Compound Finance Governance, Strategic Bitcoin Reserves, & BitClout's Legal Woes- The Chopping Block

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra explore the latest trends in the crypto world. In this episode, we dive into topics like the potential U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve proposed by Trump and political figures, and its implications for the institutional adoption of Bitcoin. The episode explores the recent turmoil in DAO governance through the example of Compound's voting mishap with a controversial proposal, analyzing the role of activist investors. The squad also reflects on the legal challenges faced by the founder of BitClout, Nader Al-Naji, who was charged with misappropriation of funds, offering insights into the importance of transparent and ethical governance in the crypto industry.

Erik Voorhees' New Venture: Why AI Desperately Needs Privacy and Uncensorability

Erik Voorhees, a crypto OG, has launched Venice, a private, uncensorable, open-source competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, powered by a decentralized crypto network. In the episode, Erik and Venice’s COO Teana Baker-Taylor delve into the problems with censorship and data in current AI agents, including how they create honeypots of information about users’ search history for hackers, or that they can be absurdly politically correct, such as refusing to create images of Caucasian people. As they point out, there’s also the risk that the companies managing them could be censoring the models to please the Chinese government, in order to access the market in that country. They talk about their plan for Venice to gain market share, considering that DuckDuckGo, a privacy-preserving competitor to Google, has a much smaller market share. And they explain why they intend for Venice to eventually use the compute of Morpheus, or other decentralized crypto-powered compute networks. They also critique the SEC’s current regulatory approach to crypto, calling it “a joke.” Additionally, they explore the concept of AI agents using cryptocurrencies as their primary currency.

How Decentralized Social Network Farcaster Hopes to Eventually Get to One Billion Users

In the two weeks since Farcaster introduced its Frames feature that allows developers to easily add mini apps to users’ posts, the decentralized social network has become the talk of Twitter, now X, and increased its user base by ten times, according to co-founder Dan Romero. Romero joins Unchained to discuss why Frames has become so popular, the philosophy behind Farcaster and its client Warpcast, why the crypto component behind Farcaster is being kept to a minimum, how Apple’s new Vision Pro could lead to the creation of a 3D social network on Farcaster, how he and his fellow co-founder’s background at Coinbase helped shape their decisions about building Farcaster, and his vision for eventually getting Farcaster to a billion-plus users.