The Chopping Block: CLARITY Dies on the Senate Floor, Hunter Biden's LAPTOP Rug, & the AI Pause Pact

Robert Leshner (0:00)

But like right now, the fact that it failed, changes nothing for tokenization, right?

Haseeb Qureshi (0:05)

So you're good.

Tom Schmidt (0:06)

Personally?

Haseeb Qureshi (0:07)

Sure.

Robert Leshner (0:08)

Yeah.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:08)

It's not a dividend.

Tarun Chitra (0:09)

It's a tale of two clans.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:10)

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

Tom Schmidt (0:13)

Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:16)

Unnamed trading firms who were very involved.

Tarun Chitra (0:19)

I like that. Each of the ultimate puns.

Robert Leshner (0:21)

DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:24)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to ChoppingBlock. Every couple of weeks, four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro. So we've got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes.

Tom Schmidt (0:34)

Hello, everyone.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:35)

We've got Robert, the Crypto Connoisseur and Tsar of SuperState.

Robert Leshner (0:38)

Good morning.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:39)

Then we've got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Grand PooBot at Gauntlet.

Tarun Chitra (0:42)

Go.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:43)

And I am a Sieve, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice or even life advice. Please see ChoppingBlock.xyz for more disclosures.

So, today is Clarity Day. We are very excited for this historic bell.

Robert Leshner (0:57)

At 2:15 p.m., the vote will occur.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:59)

Yes.

Robert Leshner (1:00)

We are going to watch it. We are excited.

Tom Schmidt (1:02)

We're going to watch it live. It's a sure thing. I put my whole bankroll on.

Haseeb Qureshi (1:04)

We are so excited. We're going to pop some champagne on the show. Yeah.

So, no, actually, Clarity.

I already edited the culture. It's over. It's dead. It's never coming back.

Robert Leshner (1:15)

It might.

Haseeb Qureshi (1:16)

Good game. Well, so I was looking at the Kalshi markets.

Kalshi has a market going out until 2028 It says 22% chance that in 2028, we get a version.

Tarun Chitra (1:27)

It's a bolder sighting Kalshi on a show where we have a host whose tweet Twitter has only been really. Yeah, you could really take them.

Tom Schmidt (1:35)

That's really true.

Robert Leshner (1:37)

There's also still like 5%, 6% chance through year end as well.

Haseeb Qureshi (1:42)

Yeah, Polymarket has it at 8% with last I saw coming in. But I think that's once you get to the tail probabilities, you can stop really believing them so much because it's just kind of hard to do much with that. But basically what happened was that clarity, of course, the big mega bill that we've all been waiting for as an industry needed 60 votes in order to get this bill passed. It got 47

So it did not even get all of the Republicans voting it, not a single Democrat voted for the bill. You got a lot of people basically saying, look, this is not quite what I thought I was getting. There was some weekend deliberations over, I think Trump signed off on some small changes to the ethics provision.

Robert Leshner (2:19)

They were actually pretty immaterial.

Haseeb Qureshi (2:21)

So the state attorney general would basically be able to go after crypto exchanges for listing tokens that were endorsed, affiliated with a president or with a congressperson. That was apparently not enough. They wanted there to be some forced divestiture of tokens that were basically part of the Trump Token Universe.

That was not enough to get done. There was some even today, this morning, there was more negotiating trying to happen from the Dems.

Robert Leshner (2:47)

There was a counter proposal from the Dems.

Haseeb Qureshi (2:49)

Right. So I think you probably saw the play by play. I just kind of saw the outcome. But basically, good game. Seems like now the story for regulation from crypto is that it's going to have to come from the agencies. It's going to have to be through rulemaking. The SEC and the CFTC have already signaled. We're just going to go ahead and basically implement Clarity.

All the frameworks that have been negotiated over, that's kind of set the blueprint for what a regulatory agency led solution is going to look like. Doesn't mean we're probably not going to get along. So it's unfortunate.

We had some comments from people in the Twitterverse that, thank God this is over so that the chopping block doesn't have to talk about this.

Robert Leshner (3:27)

This is the last show.

Haseeb Qureshi (3:29)