Unchained

CoinFund’s Jake Brukhman and Chris Perkins join Unchained to dissect their recent $158 million seed round and the transformation of the investment landscape following the 2022 crypto carnage. As backers of Worldcoin, they confront criticisms about the project's approach of distributing money to individuals who may not fully comprehend the underlying technology. They also delve into why the Coinbas...

Crypto markets are under the gun from SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s ‘regulation by enforcement’ policy. Meanwhile, a divided political landscape creates gridlock on Capitol Hill. Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres (NY-15) claims regulators have overstepped their bounds, while generational divide in the Democratic party slows appropriate regulatory legislation from passing. Listen to the episod...

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, they debate whether infrastructure is being over-invested in, explore the potential of UniswapX and the controversial launch of Worldcoin’s token, and dive into the curious world of hamster racing in crypto.  Listen to the episode on Apple...

Despite the doom and gloom, Placeholder VC partners Chris Burniske and Joel Monegro are highly bullish on the present moment. “We’re all going to look back on this period and remember it as fondly as we remember ‘18 and ‘19,” Monegro tells Laura Shin. The two long-term investors explain why the confluence of macroeconomic factors and crypto-native (and AI) innovations make this the ideal time to i...

If the SEC wants to appeal last week’s judgment in the Ripple case, it better act fast. So says Bill Hughes, regulatory chief at Ethereum booster ConsenSys and one of the many crypto policy pros assessing the ramifications of U.S. district judge Analisa Torres’ decision. The regulatory agency’s decision to appeal hinges on a number of factors, Hughes says, including that this Supreme Court will li...

XRP isn’t itself a security; it depends on how it’s sold. So said a federal judge last Thursday in the SEC vs. Ripple case and the implications are significant. Jake Chervinsky, chief policy officer at the Blockchain Association, and lawyer Kayvan Sadeghi, partner at Jenner & Block, join the show to discuss two major ramifications. One: U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres dealt a major blow to the...

Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, crypto lawyer Stephen Palley joins an emergency live show to unpack Thursday’s judgment in the Ripple case. Crypto markets are pumping after a judge handed Ripple Labs a partial victory in its fight against the SEC. But is the jubilation...

The SEC and Ripple have been locked in a legal tug of war for years, stirring up waves of controversy and debate in the crypto community. Finally, Judge Analisa Torres has given an order establishing that XRP buyers trading on exchanges were not, in fact, engaging in a securities transaction, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for the industry. Lewis Cohen, co-founder of DLx Law,...

Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest crypto news. This week, the crew is joined by Goldfinch co-founder Blake West to talk about the momentum around asset tokenization. Whether it’s private credit (what Goldfinch specializes in) or U.S. Treasurys (what Robert’s new venture Superstate will t...

In recent months, ChatGPT, Bard and other new artificial intelligence (AI) products have revolutionized numerous industries. But how this nascent technology can work with crypto and blockchain technology is still relatively unexplored. In this episode, Illia Polosukhin and Jason Warner delve into the transformative potential of AI and crypto coming together.  They explore a wide array of applicati...

In 2022, crypto crime hit an all-time high. A staggering $3.8 billion in crypto was stolen, with DeFi protocols bearing the brunt of these thefts, accounting for 82% of the total losses. Amid this alarming scenario, has a beacon of hope emerged in ERC-7265?  The proposal aims to create a 'circuit breaker' safety layer for DeFi contracts, potentially revolutionizing security measures in the crypto...

The ERC-721 token standard on Ethereum ignited the frenzied world of NFTs. Yet, as the dust settled, their limitations became apparent. Enter ERC-6551, a new standard designed to overcome these challenges. Benny Giang and Jayden Windle, cofounder and founding developer of Future Primitive, respectively, delve into the transformative potential of ERC-6551, a standard which allows every NFT to have...

From “hush money” allegations to a prospective FTX relaunch, it’s been a crazy week for those following the legal saga of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto empire. Perhaps few are following it more closely than 507 Capital founder Thomas Braziel, who specializes in the trading of bankruptcy claims. He explains the significance of a spate of recent headlines and shares newsworthy tidbits from hi...

Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest crypto news.  Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights:  why the Azuki new NFT collection 'El...

Aaron Kaplan, co-CEO of Prometheum, the trading platform that recently acquired a special-purpose broker dealer license for digital asset securities, has become a major lightning rod in the crypto community. Does the firm represent, as Kaplan has argued, a compliant path forward for crypto in the United States? Or, as Paradigm Special Counsel Rodrigo Seira maintains, does it only demonstrate that...

Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest crypto news. With BTC topping $30,000, the gang tackles the apparent surge in institutional bitcoin interest, with BlackRock’s spot ETF application spawning a bumper crop of similar bids. Why did all these TradFi players act at the same time? That, plus...

The SEC has swatted down so many spot bitcoin ETF applications that crypto diehards simply gave up caring. Then comes TradFi giant BlackRock – at the height of the SEC’s crypto crackdown, no less – with an ETF application that has seemingly changed the calculus. Bloomberg Intelligence ETF watcher James Seyffart joins the show to unpack the odds of BlackRock being the first to win approval, and wha...

The announcement of the upcoming launch of Uniswap v4 sparked fresh versions of old debates. Is it OK for DeFi’s leading DEX to not be fully open source at launch? What counts as composability and what counts as plagiarism? Is Uniswap’s dominance a threat to decentralization? Founder Hayden Adams joins the show to respond to the critics and explain the novel features of Uniswap v4.  Listen to the...

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has a reputation in the industry for being more supportive of crypto than her peers. After a rough year for the industry, Peirce weighs in on whether the agency was right in recently naming several crypto tokens as securities, the state of the current regulatory framework, and the slow pace of change. “All I can say is that I’ve been at the agency for over five years...

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 episode, Robert stirs the debate over Hinman's 2018 speech and what it means for the debate at the SEC over whether BTC and ETH should be considered securities, the similarities between Ethereum and Solana, and how Binance. US is dealing w...

On June 1, Hong Kong implemented new crypto regulations to license exchanges. Two experts – Angelina Kwan, CEO of Stratford Finance (and former COO of BitMEX), and Adrian Lai, founder and managing partner of Newman Capital – weigh in on the new rules in Hong Kong, which tokens can be listed, recent reports that China may be sanctioning this activity, and how the crypto community is responding so f...

On Monday, it was Binance. On Tuesday, Coinbase. Electric Capital General Counsel Emily Meyers joins the show to read between the lines of an action-packed week for Gary Gensler’s SEC. Meyers lends her lawyerly eye to the key differences between the two lawsuits, the SEC’s potential strategy, and whether federal legislation will beat the courts in providing clarity.  Listen to the episode on Apple...

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 episode, the Blockchain Association’s Jake Chervinsky breaks down the cases against Binance and Coinbase – and how they are different from FTX – what it means for the crypto industry, and who may be next. Listen to the episode on Apple Pod...

Wallet security was in the spotlight after the announcement of Ledger Recover, but the crypto community doesn’t need to “freak out,” according to Itai Turbahn, co-founder and CEO of Dynamic Labs, and Ouriel Ohayon, CEO of ZenGo. The two CEOs join the show to talk about the challenges of bringing self-custody to the masses. For many, “not your keys, not your coins” is actually “your keys, your prob...

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 episode, the gang answers audience questions, digs into the discourse around rollups, and debates whether modular blockchains will vanquish existing monoliths. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Poc...