Unchained

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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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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For the first time in a geopolitical crisis, bitcoin held its ground while safe havens faltered. But can it keep holding if the VIX moves from yellow to red?

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The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is past $100 a barrel. The traditional safe haven playbook, from treasuries to gold, is failing to perform the way it should. And yet bitcoin is up 4% since the conflict started, holding steady in a tight range that Andy Baehr, newly installed as managing director of asset management at GSR, calls "base camp." 

What signals should investors watch to know if the next move is up or down? Why does the VIX suggest calm when the world feels anything but? And why might the tokenization boom be built on demand that doesn't exist yet? 

Baehr, who spent years constructing the crypto index ecosystem at CoinDesk, brings a structural lens to a market moment where nothing is where it should be.

Host:


⁠⁠Steven Ehrlich, Host of Bits + Bips: The Interview

Guest:

Andy Baehr, Managing Director of Asset Management, GSR

Links:

Bitcoin = Safe Haven


Is Bitcoin Now a Safe-Haven Asset? If So, Then It Could Be Hugely Undervalued at Just $70,000


How Bitcoin and Gold Reacted Differently to the Iran War Shock

Hyperliquid Oil Perps


The Hottest New Crypto Trade Is 24/7 Oil Futures


Crypto Markets Track War Risk as Iran Conflict Endures

Tokenization


Wall Street Pushes Tokenized Stocks, but Institutions Aren’t Eager to Trade Them


Nasdaq Partners With Kraken in Plan for 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading

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Sid Powell and Paul Frambot on why Apollo, Cantor, and Coinbase are quietly building their financial products on DeFi rails, and what it means for lending. 

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Onchain lending used to be a crypto-native curiosity. Now Cantor Fitzgerald is extending credit facilities through it, Apollo Global Management is acquiring governance tokens, and Coinbase users are borrowing against Bitcoin to buy houses, all running on DeFi protocols operating in the background.

Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell and Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot sit at the center of this shift, and they have very different reads on what it takes to make institutional adoption real. 

What are the actual limits to onchain lending growth right now? Does the DeFi mullet model work for everyone, or only for specific use cases? And as DAOs across the industry stumble under the weight of public governance, what structures actually let a protocol move fast without losing trust? 

This conversation gets into the mechanics, the trade-offs, and the deals that are quietly redrawing the lines between DeFi and traditional finance.

Guests:


⁠Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO at Morpho Labs


⁠Sid Powell, CEO & Co-Founder of Maple Finance

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The crew digs into Hyperliquid's phenomenal rise. How did the perp DEX become TradFi's 24/7 casino?

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Hyperliquid is having its mainstream moment like Polymarket in 2024 and OpenSea in 2021. Amid the U.S.’s war on Iran, the platform has become a popular venue for speculators to express their market opinions.

Uneasy Money hosts Kain Warwick, Luca Netz and Taylor Monahan dig into choices that have allowed Hyperliquid to succeed where many others before it have failed. In a single sentence: not putting ideology over the product's goals.

Kain says the protocol may become unassailable in the future even as Luca says HYPE is bound to be a top five crypto by market cap.

The crew also discusses Pudgy Penguin's new open world game Pudgy World. Luca says “crypto rails have to be a tech stack not a hook” explaining why the game relegated crypto to the background.

Plus, how Across Protocol's move to pivot to only equity highlights the broken nature of tokens. Has Luca cracked the problem?

Listen to find out!

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix


⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Links:


Unchained:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Oil Becomes the Hottest Trade on Hyperliquid


Hyperliquid Launches $29 Million Policy Push in Washington


Uneasy Money: Hyperliquid’s Dilemma After 10/10: Protect Itself or Its Users?


The Aave DAO Is Collapsing. Is the Token Still a Good Investment?


Uneasy Money: Why the AI Singularity May Already Be Out of Our Hands

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The crew discusses whether prediction markets enable “Bloomberg terminal espionage,,” wonder how to regulate markets that could be on anything, dive into why the OCC is saying no to stablecoin yield and more.

The SEC has submitted guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto to the White House.

DEX in the City hosts Jessi Brooks, Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos and TuongVy Le dig into what the proposal could mean for the crypto industry and whether it could be enough to provide developers regulatory clarity as anticipated market structure legislation stalls. Why is the agency submitting guidance to the White House?

Plus, KK explains why current regulatory efforts could lead crypto to resort to more “come at me bro” legal tactics and Jessi covers why the industry may regret the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Chevron deference.

Beyond the SEC's recent crypto regulatory move, the crew discusses the arrest of the son of a government contractor alleged to have stolen the U.S.’s bitcoin, what the DOJ's planned retrial of unresolved charges against Roman Storm suggests and why banks are up in arms over Kraken's “skinny” Fed master account.

They also discuss why the crypto industry should tighten up security as Iranian groups target U.S. banking services and tech infrastructure.

Hosts:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Jessi Brooks⁠⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at Ribbit Capital


⁠⁠⁠Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos⁠⁠⁠, General Counsel at StarkWare


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TuongVy Le⁠, General Counsel at Veda

Links:


Unchained:


⁠SEC Sends Crypto Securities Framework to the White House

Blame Exchanges for Holding Up the Market Structure Bill? - DEX in the City

DOJ Pushes for Retrial of Tornado Cash Developer Roman Storm

Kraken Wins Direct Access to the Fed’s Payment System

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