The crew breaks down the SpaceX IPO’s crypto-like low float dynamics and Hyperliquid’s price prediction, debates accredited investor laws and failed tokenized stock allocations, dives into Fable 5’s export control shutdown after Amazon flagged a jailbreak to the Treasury Secretary, and argues whether open source AI models will eat frontier pricing.
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. Robert is back after a brief hiatus recording his own podcast, The Pop, for Superstate — and the crew wastes no time roasting him for it before diving into the biggest week of news in recent memory.
First up: the SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, and why it looks eerily like a crypto token launch — 4.2% float, retail getting cut out, and Hyperliquid perps predicting the first-day pop almost to the dollar. The crew debates TradeXYZ’s winner-take-all dominance of HIP3 and why building on top of Hyperliquid might be a terrible startup environment. Then they unpack Elon’s financial engineering genius — the Cursor acquisition as all-stock crypto playbook, XAI’s pivot from failed AI lab to compute reseller, and why Grok is (unanimously) an embarrassing piece of shit.
The conversation shifts to accredited investor laws, SPV dentists, and why every crypto platform failed to deliver SpaceX IPO allocations. From there, Coinbase’s massive system update — tokenized stocks, an SEC-registered AI chatbot, combos, and 15-minute markets. Then things get spicy: Robert asks Claude about SBF on air, Sonnet gets it hilariously wrong, and everyone roasts him for not using Opus.
The back half is all about Fable 5 — Amazon’s jailbreak discovery, Andy Jassy calling Dario (who didn’t pick up), and the export controls that shut down the most powerful commercial AI model ever released. Robert drops his most surprising take: “I am EAC, but this is a dry run of pressing the pause button.” The episode closes with a heated debate on whether Chinese open source models will eat frontier AI pricing and a bet that may or may not have been agreed upon.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Show highlights
🔹 SpaceX IPO breaks records with a 4.2% float — the closest thing to a crypto token launch Wall Street has ever done
🔹 Hyperliquid perps predicted the SpaceX first-day pop almost exactly, with $1.4B in daily volume on a single stock
🔹 TradeXYZ dominates HIP3 as other integrators fold — “HIP3 should be renamed to Trade”
🔹 SpaceX’s all-stock Cursor acquisition mirrors the CZ/FTT playbook — Elon learned from crypto
🔹 Accredited investor laws debated after Brian Armstrong calls for reform post-SpaceX IPO
🔹 Every crypto platform that promised SpaceX IPO allocations failed to deliver after the deal went 5x oversubscribed
🔹 Coinbase launches tokenized stocks with real dividends, an SEC-registered AI advisor, combos, and 15-minute markets
🔹 Robert asks Claude about SBF on air — Sonnet 4.6 hallucinates, Opus 4.8 gets it right, model war ensues
🔹 Fable 5 shut down after Amazon flagged a jailbreak to Treasury Secretary Bessent — Dario didn’t pick up the phone
🔹 Robert says “I am EAC” but argues the Fable shutdown is a healthy dry run of pressing the AI pause button
Hosts
⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate
⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures
⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly
Disclosures
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