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Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Tom Schmidt and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week Rob Hadick of Dragonfly guest-hosts for a second week, and Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and the former head of USDC at Coinbase, joins the show.

The hosts had agreed not to talk about hacks this week, and then Binance happened. Tom walks through an estimated $5 billion pulled out through a flaw in how Binance managed EIP-7702 delegation, three times the largest hack ever in crypto, and Nemil explains how the USDC team used to practice for exactly this as Circle and Tether froze funds within hours. Robert asks why, four years after 2022, nobody has shipped a different architecture for DeFi, Rob notes his portfolio founders barely felt it thanks to tri-party custody, and Nemil warns that the industry is still all about interconnection. Then Nemil runs through YC’s crypto Request for Startups: tokenization, new financial primitives, agents that need APIs, and raising capital for AI on-chain. Rob calls it the bull run, but not the bull run the crypto people want, and the group debates whether crypto is pre-cool or post-cool. Finally, ICE signs a definitive agreement with trade.xyz to bring regulated perps to the US, Stan Druckenmiller sends his first tweet, and Robert argues perps are a superior form factor to dated futures for everything.

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

Show highlights

🔹 Rob Hadick is back for a second week, and Nemil Dalal of Y Combinator returns as a repeat guest.

🔹 The hosts planned to skip hacks this week. Three hours before the show, Binance was hit for an estimated $5 billion, three times the largest hack in crypto history.

🔹 Tom says the attack looks tied to how Binance managed EIP-7702 delegation, letting an attacker generate signatures and withdraw funds by proxy.

🔹 Circle and Tether froze the stolen stablecoins within hours. Nemil says the USDC team literally practiced for moments like this.

🔹 Tom compares freeze requests to social media takedown requests: Circle can’t adjudicate thousands of claims a day, but a call from Binance is high signal.

🔹 Robert asks why, four and a half years after 2022, no team has shipped a genuinely different architecture for DeFi protocols, even as the forest gets darker.

🔹 Rob says his stablecoin and TradFi crossover founders barely felt the hack, and Nemil warns that every financial crisis is about interconnection.

🔹 Nemil runs through YC’s crypto Request for Startups: tokenization, new financial primitives, agents that need APIs, and raising capital for AI on-chain.

🔹 Rob calls it the bull run, but not the bull run the crypto people want. Nemil says he has to steal that.

🔹 Robert asks if it’s better to build pre-cool or post-cool, and rules that crypto is post-cool, which makes it pre-cool again.

🔹 Nemil says every personal agent will have a credit card, while stablecoins win where payments are global and micro, like Cloudflare’s pay-to-crawl.

🔹 ICE signs a definitive agreement with trade.xyz to bring regulated perps built on Hyperliquid’s technology to US customers, pending CFTC approval.

🔹 Stan Druckenmiller tweets about Hyperliquid, and Robert says nobody likes ADL, Druckenmiller least of all.

🔹 Robert argues perps are a superior form factor to dated futures for everything, and that the institutional gap is credit risk.

🔹 Robert marvels that crypto went from Byzantine generals to talking about credit risk.

Hosts

⭐️Rob Hadick, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Guest

⭐️Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator