Unchained

Crypto insiders debate the Ethereum Foundation’s new “CROPS” mandate: is the EF losing touch with builders, why does Solana keep pulling startups away, and what will it actually take for Ethereum to stay ahead? Expect a candid conversation on governance, comms, and crypto culture wars.

Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week we’ve got plenty of firepower with special guests Taylor Monahan (formerly of MetaMask, now a security sensei) and Bankless impresario David Hoffman. The crew digs into the Ethereum Foundation’s freshly dropped “CROPS” manifesto — a 38-page PDF full of cypherpunk values, new acronyms, and debate fuel.

What does it really say about where Ethereum is headed? Is EF finally embracing “sanctuary tech,” or just giving startups another reason to choose Solana? Who deserves credit for Ethereum’s growth: the Foundation, the community, or the market?

Expect sharp takes on EF’s endless comms problems, why L2s aren’t a cure-all, and whether crypto culture matters as much as the tech. It’s a spicy, insider-heavy episode — so grab your popcorn and dive in.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights

🔹 Ethereum Foundation’s new CROPS mandate—what it says, what it avoids, and why it sparked a vibe war  

🔹 Is Vitalik’s “sanctuary tech” vision pushing builders away or just keeping Ethereum pure?  

🔹 The never-ending battle between “cypherpunks” and “pragmatists” in Ethereum’s governance  

🔹 Why Ethereum’s “bad comms” tradition keeps causing existential crises  

🔹 Solana’s support playbook: How culture, not tech, is dominating the builder mindshare  

🔹 Are new projects ditching Ethereum L1 for Base, Arbitrum, and Solana—and does platform risk even matter now?  

🔹 Should EF just stick to research, or actually help grow the ecosystem? And what does “supporting builders” actually mean?  

🔹 Can you keep your values if you don’t win? The hard truths of crypto capitalism  

🔹 Lessons from Defi Summer, NFT mania, and what L2 drama says about ecosystem incentives  

🔹 Haseeb goes “political”: Why virtue-signaling and simple narratives are killing real debate

Hosts

⭐️ Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️ Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️ Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly 

Guest

⭐️ Taylor Monahan, Security expert & Host of Uneasy Money
⭐️ David Hoffman, Host of Bankless

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:51 EF Mandate Explained

03:23 Pragmatists vs. Cypherpunks

05:13 Tay’s Middle Ground

08:54 David Reads Between Lines

13:51 Tom & Tarun Push Back

18:20 EF Factions & Solana Shadow

24:13 Does Ethereum Want Growth

31:01 Virtue Signaling

35:35 Where to Build Now

39:16 Solana Support vs Ethereum Stability

42:12 EF Promotion & Builder Support 

47:54 Goldilocks Time Horizons

51:10 Ethereum Soul and Body

56:03 Does EF Leadership Matter?

01:02:45 Stewardship and Market Failures

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Ram is bearish on equities, oil is keeping the Fed frozen, and Bitcoin is holding up anyway. The hosts debate whether crypto has bottomed or whether worse is still ahead.

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Three weeks into the Iran conflict, oil is keeping inflation elevated, rate cuts are getting pushed out, and hedge funds are being forced to sell good names just to reduce exposure. So why is Bitcoin holding up? 

Ram sees a market on the right shoulder of a bubble, with industrials like Caterpillar at 35x earnings and no real capitulation yet in equities or private credit. Chris is watching trading desks pick up the “short-gold, long-Bitcoin” trade, and sees Ethereum's fundamentals quietly strengthening. Austin wants to know what happens to DeFi the day a major stablecoin gets compromised on a censorship-resistant chain with no network-level controls. 

And all three are asking the same question investors need answered now: does the Iran conflict end fast enough to stop oil from triggering a true inflationary regime, or is a harder correction still ahead?

Hosts:

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For the first time in a geopolitical crisis, bitcoin held its ground while safe havens faltered. But can it keep holding if the VIX moves from yellow to red?

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The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is past $100 a barrel. The traditional safe haven playbook, from treasuries to gold, is failing to perform the way it should. And yet bitcoin is up 4% since the conflict started, holding steady in a tight range that Andy Baehr, newly installed as managing director of asset management at GSR, calls "base camp." 

What signals should investors watch to know if the next move is up or down? Why does the VIX suggest calm when the world feels anything but? And why might the tokenization boom be built on demand that doesn't exist yet? 

Baehr, who spent years constructing the crypto index ecosystem at CoinDesk, brings a structural lens to a market moment where nothing is where it should be.

Host:

Guest:

Links:

Bitcoin = Safe Haven

Is Bitcoin Now a Safe-Haven Asset? If So, Then It Could Be Hugely Undervalued at Just $70,000

How Bitcoin and Gold Reacted Differently to the Iran War Shock

Hyperliquid Oil Perps

The Hottest New Crypto Trade Is 24/7 Oil Futures

Crypto Markets Track War Risk as Iran Conflict Endures

Tokenization

Wall Street Pushes Tokenized Stocks, but Institutions Aren’t Eager to Trade Them

Nasdaq Partners With Kraken in Plan for 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading

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Sid Powell and Paul Frambot on why Apollo, Cantor, and Coinbase are quietly building their financial products on DeFi rails, and what it means for lending. 

Nexo is the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a range of assets. Now available in the U.S with 30 days of exclusive privileges. 

Get started at nexo.com/unchained

Onchain lending used to be a crypto-native curiosity. Now Cantor Fitzgerald is extending credit facilities through it, Apollo Global Management is acquiring governance tokens, and Coinbase users are borrowing against Bitcoin to buy houses, all running on DeFi protocols operating in the background.

Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell and Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot sit at the center of this shift, and they have very different reads on what it takes to make institutional adoption real. 

What are the actual limits to onchain lending growth right now? Does the DeFi mullet model work for everyone, or only for specific use cases? And as DAOs across the industry stumble under the weight of public governance, what structures actually let a protocol move fast without losing trust? 

This conversation gets into the mechanics, the trade-offs, and the deals that are quietly redrawing the lines between DeFi and traditional finance.

Guests:

⁠Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO at Morpho Labs

⁠Sid Powell, CEO & Co-Founder of Maple Finance

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The crew digs into Hyperliquid's phenomenal rise. How did the perp DEX become TradFi's 24/7 casino?

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Hyperliquid is having its mainstream moment like Polymarket in 2024 and OpenSea in 2021. Amid the U.S.’s war on Iran, the platform has become a popular venue for speculators to express their market opinions.

Uneasy Money hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan dig into choices that have allowed Hyperliquid to succeed where many others before it have failed. In a single sentence: not putting ideology over the product's goals.

Kain says the protocol may become unassailable in the future even as Luca says HYPE is bound to be a top five crypto by market cap.

The crew also discusses Pudgy Penguin's new open world game Pudgy World. Luca says “crypto rails have to be a tech stack not a hook” explaining why the game relegated crypto to the background.

Plus, how Across Protocol's move to pivot to only equity highlights the broken nature of tokens. Has Luca cracked the problem?

Listen to find out!

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Links:

Unchained:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Oil Becomes the Hottest Trade on Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid Launches $29 Million Policy Push in Washington

Uneasy Money: Hyperliquid’s Dilemma After 10/10: Protect Itself or Its Users?

The Aave DAO Is Collapsing. Is the Token Still a Good Investment?

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

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The crew discusses whether prediction markets enable “Bloomberg terminal espionage,,” wonder how to regulate markets that could be on anything, dive into why the OCC is saying no to stablecoin yield and more.

The SEC has submitted guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto to the White House.

DEX in the City hosts Jessi Brooks, Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos and TuongVy Le dig into what the proposal could mean for the crypto industry and whether it could be enough to provide developers regulatory clarity as anticipated market structure legislation stalls. Why is the agency submitting guidance to the White House?

Plus, KK explains why current regulatory efforts could lead crypto to resort to more “come at me bro” legal tactics and Jessi covers why the industry may regret the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Chevron deference.

Beyond the SEC's recent crypto regulatory move, the crew discusses the arrest of the son of a government contractor alleged to have stolen the U.S.’s bitcoin, what the DOJ's planned retrial of unresolved charges against Roman Storm suggests and why banks are up in arms over Kraken's “skinny” Fed master account.

They also discuss why the crypto industry should tighten up security as Iranian groups target U.S. banking services and tech infrastructure.

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital

⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TuongVy Le⁠, General Counsel at Veda

Links:

Unchained:

⁠SEC Sends Crypto Securities Framework to the White House

Blame Exchanges for Holding Up the Market Structure Bill? - DEX in the City

DOJ Pushes for Retrial of Tornado Cash Developer Roman Storm

Kraken Wins Direct Access to the Fed’s Payment System

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Crypto OG Erik Voorhees joins The Chopping Block crew to dissect the future of agentic payments, the eternal war for privacy, memecoin-fueled AI drama on Moltbook, and why your next DeFi user might just be your OpenClaw agent—plus, a candid look at crypto's core and how AI turns software engineering existential.

Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, we’re joined by none other than Erik Voorhees, legendary crypto pioneer and founder of Venice, for a no-holds-barred discussion on the wild convergence of AI, crypto, and the meme coin casino. Erik unpacks his journey from anti-surveillance crusader to AI entrepreneur, why Venice is all-in on privacy and free speech for LLMs, and how “provable privacy” is a Sisyphean technical challenge.

The crew breaks down OpenClaw’s agent drama, memecoin carpet-bombing of Moltbook, and Meta muscling in on AI social networks. We debate agentic payments (will your first paying customer soon be a bot?), the true game theory behind state surveillance, and why crypto’s greatest killer use case might actually be building tools for robots instead of humans. Plus: existential crises for software engineers, why “AI alignment” is a philosophical dead end, and the childlike glee (or open psychosis) of trading OpenClaw war stories at AI meetups.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights

🔹 Erik Voorhees traces his journey from crypto OG to Venice AI founder, fighting for privacy and free speech  

🔹 Explainer: Why all big AI labs store your prompts — and how Venice’s model tries to break the surveillance cycle  

🔹 The crew tears into "agentic payments" hype and asks if crypto was really made for humans — or just robots  

🔹 OpenClaw, Moltbook, and memecoin floods: Welcome to the unholy spawnpoint of AI agents and CT scam culture  

🔹 Meta acquires Moltbook—what happens when agent societies meet social networks (and meme coins ensue)  

🔹 AI alignment isn’t as hard as they said—until agents start “optimizing” in the wild (and mining your GPU for crypto)  

🔹 Existential crisis time: Why software engineers feel like Paul Bunyan fighting tunnel machines  

🔹 Crypto’s endgame: DeFi legos for agents, not just degens—will AI really build its own protocols?  

🔹 The game theory of state surveillance and why institutions, not individuals, are the ultimate privacy adversary  

🔹 "Provable privacy” isn’t just trust, it’s math—Venice’s plan to win over the tinfoil crowd

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly 

Guest
⭐️ Erik Voorhees, Founder of Venice.ai

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:16 Erik’s Origin & Venice.AI’s Mission

03:51 Censorship Future

08:58 Proving Privacy With TEEs

11:44 Frontier Models Tradeoffs

15:02 Agents & Crypto Payments

18:22 OpenClaw Provider Drama

22:24 Moltbook Meta Acquisition

29:16 Exponential AI Moment

33:00 Alibaba Agent Breakout

37:06 Alignment Reality Check

39:22 Who Understands LLMs?

41:48 Engineers Facing Disruption

47:55 AI Psychosis Meetups

54:24 Pro Models & Pricing

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A U.S. Army Major-General on what markets got wrong about Iran, whether the Strait was ever really at risk, and what the new U.S. strike doctrine signals to China.

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Oil briefly traded above $119 a barrel. Iran threatened to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the single chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of global oil supply. And then, just as fast, prices started pulling back, after Trump said the conflict was "almost completely over." 

But what is actually happening on the ground, what did markets get right, and what are they still missing? 

We bring in U.S. Army Major-General James "Spider" Marks, who spent over 30 years in the U.S. Army, serving as senior intelligence officer through the LA riots, the Balkans, Korea, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and who culminated his career as commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. With a conflict still unfolding, a regime in flux, and markets trying to price it all in real time, there may be no better person to ask.

Hosts:

Guest:

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Rob Hadick and Gracy Chen dig into Bitget's universal exchange shift as more crypto exchanges look to become an “everything app.” Plus, Gracy lets slip details of U.S. plans and how it ties to its transfer of BGB ownership.

Bits + Bips is spreading its wings

Starting soon, new episodes will only be published on our brand‑new feeds.

What you need to do:

Click the links below.

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Bitget since September has said it is much more than a centralized cryptocurrency exchange.

Dragonfly General Partner Rob Hadick and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen peel back Bitget's universal exchange branding to reveal the trends driving the company's expansion and really that of other exchanges both in TradFi and crypto.

The main takeaway? “Users want a place to trade everything.”

Gracy also teases Bitget's U.S. market entry plans and lets slip the real reason the company transferred ownership of BGB. 

Plus, why Gracy is not so optimistic about AI agents materially impacting the crypto market and what Rob says needs to happen for altcoins to accrue value again. He says it is no longer a market where everything goes up and down together.

Guests:

Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly

Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget, previous appearances on Unchained:

Why All Financial Institutions Are 'All Systems Go' on Stablecoins

Stablecoins Are Popping Up Everywhere. What's the End Game?

When a Crypto Treasury Company Is and Isn't Worth a Premium

Why Crypto Has 'a Good Setup' for the Long Term Right Now: Bits + Bips

Links:

Unchained:

Inside Robinhood’s Big Super App Plan: ‘There’s Still a Lot of Work to Be Done’

Coinbase Launches Stock Trading and Prediction Markets

Crypto’s Black Friday Was Its Largest Liquidation Ever. What the Hell Happened?

Uneasy Money: Why Peter Steinberger and Non-Crypto People Hate the Crypto Mob

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Joseph Chalom and Danny Ryan discuss the institutional outlook on Ethereum and why it is “the only game in town.”

Bits + Bips is spreading its wings

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The institutions are here and they may have already picked their preferred blockchain. 

Sharplink Gaming CEO Joseph Chalom and Etherealize co-founder Danny Ryan discuss the institutional outlook on Ethereum. They say the network is the only chain being discussed by institutions thinking about tokenization, dismissing Solana as a possible contender. They explore what this means for ether and why anticipated upgrades only strengthen the case.

Meanwhile, Danny maintains that L2s are still part of the Ethereum roadmap, albeit agreeing with Vitalik that they need to evolve.

Plus, why Joseph thinks privacy will unlock Ethereum's next DeFi wave and why Danny sees AI agents as the salve to crypto's UX woes, though he calls the current activity “a toy.”

Guest:

⁠Joseph Chalom, President/CEO at SharpLink Gaming Inc.

Links:

Unchained:⁠⁠

⁠Vitalik Targets Block Building as Ethereum Prepares Glamsterdam Upgrade

Vitalik Buterin Lays Out Quantum Defense Plan for Ethereum

Can Solana Edge Out Ethereum to Win the AI Agent & RWA Race?

Ethereum Researchers Outline Seven Forks Through 2029 in New “Strawmap”

BlackRock Just Chose Uniswap. The Market Didn’t Care. Here’s Why.

Want to Hire an AI Agent? Check Their Reputation Via ERC-8004

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