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The boys regroup after TOKEN2049. Ledgers sold through CryptoBilis, an authorized reseller in Malaysia, came with an LTE implant that read seed phrases off the screen, an OpenAI engineer was caught with a listening device, Papertrade launches 1000x perps where losing money mints you tokens, and the hosts argue over Nikita Bier's claim that technical moats are dead.
Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week is a late-night episode recorded right after TOKEN2049.
The hosts compare notes on a TOKEN2049 with zero Lambos and a quiet Marquee, then get into the CryptoBilis hack, where Ledgers sold by an authorized reseller in Malaysia came with a hidden chip and an eSIM that sent seed phrases home over LTE. Robert calls it a software supply chain attack made physical, Tarun explains it to a bar owner as North Korea buying the liquor distributor, and an OpenAI engineer caught with a listening device has Haseeb arguing that the choke points of a high-trust society are breaking down. Then Tom and Haseeb unpack Papertrade, the 1000x perps exchange where losing trades mint PAPER, and Tarun asks how long anyone will keep losing money for a token. Finally, Nikita Bier says technical moats are dead: Tarun half agrees, Haseeb calls it a fake story, and he explains why AI still writes investment memos like a growth investor.
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 felt more institutional this year: Marquee was a normal nightclub all week, Franklin Templeton and Nasdaq took the stage, and Tarun saw zero Lambos.
🔹 Tarun says nothing in crypto feels like frontier tech anymore outside of Zcash and quantum, and remembers the robotic shrimp farm that pivoted into an L2.
🔹 Normal people have the Big Mac index; crypto people have the nightclub index.
🔹 Ledgers sold through CryptoBilis, an authorized reseller in Malaysia, carried a hardware implant with an eSIM that read the seed phrase off the screen and sent it over LTE. About $80 million was stolen.
🔹 CryptoBilis' founders say they sold the company to a Chinese buyer months ago and were under a confidentiality agreement until October 20th. Trezor has already cut off its authorized resellers.
🔹 Robert says someone has now prototyped buying a vendor to run a supply chain attack, and Tarun explains it to a bar owner as North Korea buying the liquor distributor.
🔹 Haseeb's PSA: buy hardware wallets directly from the manufacturer. Tom is skeptical of see-through cases and points to Ledger's honeypot problem.
🔹 An OpenAI engineer allegedly hid a recording device behind a TV in a conference room, and ChatGPT searches about how to build one gave it away.
🔹 Haseeb says the choke points of a high-trust society are breaking down as AI makes complex attacks easier, and Tom asks why nobody has tried to steal a frontier model's weights.
🔹 Papertrade offers 1000x leverage at Hyperliquid's mid-market price with zero slippage, losing traders mint PAPER, and it is doing about $32 million in weekly revenue.
🔹 Tom explains how Papertrade's house works and how one trader moved Hyperliquid's price to farm it. Tarun says everything hangs on the PAPER token.
🔹 Nikita Bier says technical moats are dead. Haseeb calls it a fake story: AI can one-shot a compiler, but nobody uses the one-shotted Photoshop clones.
🔹 Haseeb says the incumbents have AI too, Tarun says the superstar-engineer advantage is gone, and Robert explains why models never see the real investment memos.
Hosts
⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures
⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate
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