The Chopping Block: Crypto’s Best and Worst in 2023

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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, after an incredibly eventful year for crypto, The Chopping Block crew makes its picks for the best and worst of 2023, including its biggest winners and losers, biggest surprises, best memes, best or worst pivots, biggest flops, best comeback stories, favorite podcast guests and predictions for 2024. Hear why some in the gang consider Solana to be the year’s biggest winner, Circle the biggest loser, MicroStrategy the best and worst pivot, Coinbase the best comeback and a renewed boom in crypto lending one of the top predictions for 2024.

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures

Disclosures

Links

Surprises: 

• The Chopping Block: Was Crypto Just Debanked?
• What Is Depegging in Crypto and Why Does It Occur?

Flops:

• The Chopping Block: Why the Azuki Elementals Drop Was a Big Flop
• The Chopping Block: Michael Lewis Swindled, SBF’s Effective Altruism Ruse, Ethereum Protocol Enshrinement
• The Block: Worldcoin unveils integrations with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram and Shopify
• CoinDesk: Future of Solana’s Hyped Saga Phone Is ‘Under Internal Discussion’ as Sales Figures Fail to Wow
• ApeCoin DAO Governance

Winners:

• Unchained:
  • SEC vs Ripple: Judge Rules XRP Sold on Exchanges Is Not a Security
  • Anatoly Yakovenko on Solana’s Astounding Recovery and Its Future Plans 
  • Bitcoin’s Daily Transaction Fees Surpass Ethereum’s for First Time Since 2020
  • What Are BRC-20 Tokens? A Brief Introduction
  • The Chopping Block: Wizards vs. Laser Eyes for the Future of Bitcoin

Memes:

• Dexerto: What is TikTok’s viral NPC fetish? New streaming kink explained
• David Beckham’s memes

Favorite guests:

• The Chopping Block: Top White Hat Hacker Samczsun Discusses the State of Crypto Security
• The Chopping Block: How This DeFi Hack Negotiator Gets Hackers to Return Stolen Money
• The Chopping Block: Why Vivek Ramaswamy Wants Less Crypto Regulation
• The Chopping Block: Coinbase’s Paul Grewal on Why the SEC Is Going After Crypto So Aggressively

Others

• Unchained:
  • Ledger Library Compromised, Causing Confusion and Panic in Crypto Community
  • Vitalik Buterin Supports Integrating Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines Into Main Ethereum Chain