Unchained

The crew sizes up Bitcoin's rebound, the fight to bring Hyperliquid onshore, the SEC's new token fundraising framework, and why Stripe's OpenRouter deal could make AI inference markets look a lot like DeFi.

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.

Tom and Tarun check in from Bhutan after lunch with the king, then the crew tackles Bitcoin's rebound, the path to a compliant U.S. Hyperliquid, the SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, and the growing overlap between AI inference markets and DeFi market structure.

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

Show highlights

🔹 Tom and Tarun report from Bhutan after discussing Bitcoin mining, AI, and tokenization with the king.

🔹 Bitcoin pushes back toward $80,000 as ETF inflows and the debasement trade revive crypto sentiment.

🔹 The panel explains why a U.S. Hyperliquid would probably require KYC, surveillance, and separate liquidity.

🔹 Robert argues the SEC's $5 million startup exemption could reopen token crowdfunding for smaller projects.

🔹 Tom asks whether Regulation Crypto Assets solves an ICO-era problem that today's builders no longer have.

🔹 Tarun predicts financial engineers will try to scale the small-offering exemption through many token launches.

🔹 AI could overwhelm government processes by removing the bureaucratic proof-of-work that quietly rationed access.

🔹 Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition turns model routing, inference providers, and cached tokens into a DeFi-style market.

🔹 The hosts debate whether data rebates and inference tokens could finally revive crypto's 2017 data-ownership dreams.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Disclosures

Links

SEC Regulation Crypto Assets: https://www.sec.gov/rules-regulations/2026/08/s7-2026-27

OpenRouter is joining Stripe: https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/openrouter-is-joining-stripe/

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:22 Tom & Tarun meet the King of Bhutan

04:13 Bitcoin rebounds and crypto gets hot again

08:10 What a compliant U.S. Hyperliquid could look like

13:14 The SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets

23:53 Are the new token rules eight years too late?

28:23 AI removes the government's bureaucratic speed bumps

31:12 Why AI inference tokens could power the next cycle

34:13 Stripe buys OpenRouter and AI starts looking like DeFi

43:28 Router economics, data markets, and new security risks

51:01 Bull-market vibes from Bhutan and Asia
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Roman Storm's retrial slides to April 2027. Peter Van Valkenburgh argues prosecuting Tornado Cash's developers cost real ground in zero knowledge cryptography.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has declared "economic D-Day" on Iran, leaving an open question over whether the sanctions crackdown reaches Uniswap and Ethereum or stops at Iranian exchanges, where humans are in the loop.

Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan take that gap to Peter Van Valkenburgh, executive director of Coin Center, whose defense of the Tornado Cash developers rests as much on zero knowledge cryptography as on sanctions law.

They cover the GENIUS Act's freeze and seize rules for the stablecoin secondary market and Roman Storm's retrial, now pushed to April 2027, where speech protections clash with prosecutors' "frying pan" theory of money transmission.

The SEC's proposed exemptions, the stalled Clarity Act, and Trump’s Hyperliquid all raise the same question: where does decentralization end and regulation begin?

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Peter Van Valkenburgh - Executive Director of Coin Center

Timestamps

🎯 01:26 Bessent brands Iran sanctions 'economic D-Day', DeFi not exempt

🏦 11:15 Van Valkenburgh explains the freeze-and-seize rules coming for stablecoins

💰 15:18 Bessent claims a $1B Iranian crypto rug, but the receipts don't add up

🌊 25:08 1inch Aqua: back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-sn

⚖️ 25:50 Roman Storm's retrial slips to April as an acquittal motion looms

🔐 38:24 Why Van Valkenburgh calls Tornado Cash's developer a hero, not a villain

📜 47:22 SEC's 'Reg Crypto' plan opens two new paths to raise ICO-like capital

🏇 58:07 Trump name-drops Hyperliquid, raising hard questions for the CFTC
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📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips

Bitcoin is pushing toward $80,000 after Scott Bessent's Treasury long-end buybacks flipped spot ETF flows positive and rattled the bond market.

Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins are joined by Bitwise's Gordon Grant to unpack why rising Treasury volatility, and bizarre stress signals building in the TIPS market, are becoming a tailwind for Bitcoin's momentum trade.

Hosts:

Austin Campbell - Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Group, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern

Ram Ahluwalia - Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of Lumida

Chris Perkins - Co-host of Bits + Bips and Head of Franklin Crypto

Guest:

Gordon Grant - Portfolio Manager and Head of Derivatives at Bitwise

This clip is from a longer conversation on the CFTC's prediction-market brawl, parametric insurance, and a mystery AI model. Full episode here:https://youtu.be/tLKZl37uZ2g?si=Vp_6Y7PvXeDh_iJ8

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

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Chapters

💰 00:20 Market snapshot: Bitcoin near $80K as ETF inflows flip positive

🌊 03:32 Gordon on how Bessent linked Treasury vol to Bitcoin's own vol spike

📈 05:32 Ram on the 'extraordinary' price action and Bitcoin's momentum

🎙️ 07:39 Chris on the Bitcoin/gold chart and the Fed-Treasury accord

🧮 09:30 Austin on the fiscal-dominance divergence between the front and long end

🔒 10:54 Gordon on the 'buyer strike' driving Treasury illiquidity

🔄 15:19 Chris on why the basis trade's return is bullish for crypto
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Some crypto products work with multiple chains on different post-quantum paths. NEAR’s Illia Polosukhin and Ledger's Charles Guillemet discuss how they manage that challenge.

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In March, a Google research team published a paper on breaking cryptographic keys with a quantum algorithm, so cautious about the finding that it released only a zero-knowledge proof the algorithm existed. Weeks later, an EigenLayer AI competition improved on that method in roughly 48 hours.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, and Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, join Laura Shin for an update on the quantum threat whose deadline could be approaching fast. Both are creating products that deal with multiple chains that all have different post-quantum approaches.

They discuss why, of the three NIST-standardized, post-quantum algorithms, the crypto industry has splintered into different chains working with different ones, whereas most industries are converging on one, called lattice-based. They also debate what to do with Satoshi Nakamoto's bitcoins: do nothing, freeze them, or freeze and tail-emit new bitcoin, an option Guillemet favors even though Bitcoin's leaderless governance makes consensus hard to reach.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:

⁠Illia Polosukhin - Co-founder of NEAR Protocol

⁠Charles Guillemet - CTO of Ledger

Timestamps

🔐 02:18 Illia and Charles map Shor's algorithm leap and EigenLayer's 48-hour crack

🧠 12:43 Why Matt Corallo's Bitcoin core skepticism reveals NEAR's design edge

📢 18:18 1inch Aqua: see how the shared liquidity platform works at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-sn

🔀 23:28 How lattice vs hash based crypto split Ethereum from Bitcoin's plan

🌐 34:46 Charles: why this crypto fight is unique to blockchain, not elsewhere

🛠️ 37:04 Charles walks through Ledger's SDK and hardware wallet quantum roadmap

🔑 44:22 Why 'wrench attacks' expose the physical risk in quantum signing

🕵️ 46:11 Charles debunks the harvest now decrypt later myth for blockchains

₿ 54:52 The Satoshi's coins dilemma: three options and Bitcoin's security budget
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Venice founder Erik Voorhees says crypto's real job was never speculation. It's becoming the rails AI agents actually need. Plus, why he sold equity, not tokens.

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Stripe bought OpenRouter this month in one of the cleanest crypto-to-AI pivots yet, and Erik Voorhees says most of the industry drew the wrong lesson from it.

Voorhees, founder and CEO of Venice AI, joins Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to argue that crypto's job was never to serve crypto people, it was to become the financial rails a decentralized AI future actually needs. He pushes back on the instinct to abandon tokens for pure AI plays, and on the assumption that America deserves to win the AI race just because it is America.

They get into why Voorhees sold Venice's equity but refused to sell its VVV tokens, why he says the big labs are losing money "hand over fist" subsidizing $200-a-month plans, how DeepSeek reset the cost curve for inference, and why he calls the moderation layer sitting inside today's AI models "deceptive."

His answer for who should actually win the AI race has nothing to do with flags.

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Erik Voorhees - Founder and CEO of Venice AI

Timestamps

🤝 01:51 Why Stripe buying OpenRouter is one of crypto's cleanest AI pivots

🪙 04:02 Why Erik says he can't pivot out of crypto even while building an AI company

⚖️ 12:43 Crypto has principles, AI didn't: unpacking the two industries' DC playbooks

💧 27:58 1inch Aqua: See how shared liquidity keeps LPs' tokens in their wallet at https://1inch.com/aqua

💰 28:44 Why Erik sold Venice's equity but refuses to sell its VVV tokens

🧩 42:51 Inside Venice's strategy for aggregating every major AI model in one app

📉 49:15 Why Erik says labs are bleeding money on $200 plans, and how DeepSeek reset AI pricing

🌐 57:30 Why Erik says America doesn't deserve to win the AI race by default

🔓 01:02:41 Why Erik has 'zero faith' in politics and trusts decentralized tech instead

🕵️ 01:09:56 Why Erik calls the moderation layer inside AI models 'deceptive'
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