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Live from TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Haseeb, Tom, and Tarun sit down with Balaji Srinivasan and Arthur Hayes.
Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week they are live on the BingX Stage at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, joined by Balaji Srinivasan and Arthur Hayes.
Balaji explains why Network School moved its headquarters to Kazakhstan, which he calls Singapore with space to build, and why courting a country works a lot like enterprise sales when half of all countries have fewer than 10 million people. Then OpenAI drops 700 AI-written math papers and Justin Drake tells crypto to go into bunker mode: Tarun separates theoretical attacks from practical ones, Balaji proposes a social smart contract that would let chains rewind after a cryptographic break, and Arthur pitches the Flop Network as food for AI agents. Finally, Blast and Abstract shut down, nobody booked Marquee this year, and the panel debates whether the L2 era was a necessary search or crypto's version of Chinese ghost cities.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Show highlights
🔹 TOKEN2049 is still the one retail mega conference left, even in the first year with no wrapped Lambo out front.
🔹 Balaji says crypto is M&A-ing Western institutions, and that anything holding long-dated Treasuries is wrecked.
🔹 Network School has moved its headquarters to Kazakhstan, which Balaji calls Singapore with space to build: 21 million people, a tie with China and India at the physics Olympiad, about 40% of the world's uranium, and room for 10,000 acres of Arthur Hayes City.
🔹 More than 10 countries bid for Network School. Balaji says courting governments works like enterprise sales, because half of all countries have under 10 million people and a billion dollars goes a long way there.
🔹 Why Hollywood misleads you about the rest of the world, from Borat to Squid Game, and why Balaji splits countries into a descending world and an ascending world.
🔹 The ascending world has murals of Elon and will build Arthur a statue, preferably on a horse, while blue states drive their billionaires out.
🔹 OpenAI drops 700 AI-written math papers with nothing on cryptography, and Justin Drake tells crypto to go into bunker mode by moving funds to addresses that have never signed.
🔹 Tarun says there is still a big gap between a theoretical attack and a practical one, and Haseeb asks who will even tell us when ECDSA is broken.
🔹 Balaji proposes a social smart contract that lets a chain rewind after a cryptographic break, Haseeb says cross-chain dependencies make that far harder than it was five years ago, and Balaji warns that anti-tech is the new anti-capitalism.
🔹 Tom says to watch what people do rather than what they say, and Balaji argues there are hard mathematical bounds on what AI can do.
🔹 Tarun on quantum money, Balaji on blockchains that spend their own token budget trying to hack themselves, and Arthur on the Flop Network as food for AI agents.
🔹 Blast and Abstract shut down, and Arthur reports that Marquee, fully booked all week last year with half a million Singapore dollar minimum spends, has not had a single booking this year.
🔹 Balaji says every failed L2 was part of a search worth running, Arthur jokes that it was all a search for Base and Robinhood Chain, Tarun calls the L2s Chinese ghost cities that can at least be demolished, and Haseeb tallies the middlemen that make running one so expensive.
Hosts
⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures
Guests
⭐️Balaji Srinivasan, Founder of Network School
⭐️Arthur Hayes, CIO of Maelstrom & CEO of Flop Labs
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