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, Doug Colkitt, Founder Ambient Finance & Founding Contributor at Fogo, joins us as one of the wildest weekends in crypto history drags us back on air: a record $19B+ in liquidations, gas spiking toward $400, exchange APIs wobbling, and ADL ripping through perps as hedges vanished. We unpack what ADL actually does, why delta-neutral farmers got nuked, and how Binance’s USDe and staked ETH/SOL pegs snapped amid index design and mint/redeem gaps—followed by refunds. We get into HLP vs. LLP (vaults vs. winning traders), the Hyperliquid “whale” short ahead of the tariff tweet, cross-margin reflexivity that torched alts, and why market makers wore outsized pain. Then we zoom out to infra: sequencers, force-inclusion in practice, and the case for on-chain clearing plus real insurance funds before the next

Listen to the episode on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unchained/id1123922160">Apple Podcasts</a>,<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1cJrrfGY1SKBIRn5noKSAf"> Spotify</a>, <a href="https://pods.media/unchained">Pods</a>, <a href="https://fountain.fm/show/XCVXRPNvY3wLrlMHwAMs">Fountain</a>, <a href="https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4129535">Podcast Addict</a>,<a href="https://pca.st/podcast/bb16e6b0-1469-0134-a447-13e6b3913b15"> Pocket Casts</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f5ec630d-4dfa-4e73-baca-3f5062927c55/unchained?refMarker=null">Amazon Music</a>, or on your favorite podcast platform.
 
Show highlights
🔹 Record wipeout — $19B+ liquidations, 1.6M traders rekt, gas spiking to ~$400 while major exchanges wobbled.
🔹 ADL, decoded — What happens when perps run out of counterparties; socialized losses, P&L/leverage ranking, and why hedges vanished.
🔹 Delta-neutral nuked — Cross-venue long/short farmers turned naked as ADL picked off one leg first.
🔹 Binance peg breaks — USDe to ~$0.68 on Binance, staked ETH/SOL snapped; refunds >$250M after index/oracle and mint-redeem gaps.
🔹 Flows vs. “attack” — Earn users rushing to USDT + copy-trade momentum likely amplified the depeg more than cunning index games.
🔹 DeFi vs. CeFi — Perp DEX performance broadly comparable; transparency gaps in ADL policies and liquidation mechanics laid bare.
🔹 Vaults vs. traders — HLP vs. LLP outcomes show who platforms chose to protect in tail events—and the retention risks of clipping winners.
🔹 OI collapse — Hyperliquid open interest ~15B → ~6B; cross-margin reflexivity helped nuke alts far worse than BTC.
🔹 Why it felt one-sided — Market-maker/API failures and risk misallocation made typically “safe” actors eat outsized losses.
🔹 The whale short — A massive Hyperliquid short pre-tariff tweet sparks insider-vs-coincidence debate.
🔹 Infra faceplants — Sequencers down, force-inclusion in theory only, docs offline—while base L1s largely kept ticking.
🔹 What to fix — On-chain clearing, real insurance funds, sane ADL ranking, robust mint/redeem, and better index/oracle design before the next shock.
Hosts
⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/hosseeb">Haseeb Qureshi</a>, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/Rleshner">Robert Leshner</a>, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/tarunchitra">Tarun Chitra</a>, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures⭐️<a href="https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt">Tom Schmidt</a>, General Partner at Dragonfly 
 
Guest
⭐️ <a href="https://x.com/0xdoug">Doug Colkitt</a>, Founder Ambient Finance & Founding Contributor at Fogo
 
 <a href="http://choppingblock.xyz">⁠⁠Disclosures⁠⁠</a> 
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:11 $19B+ Liquidated
04:35 Personal Experiences & Reactions
08:30 Understanding Auto De-leveraging (ADL)
14:37 Binance & USDe Incident
23:19 DeFi vs CeFi Performance
26:05 Zero-Sum & Greedy Algorithms
34:26 Vaults & Trader Protection
39:43 Market Reactions & Trader Sentiments
44:33 Infrastructure Failures & OI Collapse
46:56 Insider Trading Allegations & Market Manipulation
52:14 Future of Perpetual DEXs
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The Chopping Block: Inside the $19B+ Perp Crash, ADL Explained, Binance’s USDe/Staked-Token Depeg, and the Hyperliquid Whale Debate

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