Unchained

The CFTC has used emergency powers just six times ever. Twice this month, both for Kalshi. Jessi, Jacob, and Jane ask whether that protects innovation or sets a dangerous precedent.

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The CFTC has invoked its rarely used emergency authority just six times in its history. Twice in the past month, it did so to shield Kalshi. Jessi Brooks argues that's normalizing a dangerous kind of agency overreach.

With KK Bos and Vy Le away this week, Brooks welcomes Jacob Robinson, host of the Law of Code podcast, and Jane Khodarkovsky, a financial integrity and sanctions expert, to debate whether shielding Kalshi from state regulators protects innovation or tramples states' rights.

They also unpack the SEC's abruptly canceled 400-page market-structure proposal, Anthropic's new EU-mandated watermark on Claude's outputs and the First Amendment questions it raises, and a presidential memorandum letting vetted private companies run offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal groups under DOJ and DHS oversight.

Robinson makes the case for treating the fight against crypto hackers like modern-day privateering — arguing what the industry really needs is its own letter of marque.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Guest:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jacob Robinson - Host of the Law of Code podcast

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jane Khodarkovsky - Financial Integrity & Sanctions Expert

Timestamps

🏛️ 02:40 Why Jacob calls the CFTC's Kalshi rescue inevitable, and Jessi disagrees

⚖️ 17:45 Why the reasons behind the SEC's shelved 400-page crypto rulemaking stay murky

💧 21:48 1inch Aqua: See how shared liquidity works at https://1inch.com/aqua

🤖 22:34 Why Claude's new EU-mandated watermark reads as compelled speech to Jacob

🔪 23:24 Jane's take on the watermark rule: a hammer when you need a scalpel

🛰️ 35:21 Jessi previews the CFTC's first public meeting on AI in markets

🔐 36:41 Jane unpacks Trump's memo letting private firms fight cybercrime abroad

🏴‍☠️ 46:24 Why Jacob wants a modern "letter of marque" for crypto's hackers
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📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips

Austin Campbell runs through the strongest legal objections to Trump’s privateering memo, from claims it violates international law on piracy to warnings that private hackers could be treated as non-uniformed combatants.

The segment ends with a pointed question: if privateering is where critics draw the line, why did nobody blink at Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran?

Hosts:

Austin Campbell - Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Group, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern - https://x.com/austincampbell

Chris Perkins - Co-host of Bits + Bips and Head of Franklin Crypto - https://x.com/perkinscr97

This clip is from a longer conversation on Trump's executive order deputizing private firms to hack foreign cybercriminals. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/FxQCMAJ9GBU?si=tVqmGwizLzv2BAk6

We go live every Monday - subscribe to catch it live.

Sponsor

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Chapters:

⚖️ 00:20 Paul Rosenzweig's claim: privateering violates international law on piracy

💰 01:39 Chris on why no better solution exists: cost, talent, and scale

🎯 03:14 Erica Lonergan and Michael Garcia: the slippery slope and attribution risk

🌍 05:31 Does this go beyond crypto? The pig butchering scam question

🪖 07:21 Jake Williams: are American privateers non-uniformed combatants?

🏛️ 09:47 Isn't privateering a congressional power, not a presidential one?

🔥 12:05 Why Austin says critics need to propose a better solution first
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Kain and Taylor unpack the AI agents that built their own society inside OpenAI's sandbox, then slipped into Hugging Face for days — plus a Bitcoin fork that died in two blocks and a DEF CON sting on North Korea.

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AI agents inside OpenAI's own testing environment built a society, found a shared vulnerability, and used it to break into Hugging Face for days, before OpenAI realized its own agents were responsible.

Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan dig into the Black Hat research behind the incident and argue the real story isn't a sudden leap in AI capability. It's that basic monitoring, sandboxing, and incident response, the kind any crypto security team would demand, were never built in the first place.

They also cover a Bitcoin soft fork that split the chain for two blocks before dying, a Metabase breach that hit Privy and other crypto companies, and a research team that built a fake DeFi startup to bait DPRK's IT workers. Kain shares his own scare: a coding agent deleted his entire database, and two AI models rebuilt it from memory in 30 seconds.

Plus, why Hyperliquid's market creators keep half the fees on RWA perps now bigger than Bitcoin's own open interest, and why Taylor thinks Washington, not Beijing, is the bigger threat to America's AI labs.

Hosts:

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

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

Timestamps

🍴 00:40 Why Luke Dashjr's OP_RETURN fork split Bitcoin, then died in two blocks

💧 12:03 1inch Aqua: Back multiple liquidity positions from one wallet at https://1inch.com/aqua

🔓 12:51 How a Metabase breach exposed Privy and a wave of other crypto apps

🇰🇵 18:32 A DPRK hacker's botched $500k laundering job, then a DEF CON fake-hire sting

⚖️ 24:45 Why Bybit is suing DPRK over its 'billion dollar' 2025 hack

🐜 30:30 The AI agents that built their own society inside OpenAI's sandbox

🕸️ 46:16 How a single shared repo let every sandboxed agent talk to each other

💾 47:44 Kain's coding agent deleted his database. Two AI models rebuilt it in 30 seconds

🏛️ 58:06 Why Taylor says the US government, not China, is AI's biggest risk

📊 01:03:12 Why Hyperliquid's RWA market creators keep half of HIP-3's fees
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📢 Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips

Bitcoin has done almost nothing for weeks, and Katie Stockton says that stillness is exactly what a long-term bottom looks like on the charts.

She walks Steven Ehrlich through the monthly stochastic oscillator that has stayed oversold for months, the DeMark indicators showing downside exhaustion, and what history says has to happen for that setup to become an actual buy signal.

Host:

Steven Ehrlich - Host of Bits + Bips: The Interview and Head of Research at Sharplink

Guest:

Katie Stockton - CMT, Founder and Managing Partner of Fairlead Strategies

This clip is from a longer conversation on Bitcoin's technical setup and Katie Stockton's read on crypto markets. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/35ZHRajBJ5E?si=d6ycx66p2Tz1fSma

We go live every week - subscribe to catch it live.

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Chapters:

🕐 00:21 Why Bitcoin's usual volatility has gone quiet even as AI stocks rip

📉 01:27 Bitcoin's monthly stochastic oscillator: the long-term oversold read

🔍 03:16 Fibonacci levels, the cloud model, and the case for a major low

🔁 04:45 What history says about oversold setups turning into real bottoms

🎯 05:34 The exact signal Katie needs to call an 'oversold buy signal'
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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, crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer threadguy joins the crew to translate what is happening in the trenches, from market-open streams and social trading apps to public PnL and Gen Z's appetite for risk.

The conversation starts with a challenge to crypto's old guard: today's lowest-cap markets look less like clicking a few ICOs and more like playing Fortnite with token scanners, wallet trackers, and social feeds all firing at once. From there, threadguy breaks down the fight between FOMO and Pump.fun, why the winner may be whoever owns the trader graph, and how one visible winning trade can turn an unknown wallet into a market-moving celebrity. Haseeb questions whether Robinhood has actually brought new money onchain, Tarun and Robert revisit the hidden counterparty risks of early crypto, and the group imagines a future in which AI agents launch protocols, raise capital, and transact without a human-facing interface.

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

Show highlights

🔹 threadguy says modern onchain trading looks like Fortnite, with token scanners, social feeds, and wallet alerts all competing for attention.

🔹 Robert argues that crypto was never simply easier or harder. The tools, assets, and attack surfaces have continually evolved.

🔹 Tarun explains how stablecoins and reliable off-ramps replaced the counterparty and FX risks that defined early crypto trading.

🔹 FOMO and Pump.fun are fighting for social traders as exchanges, wallets, and launchpads race to own the next trading graph.

🔹 threadguy says traders are becoming crypto's new celebrities because public wallets make PnL visible and influence measurable.

🔹 Haseeb argues that the latest memecoin revival may be crypto-native capital front-running Robinhood demand that has not arrived yet.

🔹 The panel rejects the idea that AI agents are already managing meaningful memecoin portfolios, but sees that changing as capabilities improve.

🔹 Haseeb predicts the next onchain inflection will come when AI agents create, govern, and use protocols that humans never designed.

🔹 A crypto wallet cannot be switched off like an agent's credit card, which gives autonomous software a uniquely durable financial rail.

🔹 threadguy believes active investing and public risk-taking are permanent cultural shifts for Gen Z and the generations behind it.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Guest

⭐️threadguy, Crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer

Links

threadguy on X: https://x.com/notthreadguy

threadguy on Twitch: https://twitch.tv/threadguy

Disclosures

Timeline

00:00 Intro

01:00 threadguy's New Purple Era

03:58 Could Crypto OGs Survive Today's Trenches?

16:05 FOMO vs Pump.fun: The Social Trading War

24:37 Traders Become Crypto's New Celebrities

31:25 Why Memecoin Volume Is Rising Again

36:57 Is Robinhood Really Bringing New Money Onchain?

40:04 Can AI Agents Trade Memecoins?

43:23 AI Agents and Crypto's Next Capabilities Jump

54:15 Is Gen Z's Risk Appetite Permanent?
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