The Chopping Block: The Binance Hack, Circle's Fast Freeze, YC's Crypto Wishlist, and ICE Bringing Hyperliquid Perps Onshore

Rob Hadick guest-hosts for a second week with Tom and Robert, joined by Nemil Dalal of Y Combinator. Hours before the show, Binance lost an estimated $5 billion in what looks like the largest hack in crypto history, Circle and Tether froze funds faster than anyone expected, YC lays out its crypto Request for Startups, and ICE signs with trade.xyz to bring regulated perps built on Hyperliquid's technology to US customers.

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Show highlights

🔹 Rob Hadick is back for a second week, and Nemil Dalal of Y Combinator returns as a repeat guest.

🔹 The hosts planned to skip hacks this week. Three hours before the show, Binance was hit for an estimated $5 billion, three times the largest hack in crypto history.

🔹 Tom says the attack looks tied to how Binance managed EIP-7702 delegation, letting an attacker generate signatures and withdraw funds by proxy.

🔹 Circle and Tether froze the stolen stablecoins within hours. Nemil says the USDC team literally practiced for moments like this.

🔹 Tom compares freeze requests to social media takedown requests: Circle can't adjudicate thousands of claims a day, but a call from Binance is high signal.

🔹 Robert asks why, four and a half years after 2022, no team has shipped a genuinely different architecture for DeFi protocols, even as the forest gets darker.

🔹 Rob says his stablecoin and TradFi crossover founders barely felt the hack, and Nemil warns that every financial crisis is about interconnection.

🔹 Nemil runs through YC's crypto Request for Startups: tokenization, new financial primitives, agents that need APIs, and raising capital for AI on-chain.

🔹 Rob calls it the bull run, but not the bull run the crypto people want. Nemil says he has to steal that.

🔹 Robert asks if it's better to build pre-cool or post-cool, and rules that crypto is post-cool, which makes it pre-cool again.

🔹 Nemil says every personal agent will have a credit card, while stablecoins win where payments are global and micro, like Cloudflare's pay-to-crawl.

🔹 ICE signs a definitive agreement with trade.xyz to bring regulated perps built on Hyperliquid's technology to US customers, pending CFTC approval.

🔹 Stan Druckenmiller tweets about Hyperliquid, and Robert says nobody likes ADL, Druckenmiller least of all.

🔹 Robert argues perps are a superior form factor to dated futures for everything, and that the institutional gap is credit risk.

🔹 Robert marvels that crypto went from Byzantine generals to talking about credit risk.

Hosts

⭐️Rob Hadick, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate

Guest

⭐️Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator
Disclosures

Timestamps 

00:00 Cold Open

00:30 Intro

01:42 The $5B Binance Hack

04:40 Circle's Fast Freeze

10:57 Where's the New DeFi?

19:48 YC's Crypto Wishlist

26:38 The Wrong Bull Run

36:53 Is Crypto Just AI Rails?

40:18 ICE x Hyperliquid

51:45 Perps vs. Dated Futures

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