The Chopping Block: In 'the First Crypto War,' How Should the Money Be Spent?

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Laura stops by to talk about The Cryptopians! Show topics:

how people have reacted to The Cryptopians
what Laura found out about Charles Hoskinson while researching The Cryptopians
how web3 has been used in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion
how crypto donations are being used by Ukraine
why concerns about Russia using crypto to evade sanctions are overblown
why Haseeb believes there could be a significant spike in global inflation in the wake of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine
why the disparity between private and public valuations of crypto protocols could be an issue now that Electric Capital, Bain Capital, and Sequoia are entering the crypto space
why Robert believes Andre Cronje’s decision to quit crypto is a “rug pull”
what effect Andre’s departure from crypto could have on Fantom
why benchmarking blockchain performance and throughput is difficult
what happened to the Evmos “Rektdrop” and what this means for IBC blockchains

Hosts

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
- https://twitter.com/hosseeb
Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital
- https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt
Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
- https://twitter.com/tarunchitra
Robert Leshner, founder of Compound
- https://twitter.com/rleshner

Episode Links

The First Crypto War – sanctions, donations, airdrop
- Binance won’t unilaterally freeze Russian accounts (amidst requests by Ukraine) https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-binance-says-it-wont-unilaterally-freeze-accounts-russia-2022-02-28/
- Rube volumes spike https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/02/28/ruble-denominated-bitcoin-volumes-surges-to-9-month-highs/
- Ukraine cancels airdrophttps://blockworks.co/ukraine-cancels-proposed-airdrop-after-receiving-record-donations/
- Visa, Mastercard withdraw from Russia https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/05/visa-mastercard-join-paypal-in-suspending-russian-operations/
- Singapore sanctions Russia https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/singapore-sanctions-russia-over-unprovoked-attack-ukraine-2022-03-05/
- Coinbase blocks 25K wallets rinked to Russian “illicit activity” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-07/coinbase-blocks-25-000-crypto-wallets-linked-to-russian-users
- Over $40M donated to Ukraine in crypto https://dune.xyz/msilb7/Ukraine-Crypto-Donations
New private funds
- Bain Capital closes $560M fund https://twitter.com/stefancoh/status/1501190432910237698
- Electric announces $1B fund https://blockworks.co/electric-capital-raises-1-billion-to-launch-crypto-venture-token-funds/
Andre Cronje ragequits
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-godfather-cronje-quits-as-tvl-and-tokens-tank-for-related-projects
The AMM test – no BS look at L1 Performance
- https://twitter.com/hosseeb/status/1498703792266645506
Evmos pauses “Rektdrop”
- https://thedefiant.io/evmos-paused-rektdrop/

The Cryptopians