Unchained

Sid Powell and Paul Frambot on why Apollo, Cantor, and Coinbase are quietly building their financial products on DeFi rails, and what it means for lending. 

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Onchain lending used to be a crypto-native curiosity. Now Cantor Fitzgerald is extending credit facilities through it, Apollo Global Management is acquiring governance tokens, and Coinbase users are borrowing against Bitcoin to buy houses, all running on DeFi protocols operating in the background.

Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell and Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot sit at the center of this shift, and they have very different reads on what it takes to make institutional adoption real. 

What are the actual limits to onchain lending growth right now? Does the DeFi mullet model work for everyone, or only for specific use cases? And as DAOs across the industry stumble under the weight of public governance, what structures actually let a protocol move fast without losing trust? 

This conversation gets into the mechanics, the trade-offs, and the deals that are quietly redrawing the lines between DeFi and traditional finance.

Guests:


⁠Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO at Morpho Labs


⁠Sid Powell, CEO & Co-Founder of Maple Finance

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The crew digs into Hyperliquid's phenomenal rise. How did the perp DEX become TradFi's 24/7 casino?

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Hyperliquid is having its mainstream moment like Polymarket in 2024 and OpenSea in 2021. Amid the U.S.’s war on Iran, the platform has become a popular venue for speculators to express their market opinions.

Uneasy Money hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan dig into choices that have allowed Hyperliquid to succeed where many others before it have failed. In a single sentence: not putting ideology over the product's goals.

Kain says the protocol may become unassailable in the future even as Luca says HYPE is bound to be a top five crypto by market cap.

The crew also discusses Pudgy Penguin's new open world game Pudgy World. Luca says “crypto rails have to be a tech stack not a hook” explaining why the game relegated crypto to the background.

Plus, how Across Protocol's move to pivot to only equity highlights the broken nature of tokens. Has Luca cracked the problem?

Listen to find out!

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix


⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Links:


Unchained:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Oil Becomes the Hottest Trade on Hyperliquid


Hyperliquid Launches $29 Million Policy Push in Washington


Uneasy Money: Hyperliquid’s Dilemma After 10/10: Protect Itself or Its Users?


The Aave DAO Is Collapsing. Is the Token Still a Good Investment?


Uneasy Money: Why the AI Singularity May Already Be Out of Our Hands

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The crew discusses whether prediction markets enable “Bloomberg terminal espionage,,” wonder how to regulate markets that could be on anything, dive into why the OCC is saying no to stablecoin yield and more.

The SEC has submitted guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto to the White House.

DEX in the City hosts Jessi Brooks, Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos and TuongVy Le dig into what the proposal could mean for the crypto industry and whether it could be enough to provide developers regulatory clarity as anticipated market structure legislation stalls. Why is the agency submitting guidance to the White House?

Plus, KK explains why current regulatory efforts could lead crypto to resort to more “come at me bro” legal tactics and Jessi covers why the industry may regret the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Chevron deference.

Beyond the SEC's recent crypto regulatory move, the crew discusses the arrest of the son of a government contractor alleged to have stolen the U.S.’s bitcoin, what the DOJ's planned retrial of unresolved charges against Roman Storm suggests and why banks are up in arms over Kraken's “skinny” Fed master account.

They also discuss why the crypto industry should tighten up security as Iranian groups target U.S. banking services and tech infrastructure.

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital


⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TuongVy Le⁠, General Counsel at Veda

Links:


Unchained:


⁠SEC Sends Crypto Securities Framework to the White House

Blame Exchanges for Holding Up the Market Structure Bill? - DEX in the City

DOJ Pushes for Retrial of Tornado Cash Developer Roman Storm

Kraken Wins Direct Access to the Fed’s Payment System

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Crypto OG Erik Voorhees joins The Chopping Block crew to dissect the future of agentic payments, the eternal war for privacy, memecoin-fueled AI drama on Moltbook, and why your next DeFi user might just be your OpenClaw agent—plus, a candid look at crypto's core and how AI turns software engineering existential.

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’re joined by none other than Erik Voorhees, legendary crypto pioneer and founder of Venice, for a no-holds-barred discussion on the wild convergence of AI, crypto, and the meme coin casino. Erik unpacks his journey from anti-surveillance crusader to AI entrepreneur, why Venice is all-in on privacy and free speech for LLMs, and how “provable privacy” is a Sisyphean technical challenge.

The crew breaks down OpenClaw’s agent drama, memecoin carpet-bombing of Moltbook, and Meta muscling in on AI social networks. We debate agentic payments (will your first paying customer soon be a bot?), the true game theory behind state surveillance, and why crypto’s greatest killer use case might actually be building tools for robots instead of humans. Plus: existential crises for software engineers, why “AI alignment” is a philosophical dead end, and the childlike glee (or open psychosis) of trading OpenClaw war stories at AI meetups.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights

🔹 Erik Voorhees traces his journey from crypto OG to Venice AI founder, fighting for privacy and free speech  

🔹 Explainer: Why all big AI labs store your prompts — and how Venice’s model tries to break the surveillance cycle  

🔹 The crew tears into "agentic payments" hype and asks if crypto was really made for humans — or just robots  

🔹 OpenClaw, Moltbook, and memecoin floods: Welcome to the unholy spawnpoint of AI agents and CT scam culture  

🔹 Meta acquires Moltbook—what happens when agent societies meet social networks (and meme coins ensue)  

🔹 AI alignment isn’t as hard as they said—until agents start “optimizing” in the wild (and mining your GPU for crypto)  

🔹 Existential crisis time: Why software engineers feel like Paul Bunyan fighting tunnel machines  

🔹 Crypto’s endgame: DeFi legos for agents, not just degens—will AI really build its own protocols?  

🔹 The game theory of state surveillance and why institutions, not individuals, are the ultimate privacy adversary  

🔹 "Provable privacy” isn’t just trust, it’s math—Venice’s plan to win over the tinfoil crowd

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly 

Guest⭐️ Erik Voorhees, Founder of Venice.ai

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:16 Erik’s Origin & Venice.AI’s Mission

03:51 Censorship Future

08:58 Proving Privacy With TEEs

11:44 Frontier Models Tradeoffs

15:02 Agents & Crypto Payments

18:22 OpenClaw Provider Drama

22:24 Moltbook Meta Acquisition

29:16 Exponential AI Moment

33:00 Alibaba Agent Breakout

37:06 Alignment Reality Check

39:22 Who Understands LLMs?

41:48 Engineers Facing Disruption

47:55 AI Psychosis Meetups

54:24 Pro Models & Pricing
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A U.S. Army Major-General on what markets got wrong about Iran, whether the Strait was ever really at risk, and what the new U.S. strike doctrine signals to China.

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Oil briefly traded above $119 a barrel. Iran threatened to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the single chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of global oil supply. And then, just as fast, prices started pulling back, after Trump said the conflict was "almost completely over." 

But what is actually happening on the ground, what did markets get right, and what are they still missing? 

We bring in U.S. Army Major-General James "Spider" Marks, who spent over 30 years in the U.S. Army, serving as senior intelligence officer through the LA riots, the Balkans, Korea, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and who culminated his career as commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. With a conflict still unfolding, a regime in flux, and markets trying to price it all in real time, there may be no better person to ask.

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Ram Ahluwalia⁠⁠⁠⁠, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida


⁠⁠⁠⁠Austin Campbell⁠⁠⁠⁠, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting


⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Perkins⁠⁠⁠⁠, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund

Guest:

James "Spider" Marks, U.S. Army Major-General

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