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, Helius’s Mert returns to defend Zcash’s ~400% run and the “encrypted Bitcoin” framing, digging into anonymity sets, privacy UX, and why Bitcoiners are so riled up. We then tackle the Tempo bombshell — a ~$500M raise at a ~$5B pre, Stripe/Paradigm ties, Dankrad’s move from the EF — alongside Péter Szilágyi’s letter on EF culture and compensation: public goods priesthood vs. market incentives. Next up: Mert’s “USD Manlet” rethink (why coordinating Solana around one stable is hard, and why pushing USDT to compete with USDC may be the sharper play) plus a gripe-fueled tour of today’s DeFi trading UX. Finally, an AWS-outage autopsy: Coinbase downtime, Base sequencer hiccups, Infura/MetaMask ripple effects, and the case for multi-region/multi-cloud redundancy when real money — and sometimes safety — are on the line. And no, despite the memes, Mert is not launching a DEX.

For more links and Show Hilights - https://unchainedcrypto.com/podcast-chopping-block/the-chopping-block-zcash-400-tempos-500m-shock-ef-pay-firestorm-aws-base-meltdown-feat-mert/

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

Guest

⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

Guest

⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius

“One Long Memo” [A Letter To The EF] by Péter Szilágyi

https://gist.github.com/karalabe/a2bc53436f29e0711fe680d59e180f6c

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:22 Mert a Madman of Solana and now Zcash

05:20 Bitcoin vs. Zcash: A Philosophical Clash

14:35 Tempo Fundraise and Ethereum's Talent Exodus

33:05 Ethereum's Social Layer & Public Goods

34:45 The Importance of Religious Priesthood in Crypto

41:01 The USD Manlet Proposal & Stablecoin Coordination

49:32 AWS Outage & Its Impact on Crypto

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