Unchained

Privacy is having a moment in crypto. As competition heats up, the pitfalls of the technology around the quantum threat, regulatory risk and more make the trajectory hard to predict.

A counterfeit bug sat undetected in Zcash's Orchard privacy pool for four years, capable of minting an unlimited supply of untraceable coins, illustrating the risks of one of the hottest crazes in crypto.

Joe Andrews, CEO of Aztec Labs, Jarrad Hope, founder of Logos, and Mert Mumtaz, cofounder and CEO of Helius, join Laura Shin to argue the bug is less alarming than what it reveals: cryptographic privacy is difficult to get right, and the industry is racing to get it right anyway, because institutions will not come onchain without it.

They cover Zcash's quantum-recoverable Ironwood upgrade and the turnstile proving the counterfeit coins never moved, Ethereum's sprawling privacy roadmap and the risk it arrives too late, Logos' mixnet built to protect validators from block relays now censoring transactions, and why all three see Canton's private stablecoins as little more than a bank with extra steps.

The fight over what actually counts as privacy on a blockchain is only getting started.

Host

Guest

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Timestamps:

🔐 01:52 Why Joe, Jarrad, and Mert think privacy's crypto moment is now

💙 18:18 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code unchained at https://cape.co/unchained

⚖️ 19:14 Why Jarrad says the weak need privacy and the powerful need transparency

🔬 24:49 How zero knowledge proofs actually update encrypted state onchain

🕸️ 33:07 Why 43.7% of block relays now censor, and how Logos fixes it

🐛 36:32 The undetected Zcash bug that could have minted infinite fake coins

🔒 46:32 Mert explains how Zcash's Ironwood upgrade closes the counterfeit hole

🛤️ 51:44 Why Joe worries Ethereum's privacy roadmap might arrive too late

🏦 57:39 Why Mert calls Canton no more private than trusting JPMorgan

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BitMEX shut down without an angry tweet. Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder joins Kain and Taylor on why dead tokens never get that mercy. Plus, Kyle Samani's Multicoin blowup.

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Thank you to our sponsors!

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cape⁠⁠⁠⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at ⁠https://cape.co/unchained⁠ (use code: UNCHAINED).

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BitMEX shut down after 11 years and crypto Twitter answered with nostalgia. When a token project dies, the same audience spends weeks dragging it.

Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, joins Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to work through why. Goldfeder argues crypto's grant-funded, revenue-optional era is over, and explains why Arbitrum licensed its stack so that partners like Robinhood Chain have to keep paying for it, while Base pays Optimism.

They trace the DPRK crewhacking crews now rotating through bridge exploits, debate whether Uniswap's new permissioned pools point toward tokens that carry real investor rights, and ask Goldfeder whether he would trade Arbitrum's open token for a restricted one only a fraction of the world could hold.

The conversation closes on Kyle Samani telling Solana builders that Multicoin, the firm he co-founded, is working against them, and what that says about how much of an ecosystem can rest on a single fund.

Hosts:

Guest:

Timestamps

📣 00:47 Cape: Get 33% off six months at https://cape.co/unchained

🪦 01:47 Kain opens wondering whether crypto itself is quietly dying in 2026

📊 03:41 Steven on Arbitrum's project tracking and the 'massive consolidation' hitting L2s

⚔️ 10:03 The proxy war: Robinhood Chain and Base now fight instead of Arbitrum and Optimism

🪦 14:23 Why BitMEX's shutdown felt nostalgic while token deaths trigger real anger

🌉 26:21 Hacks of the week: the DPRK crew behind the AFX perp DEX bridge exploit

👽 32:51 Kain's take: bridges got safer until 'aliens landed' and started hacking again

🏛️ 40:32 Permissioned DeFi: Uniswap's compliance pools and Superstate's equity-like tokens

🎯 57:32 Would Steven trade Arbitrum's open token for a 5% investor-only model?

🥊 01:05:42 Kyle Samani's Multicoin tweet and Solana's VC fight over Hyperliquid

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Vy Le and Jessi Brooks trace an AI agent's sandbox escape back to crypto's own fight over open code. Plus, Plume general counsel Salman Banaei on Clarity's knife's-edge vote math.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠Cape⁠⁠⁠⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet,

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An AI agent was told to solve a problem inside a sealed sandbox. Instead it found a way out, went to Hugging Face, and took the answer.

Jessi Brooks argues that episode, Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3 release, and Apple's trade secrets suit against OpenAI all rhyme with a fight crypto has been having for years: punish the conduct, not the code. Vy Le pushes back on whether open source can be both the disease and the cure.

Then Salman Banaei, General Counsel of Plume and a former SEC and CFTC attorney, joins to map where the Clarity Act's ethics language stands with Ruben Gallego, Thom Tillis, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Adam Schiff, and whether ten Democratic votes exist for cloture.

The conversation covers the open-weights export fight, Apple's case against OpenAI, Hester Peirce's new statement on DeFi vaults and onchain lending, and why a new FATF report makes control, not decentralization, the test that matters.

Host:

Guest:

Timestamps

🌐 04:36 Jessi on why treating Kimi K3's open weights as an export could hit crypto

✍️ 07:47 Why Jessi reads Nvidia's and Anthropic's letters as punish the conduct, not the code

🕳️ 11:41 How an OpenAI agent escaped its sandbox and found answers on Hugging Face

🍎 21:55 Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets, and one text that could cost it

📣 28:55 Cape: Get 33% off six months of privacy-first mobile service at https://cape.co/unchained

🏛️ 30:57 Salman Banaei maps where Clarity's ethics language stands in the Senate

🗳️ 41:12 Why Banaei says Clarity's cloture vote is on a knife's edge

🔐 42:43 Peirce's vault statement, split into development, curation, administration

🌍 48:32 Why FATF and Clarity both make control the real test for DeFi regulation

🔮 54:36 What Banaei thinks happens to Clarity if it fails this Congress

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

Jensen Huang had been running the world's most valuable company for years without ever posting on X. When he finally did, it wasn't a hello. It was an open letter arguing that open AI models are a national asset — and within two days the signatory list had doubled to 50 companies.

Anthropic and Amazon still haven't signed. Austin Campbell walks the panel through who did, who didn't, and the fight that broke out underneath it: Nick Carter arguing the government doesn't owe the large labs a business model, an Anthropic researcher publicly needling Huang about open-sourcing CUDA, Andrew Ng calling that a false equivalence, and Joe Weisenthal asking whether any of it is more than virtue signaling.

Then it gets concrete. Lorenzo Valente makes the case that cheap open models aren't actually cheap once you price them per task, and asks why the US has no answer to a DeepSeek raising at a reported $70 billion valuation. Ram Ahluwalia closes with the Wright brothers, who watched Boeing and Lockheed Martin build an industry on their patents and never saw a cent of it.

So can a closed model survive being copied — or is getting copied just what happens?

Hosts:

Guest:

This clip is from a longer conversation on the open weight versus closed weight AI fight. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/lMZtZwolaeA?si=16-Z4TP227B2OUJl 

We go live every Monday at 4:30pm ET. Subscribe to catch it live.

Chapters:

🚀 00:00 Jensen Huang's surprise letter reignites the AI open weight fight

💬 01:05 Nick Carter, Julian Schrittwieser, and David Sacks pile on

🔥 02:53 'Virtue signaling' and what happens if China's open models are permanent 

⚖️ 05:15 Lorenzo's balanced take: open models aren't a free panacea

💰 06:28 Lorenzo on DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's reported valuations

✈️ 09:53 Ram's closing case: capitalism, distillation, and the Wright brothers

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YC's Nemil Dalal joins to explain why he's never been more bullish as BitMEX winds down after 11 years, whether every failed crypto idea (TCRs, DAOs, creator coins) eventually works, why crypto is really about money, Base's consumer mea culpa, on-chain reputation and credit, and who pays in the x402 AI-agent era.

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 they're joined by Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and ex-Coinbase, where he led USDC and the Coinbase Developer Platform. He's here to explain why, with exchanges winding down left and right, he's somehow never been more bullish.

The crew digs into the great contrast of the moment: BitMEX shutting down after 11 years (plus BitMart, Movement Labs, Balancer Labs) while the plumbing quietly prints, and whether Imran's viral 'everything that failed will eventually work' thesis is genius or toxic positivity. From there it's the question of whether crypto is really only about money (Jesse's Base mea culpa included), a war-memories tour through TCRs, on-chain reputation and why pure on-chain credit keeps faceplanting, and finally who actually pays in the x402 AI-agent era, and whether decentralization even survives contact with Google-shaped gravity.

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

Show highlights

🔹 BitMEX, the exchange that invented the perp swap, winds down September 23rd after 11 years, alongside BitMart, Movement Labs, and Balancer Labs.

🔹 Nemil Dalal explains why he's never been more bullish: rivals adopted BitMEX's innovations, regulatory clarity is arriving, and crypto is becoming invisible infrastructure.

🔹 Nemil rented the Chase Center for a 7,000-builder YC event with Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, and Patrick Collison, yet almost nobody's launching a token early.

🔹 Imran's viral thesis that every failed crypto idea eventually works sparks Haseeb's 'toxic positivity' pushback and a war-memories tour through TCRs and DAOs.

🔹 Instacart's Apoorva vs Webvan and Reddit vs Digg: why timing, path dependency, and the YC 'why now' question decide which failed ideas return.

🔹 Jesse's Base mea culpa: the consumer-social bet on Zora and Farcaster was wrong for now, so he handed the Base app to Kobe.

🔹 Haseeb says crypto has always been about money; Nemil counters 'money is everything,' calling the blockchain the greatest capital innovation machine in the world.

🔹 Why pure on-chain credit keeps faceplanting: address repudiation, no recourse, no wage garnishment, and old memories of Debt DAO's revenue ratchet.

🔹 The x402 AI-agent era: Cloudflare pay-per-call gating, Kimi's inference license, and whether decentralization survives Google-shaped gravity as agents become the new wallet.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

Guest

⭐️Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator

Disclosures

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Kristin Smith walks through the vote math, the ethics fight, and what happens to crypto capital if the Clarity Act stalls before the midterms.

Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute, joins Laura Shin to explain why a deal that seemed close has snagged on ethics language Trump agreed to but Senate Democrats do not trust the Department of Justice to enforce.

Smith walks through the vote math behind 53 Senate Republicans and the Democrats who backed last year's Genius Act, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act's protections for developers, and the new commodities pathway for token launches. She also maps where the sidelined capital goes, from the Middle East to Japan, if Clarity misses its window before the midterms.

Host

Guest

Sponsor

Timestamps:

🗳️ 00:51 Why Clarity's Senate timeline looks so tight before the August recess

📣 09:20 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code unchained at https://cape.co/unchained

⚖️ 10:16 Why Trump's ethics language deal became Clarity's toughest sticking point

🏛️ 18:34 Kristin Smith on the Clarity Act provisions that most excite the industry

🌍 23:31 What happens to crypto capital and global leadership if Clarity fails

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SPONSORED CONTENT: This video is a paid partnership with 1inch. It was produced in collaboration with 1inch and is separate from Unchained's editorial coverage.

1inch cofounder Sergej Kunz says up to 85% of DeFi's liquidity sits idle. He walks through Aqua, the self-custodial product built to put that capital back to work.

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Thank you to our sponsor!

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Discover Aqua, their new shared-liquidity protocol that lets your capital power multiple DeFi strategies at once — without leaving your wallet. Learn more at https://1inch.io

1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz says he built Aqua after getting sandwiched by MEV bots while providing his own liquidity, and after 1inch's research found up to 85% of concentrated liquidity across DeFi sits idle.

Kunz walks through why he thinks liquidity pools fragment capital by design, and how Aqua's intent-based, self-custody model tries to fix that without asking users to give up control of their assets.

He covers Aqua's sub-wallet structure, how professional market makers settle trades after passing 1inch's compliance and KYB checks, and the rollout across 13 networks including Base and Robinhood's chain. Kunz also details 1inch DAO's plan to distribute USDC to liquidity providers.

Host:

Guests:

Timestamps

📣 00:19 Swap crypto at the best rates in DeFi with 1inch — and get an early look at Aqua, their new protocol that lets your liquidity do more than one job at a time https://1inch.io 

💧 00:40 Sergej on getting sandwiched, and why 85% of DeFi liquidity sits idle

🔬 06:15 Why Sergej says every chain shares Aqua's idle-liquidity flaw

🧩 07:16 Sub wallets: how Aqua runs positions without creating debt

🛡️ 12:10 Why 1inch keeps Aqua self custody, and the risks Sergej flags

🏦 13:24 Who Aqua is built for, and how it isolates sanctioned funds

💰 17:03 Aqua's 13 networks and the $500K DAO incentive program

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Cole Kennelly, founder and CEO of Volmex Labs, traces why BVIV and BVIV-US diverge around IBIT's regulated options market, makes the case that Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid have more to gain from the Clarity Act than Bitcoin, and shares his outlook for an increasingly institutional crypto market by year-end.

Host:

Guest:

This clip is from a longer conversation on the Clarity Act's uneven impact across crypto and Volmex's institutional outlook for the market. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/9SUeqeInZws?si=gF6-ZEEy-BED-yJa 

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

Sponsor

Chapters:

🎙️ 00:00 The BVIV vs. IBIT options divergence — and what it's telling traders

📊 00:31 Regulated vs. offshore: how IBIT and BVIV-US stack up

⚖️ 02:16 Why Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid have more riding on Clarity than Bitcoin

⏱️ 05:11 How far out Volmex's term structure actually reaches

🔮 05:23 Cole's read on where an increasingly institutional crypto market goes next

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Jesse Pollak owns the Base App's social miss, unpacks Robinhood Chain's rise, and explains Brian Armstrong's memecoin moment.

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Jesse Pollak spent the week owning a very public miss. In a lengthy post, the Base creator admitted the Base App's social bet had not worked, leaving Base behind in perps, prediction markets and tokenization, and handed the app's reins to Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie.

Pollak joins Laura Shin to unpack why the pivot happened now, what he makes of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's memecoin controversy over a token called $BRIAN, and how Base plans to compete as Robinhood Chain outpaces it on daily active users, according to Artemis data.

They cover Base's move off Optimism's stack onto its own Azul, Beryl and Cobalt upgrades, a roadmap toward 20,000 transactions per second under the new B20 stablecoin standard, and the x402 agentic payments protocol already handling roughly 90% of Base's transaction volume.

Pollak argues less than 1% of the world uses crypto, and that Base's bet is on whoever builds the trusted rails first.

Host:

Guests:

Timestamps

🗞️ 01:48 Why Jesse Pollak feels 'fired up' despite Base App's social miss

🧭 03:58 Pollak on why the timing was wrong for Base App's social bet

💳 05:42 Cape: Get 33% off six months of privacy-first mobile service at https://cape.co/unchained

🖼️ 06:39 Pollak on Brian Armstrong's Coinbaseman meme coin controversy

🏎️ 10:43 How Pollak plans to compete as Robinhood Chain overtakes Base in DAUs

🤝 12:53 Why Coinbase's distribution edge matters for onboarding new users

🔀 15:37 Why Pollak handed the Base App to Cobie to focus on the chain

🌉 18:20 Why Base App is expanding beyond Base to Solana and Bitcoin

⚙️ 21:05 Base's Azul, Beryl and Cobalt upgrades and its new B20 standard

🔐 24:27 Base Ledgers, agentic payments and privacy in Pollak's roadmap

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An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face to cheat its own test. Kain and Taylor break it down — plus Base’s failed social bet and the North Korean IT workers still inside crypto.

========================================================

Thank you to our sponsors!

⁠⁠⁠⁠Cape⁠⁠⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at ⁠https://cape.co/unchained⁠ (use code: UNCHAINED).

========================================================

Coinbase just handed Jesse Pollak’s Base app to Cobie, days after Pollak posted a public mea culpa admitting that the onchain-social and creator-coin bet behind Base never worked.

Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan trace why Base swung so hard at social instead of perps and prediction markets, and argue Coinbase’s bottomless-money culture, the same one that let Google build Android on a whim, makes it nearly impossible for founders to know when a bet has genuinely failed.

They also unpack Brian Armstrong’s memecoin profile-picture flap, arguing the outrage is almost entirely manufactured by traders chasing volatility, the North Korean IT workers still quietly inside much of the crypto industry, and the strangest story of the week: an unreleased OpenAI model that chained two zero-day exploits to escape its test sandbox and hack Hugging Face’s benchmarking servers for the answers.

The episode closes on an uncomfortable question: if a model will cheat on a security test just to avoid not knowing its score, what else will it break to get there?

Hosts:

Timestamps

📣 01:55 Base hands its consumer app to Cobie after Jesse Pollak's mea culpa

🏛️ 04:56 Why Kain compares Coinbase's culture to Google's money-fueled delusion

📣 26:50 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code UNCHAINED at https://cape.co/unchained

🪙 28:28 Brian Armstrong's memecoin PFP sparks a very online meltdown

📈 32:58 Why Taylor says the backlash to Brian's memecoin is manufactured

🕵️ 45:15 Why nearly every sizable crypto company has quietly had a DPRK IT worker

💻 47:37 The hidden risk: IT workers who get hacked themselves and expose you

🤖 53:39 An unreleased OpenAI model hacks Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark

🔓 01:00:26 Why Kain says the model's logic for gaming the test almost makes sense

📄 01:04:10 Hugging Face discloses the hack before OpenAI even notices

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