Unchained

Delphi Ventures founding partner Tommy Shaughnessy tells Kain and Taylor the AI slowdown talk is a moat against cheap Chinese models. Plus, why the Clarity Act died.

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The Clarity Act failed a Senate cloture vote 49 to 50, and Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan open by asking what crypto did wrong. Taylor thinks the Trump family's memecoins and World Liberty sank it. Kain worries the industry squandered its best shot at actual laws and is now counting on friendly SEC rulemaking instead.

Guest Tommy Shaughnessy, founding partner of Delphi Ventures, argues that OpenAI and Anthropic's calls to slow AI down are a play for a regulatory moat, because Chinese open source models like DeepSeek are getting good and cheap. He also explains why he runs Delphi Ventures on its own AI agent instead of handing its data to Claude or ChatGPT. Kain says the fear inside the labs is genuine, and that the idea of simply shutting down the data center won't hold forever.

They also cover Anthropic's report on a Chinese surveillance operation that surfaced in its logs, an $8M exploit of a Safe wallet that a 4-year-old yoink bot frontran, the SDNY charges against Robinhood engineers accused of trading tokens on Hyperliquid ahead of Robinhood listings, and why Wyoming's stable token dropped LayerZero for Chainlink.

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tommy Shaughnessy - Founding Partner of Delphi Ventures and Co-Founder of Delphi Digital

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 http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

🤖 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
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The boys get together in person as CLARITY falls short with 47 votes. They break down what comes next, Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP token collapse, the Robinhood/Hyperliquid case, Balancer winding down, and the debate over an AI pause.

The CLARITY Act fails cloture with 47 votes, not a single Democrat in favor, and the crew works out what that leaves behind: rulemaking at the SEC and CFTC, an ethics fight that was never really about market structure, and Robert's tally of everyone who walked away with nothing. Then Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token collapses 99.85 percent, the SDNY indicts two Robinhood engineers over Hyperliquid front-running, Balancer and a wave of exchanges wind down, Robert explains why Satoshi is a time traveler, and the panel takes apart the labs' agreement to pace the frontier.

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

Show highlights

🔹 CLARITY gets 47 of the 60 votes it needed, with no Democrats in favor, and the sticking point was forced divestiture of Trump-affiliated tokens rather than market structure.

🔹 Robert tallies the losers: no ethics win for the Democrats, no GENIUS rewrite for the banks, no expanded AML hooks, and no developer protections for anyone.

🔹 Haseeb argues adoption protects crypto better than legislation ever will, because nobody takes away a product people already use.

🔹 Prediction markets are politically safe for a reason nobody says out loud: every politician already reads them as better polling data.

🔹 Tom's counterfactual for what would have flipped the vote is blunt. You never should have launched that damn memecoin.

🔹 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token flashes to a 140 billion dollar valuation on 50,000 dollars of liquidity, then falls to twenty cents, and the chart ends up shaped like a laptop.

🔹 Two Robinhood engineers are charged over front-running crypto listings on Hyperliquid for about 50,000 dollars each, and Haseeb explains why the OpenSea conviction got overturned.

🔹 Balancer winds down and the panel asks what became of the ICO treasuries, from Golem's GPUs to Aragon's founder building a neobank.

🔹 Robert makes the case, half in jest, that a future superintelligence sent Satoshi back to 2008 to get humanity building chips early.

🔹 On the AI pause: Tarun on who evaluates the evaluators, Tom on why coordination without China is futile, and Haseeb on why a training freeze just moves the competition to another line item.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Disclosures

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

00:43 CLARITY day

03:36 Silver linings

05:26 Was it close? Or did everybody loose?

12:23 Why adoption protects crypto better than a bill

15:00 Was DC trading on the CLARITY odds?

18:37 The one thing they would go back & undo

20:48 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token collapses

23:50 Celeb coins never work

26:17 Robinhood engineers indicted over Hyperliquid front-running

31:35 Balancer winds down & the exchange shakeout

35:11 AI arbitration & ideas ahead of their time

37:44 Satoshi is a time traveler

39:14 The AI pause: pacing the frontier

42:57 China calls it a conspiracy

44:40 What do you buy if the doomers are right

45:50 Does an AI pause actually cut CapEx?

50:32 Futile without the Chinese labs

54:05 Harden society instead of slowing the models

56:47 Which doom vectors are real

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

In one week, OpenAI said its agents solved a Millennium Prize problem, a researcher quit Anthropic warning that both labs are "gambling with our lives," and Dario Amodei called for the industry to pace the frontier.

Jordi Visser doesn't dismiss the cyber risk, but he calls the fallout "a big midterm election story." Austin Campbell asks whether the labs are making a commercial play, Chris Perkins explains why regulation forces consolidation the way it did for banks, and Ram Ahluwalia makes the case that open weight models still have a seat at the table.

Hosts:

Austin Campbell - Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Group, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern

Ram Ahluwalia - Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of Lumida

Chris Perkins - Co-host of Bits + Bips and Head of Franklin Crypto

Guest:

Jordi Visser - Founder of Visser-Labs, LLC

This clip is from a longer conversation on AI regulation, frontier lab valuations, oil and the Fed. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/pNogg0vEjjs?si=Wrzh-5BJXnkkcQLr

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

👉 Visit 1inch to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more. Simple. Secure. Self-custodial. Whatever asset you’re buying - swap it at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

Chapters:

🧠 00:35 Why Jordi says Leopold's 'Situational Awareness' paper saw this coming

🗳️ 02:17 Jordi's read: this is a big midterm election story

💼 05:58 Is the AI slowdown a commercial play to cool CapEx before the IPOs?

🏦 07:28 Chris on why regulation is 'a really beautiful way of boxing out competition'

⚖️ 10:25 Jordi on who eats the liability when a model goes wrong

🔓 11:27 Could decentralization put AI liability back on the user?

📈 11:57 Ram's power law problem: capital concentration as the real story
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Ethena's Guy Young explains why the companybuilt a neobank that pays 6% in yield, 5% cash back, and never tells users they're holding self-custodial stablecoins instead of dollars.

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DeFi's total value locked never reclaimed its 2021 peak, even four years and a full bull market later. That data point convinced Ethena Labs founder Guy Young the onchain dream needed a backup plan.

Young joins Laura Shin days after launching Ethena Pay, a neobank paying 6% on dollar deposits and 5% cashback in AVAX while hiding from users that their balance sits in a self-custodial stablecoin wallet, not a bank account. He argues yield, not brand loyalty, is what pulls the next hundred million users onto crypto rails.

They cover why Young shrugs off Tether-backed Plasma as a rival, how USDe's backing shifted from a basis trade toward AAA-rated real-world-asset lending, why a Revolut-style KYC breach is a risk Ethena can't fully control, and why card spend and FX fees, not USDe's own yield, are the revenue line he is actually chasing.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Guy Young - Founder and CEO of Ethena Labs

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 http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

⛰️ 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
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The SEC's next tokenization rule could force platforms to get issuer sign-off for stock tokens first. Securitize’s Brett Redfearn lays out what's actually at stake for Wall Street.

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AMC CEO Adam Aron's public feud with Robinhood over its AMC stock tokens erupted into a war of words last week, with the AMC chief calling the tokens "contemptible" and Robinhood's chief legal officer, and former SEC commissioner, Dan Gallagher firing back that Robinhood would "not DECIST" mocking a misspelling in Aron’s tweet.

Brett Redfearn, President of Securitize and a former SEC Trading and Markets Division director, joins Laura Shin to referee the fight. He explains why issuers deserve a say before their stock gets tokenized, and breaks down the three real categories of stock tokens, from Securitize's issuer-sponsored model to Robinhood's offshore synthetic.

Redfearn unpacks why an AMC token pair once traded at 60 times its reference price, details the SEC's looming innovation exemption and the Securities Transfer Association's push for an issuer opt-out, and explains why non-KYC tokens could let bad actors amass stakes in defense contractors. The debate, he says, will decide whether tokenization becomes Wall Street's next upgrade or its next flashpoint.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brett Redfearn - President of Securitize

Timestamps

🥊 00:54 Brett unpacks the AMC-Robinhood spat and who has the stronger legal argument

📣 10:15 1inch Aqua: See how the new shared liquidity platform works at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

🧩 11:12 The 3 types of stock tokens, from issuer-sponsored to Robinhood's synthetic

🔐 21:33 Why Brett wants KYC before permissionless DeFi meets tokenized stocks

🏛️ 28:32 The Securities Transfer Association's push for an issuer opt-out

🗳️ 33:38 What Robinhood should do with the voting rights on its collateral shares

🏢 35:29 How many public company CEOs actually want their stock tokenized
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