Oil above $100, Qatar's LNG infrastructure in ruins, and a 150-year-old grid buckling under AI-era demand: Sean Murray breaks down why energy has an L1 problem and how Fuse is building the crypto-native fix.

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A $5 billion UK energy company built by Revolut alumni is about to launch a new token, and they already have an SEC no-action letter to back it up. 

But the real story starts with the grid itself. European gas prices are running 50-70% above normal. Multi-billion dollar LNG facilities damaged in recent attacks could take years to repair. And a power grid designed 150 years ago is buckling under AI data centers, EVs, and renewables it was never built to handle. 

Sean Murray, Fuse Energy's crypto lead, joins Steven Ehrlich to lay out why an estimated $70 billion in clean energy has been wasted because the grid can't move it, why that congestion problem mirrors crypto's own L1 scalability crisis, and how coordinating millions of smart home devices through a token-incentivized network could fix it.

Host:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steven Ehrlich, Head of Research, SharpLink

Guest:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠Sean Murray, Head of Special Projects & Crypto Lead, Fuse Energy — Previously part of the Revolut early team; now leading Fuse's crypto strategy and DePIN network launch for a vertically integrated energy company doing ~$500 million in annual revenue across the UK and Europe.

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Will AI agents use cards or stablecoins? Here’s how two crypto VCs see the agentic future shaping up.

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What happens when merchants are code instead of storefronts? Noah Levine and Robbie Petersen debate whether stablecoins or cards win in an agentic economy, and more importantly, where the profit pools end up.

One sees headless merchants driving a new payment stack; the other warns that front ends never fully disappear. Both agree on this: traditional fraud detection will likely fail against AI behavior patterns, and the rails question masks a deeper problem of regulatory and social inertia.

The outcome hinges on whether permissionless infrastructure can outcompete existing payment incumbents, and whether agentic commerce actually scales beyond niche use cases.

Guest:

• Noah Levine, Partner at a16z

• Robbie Petersen, Junior Partner at Dragonfly

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Chaos Labs’ Omer Goldberg joins the crew to dig into the Resolv Labs exploit. Why was the USR minting function controlled by a single key? And how did audits miss it?

Thank you to our sponsors!

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fuse: The Energy Network ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Shift your energy use and earn rewards.

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MultiChain Advisors -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Growth & Capital Markets Partner You Need

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Crypto Tax Girl

$25 million extracted and millions more in bad debt across lending protocols.

Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg joins Uneasy Money hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan to unpack the Resolv exploit.

They dive into how the exploit reveals DeFi's basic OpSec and risk judgement failings. Omer highlights the various ways it could have been prevented as Tay says protocol audits have become “security theater.”

Kain questions Morpho's curator model after its pools were hit hard as the contagion spread. He also highlights markers that suggest the exploit may have been executed in panic.

Beyond the Resolv exploit, the crew highlights that Aave v4 has made it out of governance, discussing the motivations behind the upgrade and whether the hub and spoke model will impact listing standards.

Hosts:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Guest:

• Omer Goldberg, Founder and CEO of Chaos Labs

Links:

• Unchained:

  • Aave V4 Clears First Governance Vote with 100% Support After Months of Internal Conflict

  • Stani Kulechov on Why Aave Labs Is Putting Itself at the Mercy of the DAO

  • How Aave Labs and the DAO Should Split Ownership of the Brand – Uneasy Money
    

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Trump pulled off a five-day ceasefire nobody expected. Ram calls it the greatest TACO of his career.

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Trump announced a five-day pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure just hours before his own 48-hour ultimatum expired. Oil crashed below $90. Bitcoin surged from $68,200 to above $71,000. Ram called it the greatest TACO of Trump’s career and said the Trump put is officially here.

Meanwhile the Fed held rates steady but the dot plot revealed a historically wide internal split: seven members want zero cuts in 2026 while five want 50 basis points or more. Powell warned inflation isn’t coming down as hoped with projections now at 2.7% for headline. 

And in tech, Elon Musk unveiled a $25 billion chip fab that Ram says is pure fiction while Bezos raised $100 billion to buy manufacturing companies and transform them with AI.

Hosts:

• Austin Campbell, Host of Bits + Bips, Zero Knowledge Consulting

• Ram Ahluwalia, Co-Host, CEO of Lumida

• Chris Perkins, Co-Host, President of CoinFund

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Bitcoin dropped under $69K even as the SEC and CFTC create more clarity for crypto, and agentic commerce looks like it will reshape the sector.

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Bitcoin dropped under $69K after the Fed, ECB, and Bank of England all held rates steady this week, while Australia hiked. Kaiko's Laurens Fraussen joins to explain what's actually happening beneath the surface, from collapsing liquidity to a quiet geographic shift in who's buying.

He also makes the case that agentic commerce could reshape how crypto payments work entirely and we break down why the market mostly shrugged at the latest crypto guidance from the SEC and CFTC.

Host:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steven Ehrlich⁠, Host of Bits + Bips: The Interview

Guest:

• ⁠Laurens Fraussen, Research Analyst at Kaiko

Links:

Bitcoin, Markets, and the Iran Conflict

• Bitcoin Holding at $70,000 as Iran War Stokes Inflation Concerns — Bloomberg
• These 3 Charts Show Bitcoin’s War-Linked Selloff Keeps Shrinking as Iran Conflict Worsens — CoinDesk
• What Bitcoin’s Falling Hash Rate Might Mean for Prices — CoinDesk
• What’s Next for Bitcoin Price Amid Iran War and Oil Prices Surge — DL News

Central bank rate decisions

• Fed Interest Rate Decision March 2026: Holds Rates Steady — CNBC
• Fed Meeting Recap: Powell Says Inflation Isn’t Coming Down as Much as ‘Hoped’ — CNBC
• Bank Rate Maintained at 3.75%, March 2026 — Bank of England
• ECB, BOE, Swiss National Bank, Riksbank Interest Rate Decisions — CNBC
• ECB Holds Rates, Predicts 2.6% Inflation for 2026 — Central Banking

SEC/CFTC Interpretive Guidance

• SEC Clarifies the Application of Federal Securities Laws to Crypto Assets — SEC.gov
• Joint Interpretation From the SEC and CFTC on Certain Types of Crypto Assets — Free Writings & Perspectives
• SEC Names Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and 13 More Crypto Assets Digital Commodities — FinTech Weekly

Agentic Commerce and Payments

• Stripe-Led Payments Blockchain Tempo Goes Live With AI Agent Protocol — CoinDesk
• Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo Mainnet Goes Live for Machine Payments — Crypto.news
• Coinbase-Backed AI Payments Protocol Wants to Fix Micropayments but Demand Is Just Not There Yet — CoinDesk
• Google Agentic Payments Protocol + x402: Agents Can Now Actually Pay Each Other — Coinbase
• Google Debuts ‘Universal’ Protocol for Agentic Commerce — PYMNTS
• Coinbase and Cloudflare Will Launch the x402 Foundation — Coinbase
• World Launches AgentKit With Coinbase-Backed x402 to Verify Human Identity Behind AI Agents — CoinDesk

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Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and CPO of Mysten Labs,  walks through how Hashi works and how it differs from the competition. Can it succeed where others have failed?

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Mysten Labs has announced Hashi, a protocol designed to unlock several financial applications for native Bitcoin in a trust minimized way.

Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun walks through how Hashi works and how it differs from wrapped Bitcoin tokens and L2s.

He says the protocol is built with institutions in mind, highlighting for one that it does not trigger a tax event like alternatives and also comes with low-premium on-chain Bitcoin denominated insurance.

Listen to find out how Hashi manages these and more.

Will Mysten Labs succeed in unlocking Bitcoin's long-desired $1.4 trillion liquidity?

Guest:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and CPO of Mysten Labs

Links

• Unchained:

  • Sui Blockchain Restored After Six-Hour Outage

  • Sui-Based Typus Finance Loses $3.4 Million in Hack

  • Coinbase’s cbBTC Crosses $1 Billion Market Cap, Deploys on Solana

  • New Bitcoin Liquid Staking Protocols Aim to Replicate Lido’s Success

  • Kraken Launches Wrapped Bitcoin Token kBTC

  • Top Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) Alternatives You Should Know About

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The crew unpacks the significance of the Trade[XYZ] S&P 500 license, why Vanity Fair's recent crypto piece is so controversial and whether the EF is returning to “communism.”

Thank you to our sponsors!

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fuse: The Energy Network ⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Shift your energy use and earn rewards.

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Trade[XYZ] has obtained a license from the S&P Dow Jones Indices to offer S&P 500 perps on Hyperliquid. A crypto trader lost $50 million in a single Aave swap. A Vanity Fair crypto shoot and article is sparking backlash. And the Ethereum Foundation has unveiled a “new” mandate.

Uneasy Money hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan dig into what the S&P license means for crypto with Kain saying it is not priced in yet.

They also debate whether DeFi frontends should block high slippage swaps after the recent Aave swap gone wrong.

Plus, did Vanity Fair intend to mock crypto? Luca shares how he dodged the bullet. Tay explains why OpenSea founder Devin Finzer and his wife got the most heat. Kain lets slip how he found himself on the New York Times for buying Trump's memecoin.

And why Kain does not think the Ethereum Foundation's new mandate matters in the long-run.

Hosts:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Links:

• Unchained:

  • S&P 500 Gets First Officially Licensed Onchain Perpetual, Landing on Hyperliquid

  • Dueling Post-Mortems Reveal How a $50 Million DeFi Swap Went From Bad to Catastrophic

  • Ethereum Foundation Codifies Its Own Obsolescence in New Mandate

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The crew unpacks the Binance case against the Wall Street Journal. Is the lawsuit just for optics? Plus, why crypto can't turn a blind eye to one Aave user's $50 million loss.

Nexo is the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a range of assets. Now available in the U.S with 30 days of exclusive privileges. 

Get started at nexo.com/unchained Binance has sued the Wall Street Journal for defamation over a report that money has flowed from its platform to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp. 

DEX in the City hosts Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos and Jessi Brooks are joined by Arktouros Partner Jane Khodarkovsky to discuss the sanctions implications of the story, what is at stake in the lawsuit and the burden of proof on Binance. 

Is Binance fighting a losing battle? And could the case backfire amid a parallel DOJ investigation?

Beyond the Binance case, the crew unpacks recent efforts by the CFTC and SEC to provide crypto with regulatory clarity. Find out why KK says the CFTC's recent prediction markets guidance is a “nothingburger” and why a no-action letter to Phantom is not a carte blanche for all crypto frontends.

Plus, is it time for crypto to consider best execution rules as an Aave user loses $50 million in a DeFi swap gone wrong?

Hosts:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare

Guest:

• Jane Khodarkovsky, Sanctions expert

Links:

• Unchained:

  • CFTC Moves to Rein In Prediction Markets as Industry Booms

  • SEC and CFTC Move Toward Unified Crypto Rules

  • Dueling Post-Mortems Reveal How a $50 Million DeFi Swap Went From Bad to Catastrophic

    
    

• Vy Le's paper on on-chain best execution:

  • Fairness by Design: Verifiable Execution in On-Chain Markets

    
    

• This week's good news:

  • Tech boss uses ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine to save dying dog

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Across Protocol wants to retire its token in exchange for equity. Is the DAO model structurally broken?

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• Adaptive Security

With Across Protocol proposing to retire its ACX token in favor of equity, a long-simmering question in crypto governance is finally breaking into the open: do token holders actually have meaningful ownership, or just the illusion of it? 

As the regulatory environment under the new U.S. administration shifts dramatically from the Gensler era, the structures that crypto teams were forced to build may now be working against the very communities they were meant to serve. 

Ryan Yi, founder of Onchain Group, and Felipe Montealegre, co-founder and CIO of Theia, have studied these incentive structures closely, and what they have found is uncomfortable. From PumpFun's suppressed valuation to the perverse incentives baked into token buyouts, this conversation examines whether the DAO model was ever built to last, and what governance actually needs to look like if crypto is going to compete with global finance.

Guests:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠Ryan Yi, Founder of Onchain Group

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠Felipe Montealegre, Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer at Theia

Links:

• Read our Aave deep dive here

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Crypto insiders debate the Ethereum Foundation’s new “CROPS” mandate: is the EF losing touch with builders, why does Solana keep pulling startups away, and what will it actually take for Ethereum to stay ahead? Expect a candid conversation on governance, comms, and crypto culture wars.

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 we’ve got plenty of firepower with special guests Taylor Monahan (formerly of MetaMask, now a security sensei) and Bankless impresario David Hoffman. The crew digs into the Ethereum Foundation’s freshly dropped “CROPS” manifesto — a 38-page PDF full of cypherpunk values, new acronyms, and debate fuel.

What does it really say about where Ethereum is headed? Is EF finally embracing “sanctuary tech,” or just giving startups another reason to choose Solana? Who deserves credit for Ethereum’s growth: the Foundation, the community, or the market?

Expect sharp takes on EF’s endless comms problems, why L2s aren’t a cure-all, and whether crypto culture matters as much as the tech. It’s a spicy, insider-heavy episode — so grab your popcorn and dive in.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights

🔹 Ethereum Foundation’s new CROPS mandate—what it says, what it avoids, and why it sparked a vibe war  

🔹 Is Vitalik’s “sanctuary tech” vision pushing builders away or just keeping Ethereum pure?  

🔹 The never-ending battle between “cypherpunks” and “pragmatists” in Ethereum’s governance  

🔹 Why Ethereum’s “bad comms” tradition keeps causing existential crises  

🔹 Solana’s support playbook: How culture, not tech, is dominating the builder mindshare  

🔹 Are new projects ditching Ethereum L1 for Base, Arbitrum, and Solana—and does platform risk even matter now?  

🔹 Should EF just stick to research, or actually help grow the ecosystem? And what does “supporting builders” actually mean?  

🔹 Can you keep your values if you don’t win? The hard truths of crypto capitalism  

🔹 Lessons from Defi Summer, NFT mania, and what L2 drama says about ecosystem incentives  

🔹 Haseeb goes “political”: Why virtue-signaling and simple narratives are killing real debate

Hosts

⭐️ Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️ Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

⭐️ Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly 

Guest

⭐️ Taylor Monahan, Security expert & Host of Uneasy Money
⭐️ David Hoffman, Host of Bankless

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:51 EF Mandate Explained

03:23 Pragmatists vs. Cypherpunks

05:13 Tay’s Middle Ground

08:54 David Reads Between Lines

13:51 Tom & Tarun Push Back

18:20 EF Factions & Solana Shadow

24:13 Does Ethereum Want Growth

31:01 Virtue Signaling

35:35 Where to Build Now

39:16 Solana Support vs Ethereum Stability

42:12 EF Promotion & Builder Support 

47:54 Goldilocks Time Horizons

51:10 Ethereum Soul and Body

56:03 Does EF Leadership Matter?

01:02:45 Stewardship and Market Failures

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Ram is bearish on equities, oil is keeping the Fed frozen, and Bitcoin is holding up anyway. The hosts debate whether crypto has bottomed or whether worse is still ahead.

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Thanks to our sponsor, Nexo!

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Three weeks into the Iran conflict, oil is keeping inflation elevated, rate cuts are getting pushed out, and hedge funds are being forced to sell good names just to reduce exposure. So why is Bitcoin holding up? 

Ram sees a market on the right shoulder of a bubble, with industrials like Caterpillar at 35x earnings and no real capitulation yet in equities or private credit. Chris is watching trading desks pick up the “short-gold, long-Bitcoin” trade, and sees Ethereum's fundamentals quietly strengthening. Austin wants to know what happens to DeFi the day a major stablecoin gets compromised on a censorship-resistant chain with no network-level controls. 

And all three are asking the same question investors need answered now: does the Iran conflict end fast enough to stop oil from triggering a true inflationary regime, or is a harder correction still ahead?

Hosts:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ram Ahluwalia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Austin Campbell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Perkins⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund

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