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On this episode, I speak with Gabriel Shapiro, who's the general counsel of Delphi Labs.
And he's a member of the Lexpunk Army, which is a really cool open source legal resource
for DAOs and other crypto projects.
We get into a lot of different topics around crypto ethics, regulations, it gets spicy
as usual.
Let's get right to it.
Mr. Gabriel Shapiro, lawyer extraordinaire, crypto lawyer extraordinaire.
Good to see you.
Do I need that qualifier?
I mean, you are a lawyer, you're a real lawyer.
I am a real lawyer.
Before I did crypto law stuff, I was actually one of the top mergers and acquisitions, younger
mergers and acquisitions attorneys in the United States.
So yeah, I'd like to think that the qualifier isn't necessary, but I do pretty much do
exclusively crypto law stuff these days.
You know, something I think about a lot when we're having chats is like how you define
your approach to this stuff, because like my approach is kind of looking at worst case
scenarios and trying to think through how the legal system or the government could eventually
turn around and abuse this to ruin our lives.
You know, I call it adversarial thinking, other people call it nonsense, but or tinfoil
hat, whatever.
So like, how do you as an attorney in the space, how do you approach this stuff versus
the way that I do?
Well, I think that perspective is definitely part of the one part of the perspective I
bring to bear.
And a really big influence on me getting into this stuff was the show Mr. Robot.
When I was working on M&A deals, I would constantly have Mr. Robot playing in the background.
And yeah, just kind of, you know, I just kind of got more and more hyped on that.
And the one of the famous scenes from that show is where the CEO of Evil Corp has a meeting
with I believe it's the Treasury Secretary in the show, the US Treasury Secretary.
And he basically says, look, Evil Corp has its own new cryptocurrency, Ecoin, and you
need to support this and basically make this almost like the official cryptocurrency of
the United States, kind of like what we now call a CBDC, which there wasn't really a
term for back then.
And in exchange for this, I'm going to give you all kinds of backdoors into the coin and
tracking surveillance powers and freezing powers, etc.
And you need to do this.
Otherwise China will beat us with Bitcoin.
And I think that that was a very prescient scene quite some time ago where the potential
for this tech to be used for evil through sort of like public-private partnerships was
acknowledged.
And so I take that pretty seriously.
I think though, the other thing I would say though about my approach that may be a little
different from yours is I think your approach is very sort of user facing, right?
Because you are a user and probably most of your audience is users.
And I am paid to represent the interests almost exclusively of developers in the space.
I don't really represent VCs.
I don't really represent centralized exchanges.
I basically just almost exclusively represent DeFi developers.
And so I also, you know, probably my predominant interest in my actual work is protecting them.
And sometimes those two constituencies, users and developers, can be at odds or can be somewhat
zero sum, right?
There might be certain ways of configuring things that are better for the legal protection
of developers or the asset protection of developers and that are worse for users.
And so, you know, I try to keep user interests in mind, but if I'm being paid for legal advice
by a client, then obviously the client has to come first and most of those clients are
devs.
Yeah.
You hit on something really important there that drives me crazy.
Like the transparency of lawyers in the space is lacking when it comes to incentives.
And like you just hit the nail on the head with regard to the fact that lawyers, almost
all the lawyers in this space are getting paid by either a developer community or a
company or a VC or somebody who's not a retail user, right?
Somebody who wants to profit off of a retail user.
So I'm so glad you brought that up because it's like, there's obviously situations where
like A16Z's incentives in this space are going to come into conflict with mine or another
user because if they didn't, then they wouldn't be making any money, but they're actually
funding huge swaths of the lawyers that are out there, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the
whoever else they're sending to Washington DC to work with Congress, right?
And regulators to develop laws.
And that's been a big beef of mine is that, tell me what you think, but it seems like
almost all the people who are in DC pushing for regulation and for laws and saying they're
fighting on behalf of users are absolutely compromised by the money that they're making
from the people who want to profit off of us.
And in turn, they're passing that compromise along to the lawmakers and the laws that are
being pumped out are not there to protect our privacy or our liberty.
They're there to ensure that there's an industry that these massive VCs can play in for the
next 50 years and not worry about somebody else coming in and innovating away from that
industry.
It seems like they just want to protect themselves at this point.
Am I way off track or am I close?
Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that that's a risk and that's certainly a very large part
of their motivations.
I mean, every human being has, I think, kind of like mixed motivations for most of the
things that they do.
And a guy like probably Mark Andreessen, who's like sitting at the top of A16Z, he's already
rich and whether you agree with his politics or not, you could tell that a lot of his motivation
is probably at this point more in shaping the world in a certain way, and that he does
kind of believe in open software in a sense.
But he doesn't make all the decisions.
He has probably a large pyramid under him of people who think about things different
ways, have different incentives.
And overall, their job is to manage other people's money and their duties are to manage
other people's money and to make them a profit.
And that definitely has to shape things.
And it has to shape things, I think you're right, somewhat adversarially to the user
base because they're trying to find ways to extract rent, in a sense, maybe a better
rent extraction proposition than TradFi has, but still a rent extraction proposition.
And that may mean that the potential solutions that don't have that element are underweighted
or underrepresented, both in the sort of project funding area, in terms of what gets funded,
and in terms of what gets represented in the political dialogue.
Yeah, I guess for me, it's like, okay, I'm in this space for very specific reasons, because
I want to increase my liberty, I want to increase my self sovereignty, I want to stay private
with my finances.
I want the government's hand out of my wallet as much as possible.
Then you look at blockchain association, they're like a leading trade association for the quote
blockchain industry.
And they're heavily funded by VCs and by their member companies.
And they're sending people to DC to work with lawmakers.
So their members are like, they're all companies, right?
They're all companies that are primarily, I would say, funded by Silicon Valley, by
16Z and Paradigm, et cetera, et cetera.
So they don't give a crap about my liberty.
They don't care about my self sovereignty or my privacy.
They only care about that stuff as far as, what's the point?
How far can they compromise on those things and still keep me and others as believers?
But they're not there to maximize my privacy, obviously.
So there is no real voice of the individual in this stuff.
There's nobody in DC that's representing the reason I am.
That I certainly agree with.
Yeah, I certainly agree that there should be a voice for users.
And I think this applies not just to the political process, but to example, to chain governance
as well, right?
And protocol governance.
That user voice just is not coordinated like the other voices are.
And basically the only vehicle for it is crypto Twitter, right?
Just people griping on crypto Twitter.
I do think that has probably more of an impact than you might sometimes think or in the most
pessimistic moments.
Because I've definitely talked to congressional staffers and other people who are active on
this stuff in the Hill.
And they actually emphasize that the lawmakers and their staff are watching crypto Twitter
for reactions.
Sometimes that might mean that if crypto Twitter is reacting very positively to something,
then if it's Elizabeth Warren's office, they're going to use that, they're going to wave that
around as evidence that it's too good for crypto, whatever is being proposed, right?
And on the other hand, if the reaction is negative, then the people who are more pro
crypto like maybe McHenry's office will use that reaction as evidence that if the proposal
is adopted, everyone will just leave the US and the problem won't be solved.
So it does come in, the mob, so to speak, does come in through that route.
But it would be far better if it were more organized and users had representatives directly
talking to staffers and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
But how does that even happen in a space like this?
First of all, we're all such nerds and anti-social freaks that we can barely even pull anything
together half the time.
But is there a parallel for this situation in another industry?
I think about that a lot.
Has there been, like when the internet was coming together, was there a similar thing?
I don't think there was because people weren't even able to organize really.
They didn't have the internet to do that with because it was just being born.
So the similar thing in that context was the cypherpunks, right?
It was guys like Nick Szabo and all these guys who, but at the time they had no money,
right?
They just represented the pure interests of software.
And now it's a very strange dynamic where people who may enter this space for idealistic
reasons very quickly get very rich and they all turn into VCs, right?
And so the lines blur very rapidly, unfortunately.
It just seems like the system's not set up for this kind of input.
It's like, okay, we can come together, we can go testify in front of Congress, we can
form organizations, try to raise money, blah, blah, blah.
But at the end of the day, Congress is bought and paid for, unfortunately, and that money
is coming from the companies, the corporations.
And this is a byproduct of living under this sort of pseudo capitalist system that we're
under.
And I was just like, there's representative, I forget what state he's from, but Tom Emmer,
who in the US Congress, and he's pretty base thinker, he seems to get it, he seems to understand
the challenges that the space is facing.
And he's now written a new bill that basically gives blockchain apps, they call it, I believe,
a safe harbor as long as they're non-custodial, right?
That's basically what the bill said.
It's like, if they're non-custodial, they don't have to be treated as money transmitters.
But I'm looking at that, and obviously, I right away, I'm asking questions like, okay,
well, if there's a multi-sig, is it custodial?
Yeah, what does custodial mean exactly?
So I'm looking at that, and so I'm thinking to myself, all right, how did this bill get
written?
What happened here?
He obviously wrote it and proposed it along with whoever co-sponsored it and whatever,
but he had meetings.
He had meetings not with users in this space necessarily, but with these trade associations
and with these crypto lobbyists and with these people who I've been saying for years, and
you know too, they thrive on obfuscating the reality of what's going on.
So is somebody like him already compromised?
Is he really looking out for my liberty, my freedom, or is he just working with these
paid-off lawyers to put together corporate-friendly legislation that's ultimately going to potentially
hurt my freedom?
Yeah, and the honest answer is, I don't know, right?
I think it's very hard to determine these things.
I would like to think that it may be at best mixed motives, right?
Like he's kind of gotten red-pilled on crypto and legitimately likes it and thinks that
it's freedom-preserving tech and that that's good for the country and that's certainly
part of why he's pushing for this.
But then obviously, he must also have industry donors.
In that particular case, I just don't know if someone pushed for that and if he understands
the sort of downsides of that, right?
Because there's a certain narrative around this tech around like, oh, it's trustless,
it's immutable, et cetera.
If you haven't gone deep into the architecture of the different protocols and how the market
works and how the ecosystem works, you're not on crypto Twitter every day, you're not
sifting through technical documentation, et cetera, then you might not realize all the
holes that exist in that narrative, right?
And so he may just not know those holes.
He may just know the narrative, right?
And I think that probably is the case for a lot of these politicians.
From what I've seen, obviously, we kind of have the opposite problem with regulators,
right?
Where they at this point, they heard the narrative, they kept investigating closely, they saw
a lot of holes in the narrative, and now they've kind of veered to the opposite extreme, which
is just disregarding the narrative completely and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
But yeah, our political situation is not ideal, that's for sure.
Yeah.
No, that's a good point.
I didn't even think about it that way that like, you got Congress who's kind of, these
lawmakers over here trying to respect things that are almost mythical at this point and
don't really exist beyond Bitcoin as far as like, the trust minimization and stuff like
that.
Like, by the way, that bill, if anybody wants to look it up is blockchain regulatory certainty
act.
That's from Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
Then you got the regulators who are unelected, appointed, work at the pleasure of the president
for the most part, who are, they just look at it like it's black and white, like there's
nothing beyond what's on paper and how current law may apply to it, right?
Or not even law.
Well, I guess it is law, but I mean, the regulations that they basically arbitrarily develop.
So it's interesting because they don't care about getting elected.
They don't care about getting reelected, right?
Because they're not elected in the first place.
On the other hand, the people that care about being reelected and actually work allegedly
for the people are out there.
So maybe that is a sign that they are having more conversations with regular people.
Regulators are not talking to regular people ever for any reason, unless they're suing
them.
Right?
So it is an interesting way to look at it and the difference between Congress and regulators
like the SEC.
You mentioned CBDC.
Where do you, do you think that this is an inevitable outcome, like this full surveillance
tyrannical CBDC, or do you think that there's still hope that it can be like privacy preserving
or anything like that?
I think there's hope because a lot of powerful politicians are against it, at least in the
US.
Right?
And I think for good reason, right?
Because they realize, hey, we're in power right now, but we might not be in power next
term and what are our opponents going to do with this?
And is it going to enable them to kind of entrench themselves in power forever?
You know, if they can, if the government can decide what you're allowed and not allowed
to donate your money to, right?
And they can enforce that programmatically, that's a pretty bad thing, right?
For whoever is not currently in power.
Right?
So, you know, I think there is a lot of pushback on that.
I personally think, I mean, I also think crypto is maybe like a little bit too close minded
to CBDCs in a certain sense.
Because if there could be like an actually decentralized autonomous CBDC, right?
And I realize that that's not what anyone is currently proposing.
They're proposing very centralized things like Ecoin, right?
Where the government has a back door and they can freeze people's money and reverse transactions
and all that stuff.
But if you kind of like just forgot about all that for a second and thought about the
idea of an actually decentralized autonomous trust minimized government CBDC, right?
I mean, in a certain sense, that would be way more efficient than like Circle, right?
Because there's not someone like extracting rent from it.
The coin is directly the dollar, right?
So you don't have the counterparty risk and you don't need these like expensive auditors
and disclosures, you know, and proofs of solvency and all these things to get at what's backing
it because like literally the token would be fiat, right?
And so, you know, in a certain sense, I think that would be like the optimal outcome.
But it's just like no one is currently proposing that.
And so CBDCs have become equated to like evil Ecoin type of things, which is accurate to
what's being proposed.
And so there's the proponents of it on the one hand and the opponents of it on the other.
And yeah, I would put myself into the opponent category in that sense.
So what you're talking about, I mean, it sounds impossible to achieve with today's the way
that governments operate, right?
But you're talking about basically cash, you know, but blockchain cash, right?
But this government could obviously control supply somehow.
Right.
Yeah, it would still have the same rules about, you know, sort of, you know, the ability to
mint new money, you know, whatever economics are currently used.
But the, you know, someone holding that cash, right, the cash would be recognized as legal
tender, you know, and there would be no ability for the government to just freeze it, take
it away, you know, reverse transactions in it, etc.
To me, that would be the most efficient, you know, optimal outcome, right?
But we're very far from that.
Yeah, I mean, to me, the real problem is that even if we develop this system and we convince
government to do this, that the ability is still there to change it, right?
And the ability is still there for a new government to come in and say, you know what?
Let's add some censorship in here.
Let's find ways to screw with this.
And yeah, this is true.
And they could always change.
They could also always, you know, they could pass a new law that doesn't recognize it as
legal tender or only recognizes like the new centralized fork of it as legal tender, right?
You know, there's always things that can happen.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's goes back to the whole adversarial thinking way of looking at something
like that, where once that technology is out of the box, it's been developed for years,
like it is being right now in DeFi, and it's out of the box, you can't put it back in the
box and somebody's going to come along and use it.
You know, you can equate it to like a nuclear weapon, you know?
It's like, it's always there.
You can't get rid of it.
And so you, you know, the reason the world is still existing right now is because the
people in charge of the nukes have decided it should continue to exist.
Like, it's not like they can't blow the world up right now.
It's like they're just choosing not to.
And you know, their finger could be on the button and you could do nothing about it.
So it's the same thing with this kind of stuff, where if the tech is there and they understand
how to use it, they're going to use it.
Just look at what's happened with the internet.
Like 30 years ago, the US government knew nothing about the internet.
You know, they had no idea how they could utilize it to censor or to, or that they would
even need to, you know?
And then as time goes on, they figure things out.
They get smarter people that, you know, now there's people that grew up with the internet
that are Congress people, right?
And like they fully were immersed and they understand it.
And there's absolutely no reason to think the same thing won't happen with this tech.
You know, even if they do launch a privacy preserving CBDC, how long is that going to
last?
10 years?
And then it's going to be used.
Or I'll tell you how long it'll last.
It'll last until the next terrorist attack or until the next, you know, lockdown or whatever
the emergency is.
And then they grab more power and then they abuse it.
So there's always the risk of abatement switch as well, right?
They could initially present some privacy preserving, you know, trust minimized thing.
And then like once it's widespread, you know, upgrade it to not have those features anymore.
Yeah, I get the risks.
Yeah.
So that's what I try to tell people on DeFi.
It's like they're building these, these weapons.
That's how I look at it.
I think that, I think that the stuff that's being built right now is exactly this.
It is these weapons that are going to be used to, to suppress freedom eventually, you know,
and it's not unique to tech innovation, right?
It's like every form of technology has been used for good and for bad, but not every form
of technology has been capable of, of micromanaging our lives into oblivion the way that this
technology is capable of doing.
So like I throw those ideas out there all the time.
People, people object and they say, I'm going too far, but like, do you see what I'm saying
as far as the future, what the future may hold?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think we've both like tweeted about this a lot and yeah, I mean, I pretty much
agree, right?
It's, you know, when you, when you, especially once you start combining this with like digital
ID, right, and it's all on chain, it's going to get like very, very tricky, very fast.
And a lot of the, you know, I've seen a lot of ideas for kind of like increasing the relationship
of crypto to the social layer, you know, that, that honestly looks something like, you know,
like, like Chinese social scoring, right?
You know, and I think that once you have these kind of on chain identities and, and once
they become, you know, some combination of commercially and politically important, you
know, then, then people can really start doing a lot with that, right?
And a lot of it will be, some of it could be good.
Some of it could be very, very bad.
Yeah.
This, this whole like world coin thing has made me realize more than ever that, um, cause,
cause they're pushing it as privacy preserving, right?
They say, okay, you don't have to give your name.
You don't have to give your social security number.
You just get your iris scanned and then that generates a unique code.
We're not even saving your iris scan, right?
We're just saving the unique code, uh, that is, is basically generated from your iris
scan.
So, um, it's completely private because all you're left with is this code that then you
can use to prove that you're a person.
You can go around and scan it and do whatever ultimately is going to be done with it.
Yeah.
But the way that I'm looking at this now is what they're working on and what a lot of
these decentralized identity folks are working on is they want to replace the old school
way of identification.
And the old school identification is basically these random words, which are like your name,
right?
Which are just totally random arbitrary letters and, and these random numbers that are, you
know, your national ID or social security number, whatever, like they're separate from
your body.
They can be spoofed and faked and it's not reliable.
They want to replace that form of ID with these biometrics and these scientific markers
that are built into your body that are impossible to a certain extent to replace or to get rid
of like your fingerprints or your iris scan or, you know, who knows what else they're
going to come up with.
And that's the new identity.
So that's the identity that is going to be associated with your bank account.
That's the identity that's going to be associated with your, your medical history and on your
driving record and all these different things.
They won't need your name anymore.
They won't need your social security number anymore because they have the core essence
of who you are.
So when you present yourself at the doctor's office and get your jab, they scan your iris.
They don't even need to know your name because then when you go to the grocery store, store,
they scan your iris again and they know if you were jabbed, they don't care that you're
Gabriel.
They don't care where you live or what state you're from or where, you know, all they care
about is does this iris scan have a jab associated?
And if it doesn't, we're not going to let you in.
And to me it's like becoming so obvious.
So when they say it's privacy preserving, it's almost a lie.
It's almost like a scam.
Oh, for sure.
Just to get people to, to, to.
Yeah, absolutely.
Am I off the rails or what?
No, no, of course.
I mean, it's only privacy preserving if like somehow the different people, the different
databases that correlate other information to these iris hashes don't, don't ever connect
with each other.
And of course we know that that's not going to be the case, right?
Iris sharing is massively abundant.
It's a huge industry, right?
And this will, this will just become part of that, obviously, right?
And so, yeah, if they know your iris hash, yes, they will also be able to know your name,
of course.
They'll be able to know everything about you, right?
It's just, you know, and of course it's also not true that this information can't be spoofed,
right?
Because let's just say you need your, you need to do your iris scan to confirm your
identity before using some particular websites, right?
You log into your bank, right?
And every time they make you do an iris scan through some pre-approved equipment that you
keep in your house and, you know, you send that hash and they confirm that the hash matches,
et cetera.
Well, I mean, everything can be hacked, right?
So someone's going to hack that device and be able to spoof the data, right?
You know, just feed it, you know, just do a man in the middle attack and if you already
know what the hash is supposed to be, right?
You could just feed it that hash without having the corresponding iris, et cetera.
So it's, you know, it's more and more data gathering on pretext that don't really make
sense in terms of the narratives presented, but that do make sense for the people who
are gathering this data because, you know, they will amass more power and money from
it.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
I just think that even without the name, even without any other identifying information,
we're being reduced to just, I want to say numbers, but it's beyond that, right?
Because it's just like a meat bag.
Matter.
Yeah.
We're reduced to just like pure configurations of organic matter.
Yes.
Right.
And there's no laws.
There's no protections.
And you know, like I'm, I consider myself a libertarian.
Like I'm not out there looking for laws.
But the more that this happens, the more I see these, these lines of people waiting to
get their iris scan in exchange for like $35 or whatever it is.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
And you start to realize like most people just are never going to get it, you know?
And so it's almost like what's left, you know?
I mean, during COVID it was clear like tyranny, the majority was real.
It was almost inescapable.
I had to move to get out of a state that, that basically people wanted to lock you out
of a hospital if you didn't get jabbed.
So like, you know, God forbid you have a heart attack and you go to the ER and they won't
let you in unless you, you are, you know, coerced into this treatment.
That's right.
So yeah, if you, if you have not, if you have not worshiped the orb for your mandatory 30
seconds, you were not allowed medical treatment.
I mean, this is just the way it has to be.
Right.
That's the thing.
Wait till the government buys into this idea.
I mean, it's, that's all it takes.
But anyway, what, what do you think the long-term, you know, for DeFi, like, what do you think
that the actual vision is?
Where do you think it goes if not to this sort of CBDC driven economy?
Where else can it possibly head?
Well, I think, I mean, there have always been those who have said that this is, this is
going to be like, like a dual or maybe like, like triple market.
Right.
There's going to be like, there's going to be a sort of TradFi version.
There's going to be CDFi, right.
Where where some of these mechanisms are used, but fully KYC, fully, you know, regulated,
compliant, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
There's going to be sort of like a pure black market where, you know, there's no KYC, there's
no compliance.
You know, the, the people who are involved are sort of like quasi criminals, but they're,
they're good at hiding for the most part.
And then there's going to be something in the middle.
Right.
Because the, the ability to keep these two markets completely apart, of course, that
never works.
There's always some leakage.
Right.
And so that, that forms the gray.
And that could be the case, although personally, because I think that the whole, this tech
is actually very inefficient from every kind of common sense perspective.
The only thing that, that it's really, the only reason why it's good is if you kind of
want the trust minimization and don't want to go through intermediaries, institutions,
don't want to face censorship by the government, et cetera.
I just have never been very confident that that TradFi version of it will really emerge
or be useful.
But it, but it's a question.
Many people think that it will.
Right.
And, and so, you know, but, but, but I think you, you kind of either think it's going to
be black market, gray market forever, you know, or you believe in kind of this tripartite
structure.
I also think that, you know, it's a cat and mouse game, the whole, the whole way the regulatory
landscape is evolving and, and also how we think about the technology is evolving.
Right.
Like we just had this curve hack.
Right.
And, you know, personally, I think you're this way as well.
You know, I've kind of like largely been an immutability maxi in the space.
Right.
And like when people say, like I've often heard people say, or like one of the value
propositions of EOS, for example, if you remember that was that there would be these, these
arbitrators and that the transactions would be reversible.
This is also something that was like advertised by polka dot a lot because they had sort of
suffered a large hack early on and lost a lot of money, you know, and so they saw the
value of reversibility.
I think like full reversibility, you know, is going too far in the wrong direction.
But then also you look at something like the curve hack where this is a battle tested
protocol.
It has some of the absolutely stellar devs involved, right.
Using best practices, heavily audited, lasted a long time without an attack.
Right.
And then all of a sudden this like extremely subtle compiler vulnerability is exposed and
exploited and you realize it's just very hard to maybe the tradeoffs are not worth it.
Right.
Like maybe the costs of immutability like really do outweigh the benefits.
And so, you know, from that point of view, I think we may evolve into much more complex
and nuanced structures where there are some social controls over these protocols, but
those social controls are themselves like sort of unusual in that it's not like a banking
style arrangement where a bank just decides things and has omnipotence, but rather it's
these smaller, more nimble organizations like an emergency multi-sig, you know, and maybe
you wrap that in some sort of entity.
And they have certain things they can do with the system, but it's fairly constrained,
right.
Like they can freeze a pool and put it into withdrawal only mode, but they can't upgrade
the pool to new code and they can't themselves withdraw the money, etc.
Right.
Or they can stop it for some period of time, but then, you know, the full DAO has an override
or like automatically after some period of time, you know, the pool becomes unfrozen.
I'm very interested in this design space and I think it's under explored and could kind
of like simultaneously address a lot of the regulatory and legal issues while also addressing
some of the failures of the tech and the failures of the governance that have occurred.
So I haven't completely given up hope yet.
I think there kind of could be like a new wave of designs that's a little bit less like
stability purist while also retaining a lot of the trust minimization, but we have to
see where it goes, I guess.
Yeah.
I think the real trick is really going to be how do you do that stuff and get it to
a place where it can't be compromised when it inevitably comes out under the scrutiny
of a regulator or a government, right.
And that's my biggest concern with a lot of these DeFi apps and protocols that even the
ones that are run by DAOs, you know, in that as soon as they face any pressure, they have
the ability to make changes that will sort of reverse a lot of that, you know, and like
the worst case of this is chain link for me because chain link is completely, at least
the Oracle system that they're using right now to run DeFi is completely compromisable
by this multi-SIG.
It's a four of nine multi-SIG with unknown signers.
And we don't have any idea if they've ever been contacted by law enforcement or government
or regulator or compromise in any way.
We have no idea what their intentions are, what they're willing to do.
We have no idea even really if DeFi matters to chain link.
Like chain link in my opinion is using DeFi as like sort of a testing ground as an incubator
for what they really want to do, which is far beyond just DeFi.
You know, they want to be a source of truth for all markets, which, you know, as a business,
it's interesting.
It's, you know, it's poised to be very important in this space and beyond over the next few
decades if they succeed.
But when you just look at DeFi and you look at the control they have over it, how is that
even like, why do I like when I bring this up, why is everybody so it's almost like the
one thing that nobody wants to really look at because they know it's why.
Well, I know why.
I know why it is.
And I think it's a deep problem with the space that I've really kind of been focused on in
the last six months in sort of like my spare time research development, which is there's
a tendency in the space where like the code is good, the code is trustless, right?
And then anything that can't be put into the code, fuck it, right?
It's just because like it's not the expertise of the people, right?
Like so they could set up this whole DAO and they like invent these interesting governance
structures, but they don't know like traditional just purely legally socially defined governance
structures.
And so they don't even try and they don't even care.
They don't even realize that trust minimization is possible on that layer, right?
Or trust reduction possible on that layer.
And so they just don't do it at all.
So like for the chain link multisig, for example, again, no, I personally, I'm not, I don't
like omnipotent multisigs under any circumstances, but let's just say, you know, for the sake
of argument, I could think of ways to make it better, right?
Even while it's omnipotent.
Like for example, you know, if that multisig was wrapped in a special purpose, like judgment
remote entity in a specific jurisdiction, that entity had specific rules about how it's
going to respond to subpoenas.
When the sig can use its powers, can it, you know, like specific defined terms, like what
is a security emergency and what rules do you need to follow before making a change
based on a security emergency, et cetera.
And all that, although that information was published and the, you know, the, there was
some sort of third party verification that at least the different multisig holders are
actually different people and that the keys were generated in a secure way, et cetera,
right?
You know, we can imagine these things and although the thing would still have power
and that would still be problematic, it would be less problematic, right?
The effects would be more predictable.
There would be a way to hold the people accountable potentially for doing something wrong for
breaking the rules.
Like the, like the DeFi protocols or the users of the DeFi protocols could be made like third
party beneficiaries of some specific subset of the rules in the entity's bylaws, right?
And things like that.
And that's what I call Borg, right?
A cybernetic enhanced organization.
And I think that there is, you know, yes, I prefer a situation where we just don't need
to worry about social slash legal rules, but it seems we're very far from that.
And so if people are going to have some of these powers and rely on these social arrangements,
let's at least make them good the best we can, right?
Which does utilize legal tech rather than, you know, purely smart contract tech.
Yeah.
I guess the thing with them specifically with Chainlink is that they have, they don't have
an incentive to do that.
You know, they don't, I guess when you compare it to something in DeFi, like, like compound
or something like that, you know, where Silicon Valley, they're trying to create this new
product space where, you know, it's this sort of trust minimized lending, whatever, you
know?
And so they had an incentive once their admin key was exposed there, they had an incentive
to decentralize it and to move to DAO governance, token governance, because they wanted to outrun
the regulators.
Like that, that's the whole reason that admin keys were getting burned and that these projects
were moving to token governance and air dropping tokens and stuff like that.
You know, so they had that incentive because they wanted to create this new product.
On the other hand, you got Chainlink who, and nobody cares that they have a multi SIG,
they're running DeFi anyway.
DeFi would collapse without them.
There are zero developers that are complaining about it.
There's zero users other than me that are complaining about, okay, there's a few, but,
you know, and so, and plus on top of that, Chainlink wants to be regulated.
They are aligned with like the vision of the World Economic Forum and this whole like singularity
of government around the world.
They are aligned with that.
So they don't have an incentive to give up that control.
They only have incentive to grow that control.
You know, so I don't have any hope that they would ever adopt any of those really, really
smart and prudent things that you're suggesting.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, I do agree the incentive is not super strong right now, but I also think
that that's not going to last forever, right?
Like think about something, and a lot of it may be legal pressure, like think about something
like the EU recently passed this like very comprehensive law about data sharing arrangements
and it even got some attention in the crypto world, albeit I think it was a little bit
misleading attention because it mentioned smart contracts and said that they had to
be reversible.
But this is a law about the handling of data, the sharing of data, etc.
And that is what Chainlink does.
So there may eventually be some regulatory pressure on that.
I agree that it's more indirect currently than kind of like these financial regulatory
concerns that the people involved with like a protocol like Compound might be faced with
and might be faced much more imminently with.
But I think there'll be some incentives.
And I think there are also other incentives, right?
Like if something is wrong with the oracle, I think at some point there will be a class
action against Chainlink, right?
For on the theory of providing bad technology or bad information, making the wrong choices
about how to weight the different information, right?
And that that caused someone financial injury.
And so at a minimum, the people on the multisig would at least want limited liability, you
know, which would mean they want to wrap it in some sort of entity, whether they go the
further step of making that entity kind of like transparent and accountable.
Yeah, you're right there.
There may be less of an incentive to do that.
But yeah, it's it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.
Yeah.
What do you think about what was going on with Richard Hart and Hex and all that?
Yeah.
So I have somewhat of like my take on this might be contrary and both to the SEC and
to the crypto community, because I think I think a lot of people at least out of the
gate were sort of like, oh, this lawsuit is way overdue, you know, and we're kind of taking
the SEC side, which I can understand because the project is I would describe it as a non
fraudulent crypto economic Ponzi game.
At least the original version of Hex, putting aside the pulse chain stuff, I would describe
that way, right?
Because it was essentially it's an immutable smart contract on Ethereum.
It was kind of marketed as like a block chain certificate of deposit.
But really all it is, it's just a token that you can stake to get more of that same token.
Right.
And it's just sort of like there's no there there.
There's really it's just a silly kind of Ponzi game where maybe if you're like really smart
about thinking about how all the different players are incentivized in this, you could
play it the right way and make a lot of money.
But you could also easily lose money if you make the wrong calculation.
And it even had these weird embedded rules around like there was a certain whale penalty.
It's been a long time since I looked at this.
But there were just these kind of like crazy rules embedded in the smart contract.
And it's just like a game where it's very transparent.
All the rules are literally on chain in the form of this code.
And there's really nothing else to it.
And a lot of people got their Hex for free.
Right.
Because there was this ability to if you had Bitcoin at a certain snapshot point, then
you would be credited with Hex on Ethereum or you could claim it.
Right.
And so to me, I just don't really consider that a security.
Right.
He didn't promise that he did sell some.
So that is like the potential opening for the SEC is that he did sell a bunch of Hex
for ETH.
But there was no at the time, I think he was pretty disciplined in the sense that he wasn't
saying he was going to take that ETH and build something further for Hex.
Right.
It was already complete.
And so I think from a securities law point of view, the SEC's case, at least on Hex
itself, is not exactly a slam dunk.
There is this I've had discussions with the SEC staff long ago at this point, because
I kind of gave up at a certain juncture, where I asked them about the sort of fully immutable
contracts that give economics to tokens.
Right.
But they're complete on day one.
Not only are there no promises of future building, but actually no future building occurs.
Right.
So I've posited that scenario to SEC staff.
And the only thing they were able to come up with on sort of the side of that being
a security was this set of cases concerning what are called viaticals, which are fractional
interests in life insurance policies.
And there is a circuit split about whether and when these are securities.
With the, I believe it's the, I'm not even going to say what circuit it is.
One of the circuits developed a view that the pre-purchase entrepreneurial efforts of
the people who sort of designed the economics of the viaticals contract were enough to make
it a security under the Howey test, even though there was no promise of future efforts.
Right.
And then another circuit found the opposite view that under Howey, someone must be investing
with an expectation of future efforts.
And the only thing that the SEC staff was able to come up with for these sort of immutable
contracts that are already done at the point that a sale is made and no future efforts
are made is the idea of leaning on these viaticals cases that count pre-purchase entrepreneurial
efforts.
So it's somewhat doubtful.
The law is somewhat doubtful on this point.
It's a bit of a stretch, I guess.
And that would really be their only argument, I think, under the Howey test.
Now, it is a little bit complicated in this case because after the Hex thing, he started
doing this pulse chain stuff, right, where suddenly he did promise to build something.
Right.
He promised to build a new chain, a fork of Ethereum, and it would be better in all these
various ways.
So it's possible that once he started making those promises, that that could turn Hex,
that could create an investment contract scheme related to Hex.
It's also possible that because there was what he called the sacrifice for people to
get tokens on that chain, which was basically donating other tokens to like a life extension
nonprofit that Richard Hart likes.
The SEC is trying to say that that was an investment of capital.
And I think that's doubtful as well, right, because there was no it's not like this was
going to like a labs company for pulse chain where they were going to use these fundraisers
to build the chain or something or improve it.
Instead, it was going to this life extension research charity.
So I don't think that's a Howey transaction either.
So Richard Hart may have done some very bad things in connection with Hex.
There are accusations of wash trading, which may be fraudulent, some type of wire fraud
or some type of other market manipulation or something, even if the securities laws
don't cover this.
But I'm kind of doubtful on the securities laws covering this.
And I actually think his defense is on the fact on the pure facts is stronger than Ripple's
was.
So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
But I don't think it's a slam dunk for the SEC.
Yeah.
And that's a great explanation and overview, and I tend to agree with a lot of it.
I think for the most part that this was it's more akin to a cult than an investment scheme
in my opinion.
And I think that the fact that you were right, like it was it's an immutable smart contract
at least Hex like the whole pulse chain thing.
I don't know.
Different story.
I mean, that might be where he really screwed up because Hex was immutable and he was able
to go around and sort of trash projects that were using multi-sigs for governance and required
trust in developers and stuff like that.
But then pulse chain came along.
And next thing you know, that was completely controlled by a admin key, an EOA admin key
that he held.
I believe he admitted to that.
There was another EOA Ethereum address that custody billions of dollars for the bridge.
And I believe he had control of that too.
So once that new layer two was launched, sort of just threw away all of the stuff that he
was saying before and just went full on like scam as far as like whether or not.
And then when you confronted Hex users with this information, the only thing you would
ever get is, oh, we trust him.
We trust him.
I don't think there was like any Hex users that got into this whole thing without understanding
that they had to trust him with their money.
Like I think that ultimately, yeah, they understood that Hex was not upgradable and stuff, but
they also understood that the market ceased to exist the day, the minute that Richard
Hart decides it should cease to exist because they knew he held a lot of it, if not most
of it.
They knew that he was controlling the markets.
They knew that he had ways to manipulate prices and they counted on him for that.
And then they had this whole marketing machine where they would try to bring in new people.
So to a certain extent, there was a little bit of a pyramid thing going on, but more
than anything, it was a cult in my opinion.
And some of the, this stuff gets very, very subtle because clearly he had many statements,
predictions that the token would go up in value.
But in theory, for securities law purposes, the reason why it's going up in value has
to be associated with the reasonable expectation of his efforts.
Which means I think, which I believe means, although this could be another subtle point,
affirmative efforts, right?
Not merely negative efforts.
So yes, he could destroy it by selling all his Hex, right?
He could tank it.
But is that enough?
Is that the kind of trust that's targeted by the securities laws?
I'm not so sure.
I think the kind of trust that's targeted by securities laws is where you really promise
to do something, right?
Directly or indirectly, right?
Oh, I'm going to build a lot of, like if he had said, yeah, I'm going to be reaching out
to all sorts of commercial partners and getting them to engage in deals with my company that
will use Hex as part of the products, right?
That's basically what Ripple did, right?
And that I think, that I get as being covered by the securities laws.
But this, I don't know.
I don't know.
It was just kind of a machine where you could play this kind of weird game.
And I think a lot of the marketing was probably decentralized as well, right?
As you say, just people who are fanboys of Richard Hart and the project and hoping to
get rich from it.
And then they start to contribute their own efforts to get others in, right?
And there's some very, very interesting case law.
There's even an entire, there's even one or more entire law firm boutiques that specialize
in structuring like pyramidal marketing schemes so that they're not security schemes.
So there's a lot of law around this and it's not as clearly stacked in the SEC's favor
as you might think, but it'll certainly be an interesting case.
Yeah.
And the thing with him is he's so, how do you put it?
I mean, he's very well-spoken on the issue.
He seems to know exactly, like he knew where this was going.
He's been saying this for a long time.
He just had a documentary made about him.
He goes to Louis Vuitton and Versace and these stores has a camera crew following him, says
in there he's spending his ex money.
Right.
And that's another weird thing about the SEC's case because this was not just a section five
registration violation case.
They're alleging fraud.
And one of the frauds they allege is that people didn't know that he was using money
he made from Hex for all these lavish purchases and instead that they somehow thought he was
using the money to build more stuff for Hex.
And I just don't think that that's factually accurate.
And I think he'll have a lot of evidence he could bring.
There's a movie for Christ's sake.
Exactly.
And they could look on Twitter on all the responses when he posted shopping at Louis
Vuitton and everyone literally talking about him using the Hex money for that.
So I just don't know who drafts these complaints sometimes.
This is by far the worst, sloppiest crypto complaint and most inaccurate that I've seen
from the SEC so far.
Yeah, it gets to a point where you ask, who are they trying to protect here?
Are there really Hex buyers or investors, whatever you want to call them, that were
hurt, that didn't have the information here?
Because the one thing that he did right was he was completely transparent about what was
going on.
He was getting rich off the back of these people.
And he told them that over and over and over.
I'm not saying that's right.
I'm saying what's the role of government when people are so stupid that they sit there and
they continue to funnel money to him so that he can keep on doing that.
It's almost like when you got these girls on TikTok, and guys keep sending them money
and they're just out there buying Mercedes and they're buying expensive stuff.
And then these guys just keep sending the money.
It's kind of like the same thing, isn't it?
In a way.
Yeah.
And look, it may be a scam.
It may be fraud, but I don't think it's securities fraud.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I agree with you there.
But I still, I'm not, yeah.
Is it fraud if he's just being honest?
I don't know.
Well, I think the one credible fraud allegation I see here, and I'd heard this long before
the SEC sued, I know someone who he's known as the deer in crypto circles.
And he had done quite a bit of research into Richard Hart's wallets around the time of
the original Hex launch.
And I think there's a reasonable case you can make as to funds recycling, kind of like
in EOS as well, although the SEC didn't bring a fraud claim there, where they recycled funds
to make it look like there was a lot more interest and money behind this than there
actually was.
And so if that is true, that may well be fraud.
Right.
He may have been doing fraud by virtue of on-chain transactions and knowing that people
would take those on-chain transactions as a certain signal of public interest in the
project and that they would rely on that.
And that could be like a wire fraud claim or some sort of commodities manipulation claim.
I don't think it's a securities law claim for what it's worth.
Yeah.
It'd be so interesting to see how this plays out.
Yeah.
Part of me just thinks there's somebody at the SEC that just was watching him make this
movie, watching him make videos, calling out the SEC.
He's doing all this stuff over there.
He does a live stream every day or whatever he does, where it's just like he's calling
out the government.
I mean, and he always wanted this type of attention at the end of the day, but he's
a little psychotic, I think.
I think he's crazy in a way.
He knew exactly how this was coming.
To me, it appears like this is the final scene of his movie and he knew it was about to happen,
so that's why he's already got this production crew surrounding him and everything.
He wanted this.
And this is somehow, for him, he thinks this is somehow a wise business move.
It's his magnum opus, right?
Yeah.
Before this, he was the spam king.
I don't know how much you've looked into his background with this whole thing where he
went to Panama and got ripped off from all his spam money, supposedly.
But I think that was a very similar type of thing and he got very savvy at operating in
a gray market, so to speak, and maximizing that.
He probably repeated much of the same playbook here with crypto.
Man, what is this space we're in, dude?
It's so crazy.
We're coming up on time, but before I let you go, I wanted to get your take on this
whole curve situation and with Igorov, the founder, highly respected developer in the
space.
But it's like, I mean, so curve gets hacked for what it's worth.
Certain pools get hacked.
And next thing you know, he obviously had millions and millions, if not billions of
dollars worth of CRV token, which he didn't sell, but he drops it in Aave and takes out
huge loans of stable coins, I believe, which he uses to buy these mansions that are worth
hundreds of millions of dollars, which is crazy in and of itself to me.
I mean, we've seen it in DeFi happen a few times.
But next thing you know, there's a curve hack.
He's getting liquidated all over the place.
And now there's worry that this liquidation, it could end up devastating a lot of the DeFi
markets.
But how much have you been following this?
So yeah, so I'll say in advance, I have somewhat of a conflict of interest as I'm pretty friendly
with the curve guys.
And I'm also on the curve.
They call it the emergency DAO, but it's really an emergency multi-sig.
So the answer is I've been following quite closely.
There is a little bit of inaccuracy in what you just said, I think, in that he has not
actually been liquidated yet.
And just to make clear on the timing of things, it's not like he took out these positions
after this hacker in connection with this hack.
They've been there a long time and Aave governance has kind of been increasingly concerned with
them for a long time.
But yes, you're exactly right.
Instead of selling his founder curve, or a bunch of it, instead he pledged it as collateral
into Aave, both Aave v2, that's where the biggest position is, and Aave v3, that's where
a much smaller position is, and used that to borrow stablecoins and spent the stablecoins
on stuff presumably, including possibly a mansion.
And the issue, of course, is that the token is like, I mean, it's not the most illiquid
token in the world.
It's not like, I don't think it's at the level of like what Mango was during the Mango
hack, but it's not liquid on the scale of like Ether BTC.
And so there's so much of this collateral in Aave v2 at this point that if the price,
if his health factor does drop sufficiently and a liquidation needs to be triggered, it's
not a liquidation that's actually going to be taken up.
No one is going to be able, no one is going to be buying that amount of curve at that
price.
And so Aave will incur bad debt.
And then he has similar positions in other credit protocols.
And he's borrowing stables on those to pay down the Aave debt and keep that one from
being liquidated.
So it is a bit of a messy situation.
But I mean, it highlights one of the key differences between DeFi and TradFi, which is that in
TradFi, if you borrow money, that is actually a debt agreement or a loan agreement.
You are making a promise to repay the money typically.
And you may pledge some collateral toward that, but that collateral is, that's not
the only recourse that the borrower has.
The borrower can take your collateral, sell it.
And if that's not sufficient to cover the debt, they can keep suing you.
You made a promise to repay that full amount plus interest.
And this is just not the case in DeFi, right?
In DeFi, you pledge your collateral and that is the sole and only recourse that the protocol
has to get paid the borrowed stablecoins back, right?
If that turns out not to be enough, if people don't want to buy that collateral or they
only want to buy it at a much lower price, that's it.
You can't go sue him.
I don't think, no one has tried it yet, but I think it would lose.
Because it's not a debt agreement.
He didn't make a promise to repay that amount, right?
You can sue him though, and you can try.
This may happen at some point.
This literally may happen at some point, right?
And it'll be a very interesting case if it does.
There's zero doubt.
If that, in my opinion, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm saying that they
can.
And that's part of my issue with a lot of this DeFi stuff is like, yeah, whenever shit
hits the fan, whether it's a Dow or just a development team or whatever, once they realize
they're screwed, then they turn to the legal system and they try everything that they can.
They hire lawyers and they do whatever they can possibly can do.
So if Aave or Frac or whoever it is out there is getting screwed and there's humans behind
it who are worried that they're going to lose their life's work or their life savings, they're
going to hire some lawyers and they're going to go for it.
And then what?
Then you get lawyers involved, you get courts involved, you get regulators involved, you
get Congress involved, you get who knows what.
Next thing you know, you have a bunch of laws.
This is why I have a lot of job and career security.
Right, right.
But yes.
But it's like it's impossible to avoid once you get down that road and next thing you
know you're dealing...
The way I look at government and crypto is like if there's even the tiniest crack, the
government's like an ooze, like a blob, like a...
What do you call it?
It's like this oozing oil or blobby grease that just can get into any crack that it can
find.
Right.
And in DeFi, there's not just cracks, there's craters.
There's these huge crevices that just lets the government ooze in.
Once it's in there, it never leaves.
Right, it never leaves.
And you look at something like Bitcoin and it's debatable.
I mean some say there's zero cracks, some say okay, maybe there's some opportunities,
but it's a much different situation.
If government can get in, it's at the very surface level versus something like DeFi where
government can get straight to the heart of it.
And something like Aave, which is DAO driven, has a development team, it has more power
than they advertise, is completely reliant on Chainlink for its price data.
So Chainlink basically...
Aave operates because Chainlink allows it to.
And so there's all these different ways for a court...
And we've seen court orders over the past year, right?
Right, Oasis.
Yeah.
Yeah, where they order a DeFi project to use their multi-sig to attack a wallet or to drain
a balance or to do whatever they had to do and actually hack their own code in order
to fix things.
So if there's a way to keep that Aave position, for instance, from just completely causing
billions of dollars to get lost, they'll probably find a way to do it.
And none of those people who are not losing their money are going to complain about it.
And regulators would probably applaud it.
And if it's driven by a court, the court would obviously be in favor of it.
And the only people who would be complaining are people like you and me who are like, well,
what are we doing here?
There's no integrity with any of this.
But to me, it's inevitable.
It's definitely...
And possibly Mitch, right?
Possibly he would complain, right?
Because he would say, the rules have been changed on me, right?
But yes.
And there was already a threat of that even before this incident, right?
Because I think it is gauntlet.
Yeah, it was gauntlet.
Before all this, I think when the health factor was at like 6.1, they posted a governance
proposal, expressing concern and suggesting some pretty surprising remedies that I didn't
even know were possible.
I can't remember exactly what they are right now.
But I was surprised that it was even possible for them to start doing a graceful liquidation
now or you know what I mean, or prevent his ability to further top it up with more collateral.
That shows quite a bit of flexibility over the protocol.
But anyway, yeah, the rule...
There's currently more flexibility to change the rules in most of these systems than people
realize.
And wherever there is flexibility, courts may order changes.
And yeah, it can become a huge mess.
So this is why I actually think we need borgs and we may even need something like our own
legal system within crypto, right?
Because there are going to be these disputes about what are legitimate changes, what are
not legitimate changes.
And if we don't internalize a dispute resolution system within crypto, then it is just going
to revert to traditional governmental systems.
And they don't really get crypto or like it.
And so most of their remedies will probably be pretty bad for crypto.
And I would hate to see that.
Interesting man.
Although do legal systems even work without threat of violence?
That's a whole separate conversation, I guess.
Some violence can be, I think, like slashing.
Like a lot of people have talked about social slashing, right?
And I think that is crypto's version of violence, right?
The Dow fork is crypto's version of violence.
And so something can be done with that.
But what's currently done with it is like pretty illegitimate, right?
I would describe it as like kangaroo courts where like there's no precedent, there's no
real rules.
You just get a bunch of people together and they just like decide what they want to do
at that moment.
And it's almost like a might makes right thing.
That's not going to be a very good long term social solution.
All of this stuff makes me appreciate Bitcoin so much more.
It has flaws.
It has weaknesses.
But I mean, the programmability and the Turing completeness on Ethereum has led to me something
that's just, it's a mutation of anything that anybody thought it would ultimately be.
I just think that we took a wrong turn somewhere.
I know for you it's more work, which is great, man.
Hey, I hope you're racking up those hours.
It's a fun time.
I enjoy the space.
Well, thanks for hanging out with me, man.
Yeah, man.
Good times.
Anytime.
Thanks for having me.