Why Fable's Shutdown Is a Warning for Every AI Lab: Uneasy Money

**Kain Warwick** (0:00)
But this is the problem with things that are not real. Like, when something is purely based on belief, and you put too much belief into one guy, and you believe that he is going to prop you up, and then that belief is questioned, there's no fundamentals for us to go back to and be like, no, it's fine that strategy is selling Bitcoin because the Bitcoin fundamentals have never been greater. Look at all of the revenue that we are generating. Like, this is the fundamental, like, it's such a belief-based system that we believe it will go up, and it'll be a store of value, whatever.
But like, if one guy has too much of it, and we think he might dump on us, there's nothing to stop. Like, it is the rational move, right? Like, if I said to Luca, I've got, you know, I've managed to accumulate 50% of the supply of penguins, right?
I've been buying it, you didn't realize, but I own 50% of it, right? And I'm like, but actually, I might sell some, just to see what happens. Like, you know, let's test the market, see how liquid it is, right? Like, a normal person, a rational person who's holding penguins would be like, well, I'm getting out of the way of this guy. This guy holds 50% of the penguins supply, and he's just like testing the market. Like, he's a lunatic, clearly, right? Like, how did he get it? What is he doing with it? Why is he here? And why is he trolling us? Of course, you're going to be like, I'm just going to sell it and get out of the way. I don't want to be on the other side of this trade if someone's going to potentially dump 50% of the supply of a thing, right?
So yeah, of course, people panic sold. Of course, they did. Hey, everyone, I'm Kain Wark, and welcome to Uneasy Money, because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Or again, here's a word from the sponsors that they-

**SPEAKER_2** (2:04)
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**Kain Warwick** (2:22)
I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monahan, Security Expert and Luca Netts, CEO of Pudgy Penguins and Chief Advertising Sales Executive for the show.
So if you don't like the ads, hit him on Twitter. If you do like the ads, let's get more of them going.
And today we are joined by Porter Stowell, CEO of w3.io. That's a good URL. I like that URL. I saw that. And I was like, this guy gets URLs. So Porter's got a decade of experience across IBM blockchain. Coinbase is the important one for this morning, Filecoin and Hedera, but hold that against you. And he's now building AI agents and programmable infrastructure for on-chain finance. So Coinbase, let's get into it. Coinbase has woken up, it's a bear market, and they've decided that this is like a weirdly like Anthropic move, like we're just going to take on everyone. Everyone that's doing everything, we're going to go and do that. So yeah, how long has it been since you've been in Coinbase?

**Porter Stowell** (3:32)
It's all of a sudden been a moment. I want to say it's coming up on four years now since I was at Coinbase. But when I see the big announcements from yesterday, I think this is just a continuation from the strategy they had from four years ago.
And what I see is like, look, they're making a concentrated effort to be the one-stop shop for everything retail and everything institutional. And look, I thought it was a banner day for Coinbase. I think the narrative is going to quickly shift from everyone focused on the SpaceX and Anthropics of the world to what Coinbase is doing. From what I see in my seat at W3, the conversation is all about software development and AI today.
But when we're going to wake up one morning and that conversation is going to be about AI and money, and Coinbase is in a fantastic market leading position when it comes to that moment.
If you looked at all the announcements...

**Kain Warwick** (4:25)
I think it's interesting. I had a chat with a friend of mine who's in Coinbase.
We have a group and someone was trolling Coinbase about some of these announcements. And I was like, man, like you're really going to town. These are good announcements and you're just like giving it to Coinbase, right? And my friend called me and he's like, why is there like this antipathy towards Coinbase? Like, you know, why do people like get frustrated? Like Coinbase does something cool, but they announce a cool thing and people are like, Coinbase, stupid Coinbase. Like, do you have a sense of why the market like, and what, like this is not like institutional investors. This is like DGENs in the trenches that have this like a bit of a, like almost a sense of frustration or animosity towards Coinbase. And I don't really have a good answer for it myself.