Mert Mumtaz & Illia Polosukhin: What Happened to Zcash (Full Explanation)

Transcript

Ilia Mert, guys, welcome back. >> Hello. Hey. Hey. >> Hello. Hello. All right, we're not gonna bury the lead here. I mistakenly, idiotically, some could say utterly, stupidly tweeted that the Zcash exploit is terrifying. M, why is this not an exploit? Why am I [ __ ] What actually happened here? and talk to us about just kind of give us the explanation as long as you need to go what happened.

>> Sure. Well, um, fundamentally there's two groups of people here. One are the people uh who were aware that this was a risk with ZK based privacy protocols and then everybody else, right? And so I think you would probably fall into the into the latter. Um but um uh I I had um like the way to think about this is that with any privacy protocol that employs ZK circuits but not necessarily even ZK circuits just different types of math for example Monero has similar issues although they are different class but counterfeiting all the same um and Bitcoin actually has had a similar issue in the past as well. The main difference here is of course it's much harder to detect if you have a fully private pool,

right? And so really the only way you can detect a supply issue is by having these things called turn styles which count the uh net difference between what goes in versus what goes out. So obviously if uh they're structured in such a way that you can't have more than what went in go out, right? So it's supply control in that sense. Um, now this is not new information to Zcash people and a fair amount of investors, I would say, especially ones who've been around for some time. Uh, like even like four months ago, 6 months ago, eight months ago, a year, I always kind of have the same debate on Twitter with Bitcoin people about like, well, Bitcoin

would never do this because they care about the auditability of the supply. And I'm like, well, that is a soluble problem with things like formal verification and um uh like better audits and and and just making the arithmetic for ZK circuits simpler. And so it's always kind of this back and forth. So this is like a pretty well-known trade-off on the risk spectrum. The problem of course is that um a lot of the new people were not aware of this risk and this was made worse by two things. Uh one is that people tweeted that well actually someone just vibe coded an exploit with AI which is of course not what happened.

Um what happened is it was a highly technical and highly domain knowledgeable uh auditor who knows Zcash better than almost anybody in the in the world. Uh and and he was explicitly tasked to helping uh patch bugs if he found anything of the sort. So that's what happened. it wasn't like a cuz like other people would have already found it by then. Um including other cryptographers who are world class who already work on Zcash, right? Um and then the other one of course is that the price went down a ton. Now there's a few reasons for this. One is that there was a network upgrade which made it such that some people actually like Binance for example disabled deposits which kind of delayed the price movement right when

everything nuked uh like yesterday or the day before in the crypto markets. Zcash didn't knew because it literally couldn't. Um but then now you combine that with the huge selloff of the market today, right? Like um QQQ, I believe, uh NASDAQ is down the most it's been since April 2025, right? So there's like a huge selloff and panic everywhere. You combine all of obviously it was the only coin that was still really up and it's just really fun to beat down in that case, right? And so you kind of have this mass hysteria. Uh and then it just keeps piling on and on and on. Uh and so that's that's kind of where we are today.

Okay. So people were saying there's infinite supply in a shielded pool and somebody was just tewing out every time this asset was trading around the $600, $700 mark. Uh that there was just like this supply that was just infinite that you know was always hitting the market. it from what I understand is do we even know if there was if there is this double spend bug or do we need to wait for the next upgrade to know >> right so it just depends on um like your it really just depends on what kind of risk spectrum you're looking for right so if you want full verifiability and full trustlessness like I want to know

this for myself I'm not going to trust anybody um then you would have to wait until the next upgrade which I think actually they will release some uh communications on it in a few hours. So it should be pretty soon. Um in which case basically what will happen is the pool uh the funds from the old pool will go to the new pool as people withdraw and deposit and then if there was an exploit you would know because the turn style would um explicitly flag it. Now some other people including myself make the game theoretical argument that look if you look at the trend of the shielded supply. So for example somebody said that well somebody has been minting an

infinite amount of notes in the shielded pool and then paying off all the koss who then do the marketing. Um well if that were the case then the shielded pool would certainly not increase in size right and it did increase in size this whole time right and again the turn style would also be triggered so then somebody will say something like well actually they would be super sophisticated and would only sell a certain amount and such whatnot and it's like look first of all they're racing against other people who would have also found the exploit second it's not in the nature of any hacker that I've seen in crypto to hide until like they don't gamble on the right? You it goes from 800 to 200 three times in the span. [snorts] So they're either the most diamond-handed person in

crypto history or there's something else to it, right? And so but again, you can you can never trust me on this, what you will have to do is wait until the next upgrade to verify this for yourself. >> And and just to close the loop here that the next or Elliot, did you have something to add here? >> Well, I just wanted to mention like Zcash had this situation before, right? In 201 I think 19 the sapling pool also had something similar where the core team found out that there is a kind of like left you know unconstrained and effectively you know assets were moved out of that pool into new pools there was no uh indication of uh any exploit right so I think like this has happened

it is obviously very unfortunate but it is not like you know something like this would usually be as Merch had like pretty evident from behavior versus Yeah. Like you you wouldn't expect a hacker to also be a Zcash bull that is, you know, paying off Kos to to pump it. >> Yeah. Yeah. That seems like an unlikely scenario. And so, you know, given that this happened before, the process will essentially replicate, you know, the the network upgrade mer that you're describing, you [snorts] know, we'll we'll we'll create this this new pool.

We'll move everything to this new pool. If everything moves to the new pool and the turn style is not triggered and we know that there's no, you know, vulnerability that was exploited, then kind of no harm, no foul. Zcash isn't dead. Everything continues operating as usual. Well, it's actually better than that because once this happens, then the next upgrade that comes after that is the Tachon upgrade. And what's new about Tachon upgrade is that the ZK circuits will be much simpler arithmetic, which means less nonlinear complexity um for people to like hide bugs. But also, it'll be provably sound. It'll use formal verification to mathematically prove that the system behaves exactly as

described. It'll also be quantum proof. And so and like that is a very huge undertaking and that's been in the works for actually a year and a half to two years already. So it'll be timed pretty nicely to like help derisk this narrative that you're now seeing. Right. Right. And like the final thing I'll say on this or maybe not final unless you have more questions is like fundamentally speaking um this the timing here is not an accident, right? There's a reason why you've seen all these recent DeFi exploits as well. [snorts] And the one big difference between um all the vulnerabilities that are still hiding out there in the rest of crypto and DeFi and a privacy pool is that in in theory privacy pools are much

harder to detect, right? Now in practice though what I've seen on different ecosystems is that even when people determine or uh uh detect the exploit the hackers generally are fast enough as you've seen in Drift and the other hacking scenarios that they get away with it regardless. So that's like another game theoretical argument. And so fundamentally speaking all of crypto needs to start doing um formal verification simple arithmetic and open source software. And that's really fundamentally how we're all going to get out of this.

>> Um, merch something from the from the chat here. How do you know what's verified safe or is it until someone else finds a new flaw? Is this um so if this is referring to the new orchard upgrade so like the immediate one that's coming up um well then so I would say yeah you can since that's not formally verified it's the same risk as for example a smart contract on a different blockchain where you're trusting that the smart contract isn't completely [ __ ] Um, one thing I'll add to that though is that the reason this was found is because um, the core teams behind the scenes have started vastly increasing resources to red team their own protocol. That is to

say, there is half a dozen to more auditors with super advanced AI tools constantly looking to break the [ __ ] out of this before anybody else can. So that's actually like why the timing here is is such such that it is. And so that is the risk that is present until um project hakon goes live which is slated to be early uh autumn late summer for when the formal verified version of this will go live. Ilia, I just want to give you a chance as well to add on to the formal verification side of things and just like your your thoughts on why that's so important for for Zcash for privacy for near and confidential intents kind of

what is the you know break down the the formal verification solution for why privacy on chain can can be possible with this technology. So I actually wrote a blog post almost a year ago that was saying that we are approaching an Armageddon in vulnerabilities uh and the only way to solve it is for verification and so we've seen this effectively ramping up since I guess like October November when you know first OPUS came out and effectively all the models capabilities kind of made a jump and uh we continue seeing this kind of throughout like April and May now of

just like the the AI tools are getting better and better and yes you can use them for good which I mean in this case the auditor was uh and and you know same on near side you know we have everybody effectively equipped with AI systems to scan to find vulnerabilities to kind of uh audit code as it comes out but same time uh we've seen you know pretty crazy hacks happening right um across across ecosystems. And so formification is the only way where you can actually guarantee up to the level of the what you specified that it's working correctly. And there's actually

interesting ways how the specification itself should work. And one of the positions we took is you actually want the specification almost be on the level of a transaction. And so I think for Zcash and for shielded pool it's very much possible to say hey I want to prove that when I put money into the shielded pool I will be able to withdraw it at all times and you know the total supply of the token effectively stays the same right and so if you prove that like it's a very simple property I want to put money in I can withdraw them out and total supply stays the same you effectively proved everything around this to to like prove that property and so I think that's a very like fundamental where almost like your wallet your client

software your you know uh explorer can prove this properties to you in a very kind of human understandable way and now underneath there's a lot of mass you know make sure the code runs the runtimes run like there's a lot of hard work to make this happen and AI will do the hard work to be clear um but the kind of the properties we want to prove are pretty simple and so because there's a lot of like uh additional thought on formification now that says like hey but what if the spec is wrong? What if there's something wrong and so that's kind of my point there. We can make spec from your perspective you want to make sure uh some properties hold.

>> Yeah. And and that's crucial in this kind of like private environment to be able to have that verifiable proof that there wasn't this kind of like infinite mint that now feels like a bit like like people are calling it an irreversible you know damage to Zcash. I'm you know Mr. I know you don't feel that way, but I mean people are saying that there was just years on end of this infinite mint happening and this formal verification technology seems to be the the solution to enable privacy at scale while also having that provable verifiability.

>> Well, Mer, before you go ahead, it also sounds like we're going to get an answer here. Like there's going to be a network upgrade, there's going to be a new pool, we're going to find out whether this infinite mint actually happened. Yeah, exactly. I mean like again this is not the first time this has happened in cryp. I mean for for example this actually happened twice on Salana last year um uh with with the ZK circus and we actually disabled the future um for for um it was for confidential transfers. Uh it happened in Zcash's future. I mean Zcash has three pools for a reason right now. Uh it happened in Monero. It happened in Bitcoin. Um this this stuff can happen. But like the thing that gives me confidence with Zcash is that and and this is also why I'm relatively bearish on privacy

protocols that are built on as smart contracts on um like a like um um different type of solutions because unless you have some auditability. [snorts] So for example, near confidential stuff has some auditability built in. So like if something happens you can actually find out but like some of these things don't and they kind of frame it as an ideological thing but it's actually not that because the thing that gives you confidence about Zcash is that you have literally the best cryptographers like the people who actually pioneered ZK snarks looking at it at all times with a concentration of scrutiny and security and so and and then you know again I made the game theoretical argument some people don't

like the argument so I'm not going to keep making it but like you said it will be you will be able to determine it in the next uh upgrade. I I fundamentally don't think it's irreversible in any way. Now if there is an exploit like if the turnstyle does trigger that obviously is a big hit and that would really really complicate things depending on the severity right like for example if it was used to exploit like I don't know a million versus $500 million that's a big difference >> will will we know the amount as well >> but fundamentally you you'll have a a range of the amount but you won't know the exact amount unless the entire pool empty. So, for example, um assume that orchard right now has a

billion dollars in it and assume it goes down to $10 million and the turn style is still not triggered. Well, then you know that it's at least contained to the amount still remaining in that pool. But unless the entire pool exits, you'll never know deterministically for that exact $10 million remaining as well. Anyway, the way I think of this, of course, is you invest based on future expectations and time horizons, right? [snorts] So assuming there is no uh issue that is found with the new migration and assuming that you now have tachion coming with formal verification well then now you have a risk profile that is orders of magnitude different than it was before. Now obviously that also means you know depending on how degenerate you are the risk profile also looks much different right uh because

now people who took on that risk took on that risk and won but then some people don't want to do that right it's just completely dependent on who you are as a independent investor >> m one one last question on you know the way in which this is going to move forward and and you mentioned that you know this new pool gets created the Zcash that's currently in the orchid pool is going to move to the new pool if if we get all the way down you know from a billion in the old moves to the and we're left with say you know 10 million for example. I is that movement a manual process that everyone that is currently in the pool is going to have to go to the pool click a few buttons move their assets. Is there you know a a potential that you

know someone died, someone lost their keys, lost their wallet, right? Like that would stay in the old pool. >> Correct. Yes. So that is that is a good point. So what will happen? So, there's actually a few uh there's actually a silver lining here in that, you know, people kind of troll Zcash for having optional uh transparency. Uh but it just so happens that most people actually trade based on the the transparent pool. Um so like when you see it on Salana or Binance, it's a transparent pool that you're interacting with. And almost the v I would say almost all maybe not all but like 90% 80% of it of the shielded pool interactions are through the zodal wallet like formerly called Zashi because those are the guys who made it

normal to be able to interact with the privacy pool. [snorts] And so what will happen and I'm speculating here but I'm relatively sure is the zoda will have an upgrade. It'll give you a push notification and it'll say, "Okay, migrate your friends to the new pool." It will not be a full stack entire migration. So, for example, if you have 5,375 Ze, you're not going to unshield that and then reshield it right back because that'll completely expose your privacy. What will probably happen is it'll be in set amount and everybody will do like batches of like a 100 ze or a thousand ze or something like this. And so, nobody's privacy will be exposed. And then if my math is correct in that it is probably 80% of users that are zodal

users that make up that pool, then you'll get the certainty of that money, which is the vast majority of the money. But uh I mean, yeah, if people are literally [ __ ] dead or lost their keys, then their stuff will just stay there. Um but again, like that doesn't give the attacker any more leverage because the turn style keeps track of the inputs and outputs. >> Okay. Okay. Okay. So, the most likely scenario here is that there's a nonzero amount left in the or orchid pool. >> Yeah. I mean, so sapling still has money, right? And sapling was effectively deprecated like five, six years ago.

>> And it's Yeah. It's like some people lost money, some people, but like at that point, it's kind of a, you know, rounding error. >> Yeah. The important thing is that there is no infinite like the way this was worded is kind of confusing because people assume there is an infinite mint bug for all of Zcash, but that is not correct. It is an infinite double spend problem within the orchard pool itself, >> right? >> But once most of that capital leaves it, then it'll be completely contained. And so like it's it's it's just not like you know the I already made this point but like when people are like oh well somebody was just minting an infinite amount of Zack and selling into the market it's like well then how did the price go up right like if if somebody's selling an infinite amount of coins was

somebody also buying an infinite amount of coins to to move the price up like it just there's some math that doesn't math here. >> Yeah. And and so kind of switching gears here, Ilia, like Zcash was, you know, obviously a a piece of um you know, an asset that was transacted quite a bit on Near Intense. Um looking at what Near Intense is is doing today, is there anything that you have to do in order to you know maintain the confidentiality when things are going and using confidential near intense? Is there any adjustments that you have to make into the near intense protocol in order to adjust for this upgraded Zcash?

>> So few few things on near intense side. So one is first of all in past two days we actually had net inflow into Zcash uh through near intense. So people are uh buying in. I think the as price was going down people who who believe in protocol are are coming in which is uh which is exciting to see. The second thing is we actually do support going directly in and out of shielded pool. So we will need to adjust and and obviously we paused that uh to adjust to the new pool uh and obviously we'll be waiting for the tachion um to to kind of really support that and I think from our side I mean what Mer mentioned right we've took

a position that we want this auditability uh both because we don't want to facilitate crime and and like when you talk about trading this is usually where the crime is happening. So we kind of have a higher bar than you know just having an asset and at the same time you know we want to continue expanding what the confidentiality offers right lending and and other use cases and so the kind of near intense confidentiality itself right has auditability we you know running our kind of AI based shield system to effectively propagate if there's any like risk uh analysis from the incoming

transactions it. So there's like a lot more machinery running kind of inside our shielded pool in a way >> um to effectively enable uh kind of understanding that the whole system is functioning correctly. And so I think like for us, yeah, it it's a lot, you know, monitoring situation uh with Zcash and making sure we support support the team uh as as they upgrade uh and then offer everyone a place to kind of have confidentiality for all your assets on confidential intents.

>> Yeah. Uh Gareth says, "M sipping Hinekin on the stream is the best legend." Um M. So we're going to get an outcome here, right? Um, can you just please explain to us what you think the not to turn into like investing terms but more of just like where the protocol goes like bare case, bull case, what like what should the community how should the community think about each of the scenarios from like a long-term protocol perspective. I don't think you're going anywhere regardless, but people want to know kind of like the course of action given what the information will be from the outcome. Like when we're thinking

about what the outcome is going to be, what's like your, you know, maximum optimistic case, thus kind of back to business as regular, what what's kind of the more kind of bare or pessimistic case and how do we build back, uh, you know, if we're there somewhere in the middle? >> Sure. So, I can tell you what I'm doing personally, right? Because so, so, first of all, like I'm not going to I'm not going to [ __ ] sell. Like, if if you go to bat for a protocol, uh, and you you live by the sword, you just die by the sword, okay? Uh, there is no desertion happening here. I already did this with Salana. Um, fundamentally, no new information has surfaced except for the fact that one less bug exists. This is how I think of it in my own head.

People can disagree. I don't care. Okay. So you then look at the different types of possibilities. Okay. So let's think of the worst possible case. The worst [snorts] possible case is that there was some minting of notes in the orchard pool which means that there is a race basically to get out of that pool as soon as possible and there's some collateral damage um assuming some people can't get out, right? And depending on the scope of that, so for example, it can be on the order of $5 million. It can be on the order of $50 million depending on the severity of that. There's obviously quite a difference in possibilities. So, for example, if it was like $50 million or

something, it those users can probably made whole and then there can probably be social consensus on the new way forward. If it's like a billion dollars, I don't know, right? That that starts getting quite complex. So, I'm not going to sugarcoat that. That is always a possibility. So, you should always underwrite that in your risk model. Now, as it stands, I personally think and many others, including Josh and Zuko and whatnot, think that there was no exploit, right? And we can't ask you to trust anybody on this because that's not how crypto works. You should be able to verify it. And so, the way forward from here is that there's a new network upgrade. The pools are migrated and then you find out for yourself that there is no exploit. Once that happens, then

again, like I said, the next upgrade is a formally verified quantum proof and more scalable shielded pool in Project Tachion, which is how I got into Zcash in the first place two years ago, right? And I think that is one of the most bullish possible network upgrades that I've seen in the history of crypto, which is again why I got into Zcash. It's going to increase scale. is going to be a quantum proof and it's going to formally verify this entire class of auditability bugs that has been a drag on ZK and privacy protocols since existence. Right? [snorts] So that's a bullc case and also it's a bullc case because um you you can kind of make the argument that look Zcash does hold a lot of private value more than I think it's

actually the biggest shielded pool in crypto and so you have the most people looking at it bad guys and good guys and so you start developing this Lindy effect of well clearly this is the one that's been proven to be safe because everybody's looking at it and formally verifying and all this stuff. So assuming we make it through that, which again, this is all this year. This is not in three years. This is not a 5year road map. This is going to happen throughout the summer and the fall. It's been underway this whole time. So that's the bull case and the bare case is what I said. So I'm not selling. Uh I am here to make crypto work and privacy and uh scale to planetary scale and there will be no giving up.

>> Man, that gave Jordan Bell for it. I'm not in leaving vibes. >> Ilia, anything on your side about just kind of thinking ahead for the future of Zcash as a network in terms of its importance um in the space and kind of what this outcome means to Near as well as to yourself and your personal holdings etc. >> For sure. Yeah. Um I mean Zash has effectively took this spot which is what is the sovereign asset that is kind of truly belongs to you and is not under kind of constant surveillance and this is not a point in time right it's a trajectory this is the evolution right none of these protocols you know near

Salana Zcash are frozen in time this is why you know me mer toy zuko you know Josh everyone is working right? We're not chilling. Uh it's all about, you know, evolving this into the system that we want to see. And so, uh kind of the way I see this, you know, yeah, Techon, I mean, obviously been talking with the team a bunch, uh before like lots of great upgrades, lots of innovation happening to really bring this forward and kind of keep evolving what Zcash is offering. Uh same for near right we've continuously innovating and adding more pieces to our stack to really offer um the the solutions that we believe you

know will bring this user owned internet. So yeah like I I see this as you know bugs will happen you know AI has accelerated this the there was indeed enough kind of controls to to mitigate it we'll I mean hopeful hope hopefully and again based on all the data we've seen there's hasn't been an exploit but we'll see this as this transition happen and then from there I I think yeah like the whole space needs to effectively adopt for verification across the stack and and kind of in this new paradigm and I think this is going to happen also like within

next six months. Uh and uh yeah I mean for for near right I mean this week obviously been very volatile on the markets [laughter] but the cool thing is you know the the near intensive actually makes money on volatility and so yeah we've had I think we had like 150k revenue a day which is like 50 something million annualized of buy effectively buyback near right. So, so effectively as you know, you know, even if people are selling, the near protocol is buying. [laughter] >> We had you hit on with Arthur and Arthur literally asked you like a long-term view question like, "Oh man, when's near

going to be, you know, deflationary?" Like, I'm really calculating this into my thesis, right? you know, goes next week, dumps his all of his near when you [laughter] be Andy, before before you get there, a quick question on the buybacks. Is are all of the near intense fees going to buy back near? >> So, so the near intense protocol, which is kind of the main bus that effectively matches and settles the transactions, those fees are go to buy back near. Now we also run a front end right near.com and few other components those are paying salaries for people right at least at the moment I mean near.com

actually yeah we've we've started buying back near with those fees as well >> so so we we there is like actually the goal for near foundation which I put like uh last year was to become first cash neutral and then near near neutral I want to stop selling near I want to actually buy buy near as a foundation And I like on top of the protocol and near buying I want as a foundation to like be cash neutral positive to be able to I mean and there's obviously a lot of like regulatory stuff around that but effectally not not be a seller because like we believe in near why are we selling it we want to be buying it right so so and like all foundations actually are sellers right now because they need to pay salaries they pay to like so

we've been flipping and like we we've actually had cash neutral uh kind of months um obviously depending on where the market and and some other things are. And so that's actually the goal is like hey we want to be not just deflationary on near we want to also like as we you think of all the teams working on different components of the near stack like that also should be ideally net uh buyer and uh yeah so like that's kind of how we structuring this to really uh you know keep accumulating across the board. >> Yeah. Yeah. there's you know near is part of this cohort in you know the this industry that actually has revenue which is a very select you know choice uh set of companies and e so even amongst these

companies we're seeing you know this bifurcation of those who have these pre-commitments with what they're going to do with that revenue right there's programmatically enforced buybacks with the revenue versus those who maybe just kind of use the revenue venue for buybacks when they feel like it and >> yeah, sporadically. >> Sporadically, right? And so you're saying, you know, kind of the near protocol, the near intense protocol uses all of its revenue for buybacks and then there's and so that's programmatic that happens according to the chain and then there's other >> the transaction happen, right? There's a fee and that you know we already own the near intent. So the fee is near, >> right?

>> It's good. It's good to have the swap already embedded into the swap. So, >> yeah. Yep. And then that creates more fees. The buybacks creates more fees. [laughter] >> Um, I just wanted to ask you like, you know, we literally had the show with Arthur last week and then he comes out and dumps all of his near. Like, you know, I I'm I'm looking at the episode on our YouTube and I'm just like this this doesn't even feel right. Uh, did you give a [ __ ] or do you just like whatever, traders going to trade? >> I mean, traders going to trade, right? I mean merch started with that like you know pe people have very different uh different approaches like I think I'm here for the long run right I've been here since 2018 I've seen you know now

like I guess three bare markets right we started in bare market cue the meme you know I was born in I was raised in bare um and yeah I mean like you know obviously we've had investors who bought in and sold like last bear like we've we've seen kind of all of this at the end here you know we we're building this future we are built kind of revenue streams and we're like using these revenue streams to buy back token and I like I you know again working toward reducing inflation and figuring out how we make it deflationary so that as we stack near right there is actually less near available period on the market right that's that's a goal

and we have like a pretty clear plan uh on how we're going to get there. >> No. Um, Ilia, we just got a a question in the chat. Does Ilia have Jensen's phone number? Does Jensen ever give him crap for being in crypto? [laughter] >> I mean, I've I've definitely gotten crap. Not crap, but we're like, why are you still in crypto? Uh, and my answer is like that that is the coordination and like ownership layer for the AI, right? And I mean that's like I mean I'm going to repeat my thesis but AI is you know how you interface with computing and blockchain is how all of this coordination will happen on the back end right

>> and so like these two technologies go hand in hand and uh again we we bringing all this piece together uh for everyone to enjoy. >> How many energy drinks does Andy smash per day? Yeah. [laughter] Got it. Uh M last thing here from the audience. Someone wants to know if when you're going to shave your beard and unjinx us from this uh catastrophic time here. >> Uh I was actually so I I made a post uh last year. I I don't quite remember what it was, but it was something like if Solano is not at 300 by end of year, then I'm going to get a mustache. Um, now the the problem is I need to ask my girlfriend's parents to uh for for her hand in marriage in in some sense

basically uh at some point. And I I feel like doing that with a mustache will get me an automatic no. So um there's just got to be or the Zach Prize right now will get me >> Yeah. Salana under 300 Mike and automatic. >> Uh but it is coming. I'm I'm looking for the best possible mustache style. >> Okay. Okay. And then any any words on Arthur Hayes's trading strategies, Mark? >> Uh I'm Well, how do I Look, I mean, fundamentally, I don't give a [ __ ] Um, if you get emotional because some random dude [ __ ] who's

made his entire living by swing trading, then he has edge over you and he owns you in some sense. Uh, he occupies way too much space in your mental uh framework. Like, and and I'm just not going to let that happen. Like, I don't care. Uh, he doesn't he doesn't know what he doesn't know. That's totally okay. He can be sidelined. Um, the reality is me and I are builders. Ilia much more so I just mostly talk on Twitter and we know what we can do to help improve these protocols while improving the entire industry in the meantime and I think that's just completely undervalued. It takes conviction. It takes a lot of pain and

sweat but fundamentally we are doing it and we'll continue to do it and then people can come on later when they realize um the opportunity as well. >> Love it gentlemen. Great vibes on a uh bloody bloody Friday here. Thanks for spending some time with us. Fun times. Thank you for uh >> I can't believe that Zcash [ __ ] nuked the QQQ, man. >> Down. >> It's all because of Zcash, man. >> Yeah. >> Everybody's selling stocks. That's why. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> My girlfriend just dumped me, you know, she's with Zuko now. [laughter] >> All right, guys. Thanks for coming on.

It was fun. Have a great weekend. All right. >> All right. [screaming] Thank you. Yes.