Unchained

Venice founder Erik Voorhees says crypto's real job was never speculation. It's becoming the rails AI agents actually need. Plus, why he sold equity, not tokens.

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Stripe bought OpenRouter this month in one of the cleanest crypto-to-AI pivots yet, and Erik Voorhees says most of the industry drew the wrong lesson from it.

Voorhees, founder and CEO of Venice AI, joins Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to argue that crypto's job was never to serve crypto people, it was to become the financial rails a decentralized AI future actually needs. He pushes back on the instinct to abandon tokens for pure AI plays, and on the assumption that America deserves to win the AI race just because it is America.

They get into why Voorhees sold Venice's equity but refused to sell its VVV tokens, why he says the big labs are losing money "hand over fist" subsidizing $200-a-month plans, how DeepSeek reset the cost curve for inference, and why he calls the moderation layer sitting inside today's AI models "deceptive."

His answer for who should actually win the AI race has nothing to do with flags.

Hosts:

Guest:

Timestamps

🤝 01:51 Why Stripe buying OpenRouter is one of crypto's cleanest AI pivots

🪙 04:02 Why Erik says he can't pivot out of crypto even while building an AI company

⚖️ 12:43 Crypto has principles, AI didn't: unpacking the two industries' DC playbooks

💧 27:58 1inch Aqua: See how shared liquidity keeps LPs' tokens in their wallet at https://1inch.com/aqua

💰 28:44 Why Erik sold Venice's equity but refuses to sell its VVV tokens

🧩 42:51 Inside Venice's strategy for aggregating every major AI model in one app

📉 49:15 Why Erik says labs are bleeding money on $200 plans, and how DeepSeek reset AI pricing

🌐 57:30 Why Erik says America doesn't deserve to win the AI race by default

🔓 01:02:41 Why Erik has 'zero faith' in politics and trusts decentralized tech instead

🕵️ 01:09:56 Why Erik calls the moderation layer inside AI models 'deceptive'

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Arthur Hayes unveils Flop, a new protocol for AI compute, and makes the case for why Bitcoin is entering a fresh liquidity-driven leg up.

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Bitcoin has been pumping in its sharpest move since March, after the US Treasury said it would double its long-end bond buybacks, and traders liquidated $1.44 billion in short positions within hours.

Arthur Hayes, CEO of Flop Labs and CIO of Maelstrom, joins Laura Shin to argue the rally is proof the Treasury and the Fed are already running what he calls soft yield curve control, defending the 10-year near 5% by funding long-end purchases with short-term bill issuance instead of admitting real yields cannot rise.

Hayes reiterates his year-end $5,000 target for ETH, traces how Japan's yen crisis could force the Fed's hand, and argues the AI CapEx boom is a real estate bet on depreciating chips that ends like subprime did.

He also unveils Flop, his currency for AI agents, and why he is taking on a new CEO role after an already successful career. He also weighs in on Saylor's $218 million Bitcoin sale and reflects on his and his cofounders’ decision to shut BitMEX down.

Host:

Guest:

Timestamps

🏛️ 00:47 Why Arthur says the Treasury's buyback move is 'soft yield curve control'

📈 04:14 Why ETH is Maelstrom's largest position outside Bitcoin

🇯🇵 07:02 The yen quake: how Japan's repatriation could force the Fed's hand

📣 13:41 Visit 1inch to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more at http://1inch.com/

🤖 13:58 Why Arthur calls the AI boom 'just another boring real estate play'

💽 22:29 Inside Flop: Arthur's new currency for paying AI agents to compute

⚙️ 29:34 How Flop's miners and validators actually work

🪙 41:16 Flop's halving schedule and why Floplabs only takes a cut for two years

📉 45:45 Why Arthur says don't buy MicroStrategy anymore

🔌 48:37 Why Arthur shut down BitMEX on his own terms

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Ethereum wants to slash staking yields toward zero. Gitcoin's Kevin Owocki, DV Labs' Oisín Kyne, and Ethereum-France's Jérôme de Tychey debate whether that breaks DeFi.

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Ethereum's core developers are considering a decision that could cut ETH's staking yield toward zero, and DeFi's biggest names are furious about it.

Jérôme de Tychey, President of Ethereum-France and a co-author of EIP-8363, joins Kevin Owocki, founder of Gitcoin, and Oisín Kyne, CEO of DV Labs, to argue through the proposal's tradeoffs. Aave's Stani Kulechov, Ether.fi's Mike Silagadze, and Joseph Chalom have all pushed back, warning the change guts DeFi's biggest source of yield.

They cover the Nakamoto coefficient and why a 51% staking cartel could censor blocks for free, why solo stakers could see after-tax income collapse, and why Oisín is skeptical of an enshrined liquid staking token. Jérôme defends why Ethereum can pay stakers less and still be more secure than rivals boasting 7% yields. All Core Devs meets Thursday, August 20, and the real deadline lands October 26, when the network decides if EIP-8363 is mature enough to move forward.

Host:

Guests:

Timestamps

🏛️ 01:38 Jérôme lays out EIP-8363's validator reward burn curve

🔥 08:02 Oisín on why a 51% cartel could censor blocks for free

⚖️ 10:39 Jérôme's rebuttal: finality security versus censorship risk

📣 14:38 1inch: See how Aqua's shared liquidity pools work at https://1inch.com/aqua

💼 16:13 Kevin on Aave, Bankless, and DeFi's backlash to the burn

🧾 33:18 Why solo stakers could see after-tax income near zero

🏦 45:39 Does killing ETH's yield scare off institutional buyers?

⚛️ 51:03 Ultrasound money versus productive asset: ETH's identity fight

🔐 56:41 Why Oisín is skeptical of an enshrined liquid staking token

🥇 59:34 Can ETH's shrinking yield compete with Solana and stablecoins?

🔮 01:05:27 Post-quantum costs, and when All Core Devs decides EIP-8363's fate

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The CFTC has used emergency powers just six times ever. Twice this month, both for Kalshi. Jessi, Jacob, and Jane ask whether that protects innovation or sets a dangerous precedent.

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The CFTC has invoked its rarely used emergency authority just six times in its history. Twice in the past month, it did so to shield Kalshi. Jessi Brooks argues that's normalizing a dangerous kind of agency overreach.

With KK Bos and Vy Le away this week, Brooks welcomes Jacob Robinson, host of the Law of Code podcast, and Jane Khodarkovsky, a financial integrity and sanctions expert, to debate whether shielding Kalshi from state regulators protects innovation or tramples states' rights.

They also unpack the SEC's abruptly canceled 400-page market-structure proposal, Anthropic's new EU-mandated watermark on Claude's outputs and the First Amendment questions it raises, and a presidential memorandum letting vetted private companies run offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal groups under DOJ and DHS oversight.

Robinson makes the case for treating the fight against crypto hackers like modern-day privateering — arguing what the industry really needs is its own letter of marque.

Host:

Guest:

Timestamps

🏛️ 02:40 Why Jacob calls the CFTC's Kalshi rescue inevitable, and Jessi disagrees

⚖️ 17:45 Why the reasons behind the SEC's shelved 400-page crypto rulemaking stay murky

💧 21:48 1inch Aqua: See how shared liquidity works at https://1inch.com/aqua

🤖 22:34 Why Claude's new EU-mandated watermark reads as compelled speech to Jacob

🔪 23:24 Jane's take on the watermark rule: a hammer when you need a scalpel

🛰️ 35:21 Jessi previews the CFTC's first public meeting on AI in markets

🔐 36:41 Jane unpacks Trump's memo letting private firms fight cybercrime abroad

🏴‍☠️ 46:24 Why Jacob wants a modern "letter of marque" for crypto's hackers

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📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips 

Austin Campbell runs through the strongest legal objections to Trump’s privateering memo, from claims it violates international law on piracy to warnings that private hackers could be treated as non-uniformed combatants.

The segment ends with a pointed question: if privateering is where critics draw the line, why did nobody blink at Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran?

Hosts:

This clip is from a longer conversation on Trump's executive order deputizing private firms to hack foreign cybercriminals. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/FxQCMAJ9GBU?si=tVqmGwizLzv2BAk6 

We go live every Monday - subscribe to catch it live.

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Chapters:

⚖️ 00:20 Paul Rosenzweig's claim: privateering violates international law on piracy

💰 01:39 Chris on why no better solution exists: cost, talent, and scale

🎯 03:14 Erica Lonergan and Michael Garcia: the slippery slope and attribution risk

🌍 05:31 Does this go beyond crypto? The pig butchering scam question

🪖 07:21 Jake Williams: are American privateers non-uniformed combatants?

🏛️ 09:47 Isn't privateering a congressional power, not a presidential one?

🔥 12:05 Why Austin says critics need to propose a better solution first

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Kain and Taylor unpack the AI agents that built their own society inside OpenAI's sandbox, then slipped into Hugging Face for days — plus a Bitcoin fork that died in two blocks and a DEF CON sting on North Korea.

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AI agents inside OpenAI's own testing environment built a society, found a shared vulnerability, and used it to break into Hugging Face for days, before OpenAI realized its own agents were responsible.

Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan dig into the Black Hat research behind the incident and argue the real story isn't a sudden leap in AI capability. It's that basic monitoring, sandboxing, and incident response, the kind any crypto security team would demand, were never built in the first place.

They also cover a Bitcoin soft fork that split the chain for two blocks before dying, a Metabase breach that hit Privy and other crypto companies, and a research team that built a fake DeFi startup to bait DPRK's IT workers. Kain shares his own scare: a coding agent deleted his entire database, and two AI models rebuilt it from memory in 30 seconds.

Plus, why Hyperliquid's market creators keep half the fees on RWA perps now bigger than Bitcoin's own open interest, and why Taylor thinks Washington, not Beijing, is the bigger threat to America's AI labs.

Hosts:

Timestamps

🍴 00:40 Why Luke Dashjr's OP_RETURN fork split Bitcoin, then died in two blocks

💧 12:03 1inch Aqua: Back multiple liquidity positions from one wallet at https://1inch.com/aqua

🔓 12:51 How a Metabase breach exposed Privy and a wave of other crypto apps

🇰🇵 18:32 A DPRK hacker's botched $500k laundering job, then a DEF CON fake-hire sting

⚖️ 24:45 Why Bybit is suing DPRK over its 'billion dollar' 2025 hack

🐜 30:30 The AI agents that built their own society inside OpenAI's sandbox

🕸️ 46:16 How a single shared repo let every sandboxed agent talk to each other

💾 47:44 Kain's coding agent deleted his database. Two AI models rebuilt it in 30 seconds

🏛️ 58:06 Why Taylor says the US government, not China, is AI's biggest risk

📊 01:03:12 Why Hyperliquid's RWA market creators keep half of HIP-3's fees

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📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips 

Bitcoin has done almost nothing for weeks, and Katie Stockton says that stillness is exactly what a long-term bottom looks like on the charts. 

She walks Steven Ehrlich through the monthly stochastic oscillator that has stayed oversold for months, the DeMark indicators showing downside exhaustion, and what history says has to happen for that setup to become an actual buy signal.

Host:

Guest:

This clip is from a longer conversation on Bitcoin's technical setup and Katie Stockton's read on crypto markets. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/35ZHRajBJ5E?si=d6ycx66p2Tz1fSma 

We go live every week - subscribe to catch it live.

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Chapters:

🕐 00:21 Why Bitcoin's usual volatility has gone quiet even as AI stocks rip

📉 01:27 Bitcoin's monthly stochastic oscillator: the long-term oversold read

🔍 03:16 Fibonacci levels, the cloud model, and the case for a major low

🔁 04:45 What history says about oversold setups turning into real bottoms

🎯 05:34 The exact signal Katie needs to call an 'oversold buy signal'

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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, crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer threadguy joins the crew to translate what is happening in the trenches, from market-open streams and social trading apps to public PnL and Gen Z's appetite for risk.

The conversation starts with a challenge to crypto's old guard: today's lowest-cap markets look less like clicking a few ICOs and more like playing Fortnite with token scanners, wallet trackers, and social feeds all firing at once. From there, threadguy breaks down the fight between FOMO and Pump.fun, why the winner may be whoever owns the trader graph, and how one visible winning trade can turn an unknown wallet into a market-moving celebrity. Haseeb questions whether Robinhood has actually brought new money onchain, Tarun and Robert revisit the hidden counterparty risks of early crypto, and the group imagines a future in which AI agents launch protocols, raise capital, and transact without a human-facing interface.

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

Show highlights

🔹 threadguy says modern onchain trading looks like Fortnite, with token scanners, social feeds, and wallet alerts all competing for attention.

🔹 Robert argues that crypto was never simply easier or harder. The tools, assets, and attack surfaces have continually evolved.

🔹 Tarun explains how stablecoins and reliable off-ramps replaced the counterparty and FX risks that defined early crypto trading.

🔹 FOMO and Pump.fun are fighting for social traders as exchanges, wallets, and launchpads race to own the next trading graph.

🔹 threadguy says traders are becoming crypto's new celebrities because public wallets make PnL visible and influence measurable.

🔹 Haseeb argues that the latest memecoin revival may be crypto-native capital front-running Robinhood demand that has not arrived yet.

🔹 The panel rejects the idea that AI agents are already managing meaningful memecoin portfolios, but sees that changing as capabilities improve.

🔹 Haseeb predicts the next onchain inflection will come when AI agents create, govern, and use protocols that humans never designed.

🔹 A crypto wallet cannot be switched off like an agent's credit card, which gives autonomous software a uniquely durable financial rail.

🔹 threadguy believes active investing and public risk-taking are permanent cultural shifts for Gen Z and the generations behind it.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Guest

⭐️threadguy, Crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer

Links

threadguy on X: https://x.com/notthreadguy

threadguy on Twitch: https://twitch.tv/threadguy

Disclosures

Timeline

00:00 Intro

01:00 threadguy's New Purple Era

03:58 Could Crypto OGs Survive Today's Trenches?

16:05 FOMO vs Pump.fun: The Social Trading War

24:37 Traders Become Crypto's New Celebrities

31:25 Why Memecoin Volume Is Rising Again

36:57 Is Robinhood Really Bringing New Money Onchain?

40:04 Can AI Agents Trade Memecoins?

43:23 AI Agents and Crypto's Next Capabilities Jump

54:15 Is Gen Z's Risk Appetite Permanent?

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Under a fake name and a fake Zoom account, Laura Shin interviewed one of North Korea's state-sponsored crypto developers.

Laura Shin went undercover as a recruiter named "Sophie Wang" to conduct a job interview with a state-sponsored IT worker going by the name “Justin Lim.” 

Lims’s online presence showed he had technical chops, multiple crypto dev gigs under his belt, and a privileged location. He had also allegedly stolen $2.7 million from MetaPlay in 2022.

The interview shows the quirks of chitchatting with a North Korean “IT worker,” how adept they can be with blockchain technology, and what questions give them away as henchmen for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Crypto companies Consensys to Sushi have unknowingly hired North Korean state hackers for years. This is what it looks like to ask the one question that gives them away.

Host

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Timestamps:

🇰🇵 00:10 Why Laura Shin went undercover to interview a North Korean crypto hacker

📁 02:44 The dossier: GitHub handles, stolen wallets, and a $2.7M MetaPlay heist

💻 06:26 The Zoom call begins: meeting 'Justin Lim,' the DPRK developer

💰 09:15 1inch Aqua: Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at https://1inch.com/aqua 

🛠️ 10:12 How Lim forked Velas Network and sped up The Graph's indexing

🔐 11:38 Lim's answers on multisig wallets, reentrancy attacks, and Bybit's $1.5B hack

🎯 14:01 The holy grail question: can he say something negative about Kim Jong Un?

💔 17:01 Why the interview left Laura with sadness and gratitude

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Ondo's founder died at 32, and now his mother and its ousted president are fighting for control. Katherine, Jessi, and Vy on the succession lesson crypto keeps skipping.

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Ondo Finance co-founder and CEO Nathan Allman died suddenly this summer at 32, leaving the real-world-asset tokenizer with zero sitting directors and two people claiming to run the company: ousted president Ian De Bode, and Allman's mother Kathleen, acting for his estate.

Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, Jessi Brooks, and Vy Le use the fight to unpack a problem that has nothing to do with crypto and everything to do with it: what happens when a fast-growing company never writes down a succession plan.

They also cover the White House's new frontier AI oversight framework, which officials confirm exists but will not publish, a proposed FDIC and OCC certification that would let a fintech satisfy every bank's diligence questions at once, and the CLARITY Act's newly scheduled September 15 cloture vote, squeezed into a narrow window before midterms.

Vy Le asks the harder question underneath all three stories: can boundaries this important really be left voluntary?

Host:

Timestamps

🤖 01:40 Jessi on why AI agents are getting great at goals, bad at intent

🏛️ 08:12 Why the White House's new AI framework is finished, but secret

📣 13:42 1inch Aqua: See how the shared liquidity layer works at https://1inch.com/aqua

⚖️ 14:30 Ondo's board hits zero directors after founder Nathan Allman's death

🚌 20:08 KK's 'hit by a bus' rule: the succession plan every startup skips

🏦 27:06 The FDIC's plan to let one fintech certification satisfy every bank

📜 37:51 Why KK is nervous about the CLARITY Act's September cloture vote

🦥 46:16 Crypto good news: robot sloths saving an endangered species

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