No Altcoin Season? Tell That to the TradFi Players - Uneasy Money

I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets, right? Because the attention is derived from social activity, right? And social impression and activity and impressions can be rigged.

I take security and safety very seriously. I think that we should absolutely be concerned about these things. And it concerns me when I see the safety people leaving the AI being like, I'm going to go move to an island. Bye.

Imagine if Medi from SIGP and you and all of the crypto safety people were all of a sudden like, I'm out. Okay, I'm moving to England. Here's the thing. You would be like, "Holy crypto's cooked." Like, we're in a lot of trouble.

Hey everyone, I'm Kane Warrick and welcome to Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with my co-host Taylor Monahan, security expert, and Luca Netz, CEO of the Pudgy Penguins Metaverse Universe, Ultraverse.

We are going to dive in in one minute, but one quick thing before we start. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchainedcrypto.com/unemoney.

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All right, we're back. So, we have a bunch of topics this week, but first we have a little preamble, I guess, because the world is going crazy.

So, Tay, I don't know, you can you can take it from here. First of all, Kyle from Multicoin retired or something. I don't know. Maybe he's uploading into a computer or something. I don't know exactly what's going on, but he's left crypto.

But he took the time to take a couple of pot shots on the way out the door at Hyperlquid and I couldn't help himself. He's like, "Hey guys, I retired. You'll never see me again." But also, by the way, here's some dumb that I'm going to say as I'm literally disappearing into the hedge.

So, Tay, yeah, hit us. What's going on?

I don't know. What's going on?

I think whenever you have these sort of market shifts people get weird. I think the world is actually like it feels like this is like a bigger than just like another bare market though. My biggest observation has been like the AI turnover.

We saw huge number of folks from like XAI leave the anthropic guy. He was like the head of their safeguard research, which I assume is like the guy who's in charge of making sure the AI doesn't go insane and kill us all.

He wrote this really scary philosophical letter about his observations and why he was leaving. He ended the tweet though with this statement that I kind of relate to, but I'm also terrified. He just said, "Anyways, I'll be moving back to the UK and letting myself become invisible for a period of time."

So, the safety people are losing their minds, right? And I feel like so I there was a long ex article that I read yesterday from this guy that was like, "Hey, I know all of the normies out there." He's like I this is like he runs an AI startup and he said I've been working in AI for like five years, right?

He's like all of the my normie friends are like ah I tried chatb it's fine like I'm okay I'm a lawyer it'll be fine. And he was like this feels a little bit like the first two weeks in Feb in 2020 where like people are and you know it's interesting right because like who is the most connected to these like zeitgeist changes.

It's always crypto people because we're insane, right? The crypto people are lunatics and they're so obsessively weirdly into like whatever weird stuff is going on even outside of crypto that like we were probably in December. It feels like we hit this like weird Cambrian explosion of like crypto people doing weird AI stuff.

Anyway, so this guy's like, "It feels like early CO." And for those of us who were in crypto, early co on crypto Twitter when crypto Twitter still existed before it was killed. People were like, "This is bad."

I remember walking around and saying to people in real life like we are This is going to be an absolute capacity. This is in Feb. In Feb, first week of Feb, we sent everyone home. said, "We're working from home now. Good luck, guys. We'll see. We'll figure it out later."

Like literally like we just sent everyone home like like first week of Feb and then we watched this all play out. And this guy is like this feels like something like that where there are people who are kind of canaries in the coal mine who are like, "Uh, shit's getting weird and we're about to kind of"

And it's funny. So I had dinner with a good friend of mine who was in crypto for a long time. He was our CTO at Synthetics in 2018. He's been out of crypto, he's been out of everything on like talking about people like disappearing. He lives in Lisbon, hangs out and like surfs and stuff, right?

And I was like, how much have you been paying attention to this stuff? And he's like, uh not much at all. And I was like, dude, like wow, you are about to be hit by a tsunami and you're just like paddling around being like this is fun.

So so uh it does feel like we are in this transitional moment and like something happened. Like Opus 4.6 and Codeex 5.3. Codex 5.3 is the wildest I've ever seen. Like it is wild. It is so much smarter than me that I'm like becoming differential to it.

I find myself being like, "Oh, thank you for not killing me right now. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Be nice to your AI game. Like it's coming for you."

I used to be kind of a dick. I used to be I'm like, "God, you idiot. Like, stop doing dumb shit." And now I'm like, "Thank you for doing smart things. I really appreciate it."

Yeah, I know, right? I know. I'm definitely I'm definitely going to be turn into paper clips for sure.

So, uh okay, let's let's get into the first segment. Black Rockck picks unis swap rails on Ethereum for its little fund, which I hate that name so much, but uh here we are.

So, they have a $2.2 billion tokenized treasury fund, and it's going to be tradable on Uniswap via Uniswap X. Uniswap X is this new version of of Uniswap that has like hooks and various things.

So, it's permission. Which I think we're okay with in 2026. 2019 me would have been losing my mind about this, but whatever. It is what it is. Uh, the institutions are here and they want KYC. So, you have to be pre-qualified. There's white lists, etc.

They also acquired some UNI. Thank you for buying our bags. That's amazing because UNI was trading at like $3. So, I'm very excited that that they were able to push it back up to $4.

So, this feels like the thing we've been waiting for, right? Like institutions coming using onchain stuff, tokenizing things like yeah, there's some KYC, but you know, let's just squint and ignore that. And yeah, it feels it feels pretty crazy.

Yeah, I mean it is like what we were waiting for. It kind of I don't know. I guess I'm I'm like well like waiting for what happens next seeing if it if it uh if it hits the same like the announcements just are like greedy. We're like uh yeah you're trading your like securities on our blockchains but like what else are you going to do for us?

But it is a massive improvement I would say over the last few years. Like we might we might be getting closer together. We might be merging these worlds maybe. I don't know. We'll see what happens though. We'll see if it's uh they still sort of have to find like PMF, right? To a certain extent.

I think it to me it feels like um the the meme and narrative of like always on trading. We've kind of like got these guys over the line. Like the Trafy guys are like, "Yeah, actually fine. like let's just trade all the time and never sleep.

So I think like that alone is like a bit of a win for us that we're like, "Oh, okay. We we we convinced these guys that 247 markets was a good idea somehow because there was a period of time where like TRFI was like, we are going to go to one-hour markets twice a week and we're just going to consolidate all of trading activity into these like two hour windows at the start of the week and the end of the week and not bother to do things in the middle."

And we're like, "Ah, what if we did the exact opposite of that?" and we seem to be winning. So, um, so yeah, that feels bullish.

Well, and we'll see what happens. I mean, I think that there's an opportunity here, right? Like again, like these two worlds getting closer and closer together. Uh, the real question will be, does anyone actually want to do this?

Especially with the permission. That's the question. It's like, does this improve liquidity? Does it actually Yeah.

Luca, Luca, what's what's going on? What do you think about this?

I I I spent more time going down the layer zero rabbit hole yesterday, so I probably don't have as much to speak on this as it's probably cool that like they're actually buying a token that's an altcoin. I think that's probably like the the brief understanding I have about the whole uni lap rock thing is the coolest part to me in my brief understanding of it is Black Rockck owns all is buying and holding altcoins.

Yeah, that's cool. That feels bullish. Yeah, I'm excited about that. As a uni bag holder, I'm excited for anyone to buy Uni. The more people who buy it, the better. Um, someone's got to buy our bags.

Okay. Uh let's go uh let's go on to our second segment. Like am I losing my mind? But did we not decide that we don't need every single person to have a chain? We had like a three-month period where we're like we don't need any more chains and now we're back to actually no, we need all the chains.

We just talked about this last week and we're like we're going to chill on the chains. We're going to chill on chain. Less chainy. Nope. More trains. All right, Luca. Luca, give us the Sorry. Bare markets, right? Like it's like as soon as you get into a bare market, people just go back to the same old They're like, "All right, we're launching more chains."

So Luca, uh, well, I guess let's let's just go through the chains that launch, right? So, Mega Eat launched. Bullish on Mega E. I was I was excited that they um that they launched. I think they are doing some very interesting things. uh like not launching the token with the chain, having these KPI based gates.

There's there's a bunch of cool stuff that uh that Mega ETH is trying and it feels good to have someone trying new right now. Especially in a bare market, right? Like that's the time to do experimentation. Um but probably the I mean and then you know Robin Hood um launched a chain on arbitum um uh which is also interesting going to be interesting to see how they like speaking of you know uh chain pilling um Tradfi right like it feels like we've we've definitely got all of the like big retailfacing uh TRDFI uh apps to like go all in on chains.

They need to have chains. So, um I feel like that's again a win. Um too many chains, but here we are. Um so the most interesting one yesterday for me though was maybe layer zero. Um so Luca, if you went down that rabbit hole, give us the debrief. What's going on with layer zero?

Yeah, the layman's explanation because I can only explain because it's very techheavy. Okay, maybe you get into the minutiae as you know in layman's terms it's it's probably one of the greatest technological advancements from a you know EVM ZK perspective right like I I think for those who are not familiar with layer zero layer zero is basically the interoperability protocol that basically allows any and all crosschain you know movements to happen uh if something's crosschain there's a 90% % chance it's probably being powered by layer zero.

I know they've pretty much had, you know, huge market share either via Stargate or actual layer zero protocol, but nonetheless, um, they've been working on this for the last two and a half years. The thought process for them was like, look, you know, if if we're going to do certain things, I remember speaking to Brian a year ago and he was kind of constraint constrained in terms of certain ambition, certain ambitions that he had around certain builds.

He was kind of alluding to that he was working in this direction, but obviously he didn't share anything at the time. Uh but basically the most performant blockchain that requires the most menial or the most uh basic hardware to kind of process and run. Uh basically it was running it was running on a Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi which is super impressive, right?

And and basically it's you know the tagline which I loved is the last blockchain and he's basically saying you don't need another blockchain after this one. This is the one. Uh Yeah, just the 15th standard problem. Now, now I will say those guys are that's probably one of the best teams in crypto. You'd probably agree. I mean, those guys Yeah, I I love those guys. I think so.

The most interesting thing to me aside from the tech, right? And Luca, I think you'll you will uh have some thoughts here, right? Is the channel conflict problem of of layer zero. If I'm not mistaken, when Layer Zero launched, they're like, "We don't need a chain. We are the layer zero below all the chains. We're not going to compete with you guys.

We're going to, you know, just make all your chains better and and interoperable." And so, don't even worry about it. Like, we're definitely not going to do anything to threaten that equilibrium. And then they're like, "Ah, it. We're just going to launch a chain."

All right. What does the chain do now? Like, what is the It's fast, bro. Like, what? like 2 million TV. Okay, I got it. Awesome.

So, wait. Okay, but seriously, in a world where AI agents are going to be sending a quadrillion transactions a week, right? Like nothing outside of Salana is at least like on a production perspective can kind of meet that demand. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but at least like to my knowledge, right? Like Salana is the only battle tested one.

Zero's not battle tested, but this is like the fire dancer dream and everything kind of compartmentalized in a new foundational model that like blockchains aren't built. My understanding of it is like blockchains aren't built the way that these guys built it. It kind of reinvents how people I think look at them uh and how and how I guess you know certain parts of the puzzle kind of fit in.

And so it's kind of like a new foundational layer of like, you know, when you think about it, if you want to process huge amounts of transactions, you know, if if you can do that with minimal hardware requirements, then you kind of like fulfill the promise of like a fast blockchain that's permissionless and censorship resistant.

It kind of is like the the taglines at least to me read like the creme de la creme of like blockchains, right? Because like what is Salana's big objection, right? the concentration of the validators, right? I mean, if everyone can run a validator, you know, for zero chain on a Raspberry Pi, then all of a sudden you have like Ethereum level decentralization with like Salana-esque performance.

But the argument is that like this is even a lot faster than even Salana. Uh, okay. So you have like a you know like in a world where we believe which I think like the next great crypto bull run is going to come from this idea this speculative idea that like AI agents are running all this volume and transactions on crypto rails like what chains are going to reap the benefits from that well probably the fastest most decentralized you know chain that's it's probably with the cheapest cost is going to is going to realize that and like their costs too are like unheard of you know it's like a fraction fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny, you know, for a transaction.

That one of the things in their presentation was like, you know, gas is basically gone, right? Like we've eliminated gas, whatever that means. Uh if it means what it what if it means what we what we think it means literally, then you know that is the arena in which I think the people will play.

Now, you know, it is fascinating because I wonder I wonder if I'm a if I'm a chain, if I then think to myself, the the thing is is like if you're using layer zero and oft crosschain capability, if you're like Solano or if I'm abstract and then I see layer zero building a chain, like I'm going to think to myself, wow, this is a super competitive product, right?

And you know in this world as Kane you were explaining and I've been saying for years like tech is not the moat. That's probably the first time in a long time where we can say tech is a moat until you know all the LLM start capturing you know all of the data and all of the code and you know maybe people can then can soon copy zero chain.

Again I can't speak on that. Like honestly agents are going to be launching their own chain soon and they'll be better than that. No we just we need to make peace with that. like they're going to be like, "Oh, it took you two years to build this chain. That's so cute. I built my chain in two minutes and it's got 8 million TPS."

I don't know. Uh like I'm bearish on on humanity's ability to build things at this point. We're we're really cooked. Okay. But it's still the whole point of the chain is still primarily interoperability settlement stuff.

I think so. So the the point was I guess that uh that like all of these trads like the the two threads that are going on here is like Tradfi coming in um and saying this, you know, this is the thing we're going to bet on um you know on on this zero uh token, zero tech, zero chain. Um and same thing with unis swap, right? like we're betting on this Ethereum uh you know um gated uh onchain liquidity solution and we're going to buy into the protocol itself.

So it feels like if this starts to become a thing that you know it could really differentiate the tokens that are uh becoming investable by like actual institutions as opposed to Bitcoin. Like we haven't really seen institutions to your point, Luca, buying alts. Mhm. Unless you include ETH, which we should not talk about.

But outside of that, right, like um you know, we've had we've had some DATs buying ETH and Saul and and you know, some alts, but uh institutions, actual you know, large companies turning up and saying, "No, we're going to buy uni. We're going to buy zero." That feels pretty new for this cycle. It feels like the first time that I' I've seen these announcements.

So, um yeah, we got to we got to lean into that, I guess, if uh if that's if that's working. But it does feel like that will become a very big differentiator like is this asset investable is going to be a big question that probably crypto people are going to start asking themselves like you know why am I buying this random shitcoin if you know ARC is not willing to buy it.

I mean, that'll be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's like But that's like a full a full full 180 from like the current memecoin status. Totally. Right. And we're going to go back to the technicals and the foundations and see what see if we can can actually like build new value.

I had a podcast yesterday uh and it was this like OG DeFi guy that started asking me questions um about like, you know, how tokens work, right? and like why why they work the way they do. Um, and it forced me to really kind of rethink my position on tokens in 2026.

And my hot take is that in DeFi summer, like that whole period, we figured out ways to create token syncs. Like token syncs were the thing. You had to find a way to get people to hold a token. This cycle has been the memeification and propification of everything. No one holds anything. No one holds tokens. No one wants to hold tokens.

Um, and in order for tokens to hold any value, someone has to be buying them and holding them, right? If everyone is just selling them and it's this, you know, very short-term trade, then it's just not going to work. Um, so my my hot take is that seeing things like this, you know, Citadel buying zero is a token sync. uh they're not gonna dump on you in 48 hours, right? Like they have, you know, like a mandate to now hold this token for a while.

So that alone seeing Trad start to buy these tokens and hold them could could be an interesting catalyst as well. So I mean I am 100% for it. I'm for anything that is not continuing to this like race to the bottom of tokens being valless and like it just feels like we just got really really raced to the bottom in terms of like intelligence on some of the stuff and I don't know I think like attention like the memeiness and like the attention like I think that's a huge part of it.

We just like once again like crypto does, we just took it way too far. Way too far. We're like nothing has any value. Nothing matters. The tagline of crypto is like you think that you've taken something too far. Well, hold my beer. Uh because I will take it.

And you know it is funny, right? Like what ended up happening was and you know part why do we take things too far? Because we have a vested interest in taking it too far. something starts working and we're like, "Oh, okay. How can I like take this to its like logical conclusion, right?

Um, and so this false equivocation of like everything is meaningless. Nothing has value. Everything is just a short-term trade. There's no difference between uh like, you know, a dog with hat and uni. They're the same thing. They're just like a random tra. they're a random cryptographic thing that you can sell and buy and trade, right? Like they have they have no diff there's no distinction between those two things.

It really hollowed us out, right? Like it it created and part of that was, you know, regulatory, etc. There were a whole bunch of reasons for that. But um I think if we get back to a world where we go, no, there is a difference between Pepe and UniS swap, right? And it doesn't mean Pepe is bad, but Uni the token has some intrinsic utility and value for reasons and people want to hold it.

And look at some of the people who are holding it, right? Like back in the day, we used to point at crypto VCs and be like Andre's holding UNI like get excited, right? Um, I feel like uh I feel like Citadel, you know, they might be evil, but they're probably gonna be an even better holder than uh than um Andrea.

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All right, uh we are back. So, betting on Mindshare. Um we've talked a lot about Kaito uh over the last six months, the the Kao um attention meta. Um this is a slight different take. You know Kaido um because they were cut off from the X API they've had to kind of pivot uh towards um these different approaches.

And so there's a partnership between Poly Market and Kaito um to launch attention markets starting in March um that will let users wager on social media mind share and sentiment. Um so Kao is going to aggregate data from X, Tik Tok and Instagram. I thought they got cut off from X. I don't know how they're going to pull that off, but um we'll see. Um Nikita is probably uh looking into um all of the API uh deals that they've got right now.

So, uh Poly Market processed $8 billion in in volume in January, um which was up 44%. um which feels crazy like so you know historically the meme with poly market has been like oh it's just like an election thing and it you know gets big for the election and then it dies off. Um obviously the election is you know a four-year cycle thing that's uh that's a huge driver of volume but this cycle post election they have held their volumes really well.

Um, and you know, I think that's been the combination of like the rise of sports markets and a bunch of things, but these attention markets, I don't know, uh, Luca, what's what's your take on attention markets?

Yeah, I think functionally the big the big problem there and and the smartest people in the world have yet to be able to solve it is this idea that I just don't know how you can't rig these attention markets, right? Because the attention is derived from social activity, right? and social impressions and activity and impressions can be rigged and the biggest companies in the world Allah meta and you know and Google you know have have been trying since the beginning of their business to figure out you know which impression is a real impression versus a fake impression and though I'm sure they have you know decent solutions it's not foolproof and I think when you're just like hyper financializing you know attention without, you know, some trillion dollar intermediary like validating that.

I think I think it's just going to get a little messy. I think it can be a little messy. So, in in that respect, I think it's interesting. The Kaido team's incredibly bright. Like, super excited for them to, you know, try to innovate here. But, you know, functionally, I'm worried that the attention can be rigged too easily.

And even the Kaido product, just speaking directly to the Kaido product, one of the big problems with the Kaido product was that the bots were farming the apps and you know, you couldn't, you know, you were able to rig that system to a certain extent and that ultimately hurt a lot of crypto Twitter's feed. So, I think functionally, uh, it's a little bit of a bigger problem than I think uh, I I I think it's a great idea. I just I just don't think functionally. I I can't see how that can't get rigged or exploited in a way that's only going to be harmful to users, but excited to see what they've come up with and I'll definitely be placing some some bets and trying to see how it works.

Yeah, it's it's interesting like it doesn't feel, you know, if people on the inside of this, if Nikita and Elon are still being overrun by bots, and it feels like they are, um it's hard to imagine that an outside entity that doesn't have control over that infrastructure is going to be able to solve this problem through like filtering or, you know, alos.

So, I don't know. We'll see. This feels like one of those things that may be like a partnership that started six months ago and has been slowly working its way towards launch and it's now launched and it's like oh yeah actually we've been nuked in the interim. So I look I don't know it'll be interesting to see what happens here and how they how they manage it. Um certainly Poly Market is um not never short of controversy around uh market resolution. So this should uh add some interesting market resolution uh chaos I would imagine.

I mean that's what that's one thing I was thinking about is like if you look at like the thing that KO like needs to do right it's like on the attention side and then you look at the thing that Poly Market needs to do and it's like really get the trust in the in the resolutions like up. I don't know how this fits into that guys like seems like you've really uh I mean if you man I guess if poly market manages to solve that right meaning manages to somehow increase the trust and the resolutions while also bringing attention markets to market like then I guess the rest is like easy and they're done right they've solved all the problems but uh that's I mean personally I wouldn't start.

Well, so so I I'm an investor in a project called Noise, um which uh I think a lot of people um were excited about. Uh it was part of the Mega ETH um uh ecosystem um for a while. They they've launched uh elsewhere now. Um and we had an interesting debate at Bod where uh Jordan was like, I don't know how this is going to work. And I was like, ah, you're overthinking it. like it's attention. It doesn't matter. Like don't even worry about it.

And he was like, "What do you mean don't even worry about it?" Like the entire thesis of the thing is that you can measure attention somehow and it won't be gameable. And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, don't like it's fine, bro. Don't even don't even think about that part of it." And he was like, "You are so I don't know how to deal with you." He's like, "How am I investing money with you?" And I'm like, "It's just people are excited about it. just you just roll with it.

So, I mean, yeah, let's see. Let's see what happens. Anyway, I won. I'm here for it. We invested in noise. So, um So, but was that a win, Kane?

Uh yes, it's always a win if I get my way. Doesn't matter if I lose money. Just important that I get the check written. I don't care. All right. I don't care about the rest of it. Um they let me write like two checks a year, so that was one of them.

All right, cool. Uh Bass um has pivoted away from uh Farcaster Social within the Bass app. Um, I thought this was really like Bass and and you know, in particular Jesse. Um, he is, you know, Jesse is so adamant about their attention to what, uh, people want whilst also trying to balance this um, you know, not being driven by like the current meta. like they're trying to like invent stuff and like create new meta whilst also you like and it's a really hard thing