The Chopping Block: Ethereum's Inflection Point w/ Joe Lubin on DATs, CROPS, AI-Driven Exploits, Quantum Threats, and CFTC's Perps

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:00)
The formal verification is the strongest argument for like, okay, there's a correct by construction. You know, we have the Swiss cheese, and we've like put the holes in all the Swiss cheese, but it turns out it's multidimensional Swiss cheese because now it's in the third dimension, and then eventually post mythos in the fourth dimension.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:14)
Let's see, who are you this way?

**Tom Schmidt** (0:16)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:17)
It's a tale of two clans.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:18)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:21)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:24)
I mean, it's trading firms who are very involved.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:27)
I like that.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:29)
DeFi protocol is part of the antidote to this problem.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Chopping Block. In a couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry inside perspective on the topics of the day. So, quick intro. First, we got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:41)
Hello, everyone.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:43)
Next, we've got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Graham Pruba at Gauntlet. Yo. Joining us today, we've got special guest, Joe Lubin, Ethereum evangelist and protocol patriarch.

**Joe Lubin** (0:52)
Wow. Good name. Thanks for having me.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:55)
Thanks for being here. I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto and onto caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see ChoppingBlock.xyz for more disclosures.
So, we had some Ethereum bearishness on the show last time, and we thought it might be good to counterpoint a little bit with some Ethereum bullishness. Unfortunately, we brought you on on a day where it feels a little hard to be bullish.

**Tarun Chitra** (1:18)
ETHBTC is up.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (1:21)
As has been pointed out before the show rolled.

**Joe Lubin** (1:22)
Of the majors, Ether is less.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (1:24)
Yes, of the majors, Ethereum is the least.

**Tarun Chitra** (1:27)
Bullish.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (1:28)
Yes, bullish for those of you who are doing the pair trade, or anyone else who is holding ETH. It's a painful, painful day. So, okay, tell me, first of all, market seems to be very jittery right now.
We've had just a bleed over the last week and a half, and today, it legged down 6 percent. I think the news that catalyzed this was that Saylor had sold 25 BTC, which is not a lot of Bitcoin and he sold it months ago.
But this seems to have been enough to say, oh my God, the one buyer in the market seems to be capitulating. It seems like that was maybe a shot across the bow just a signal to the market, hey, I might actually sell these, so please buy my derivatives and I will pay my debts. But it seems to have backfired. I don't know, maybe this was understood to be the effect, but thoughts on the Saylor effect and also what does that maybe mean for the ETH debts?

**Joe Lubin** (2:24)
Well, he telegraphed it. He said he was going to do this and he did it. I think you can be a maniacal bull for your favorite token, but you can also be a prudent CEO and do the right things for a particular strategy that you're trying to implement. So maybe a Bitcoin debt is potentially more dangerous because it's not a productive asset in the same way that an Ether debt, SharpLink and BMNR are. So we're not going to get into any strategy that requires us to pay a coupon to essentially leverage the product and have to sell our token.
But I also think it's way overblown. They have so much Bitcoin and they had to implement the STRC strategy.
There are probably pieces of news on the horizon. There's this rumor that the Trump administration is going to actually do something on a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So I'm not worried at all.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:36)
I have been hearing that for a while.

**Joe Lubin** (3:37)
Not worried at all about Michael Saylor and strategy.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:41)
That rumor does not seem to be calming the market at all.
Saylor owes something like $1.4 billion a year, I think in cash dividends from STRC, and $1.4 billion a year, I think they have $700 million cash. So the cash has to come up somehow, and either comes through them issuing new shares and diluting the existing micro strategy.

**Joe Lubin** (4:05)
And it's a testament to his discipline that he actually did do that little sell, telling the market that he's not afraid to implement the strategy correctly.