Unchained

The government export-controlled Anthropic's best model. Kain, Luca, and Taylor debate whether Dario talked his way into it and what the shutdown means for every AI lab.

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⁠⁠Multichain Advisors⁠⁠: Get help navigating TGEs, go‑to‑market, BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more at https://multichainadv.com.

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A reported jailbreak of Anthropic's most powerful model, Fable, triggered US government export controls, and the Uneasy Money hosts argue Dario Amodei's response on the call with the administration made it inevitable. Kain, Taylor, and Luca dig into what Dario got wrong, why a company about to go public had no one in Washington who could speak the government's language, and what it means that the shutdown drew no public backlash.

Porter Stowell, CEO of W3.io and a Coinbase alum, joins for the first half with his read on the exchange's big announcement day: agentic payments on Base, tokenized stocks, and a ground-up trading rebuild. Midway through, Luca drops something unannounced: Igloo has built a financial instrument to list crypto tokens directly on the NYSE as securities, with protocol revenue flowing back to holders.

The episode closes on Strategy, and why Kain thinks selling 32 Bitcoin, then buying back 1,587 two weeks later, exposes the structural risk of a belief-based asset with one dominant buyer.

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Guest:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Porter Stowell - CEO of W3.io

Timestamps
🏦 03:16 Porter Stowell on why Coinbase's announcement day signals a real shift in how the exchange competes

💬 06:26 Luca on why Coinbase's core trading product still lags: charts that won't load and page refreshes to buy Bitcoin

🤖 17:40 Porter on why agentic payments on Base is the real sleeper from Coinbase's announcement day

📋 25:10 What "real" means in Coinbase's tokenized stocks launch and whether the custody approach actually differentiates it

💡 34:15 Luca reveals Igloo's instrument to list crypto tokens directly on the NYSE as securities

📣 41:12 Multichain Advisors: Navigate TGEs, go-to-market, and capital markets advisory at https://multichainadv.com

🧠 41:54 What Fable was, why it scared security researchers, and how a reported jailbreak report ended it

⚠️ 48:36 Taylor on why Anthropic's communications with the government made the Fable export control inevitable

🏛️ 57:09 Kain on why the Fable shutdown is the 'first fracture' in AI, and what the lack of pushback means

🌍 01:00:18 Binance's EU license bid in doubt, and Kain's contrarian case that losing Europe is bullish

📉 01:07:32 Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin on June 1 then bought back 1,587: what the panic reaction revealed about Bitcoin's concentration risk
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Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale Investments, argues that speculative retail flows, not geopolitical fundamentals, drove the recent gold and Bitcoin selloffs. His read: momentum chasing built gold from $4,000 to well above $5,000, then rotated out to chips and pre-IPO trades. The underlying deficit-and-debt case for both assets hasn't changed, and he's calling the dip a buy for longer-horizon investors.

He closes with Grayscale's H2 DeFi revenue thesis. Hyperliquid is the clearest proof of concept: a protocol with a clear use case, real revenue, and value returned to token holders. Grayscale applied a discounted cash flow model to Aave and published a price target on the token.

Host:


Steven Ehrlich, Host of Bits + Bips: The Interview and Head of Research at Sharplink - https://x.com/Steven_Ehrlich

Guest:


Zach Pandl - Head of Research at Grayscale Investments - https://x.com/LowBeta

This clip is from a longer conversation on the Fed's hawkish pivot, the SpaceX IPO, crypto winter, and Strategy's preferred equity. Full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/live/WIlLtRQidQg?si=ONIIkcPElZFgpa8l 

We go live every Thursday at 12:00pm ET - subscribe to catch it live.

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Chapters

🔍 00:00 Steve on gold and Bitcoin's worst quarter - what happened during the Iran war

📊 00:57 Why Pandl argues speculation, not fundamentals, drove both the run-up and the selloff

🥇 02:42 The buy case - Pandl on what to do when speculative excess washes out

💡 03:25 Steve asks about second-half assets and Standard Chartered's Uniswap call

💰 03:50 Why Hyperliquid and Aave anchor Grayscale's H2 DeFi revenue thesis
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The federal government pulled Anthropic's Fable 5 offline with no public process — and Jessi Brooks makes the case it's a crypto chokepoint story, not just an AI one.

Thanks to our sponsor!


👉 Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com.


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The federal government forced Anthropic to take Fable 5 offline last week, and the justification is still murky. Jessi Brooks makes the case that what began as a cybersecurity story is really a chokepoint story, one crypto has seen before. With no transparent process, no technical experts cited, and no clear legal authority, she argues the administration has effectively invented KYC for AI, raising questions far beyond Anthropic.

Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, Jessi Brooks, and Vy Le work through two regulatory moves with real market-structure stakes. The CFTC released a near-300-page proposed rule on prediction markets, amending Rule 40.11 and clearing political event contracts. The SEC moved to repeal Reg NMS Rules 611 and 610E, two-decade-old market pillars.

Vy Le argues the repeal is crypto's real opening: stop forcing AMMs to fit the old rules and start building the replacement, where solver auctions and cryptographic attestations let investors and regulators verify execution in real time. The throughline across the week is the same: when Washington moves this fast and quietly, is crypto the cautionary tale or the fix?

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare. Previously held senior legal roles across DeFi and centralized exchanges.


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Vy Le - Co-host of DEX in the City and General Counsel of Veda

Timestamps
🤖 03:04 Why the Fable 5 shutdown is a chokepoint story, not just a security one

🔑 09:36 Jessi on why inventing KYC for AI with no process echoes the Gensler era

☢️ 18:48 Why Vy Le puts AI on the threat level of the nuclear bomb

🏛️ 22:36 What the CFTC's near-300-page prediction-markets rule changes in Rule 40.11

📣 34:21 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com

📈 36:32 Why the SEC's Reg NMS repeal could clear the way for onchain markets

⚙️ 41:18 Why Vy Le says crypto already built the tools for better best execution

📑 46:42 Why Citi's 'tokenized shares' aren't shares, plus Coinbase's onchain dividends

🦕 51:26 Crypto good news: Jurassic Finance tokenizes dinosaur bones
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The crew breaks down the SpaceX IPO's crypto-like low float dynamics and Hyperliquid's price prediction, debates accredited investor laws and failed tokenized stock allocations, dives into Fable 5's export control shutdown after Amazon flagged a jailbreak to the Treasury Secretary, and argues whether open source AI models will eat frontier pricing.

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. Robert is back after a brief hiatus recording his own podcast, The Pop, for Superstate — and the crew wastes no time roasting him for it before diving into the biggest week of news in recent memory.

First up: the SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, and why it looks eerily like a crypto token launch — 4.2% float, retail getting cut out, and Hyperliquid perps predicting the first-day pop almost to the dollar. The crew debates TradeXYZ's winner-take-all dominance of HIP3 and why building on top of Hyperliquid might be a terrible startup environment. Then they unpack Elon's financial engineering genius — the Cursor acquisition as all-stock crypto playbook, XAI's pivot from failed AI lab to compute reseller, and why Grok is (unanimously) an embarrassing piece of shit.

The conversation shifts to accredited investor laws, SPV dentists, and why every crypto platform failed to deliver SpaceX IPO allocations. From there, Coinbase's massive system update — tokenized stocks, an SEC-registered AI chatbot, combos, and 15-minute markets. Then things get spicy: Robert asks Claude about SBF on air, Sonnet gets it hilariously wrong, and everyone roasts him for not using Opus.

The back half is all about Fable 5 — Amazon's jailbreak discovery, Andy Jassy calling Dario (who didn't pick up), and the export controls that shut down the most powerful commercial AI model ever released. Robert drops his most surprising take: "I am EAC, but this is a dry run of pressing the pause button." The episode closes with a heated debate on whether Chinese open source models will eat frontier AI pricing and a bet that may or may not have been agreed upon. 

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

Show highlights

🔹 SpaceX IPO breaks records with a 4.2% float — the closest thing to a crypto token launch Wall Street has ever done

🔹 Hyperliquid perps predicted the SpaceX first-day pop almost exactly, with $1.4B in daily volume on a single stock

🔹 TradeXYZ dominates HIP3 as other integrators fold — "HIP3 should be renamed to Trade"

🔹 SpaceX's all-stock Cursor acquisition mirrors the CZ/FTT playbook — Elon learned from crypto

🔹 Accredited investor laws debated after Brian Armstrong calls for reform post-SpaceX IPO

🔹 Every crypto platform that promised SpaceX IPO allocations failed to deliver after the deal went 5x oversubscribed

🔹 Coinbase launches tokenized stocks with real dividends, an SEC-registered AI advisor, combos, and 15-minute markets

🔹 Robert asks Claude about SBF on air — Sonnet 4.6 hallucinates, Opus 4.8 gets it right, model war ensues

🔹 Fable 5 shut down after Amazon flagged a jailbreak to Treasury Secretary Bessent — Dario didn't pick up the phone

🔹 Robert says "I am EAC" but argues the Fable shutdown is a healthy dry run of pressing the AI pause button

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly Disclosures
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For the tenth anniversary of Unchained, Laura reflects on the SBF question she never asked, the Charles Hoskinson beef, and why she may be done with strict neutrality.

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Thank you to our sponsor!


⁠⁠Fidelity⁠⁠: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠⁠crypto.fidelitycareers.com⁠⁠.


⁠⁠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 cape.co/unchained (use code: UNCHAINED).

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Unchained started as a side project by Laura in 2016, with two interviews recorded on Necker Island. Ten years later, it’s become a network of podcasts and newsletters. Haseeb Qureshi of one of most beloved podcasts on the network, The Chopping Block, chats with Laura about everything from its origins to biggest regrets to her interview style and more.  Plus, she reveals the one regret she has over a question she never got to ask Sam Bankman-Fried after the collapse of FTX.

Haseeb, managing partner at Dragonfly and an effective altruist himself, traces whether EA's moral framework enabled SBF's fraud, or whether SBF simply had ordinary delusions of grandeur. 

The conversation also moves through Charles Hoskinson's disputed PhD claims, the Brian Armstrong interview that never happened, and Laura's emerging conviction that ten years of institutional disillusionment may be pushing her away from the neutrality that built her career.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Haseeb Qureshi - Managing Partner of Dragonfly - https://x.com/hosseeb

Timestamps

🎙️ 1:46 How Unchained started: Necker Island, first guests, and the year-one sponsor

📰 6:46 Why Laura sold her crypto for journalism ethics and why she bought back in years later

😳 10:45 Why the SBF collapse was Laura's biggest shock in 11 years of covering crypto

🧠 14:24 Laura's 'license to play God' critique of effective altruism and Haseeb's rebuttal

❓ 23:32 The question Laura would have asked SBF after the FTX Collapse and why nobody did

🎤 25:16 Why Brian Armstrong has never been on the show and Laura's neutrality code

📣 30:08 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers and make the decision that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com

🌐 30:58 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months at https://cape.co/unchained

⚔️ 32:19 Laura ranks her worst and best Crypto Twitter brawls

🎭 38:33 Why Haseeb thinks The Chopping Block works best as a play, not a roundtable

🤔 47:06 Laura asks whether she should shed journalistic neutrality after ten years

🗞️ 51:06 Why Laura now believes independent journalism is better for humanity
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