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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 in crypto. This week they’re joined by Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and ex-Coinbase, where he led USDC and the Coinbase Developer Platform. He’s here to explain why, with exchanges winding down left and right, he’s somehow never been more bullish.

The crew digs into the great contrast of the moment: BitMEX shutting down after 11 years (plus BitMart, Movement Labs, Balancer Labs) while the plumbing quietly prints, and whether Imran’s viral ‘everything that failed will eventually work’ thesis is genius or toxic positivity. From there it’s the question of whether crypto is really only about money (Jesse’s Base mea culpa included), a war-memories tour through TCRs, on-chain reputation and why pure on-chain credit keeps faceplanting, and finally who actually pays in the x402 AI-agent era, and whether decentralization even survives contact with Google-shaped gravity.

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