The Chopping Block: Visa, Mastercard & 140 Firms Take On Circle, Saylor’s Digital Credit Reset & the DAO Reckoning

**Tom Schmidt** (0:00)
I kind of thought it almost more like like the end of Apocalypto, when it's like Jaguar Paw and whoever, they're having their little battle on the cliff, and then in the background, the Spanish show up, and it's like, all right, daddy's home. And I feel like that's what this, where we have this weird, duopolistic, semi-not really top tier competition and stable coins in crypto. And now it's like all the big players are here, and it's serious now. Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:20)
It's a tale of two quants.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:22)
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:24)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:27)
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:30)
I like that ethos of the ultimate.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:32)
DeFi protocol is part of the antidote to this problem.
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 intro. First, we got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes.

**Jordi Alexander** (0:46)
Hello, everyone.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:47)
Thanks to Tarun, the Giga Brain and Granpuba at Gauntlet.

**Jordi Alexander** (0:51)
Yo.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:53)
Joining us today, we've got Jordi, Trading Titan at Selini. Hey, Jordi.

**Jordi Alexander** (0:58)
Trading Titan. Thank you for the amazing intro. I think we've tried to schedule this many times over the years, but this is my first Chopping Block appearance, so I'm excited.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (1:07)
I know. We wanted to bring you at the moment of Max Payne, and I'm glad we were able to make that happen. I received that hype man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto. We want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopping Block.xyz for more disclosures. Speaking of Max Payne, actually, I wanted to talk about something just at the top of the show that Tarun and I were talking about off-camera.
I had a tweet a couple of days ago where I was calling out some VC for dunking on a founder, and I said, hey, this guy is being very unfair to a founder who's paying himself a salary, he's winding down his company. Tarun quote tweeted me, and he said something along the lines of, this guy is like a low rent DeSci VC who's hawking all these DeSci shitcoins. He deserves to get pilloried. Apparently, it was unclear if you were talking about me, or if you were talking about the person I was quoting.
I ran into a couple of people here at this event, at this Goldman event in London, who were like, what's going on between you and Tarun? Why is Tarun like, why is there a beef going on between the two of you? What happened? Do you want to explain the beef?

**Tarun Chitra** (2:20)
There is no beef. I was really just ducking on the guy that Haseeb was quoting, because that guy during the very tiny.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (2:28)
We should name who that guy is. That guy is the founder of the Moon Rock Capital, Simon Dedekaglu is his name.

**Tarun Chitra** (2:34)
It was really shilling a lot of Ponzi Disci coins that were just like, stake your Disci coin and maybe 1% of these assets will maybe go to scientists. The other 99% go to pay inflation for anyone staking. It was like real low-level Ponzi stuff and like, I don't know. It's weird to me that the guy who's shilling the Disci coins is getting mad about someone getting paid. Like, what do you think is going to happen in science investment that you're going to make? You're always going to have a ROI that's positive. Ninety-nine percent of science investment goes to zero.
So I think that was more my slightly inebriated Schadenfreude when I wrote that tweet.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:12)
Oh, okay.

**Tom Schmidt** (3:14)
All right.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:15)
Well, I'm glad to know-

**Tom Schmidt** (3:16)
DeSci percentage continues.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:17)
Yeah. I'm glad to know that I was only collateral damage in your- No, no, no.

**Tarun Chitra** (3:21)
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. So there is no beef. I was more pointing out that Haseeb was choosing a worthy victim.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:30)
Okay. Good to know. My targeting algorithms are Tarun approved. But okay, there's other pain going on beyond just the personal pain of DeSci, which is what's happening in the markets right now. The big story is around strategy, also known as micro strategy. If you recall, last time on the show, we talked about their preferreds, which are called stretch, were significantly impaired. They were targeting $100 price target, and they fell all the way down into the 80 cent territory, which seemed to belie an enormous amount of weakness and incredulity in the strength of the capital stack that Michael Saylor has built up over the time that he's building micro strategy. It hit a low of $71 last week, relative to the $100 that it was historically trading at. MSTR is down about 30% in five days, currently sitting in the low $80 range, and it's minus 82% from July 2025 peak. The MNAV is now well below one, meaning that it's now trading below the value of all the Bitcoin held in reserve. So it's a very, very challenged time for micro strategy. Now, in response to all of this, Saylor came out and announced a new framework called the Digital Credit Capital Framework. And his whole thing, which he's said many times now, is that, look, micro strategy, we're not a DAT. That's not how he positions himself. He is a digital credit company. His job is to issue very attractive forms of digital credit and do this kind of capital transformation from risky Bitcoin into this beautiful menagerie of financial assets that are backed by Bitcoin. And so he's now announced that he's going to do a large cushion, a larger cash cushion than he currently has, 2.5 billion that he's going to be setting aside for just dividends and interest, which would give them roughly 18 months of dividend coverage. That's significantly up where they are today, which is closer to 12 months.