The Chopping Block: Tokens vs Equity, Lighter's Robinhood Perps Deal, and Trump's $2.4B Crypto Windfall

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:00)
Robert, what's your reaction to the Trump financial disclosures?

**Robert Leshner** (0:02)
That's a lot of money.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:03)
That's a lot of money.

**Robert Leshner** (0:04)
That's a lot of money. Not a dividend.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:08)
It's a tale of two quants.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:09)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:11)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:14)
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:17)
I like that eat of the ultimate pump.

**Robert Leshner** (0:19)
DeFi protocol is part of the antidote to this problem.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:23)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Chopping Block. 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 intros. First, we got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:33)
Hello, everyone.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:34)
Next, we got Robert, the Crypto Connoisseur and Tsar of Superstate. Good morning.
Joining us again, we've got special guest, Vlad, Leverage Legend and Leader of Lighter. Welcome back, Vlad.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:46)
Hey, guys. Good to be back.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:48)
And I am Haseeb, 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, gentlemen, we have once again one of these classic debates that has resurfaced on crypto Twitter, and that debate is about this perennial conversation about tokens, equity and what is worth what. So, a lot of this conversation was galvanized by a fundraising announcement that we recently led, Dragonfly recently led a fundraising round into Venice. So Venice, for those of you who don't know, it's a crypto AI project. They're pretty large. They have like 70 million run rate. We led a round at $65 million into them for a billion dollar equity valuation. Now Venice has a token called VVV.
Venice's token, they launched like roughly a year after the product existed.
In an airdrop, they gave 50% of the supply for free to their community. And they stated very clearly when they made the airdrop that this is not equity in Venice. This is like, you know, here's specifically what this thing does. It gives you the right to compute over time. And so when we did this investment into Venice, a bunch of people got really upset.
And part of the reason why they got upset is that they were like, okay, this thing now has tokens and it has equity. And the equity holders, presumably, they have, you know, they're senior in some sense to the token holders or something like this. And there's a perception that, okay, well, if you have a token, then probably like that's supposed to be like equity.
It's supposed to be where the value of this business is accruing. And so, you know, this is, of course, not the only example of this. There's been a lot of conversations before about the progenitor of this conversation, Uniswap Labs. So famously, this was like probably four years ago. Uniswap had a token, sold the token to investors, represented this is the governance token of Uniswap, and then later raised money for Uniswap Labs, a for-profit corporation that was initially supposed to be the development corporation behind Uniswap. They raised venture capital separately, and that caused them to eventually have their own wallet, have their own monetization strategy on top of Uniswap. And this is perceived by many people to be one of the original sins behind this, having two masters, a protocol that has both token holders and equity holders, and okay, maybe it's zero sum between the two. Now, I made the argument, and we had this video clip that went viral, that I don't think actually Venice is like this. Venice is very different because Venice is a company. Venice is not a protocol. This token was never meant to be a governance token or have control over Venice. But this has raised the question broadly, not just about Venice, but in general across the industry, of how do we think about when tokens and equity coexist? First of all, of course, it's worth to talk about why they coexist. And Vlad, we brought you on. Obviously, Lighter has been the center of attention for some of the stuff about Robinhood that we'll talk about shortly. But one of the things that people bring up is that, well, Lighter also raised money into Lighter Labs, also has Lit Token. Talk to us as a founder how you think about the dichotomy between equity and tokens.