The people who got screwed the most were actually people who are doing the basis on long perhaps on one venue and then short perhaps on the other. So like you kind of got away with it if you had like spot long on one side, short derives on the other. But when it was derives on both sides, you kind of got like pulled out of one leg and then it didn't match up at all. The reason I'm giving that context is that actually if you gave users the option to say,

I want to be ADLed when this like put me at the top of the queue, right? If your account that you're using there is just like directionally short things or doing like spot versus per basis, you might actually just say, I want to be at the top of the waterfall. While other users, like Athena, for example, we never want to be touched within that waterfall at all. But actually just like putting it on the user to just like select and click and say, I would actually, this is where I would like to sit within the waterfall. Anyone who's like opted into it, first you do like a pro rata socialization for those users of the losses. And then you sort of go down to the mechanic that works now for everyone else as you go through it.

So that's one thing which I think we could improve. I think the second one is actually- It wouldn't be crypto though if we didn't like auction that off, right? Like we should we should auction off the right to be at the top of the ADLQ. Yeah. Who's building this? Come on. Someone. Yeah. And then I think the other one is actually just like transparency around if you remember like in the Bitmax days, you actually had like a

bit of a meter on your account which is saying like you're close to the top of the ad lQ or not and it wasn't like perfect information but it was some information so that you can actually try and address things yourself to try and reposition uh where you saw like a picture of arthur and a Ferrari right that was like driving along like getting closer to the top of the adLQ um and yeah i think like there is no clarity whatsoever with how insurance funds are being used on centralized exchanges and how that interacts with adLs uh specifically like it's kind of Some exchanges will dip into the insurance fund. Sometimes they won't.

It's very different in terms of the treatment on different coins. I think this just feels like a very easy thing to make extremely clear to people and just put on a dashboard, which is like, this is the insurance fund that sits next to each coin. Because the more that you can, like, give people this information to price things, the better liquidity is basically because the only thing that everyone hates is like uncertainty. And if you give people information to say, this is where you're sitting in the queue, this is the size of the insurance fund.

You actually don't see like liquidity gap out in the same way that it did. on 10th of October. Because people are de-risking if they think they're, yeah, like, market makers are like, I don't have this information, so I don't even want to trade. Like, there isn't even a price that I want to touch this because I'm just like shooting in the dark. And so I think the more that you can actually just give people these inputs, it's actually useful signal for a lot of these market makers to actually just turn up and provide liquidity when, even when the world's are crumbling, like, yeah. So this wasn't on our agenda, but you raise an interesting point. I haven't done any research other than just seeing this on the timeline, but hyperliquid burned a bunch of

of hype that was in their assistance fund like yesterday or the day before it was already burned or something like that. Does anyone have any info on that? Because it did feel a bit strange to me. I was like, why are you burning the assistance fund? Yeah. No, I think it was that was like the buyback wallet where the programmatic buybacks had been deposited. And as far as I understood, no one actually had access and control without like a hard fork of the chain to be able to. Right. Okay.

Right. So that's not the assistance fund then, right? Like that couldn't be the assistance fund if it's in an inaccessible wallet. Well, I think you could hard fork, hard fork the chain and then be able to reallocated if there was like a huge hack or something like that. But I kind of see where you're getting through there, which is like, was it buybacks to then use for a rainy day? Because now like the rainy day thing has been banned. So yeah, there isn't like a reserve fund that's sitting behind things.

The assistance fund denominated in hype doesn't make any sense. So it's probably not bad, right? Because I mean, do you have assistance funds denominated in the native currency? I mean, isn't that like the FTX debacle, right? Like everything's denominated in FTX tokens or once it blew up. So I hope their assistance fund is not denominated in hype and it's denominated in dollars. But this seems like they're just, this seems like the buyback wallet and they just burn it.

Yeah, that's fine. That's great. All right. We'll do some more. We'll do some more research. I just saw a few people being like, they burn the assistance fund. I was like, we might need assistance, guys. He always need assistance, guys.

He always needs assistance, guys. Like, why would we do this? All right. Next thing that we're moving on to North Korean fake Zoom crypto scams go daily. So, SEAL Team 9-11, who are volunteer organization. Is that fair to say? I don't think they monetize their activities. A volunteer organization that tries to keep everyone safe

have warned that North Korean hackers, some of whom are good friends of Tay and I. I was actually, I did message fake Nick. So one of the North Green hackers, yeah. So I messaged fake Nick and I was like, hey, I'm really sorry to see that you got this scam tag. And he was like, yeah, this is bullshit. I don't know what's going on here.

I don't know. It's like so amazing. Just like the level of like, this is not fair. Why would Telegram target me? I haven't done anything wrong in this account. But anyway, so these guys go around and they compromise telegram accounts. And, you know, so they'll compromise my account and then they'll message you and be like, hey, let's jump on a Zoom call.

So if I ever message you asking to jump on a Zoom call, run, like I'm not going to ask you to jump on a Zoom call. And then they have all of these different ways of getting you to basically run some software on your machine. Like I thought this kind of declined a little bit, Tay. Like what how do you come back? It's so much worse.

Really? Yeah, because they've completely, so fake Nick, fake Wyatt, those were fake accounts. Like Nick and Wyatt didn't get hacked. Yeah. Right? Over the last year, they've pivoted to basically only using taken over accounts.

And so it's like if real your, if if real Nick where you had conversation history with Nick, I've been like, hey, nice fight man, or whatever he said. And then was like, let's hop on a Zoom. Like the likelihood that you would detect that red flag as being like, wait, Nick wouldn't ask me to get on Zoom. The likelihood just is infinitely lower because you actually have the conversation history. Right. And most of the victims, so the other thing is that actually now they, they're more unlikely to, say, target you from, like, from Nick's account because you and Nick actually, like, talk quite frequently and have interactions and stuff.

What they're doing is that something that's super common for, like, VCs, BDs, founders, CEOs, right? You have this whole, like, old history in your telegram of, like, this person that you met at, a conference once and like you took a selfie together and you had a great conversation and then like you never talked together. And you like remember them and you have like positive vibes with them. They'll restart those conversations and be like, hey, we haven't talked in a while. Like we should catch up. And for founders who are raising rounds or potentially raising rounds or looking for partnerships, it is completely disarming because you have prior conversation. You met the person in real life. You met the person in real life.

You exchange telegram handles in real life. It is it bypasses people. And then they're also just they're just quite good at, um, like so that bypasses, right? And then there are red flags that will pop up and people do tend to like sort of detect sometimes, but they're very good at just being like, no worries. They'll tell you straight up.

Yeah, yeah, no worries. Don't worry about it. My security, I had to do the same thing. My security team checked it. Like it's fine. Just click the button. Just run the thing. And then it completely takes your shit. You know, when my, so I had like a random domain registrar, right?

And they got social engineered. The domain registrar got social engineered. I think this actually happened to you as well, Guy, where like the registrar got social engineered because they've got a bunch of support people, wherever they are, you know, who are tired and they're not used to like a high value thing being secured by these systems, right? And this was just like my family office domain. But these guys went and were able to social engineer the support agent who isn't even supposed to have, by the way, the power to like redirect DNS, but somehow did. So they somehow got like escalated up to someone who actually

had the power to do this. And that person was like, yeah, sure. You seem like a nice guy. I'll just change the DNS records on this domain for you. And it took me like weeks and weeks of like hammering these guys for them to even admit that that was possible. I'm like, listen. And so I eventually social engineered one of their guys who was like a bit of like a kind of what's the best way of putting it like like a like a kind of pissed off employee. Like they they were like angry. Like so I kept going to like different people. And eventually I was like, hey, just I need your help.

here, can you actually do this? And this guy's like, yeah, we can actually. Like, they tell us not to say. So you like, you like, you like got. I reverse social. Yeah. I mean, they're obviously. In order to take yourself back.

Yeah. And so, so I was able to like create like some affinity with this guy. And he was like, let me help you. I'm so sorry this happened. This company's a piece of shit. Like, it was hilarious. And so, so he, so he was like, yeah, like I can fix this. And so then that guy was at my point of contact from like then on.

Yeah. And that's the thing is that, so why do people get scammed? Why do people get taken by this? Part of it is they just don't understand what could happen. Like, oh, like, dude, who's going to spend a huge amount of effort trying to change the DNS of this domain? Yeah. And it's like, they don't realize like, oh, if you redirected crypto domain, there's like millions of dollars on the table for that. Yeah.

And it's similar with these, with like the fake Zoom, fake team scams. People just like don't realize that when you somehow, when you, if you copy paste something into terminal and like press run, if you, they use Apple script, which is like a terminal-esque program, you do that. If you install a new application, all of those things can do basically anything. Completely own you. Yeah. And they do it silently. And this, the malware that they're doing is really focus on max. And it is, it is incredible, horrible malware.

As a Mac user, right? You have a little bit of a sense of like, I'm on a Mac, like I'll be okay. Yeah, no. But so this was actually interesting as well. I used Dynamic Wallet for one of the things that I've been building. And Dynamic Wallet injects into the browser console, this giant red text that says like, this is a bad place.

you shouldn't be here. Don't copy paste. Don't copy paste anything in here. Don't do anything, right? And it was funny because I was like, it kept popping up, right? Because I updated dynamic and they've changed the thing. And I was like, if I were the scammer, what I would do is I would be like, hey, I need you to open the browser console.

And then there's a little button with like a cross out of it. Like press that real quick. Like you got to press it really quickly or the person's red and then it clears the console. And then it's like, all right, now I've got them. And it's like, you just if you're, if you are thinking, from that like adversarial perspective like every attempt to prevent people from owning themselves so you can get around so yeah yeah and i want to just emphasize with the because this is the thing this is like the real damage to these is they're using the existing accounts the existing telegram

accounts and so it really looks like it you have the prior conversation history and they just like they just go down the list and spam everyone and it's they're patient and they're dedicated and they will just act like normal people. The most important thing that people need to know is like, if you're a victim of one of these and they get your telegram account, you have to, one, warn everyone, but two, if they like don't get your telegram account for a second, you have to go into telegram and there's like a thing under settings under devices where you can kill all of the sessions. It says it's called like literally like terminate all sessions. You must do that because they're not logging in with your password.

And so a lot of people, what's happening is that even when they know that they've been hacked, they'll just update their password. But because the malware is taking all this, they're taking the session keys. They're using that to re-log in. And so we're seeing people get hacked even weeks after they got like initially hacked. They'll have their telegram taken over. Because they just exactly. And so I'm really hopeful.

We're all really hopeful to break the cycle, especially they, they are just going to town right now. We saw like, maybe like 15 new accounts get taken over last week. Wow. Fifteen that we know about. So these are like English speaking crypto Twitter users. Who knows what's going on with like the LinkedIn and the Chinese community? Like they're also getting taken. It's so bad. I hate everything. All right. We've got like a minute left here. Let's quickly talk about leverage in polymarket. So someone invented leverage. polymarket positions as is inevitable if something is successful enough. So we saw how well this went for leveraged NFT positions and we're like let's roll it out to polymarket. This, my immediate

reaction to this is like this feels like pure insanity because most polymarket positions are super illiquid and I feel like there's just like people are going to come and do crazy. stuff to these positions and people are going to get wrecked and it's i don't know i haven't looked into like the dynamic and and mechanism design of this so maybe they've got like protections from like wick liquidations or something but uh it just feels like there's unintended consequences all over this thing another basis trade for guy that's the market keeps expanding well i was going to say as long as you're farming the basis on president in AOC's election, just to build up a bit of a war chest for all of us when we're in the

gulag, I'm okay with it. Yeah. I was going to say, I was quite surprised. I think it's a cool idea, but I don't know how big the market actually is. Like, the open interest in like size of dollars, I think, on these prediction markets is actually just not that big. I think relative to the mindshed that they've got. Like, you see people talking about the stuff obviously in the real world and in crypto like a lot

these days, but I think it's like a few hundred million dollars. basically across both CaliGi and the polymarket. So yeah, I'm not sure how big the actual market can be for lending against this stuff. Well, it gets bigger if you leverage it, right? I was about to say. But all we need, if we injects. That's the whole thing. If we just add some leverage, then it could become $100 billion.

And then the problem goes away. So final thing before we wrap up, Meta Mosque added Bitcoin support. which is pretty cool. Only took 15 years. Congrats, guys. I'm so proud of our team. I will say. It feels to me as like as a as a you know,

Meta Mosque enjoyer. I still use Meta Mosque. I never switched to Ravi. I tried it and it was not amazing and I went back to Meta Mosque. It feels to me like you guys have been rolling stuff out very quickly lately, which as like as a pseudo competitor in Infinex, like I don't appreciate it. If you can go back to being complacent.

We still have a huge amount of work to do, but yeah, we have gotten, we've gotten so much better. And we've also paid down years of tech debt, which took an immense amount of effort from every single engineer in our team, like the most grueling, tedious, horrible amount of effort to pay down the tech debt. So we are definitely in a better position. I swapped, swapped slash bridged from ETH to big. just to see how the flow was.

And it was like super seamless. I'm like, I was so impressed. You can just get Bitcoin and like you don't, it just goes and it's in your existing Bitcoin. Well, it's so nice. But yeah, we'll, you know, we've gotten good at rolling out these new networks. We've gotten good. We have prediction markets now too.

I think the biggest thing is like we still have a lot of just rough edges and especially for the power users. Like, we hear you. I'm a power user. They, my own slash years, bro, like you got to pay down that hardware wallet tech debt. Like, when you have 100 plus accounts, like we're still working on those. But hopefully we'll get there someday soon.

But yeah, it's, we're not, we're still going. Awesome. All right, that's it for this episode of UnEasy Money. Thank you, Guy, for joining us. It was fun. I hope to see you on the other side of the holidays. Thanks for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained Feed on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Happy holidays, everyone.