Welcome to The Chopping Block, where Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner dive into the crypto universe's hottest topics. In this episode, we're tackling pressing questions: "Are Memecoins a Good Bet for Institutional Investors?" and "Can BASE Catalyze a Shift in Ethereum's DeFi Dominance?" Amidst Ethereum's upgrades, we explore the impact on scalability and the Layer 2 landscape. The legal entanglements of KuCoin with the DOJ and Beba's lawsuit against the SEC prompt...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. In this episode, Laura interviews Meg Lister, GM of Grants Labs at Gitcoin, and Kevin Owocki, co-founder of Gitcoin.  They discuss the evolution of Gitcoin from a centralized platform to a decentralized suite of protocols, Gitcoin 2.0, which allows any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based ecosystem to fund...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. On Wednesday, BlackRock, the world's leading asset management firm, announced the launch of a tokenized investment fund, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity (BUIDL) Fund, developed in collaboration with Securitize.  Carlos Domingo, founder and CEO of Securitize, discusses the launch of the fund, which is...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. In this week's episode, the squad dives into the riveting dynamics of meme coins and their undeniable sway over market sentiments, alongside a detailed exploration of BlackRock's groundbreaking leap into blockchain with its on-chain fund initiative. Is Solana redefining its role as the new haven for meme coin ventures, signaling a shift in...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Few crypto figures have been as vilified as Kyle Davies, the co-founder, along with Su Zhu, of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which imploded in mid-2022, losing $3 billion and bringing many pillars of the crypto industry down with it. Davies and Zhu have been accused of, among other things, lying about 3AC’s...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Ethereum’s long-awaited Dencun upgrade finally went live this week, and many L2s immediately saw their transaction fees fall dramatically, as was the intention. Among them was the Coinbase-incubated Base, which was created by Jesse Pollak. Pollak joined Unchained to discuss the impact Dencun was having on Base; how he...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. In this week's episode the squad asks: Is MakerDAO setting a new precedent for DeFi protocols with its emergency rate hike? How significant is the role of meme coins in the crypto market's volatility, and what does Solana's prominence tell us about the future of blockchain platforms? Can Ethereum maintain its position as the backbone of DeFi...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer, and Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CIO of Polychain Capital, an investor in EigenLayer, say that the developer ecosystem around EigenLayer is sprouting up very fast, which reminds Carlson-Wee of the developer excitement in Ethereum’s early days. They discuss the potential...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner dive into the hot topics stirring the cryptocurrency world. Could Uniswap's fee switch revolutionize DeFi's economic model? What's the real potential of decentralized AI in blockchain, and how close are we to seeing its practical applications? And in the whirlwind of the crypto market, what makes meme coins like Jeo Boden not just viral, but influential? This episode offers a...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. In this episode, Eric Balchunas, senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, discussed the performance of Bitcoin ETFs since their launch two months ago.  Balchunas noted that the ETFs' performance exceeded his expectations, with a faster and more intense "second wind" than anticipated. He attributed this to a...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. In this episode of Unchained, Alex Pack, managing partner at Hack VC discusses the firm's recent $150 million fundraise, the challenges of raising capital in a bear market, and the firm's focus on early-stage Web3 infrastructure. He also shares his thoughts on the intersection of crypto and AI, the future of...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. After a week in which Bitcoin nearly hit its all-time high, Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, joins Unchained to discuss the pivotal role of ETF inflows in Bitcoin's recent price surge, the nuanced behaviors of long-term versus short-term holders, and the potential impacts of upcoming halvings...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Well-known white hat hacker and head of security at Paradigm samczsun recently took the wraps off a new security organization called the Security Alliance (SEAL) that offers a 911 hotline for immediate response to security threats, runs war games to simulate potential security incidents, and provides a safe...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Fifteen years after the birth of Bitcoin, the network is now entering an era of remarkable innovation and change, according to Stacks' co-creator Muneeb Ali. On this episode of Unchained recorded at the Bitcoin Builders conference, Muneeb explores the complexities and advancements within Bitcoin's Layer 1 and...

Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto experts Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner bring you inside perspectives on critical topics in the crypto world. This week the boys dive deep into Starknet's airdrop controversies, the psychological toll of internet backlash on founders, and the groundbreaking Ethena project inspired by Arthur Hayes. This episode questions the effectiveness of airdrop strategies in user engagement, the resilience founders must muster...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Celestia, a data availability layer for blockchains, was launched last October to much fanfare. The platform takes a modular approach to blockchains, allowing developers to post data onto it without the need for smart contracts or execution. This makes it extremely useful for scaling roll-ups and other layer...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Starknet made news this week for announcing what will be the largest initial airdrop by number of eligible addresses ever. But it faced heavy criticism online for many of the details of the airdrop, from the fact that Ethereum solo takers received almost 22% of the distribution to eligibility requirements...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and special guest Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, engage in a riveting discussion on decentralized social media and the burgeoning meme coin trend within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. This episode offers an in-depth analysis of Farcaster's innovative mechanisms for user engagement and its significant role in shaping the future of social interactions in the crypto domain. We delve into the...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. In the two weeks since Farcaster introduced its Frames feature that allows developers to easily add mini apps to users’ posts, the decentralized social network has become the talk of Twitter, now X, and increased its user base by ten times, according to co-founder Dan Romero.  Romero joins Unchained to...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Crypto: The Game captivated a large swath of the crypto community this past week. The game, modeled after “Survivor,” was the brainchild of Dylan Abruscato, Tyler Cagle and Bryan Lee. The intention of the game, which was played virtually but also unfolded in real life, was to ruthlessly vote people off to...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. On Tuesday, Solana suffered a network outage, just shy of a year since its last shutdown. The blockchain had to quickly get a new version out and notify its validators to upgrade to it and restart their systems before blocks could be produced again, resulting in downtime of roughly five hours. This was...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news and with special guest, and Farcaster aficionado Ted! This episode zooms in on Farcaster Frames: How are they revolutionizing the platform? We examine Farcaster's transformation and its impact on the future of social media: Can Farcaster redefine decentralized communication? Delving into its user base, we ask: What makes Farcaster's community unique? How do...

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Trying to regulate DeFi is a huge challenge because in a truly decentralized system, there should be no centralized actors to make and enforce rules for. This could make combating illicit finance challenging since traditionally, regulation has been targeted at centralized intermediaries. Yet Rebecca Rettig, Chief...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news and with special guest Aevo's Co-Founder - Julian Koh. This episode zeroes in on the latest buzz around the Jupiter ($JUP) airdrop: What's the real story behind Jupiter’s valuation and controversy? We peel back the layers of Jupiter's token strategy and its impact on market dynamics. The dialogue then shifts to the innovative approaches of Aevo...

While Solana DeFi protocol Jupiter staged what was by most measures a very successful airdrop launch on Wednesday, achieving a market cap of close to $800 million, the company’s critics pointed out numerous ways the company seemed to unfairly enrich itself in the process. While Jupiter’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym Meow, acknowledges he might have done some things differently, he finds the criticisms of the launch mostly based on “bad faith” and misinformation.   Meow joined Unchained...