Unchained

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:

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

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

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steven Goldfeder - Co-Founder and CEO of Offchain Labs

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.

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

Thank you to our sponsor!

⁠⁠⁠⁠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).

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

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:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Salman Banaei - General Counsel of Plume, Former Head of Policy at Uniswap and Chainalysis, and Former SEC and CFTC Attorney

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:

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:

Lorenzo Valente - Director of Research at ARK Invest

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.

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).

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.

The Senate needs 60 votes to pass crypto's market structure bill, the Clarity Act, before an August recess deadline just weeks away. Majority Leader John Thune says the votes likely will not be there in time, and Polymarket puts the odds of passage this year at roughly 30 percent.

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

Laura Shin - Founder, CEO and Host of Unchained

Guest

Kristin Smith - President of the Solana Policy Institute

Sponsor

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).

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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