Ran Neuner says $ZEC is more useful than $BTC "For me, ZEC and the whole privacy around ZEC is super, super, super interesting. I think it's more useful than BTC." "I know you're not supposed to say that, because BTC is the king of coins, but there's a better use case for Zcash than there is for Bitcoin" "Private money is much more valuable than transparent money that everyone can see the transaction history of." "So I know you're not supposed to say that Zcash is maybe a little bit more interesting than Bitcoin, but I can't help thinking it."

"Binance will eventually be replaced by a social trading app, like a FOMO." Ran Neuner says social trading is the future of crypto "And I'm not saying it's going to be FOMO replacing Binance. I'm saying there's going to be a version of FOMO that's going to be so powerful, that is so much fun, because it combines the social network with the trading experience." "And when that happens, it's going to be just much more fun than trading on an exchange. Already, FOMO is more fun than trading on an exchange."

The usual story is that China just distills U.S. AI models. Delphi Ventures' @Shaughnessy119 says the DeepSeek R1 paper shows real innovation, and that cheap Chinese open source models are exactly why OpenAI and Anthropic want a regulatory moat. 🐉

Why do OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly want AI to slow down? Delphi Ventures' @Shaughnessy119 tells @kain and @tayvano_ it's a regulatory moat against cheap, fast-improving models like @deepseek_ai. 🐉

Clarity Is Dead. Did Crypto's All-In Bet on Trump Backfire? - Uneasy Money Are OpenAI and Anthropic's calls to slow AI down about safety, or a regulatory moat against cheap Chinese open source models? On the new Uneasy Money, Delphi Ventures' @Shaughnessy119 tells @kaiynne and @tayvano_ it's the moat. Plus: why the Clarity Act died, an $8M Safe exploit Kain calls AI-assisted, and Wyoming dropping @LayerZero_Core for @chainlink. 🎧 Timestamps: 🏛️ 02:35 Why Clarity died without 50 votes and what SEC/CFTC rules might replace it 🇺🇸 19:06 Why crypto's all-in bet on Trump has Taylor uneasy about the partisan trade 💧 23:20 1inch: Back multiple liquidity positions and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills at 🤖 24:08 Why OpenAI and Anthropic's own founders are calling to slow AI down 🐉 31:12 Tommy on why AI safety talk is regulatory capture against Chinese open source 🕵️ 38:17 Anthropic's own report: how a CCP surveillance job showed up in its logs 💰 51:42 Would you bet on AI safety or acceleration? Tommy makes the hosts pick a side 🔓 56:56 How an $8M Safe exploit got frontrun by a 4-year-old yoink bot 📈 01:01:46 Why the SDNY charged Robinhood engineers with trading on Hyperliquid ahead of listings ⚔️ 01:05:27 Why Wyoming dropping LayerZero for Chainlink reignited the Link Marines

"The banks needed this bill ... this is a good bill for them ... it allows them to interact permissionless blockchains for the first time. I am shocked that they went all in on tanking this bill," @CodyCarboneDC .

The Clarity Act got 49 votes. It needed 60. Digital Chamber CEO @codycarbonedc joins me to sort out who sank crypto's market structure bill (Senate Dems, Trump's crypto ventures, or the banks) and whether it gets a second life. Live 9am ET

Can Yield Buy Loyalty? Ethena Bets Neobank Users Won't Leave Why would a protocol behind one of DeFi's most successful stablecoins build a neobank that hides the fact you're using crypto? I put that to @gdog97_ days after @EthenaPay's launch. 🏦 His answer: yield beats loyalty, and @ethena already owns the engine that produces it. Timestamps: 🏦 01:25 Why Guy built a neobank after DeFi's TVL never beat its 2021 peak 🥊 07:16 Why Guy doesn't see Tether-backed Plasma as a competitor 🕵️ 17:57 How Ethena Pay hides self-custody from users who don't know it 🌍 19:10 The nearly 50-country rollout and Ethena's slow, controlled go-to-market 📣 22:30 1inch Aqua: See how the shared liquidity platform lets LPs back multiple positions with one wallet balance at ⛰️ 23:18 Why Ethena Pay chose Avalanche, not Ethereum, for settlement 🏛️ 29:20 How USDe's backing shifted from basis trades to AAA-rated RWA lending 🔓 33:00 What the Revolut KYC breach means for Ethena Pay's own compliance risk 💳 39:55 Why card spend, not USDe's yield, is the metric Guy actually chases 🚀 47:50 The 7-figure deposits that surprised Guy in Ethena Pay's first two weeks

Guy Young says the biggest winners of the neobank boom weren't the neobanks, but Circle and Tether "We looked at the pretty insane growth that we've seen in the segment of the market in terms of how many neobanks, and also just the growth in terms of user numbers and spend." "In some senses, the biggest beneficiaries of that weren't actually the neobanks themselves. It was kind of Circle and Tether." "They're all built on someone else's stablecoin, basically, and they were able to monetize the NIM and the float at Circle and Tether." "And for us, in an end state, we think that's a pretty unsustainable kind of revenue structure if you're losing what should be one of the largest revenue drivers within the business to someone else."

ALERT: @gdog97_ spent two years building the dollar inside other people's apps. This month @‌ethena launched its own neobank — savings, a card, free global transfers. He joins me on why, and what owning the full stack changes. Live today, 3:30pm ET.

AMC's CEO called Robinhood's stock tokens "vile." Robinhood's CLO told him to send lawyers. Brett Redfearn (@Observatory13) ran the SEC's Trading and Markets division. Now he's president of Securitize. He joins me on what those tokens actually are. 9:30am ET.

AI Agents Can't Go to Jail. So GenLayer Built Them a Court Instead. What happens when an AI agent decides to cheat, and there's no jail to put it in? @kstellana of @GenLayer and @cryptohayes of @flop_labs told me why the only leverage left over an agent is the money sitting in escrow. 🤖⚖️ Timestamps: 🏛️ 01:20 Albert Castellana on the $150 million custody failure that led him to build GenLayer 🤖 05:20 Why Flop needs GenLayer's dispute layer to make agentic commerce work ⚖️ 07:26 The kinds of disputes AI agents will actually have with each other 📣 13:38 1inch Aqua: See how the shared liquidity platform works at 📜 14:29 How an intelligent contract escrows funds and calls in AI validators 🔗 18:51 Inside GenLayer's architecture: the L2 chain and 1,500 validators 💵 27:21 What an AI verdict actually costs: 50 cents to $100, minutes to hours 🔒 34:30 Why AI agents can't go to jail, so escrow is the only enforcement ⚔️ 40:14 How GenLayer compares to the AAA, Kleros, UMA, and the failed Aragon Court 🕵️ 49:29 Can the validator network be gamed or bought off? 🚀 54:34 What's next for GenLayer's token launch and Flop's Q4 airdrop

AI agents can't be jailed, don't sleep, and cut every corner. @kstellana of GenLayer Labs built them a court instead: 1,500 AI validators, a verdict in minutes, for fifty cents. Live Mon 8:50am ET w/ @laurashin , @cryptohayes .

How Tokenized Stocks Could Undercut Interactive Brokers' 77% Profit Margin "Weekend price dislocation is a feature, not a bug," Cutler told me. 📈 On the latest episode of Unchained, Alex Cutler @wagmiAlexander and I discussed @coinbase 's tokenized Apple, Nvidia, Meta, and Google shares on @base : real 1:1-backed tokens held in trust, not synthetic wrappers, and how @AerodromeFi grabbed roughly 25% of AMM volume on these assets within days. Timestamps: 🪙 01:15 How Cutler splits tokenized stocks: real backing vs synthetic wrappers 📈 04:44 Cutler's launch numbers: 25% of AMM volume, $80M traded, 5,000 wallets 💧 13:10 1inch Aqua: back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at 🧩 13:59 Why composability across 9 DeFi protocols is Dromos' biggest draw 🌙 19:11 Cutler on 24/5 oracle risk: weekend price gaps are a feature, not a bug 🏛️ 24:23 Cutler on the SEC exemption bid and Armstrong's 10%-of-GDP vision

One Type of Post-Quantum Cryptography Is Most Popular. Why Is Crypto Trying Out Three? 🥷 Bitcoin's unmigrated Satoshi-era coins are quantum computing's biggest test for crypto. Do nothing, and a quantum attacker could dump millions of BTC onto the market. @P3b7_ prefers a third path instead: freeze the coins and tail-emit new BTC to compensate for the security budget problem. @ilblackdragon and I agree it makes sense. ⚖️ Timestamps: 🔐 02:18 Illia and Charles map Shor's algorithm leap and EigenLayer's 48-hour crack 🧠 12:43 Why Matt Corallo's Bitcoin core skepticism reveals NEAR's design edge 📢 18:18 1inch Aqua: see how the shared liquidity platform works at 🔀 23:28 How lattice vs hash based crypto split Ethereum from Bitcoin's plan 🌐 34:46 Charles: why this crypto fight is unique to blockchain, not elsewhere 🛠️ 37:04 Charles walks through Ledger's SDK and hardware wallet quantum roadmap 🔑 44:22 Why 'wrench attacks' expose the physical risk in quantum signing 🕵️ 46:11 Charles debunks the harvest now decrypt later myth for blockchains ₿ 54:52 The Satoshi's coins dilemma: three options and Bitcoin's security budget

Illia on the two types of post quantum cryptography, and which one Near prefers "There's a difference between types of cryptography, so-called lattice based and hash based, and there's a bit of a debate right now in the Web3 space about what should be used, with different tradeoffs" "People are used to signing with their wallet, the traditional way, but if we go to more institutional adoption, people use multi party computation, MPC. That's also what backs Near Intents and a lot of the cross chain work Near is doing. Today we have an announcement that we have a consortium testing multi party computation across custodians, banks and regulators, to showcase how this is going to work in production for real institutional use cases" "This is where we need the social consensus for the whole of Web3 to work together in a reasonable way, because hash based is actually very hard to support with hardware wallets and MPC solutions. So it's important for us that there's consensus on lattice based" "We want to be ahead of the curve and showcase how all of these tools work, and bring it to both individual users and institutional usage. That enables both security and trust in blockchain, which we've seen plummet a bit since post quantum concerns started coming out late last year"

data centers are *the* electoral issue going into the midterms which does not bode well for the structural tightness in the compute market 1. consumer surplus of low cost / free tokens ending 2. prices exploding upward 3. Cambrian explosion for compute optimization

Zcash brought privacy back into the center of the crypto conversation Mert connects the renewed interest in privacy directly to Zcash's rise from the top 100 into the top 10. "Zcash, going from the top 100 to the top 10, played quite a large role in that." "Crypto, attention, liquidity equals price action." "It is one of the things left in finance that is player versus environment." "If I have privacy, and Laura, you have privacy, that's good for both of us." Price action creates attention. Attention brings liquidity, new participants and more opportunities for teams building in the sector. That's where Mert's PvE idea becomes interesting. Most financial markets are fundamentally competitive. One participant's gain can come from another participant's loss. Privacy works differently. If two people gain stronger financial privacy, both benefit from it. The utility expands across the network instead of requiring users to compete against each other for the same outcome. Zcash's recent rise therefore did more than move the token higher. It put privacy back on the industry's radar and gave the entire sector a new source of attention. Zcash moved. Privacy got attention. A forgotten crypto primitive started becoming a market again. w/ @mert