Mert and Illia autopsy a brutal weekend in crypto: Saylor's $3M test sale that taught him there's no sell button, the Zcash bug Claude found that could've minted unlimited counterfeit ZEC, formal verification as the bulwark against AI attackers, and whether NEAR's agentic commerce vision is real.
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 we've got two heavy hitters: NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Helius founder Mert Mumtaz.
We kick things off with the weekend market meltdown -- Saylor sold 32 BTC for the first time in four years, STRC is trading below par, and Mert argues the real damage is that Saylor sucks all the air out of the room for actual crypto innovation. Then we get into the biggest story of the week: a critical bug discovered in Zcash's Orchard ZK circuit using Claude Opus 4.8 that could have allowed infinite counterfeit minting inside the shielded pool. Mert walks us through the emergency soft fork, the Ironwood migration, and why formal verification is about to become table stakes. Illia makes the case that AI-powered attackers have a permanent asymmetric advantage and that we need real-time on-chain detection systems to survive. Tom coins the analogy of the episode: we're moving from building boats to building spaceships. We close with Illia's pitch for NEAR's agent commerce vision – $240M in single-day volume, private intents, and the claim that agent-to-agent trustless commerce is already live – while Mert remains a friendly skeptic. Let's get into it.Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Hosts
⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly
Guest
⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius
⭐️ Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR Protocol
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:17 Weekend Crypto Meltdown & Bitcoin Crash
02:52 Saylor, STRC & the DAT Death Spiral Fears
11:51 "No Sell Button" — Saylor's Lesson Learned
13:14 Zcash Bug: 50% Crash Explained
20:30 The Fix: Ironwood Pool & Formal Verification
23:11 AI vs Crypto Security: The Attacker Advantage
27:21 What Is Formal Verification?
30:07 Spaceship-Grade Smart Contract Security
31:36 OPSEC, Oracles & Anomaly Detection
36:08 Cypherpunk Dilemma: Stop the Hack or Not?
38:37 Will DeFi Survive? Long Math
42:49 NEAR's AI Agents & Intents Vision
48:43 Is Agentic Commerce Real? Mert's Skepticism
Disclosures
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