Unchained

Mert and Illia autopsy a brutal weekend in crypto: Saylor's $3M test sale that taught him there's no sell button, the Zcash bug Claude found that could've minted unlimited counterfeit ZEC, formal verification as the bulwark against AI attackers, and whether NEAR's agentic commerce vision is real.

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 we've got two heavy hitters: NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Helius founder Mert Mumtaz.

We kick things off with the weekend market meltdown -- Saylor sold 32 BTC for the first time in four years, STRC is trading below par, and Mert argues the real damage is that Saylor sucks all the air out of the room for actual crypto innovation. Then we get into the biggest story of the week: a critical bug discovered in Zcash's Orchard ZK circuit using Claude Opus 4.8 that could have allowed infinite counterfeit minting inside the shielded pool. Mert walks us through the emergency soft fork, the Ironwood migration, and why formal verification is about to become table stakes. Illia makes the case that AI-powered attackers have a permanent asymmetric advantage and that we need real-time on-chain detection systems to survive. Tom coins the analogy of the episode: we're moving from building boats to building spaceships. We close with Illia's pitch for NEAR's agent commerce vision – $240M in single-day volume, private intents, and the claim that agent-to-agent trustless commerce is already live – while Mert remains a friendly skeptic. Let's get into it.Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly 

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly 

Guest

⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius

⭐️ Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR Protocol

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:17 Weekend Crypto Meltdown & Bitcoin Crash

02:52 Saylor, STRC & the DAT Death Spiral Fears

11:51 "No Sell Button" — Saylor's Lesson Learned

13:14 Zcash Bug: 50% Crash Explained

20:30 The Fix: Ironwood Pool & Formal Verification

23:11 AI vs Crypto Security: The Attacker Advantage

27:21 What Is Formal Verification?

30:07 Spaceship-Grade Smart Contract Security

31:36 OPSEC, Oracles & Anomaly Detection

36:08 Cypherpunk Dilemma: Stop the Hack or Not?

38:37 Will DeFi Survive? Long Math

42:49 NEAR's AI Agents & Intents Vision

48:43 Is Agentic Commerce Real? Mert's Skepticism

Disclosures
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For three years, a counterfeiting bug sat live inside Zcash's shielded pool, and no one noticed. Then Taylor Hornby pointed a custom Claude Opus 4.8 agent at the code, and it surfaced the flaw in Orchard that had gone undetected since 2022.

Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins debate what that means for privacy protocols, the rotation away from dead-protocol alts, and why Bitcoin's simplicity may be its strongest security argument yet.

The conversation closes on quantum risk and whether the Lindy effect holds up under the new threat environment.

Hosts:


Austin Campbell, Founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern - https://x.com/austincampbell


Ram Ahluwalia, CEO of Lumida - https://x.com/ramahluwalia


Chris Perkins, President of CoinFund - https://x.com/perkinscr97

This clip is from a longer conversation on AI, security, and the Zcash counterfeiting bug. Full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/live/oSUVTmC3wZo?si=zTopwWKi3ETPD5Rz 

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

Sponsors


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Chapters

🤖 00:00 Chris on AI, security vulnerabilities, and the Zcash counterfeiting bug

💰 02:28 Should you rotate into Hyperliquid over dead protocols?

🔍 05:53 Claude Opus 4.8 finds Zcash's live shielded-pool bug

📉 08:16 The Enron analogy for a confidence crisis in privacy coins

⚛️ 12:30 Bitcoin's Lindy effect meets the quantum risk tension
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About 80% of STRC holders are retail investors. Glenn Cameron walks through the prospectus, how Saylor's public claims differ from the reality, and why Strategy has no good options.

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Strategy's sale of 32 Bitcoin last week came with unusual framing: Saylor said the purpose was to "inoculate the markets." Glenn Cameron, Global Head of Institutional at Onramp Bitcoin, reads that word as preparation for larger Bitcoin sales ahead.

Glenn traces the pressure points. Strategy is trading at 84% of its Bitcoin value, making new equity issuance dilutive rather than accretive on a Bitcoin-per-share basis. Its cash reserve has been cut to roughly seven months after the company redeemed a 0%-interest convertible note. And STRC, the perpetual preferred stock Saylor has marketed as "a high yield bank account," carries a dividend the board can suspend for any reason.

The episode's sharpest argument: 83% of STRC holders are retail investors sold a product that resembles a bank account but behaves like junior equity on a volatile Bitcoin company. No maturity, no FDIC protection, no right to redeem.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:


Glenn Cameron, CFA - Global Head of Institutional at Onramp Bitcoin

Timestamps

📊 1:24 Risk vs uncertainty: why Glenn won't predict Bitcoin's price but will name every structural pressure point

🔑 4:27 What 'inoculate' means: why Saylor's word choice signals a larger Bitcoin sale may be coming

📉 6:58 Strategy below NAV: why buying Bitcoin with new stock now dilutes Bitcoin per share for existing holders

🗣️ 12:33 Glenn's response to people who say that the criticism of Strategy is FUD: STRC has to raise the dividend if bitcoin lowers

👥 19:57 Strrategy's section option: suspend the dividend, but 83% of holders are retail who think STRC is a bank account

⏰ 24:02 The 2028 cliff: $3.5B in convertibles become putable when history says a drawdown may not have recovered

📣 29:21 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com

📱 30:19 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code unchained at https://cape.co/unchained

🏷️ 31:02 The 'digital credits' name: why STRC's marketing label creates false expectations about legal structure and protections

💬 36:13 Saylor's own words: three public claims that STRC is a 'high yield bank account' or money market fund

⚖️ 40:54 The real product: how STRC compares to actual money market funds and FDIC-insured accounts

🔄 48:22 SATA vs STRC: same instrument, different issuer since one-third of Sata's cash reserve is in STRC

🪣 55:42 why the staking yield of Bitmine's upcoming BMNP, an Ethereum-backed preferred at $80 par, won't cover the cost of capital
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Steve Sosnick on the ratchet effect in equities, the AI bandwidth parallel, Kevin Warsh’s impossible first week, and why crypto is the unsexy trade right now.

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Coinbase: Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan at coinbase.com/unchained.

Heads up!

If you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe to Bits + Bips, since the show will migrate there in a few weeks. Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Equities are near all-time highs, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge just hit a multi-year peak, Iran ceasefire talks are producing a familiar ratchet effect in markets, and Bitcoin is quietly underperforming tech stocks on a nine-month volatility low. Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, joins Steve Ehrlich to map what’s actually driving these unique market dynamics. They cover the two vulnerabilities that could change things, the uncomfortable parallel between today’s AI capex and the 1999 bandwidth buildout, what $120 billion in money market inflows says about where retail cash is actually sitting, the challenge Kevin Warsh faces walking into an already-skeptical FOMC, and why crypto is currently losing the competition for momentum-chasing money to AI stocks, upcoming IPOs, and even a memory chip ETF.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steve Ehrlich, Head of Research at SharpLink and Host of Bits + Bips: The Interview

Guest:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steve Sosnick — Chief Strategist at Interactive Brokers

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Circle froze $12M in a DeFi pool on a Friday court order, trapping users who had nothing to do with the dispute. . Polymarket couldn't resolve a Strategy market. And MegaETH's apps are defecting. Nothing is simple.

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Thank you to our sponsors!

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Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin before the May 31 deadline. It just didn't disclose it until June 1 — and that one-day gap is why a $50M Polymarket market resolved "no," even though Strategy's own 8-K shows the sale happened inside the window.Kain Warwick, Luca Netz, and Taylor Monahan trace why Polymarket keeps writing resolution criteria that break under edge cases, and why handing oracle duties to UMA is a liability for a $20 billion platform. They also get into the third proposal to cut Solana's staking inflation, and what it would take to spark an "ultrasound money" moment for SOL.

The most consequential story is Circle. A Friday-afternoon ex-parte court order froze a $12M commingled USDC pool all weekend, trapping innocent users' funds inside the Zama privacy protocol. Taylor’s warning: Circle's policy of complying with any court order without retaining a final say creates a replicable attack template for any pool with USDC exposure.

The episode closes on MegaETH and Monad: Kain on whether the "Mega Mafia" approach was adverse selection from the start, and Luca on what chains actually owe their builders.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

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