The Chopping Block: ETHPoW Is 'a Terrible Way to Fork the Blockchain'

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**Robert Leshner** (0:34)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:35)
It's a tale of two quants.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:36)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:39)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:42)
I made the trading firms who were very involved.

**Robert Leshner** (0:46)
DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:51)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the usually four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First up, we've got Robert, Crypto Chronosur, and Captain of Compound. Next up, we've got Tarun, GigaBrain, and GrandPuba at Contland. Then we've got Emin Gün Sirer, the Emperor of Avalanche. And lastly, myself, I'm Haseeb, I'm the head hype man at Dragonfly. So 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. Gün, it's great to see you.
I know that you have had a harrowing few weeks with this whole drama. We talked about it on the last episode, just to get everybody caught up and really quickly jump into the meat of things. So there's this guy named Kyle Roche, who is a class action lawyer, who was caught in some kind of sting video recording operation, basically saying that he is the attack dog of Avalanche and he's suing a bunch of Avalanche competitors.
Ava Labs came out and basically said that actually Kyle Roche was one of a bunch of lawyers we used. Kyle has since been largely publicly disgraced. Both Kyle and Ava Labs have both basically denied that they have a continuing ongoing relationship. And Kyle Roche apparently, since our last episode, it's been announced that Kyle Roche withdrew from the open class action cases and was let go from his own law firm, Roche Friedman. So if I'm understanding correctly, the Tether lawsuit, the Bifx lawsuit, Tron and Binance class action lawsuits, all Kyle Roche is no longer active on those lawsuits. So I know that this has probably been an insane few weeks for you.
What's your, give us the industry insider's perspective.

**Emin Gün Sirer** (2:39)
Sure. When I heard what was on that site, I was taken aback. I was incredulous.
And my first reaction was, this is crazy.
And it's so out there that it's unbelievable that I don't think anyone's gonna take any of this seriously. So I still hold that position. It's just way out there. And Kyle Roche is a lawyer of the many lawyers that we employed. It's one of the lawyers that we employed in the early days of Ava Labs. We've since of course, cut all ties with him.
And Kyle was evidently trying to impress someone. And to do that, he decided to make up this whole Walter Mitty world for himself where he's doing things and in the middle of everything and suing this and that.
The one time we told Kyle what to do was the time after he sued Solana. And we learned about it from the press. And we were immediately on the phone with him saying, what the heck are you doing? You can't be doing this.
And he refused any advice. So we told him not to sue Solana. And my general counsel then wrote a long piece saying that the core argument behind that class action lawsuit is entirely and doesn't have legs. So that's the fact pattern. We don't sue our competitors. We have nothing to do with those lawsuits. So that's the short of it. The long of it, of course, is, you know, Kyle has sued a lot of projects, has made a lot of enemies, and he got trapped into saying things that are utterly false. I will add one additional fact to the fact pattern. He admitted that he lied, and it's also been entered into court proceedings. So when he's withdrawing, he has actually written out that there were complete fabrications and falsifications made. So I think it's over. You know, I'm over it, and, you know, there's no material to those. But there was a joke before that when Tarun was late, that he'd better be here on time, or else I'll have him sued.