The boys get together in person as CLARITY falls short with 47 votes. They break down what comes next, Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP token collapse, the Robinhood/Hyperliquid case, Balancer winding down, and the debate over an AI pause.

The CLARITY Act fails cloture with 47 votes, not a single Democrat in favor, and the crew works out what that leaves behind: rulemaking at the SEC and CFTC, an ethics fight that was never really about market structure, and Robert's tally of everyone who walked away with nothing. Then Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token collapses 99.85 percent, the SDNY indicts two Robinhood engineers over Hyperliquid front-running, Balancer and a wave of exchanges wind down, Robert explains why Satoshi is a time traveler, and the panel takes apart the labs' agreement to pace the frontier.
Listen to the episode on <a href="https://bit.ly/3w9HQ7J">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://bit.ly/3wiIOyy">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://pods.media/the-chopping-block">Pods</a>, <a href="https://fountain.fm/">Fountain</a>, <a href="https://podcastaddict.com/">Podcast Addict</a>, <a href="https://pocketcasts.com/">Pocket Casts</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/">Amazon Music</a>, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights
🔹 CLARITY gets 47 of the 60 votes it needed, with no Democrats in favor, and the sticking point was forced divestiture of Trump-affiliated tokens rather than market structure.
🔹 Robert tallies the losers: no ethics win for the Democrats, no GENIUS rewrite for the banks, no expanded AML hooks, and no developer protections for anyone.
🔹 Haseeb argues adoption protects crypto better than legislation ever will, because nobody takes away a product people already use.
🔹 Prediction markets are politically safe for a reason nobody says out loud: every politician already reads them as better polling data.
🔹 Tom's counterfactual for what would have flipped the vote is blunt. You never should have launched that damn memecoin.
🔹 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token flashes to a 140 billion dollar valuation on 50,000 dollars of liquidity, then falls to twenty cents, and the chart ends up shaped like a laptop.
🔹 Two Robinhood engineers are charged over front-running crypto listings on Hyperliquid for about 50,000 dollars each, and Haseeb explains why the OpenSea conviction got overturned.
🔹 Balancer winds down and the panel asks what became of the ICO treasuries, from Golem's GPUs to Aragon's founder building a neobank.
🔹 Robert makes the case, half in jest, that a future superintelligence sent Satoshi back to 2008 to get humanity building chips early.
🔹 On the AI pause: Tarun on who evaluates the evaluators, Tom on why coordination without China is futile, and Haseeb on why a training freeze just moves the competition to another line item.

Hosts
⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/hosseeb">Haseeb Qureshi</a>, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt">Tom Schmidt</a>, General Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/tarunchitra">Tarun Chitra</a>, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures
⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/rleshner">Robert Leshner</a>, Founder & CEO of Superstate
<a href="http://choppingblock.xyz">Disclosures</a>

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:43 CLARITY day
03:36 Silver linings
05:26 Was it close? Or did everybody loose?
12:23 Why adoption protects crypto better than a bill
15:00 Was DC trading on the CLARITY odds?
18:37 The one thing they would go back & undo
20:48 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token collapses
23:50 Celeb coins never work
26:17 Robinhood engineers indicted over Hyperliquid front-running
31:35 Balancer winds down & the exchange shakeout
35:11 AI arbitration & ideas ahead of their time
37:44 Satoshi is a time traveler
39:14 The AI pause: pacing the frontier
42:57 China calls it a conspiracy
44:40 What do you buy if the doomers are right
45:50 Does an AI pause actually cut CapEx?
50:32 Futile without the Chinese labs
54:05 Harden society instead of slowing the models
56:47 Which doom vectors are real
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The Chopping Block: CLARITY Dies on the Senate Floor, Hunter Biden's LAPTOP Rug, & the AI Pause Pact

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