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’re joined by Jon Charbonneau and Ryan Watkins to unpack the bombshell news of Robinhood Chain—an Arbitrum-based network debuting tokenized U.S. stocks, 3× crypto perps, and that head-scratching $500 K liquidity cap. From riffing on whether proof-of-stake yields are just “money in a box,” to debating Solana’s first U.S. staked ETF, to sizing up the looming perp wars between Robinhood and Coinbase, the crew maps a common thread: corporate chains and regulatory work-arounds are colliding with crypto’s decentralization ideals, forcing builders, traders, and even ETF hawks to rethink where real security, fairness, and opportunity will live next.

Show highlights

🔹 Robinhood Chain Revealed – Why the trading-app giant paid up to launch an Arbitrum-based “Robinhood Chain,” starting with 24/5 perpetuals and tokenized U.S. stocks, plus a rumored $500 K–liquidity cap that has Crypto Twitter howling.

🔹 Tokenized-Stock Gold Rush – From Tesla and SpaceX pre-IPO shares to on-chain S&P stalwarts: does 24/7 trading finally make equity tokens stick, or is it just another CFD in disguise?

🔹 Perps Arms Race – Coinbase’s 5-year “quasi-perp” futures vs. Robinhood’s 3×-leverage launch vs. Hyperliquid’s 20× turbo deck—who wins the battle for retail flow?

🔹 Solana ETF First-Mover – RexShares files a staked-SOL C-Corp ETF, beating BlackRock to the punch and testing Wall Street’s appetite after ETH’s lukewarm debut.

🔹 Proof-of-Stake Reality Check – The crew dismantles the “economic security” myth, asks whether validator cartels make inflation rewards pointless, and floats proof-of-governance as the next model.

🔹 Hyperliquid vs. The World – Why a single Tokyo data center is eating CLOB volume, what zk-rollup challengers are planning, and how latency games redefine “decentralized exchange.”

🔹 $2 B Prediction-Market Beef – Paradigm-backed Kalshi clashes with PolyMarket after a viral “little rats” tweet; inside the influencer war and the CFTC license flex.

🔹 Conference FOMO No More – New-York-privileged hosts roast ETH CC in Cannes and declare the age of fly-to-France crypto tourism officially over.

🔹 Reg-Tech vs. Fin-Tech – From transfer agents to T+1 settlement: why outdated TradFi plumbing, not blockchains, still blocks global access to U.S. securities.

🔹 Super-App Skepticism – The panel pokes holes in “super-app” buzzwords and explains why sequencing—product-first, chain-later—matters more than catchy slogans.

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

Guests

⭐️ Ryan Watkins, Co-Founder of Syncracy Capital

⭐️ Jon Charbonneau, Co-founder & General Partner at DBA

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

02:59 Robinhood Chain

15:05 Debate on Tokenized Stocks

27:18 Perpetuals (Perps) in the Crypto Market

37:15 Robinhood's New Crypto Traders

39:26 The Solana ETF Approval

41:17 Understanding Staking and ETFs

43:36 The Future of Proof of Stake

46:20 Governance in Ethereum and Other Chains

56:26 Corporate Chains and Validator Selection

01:04:31 Polymarket vs. Kalshi

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LIFE LATELY: SUMMER WRAP-UP | Love Ya, Bye Ep. 42

Love Ya, Bye with Emma and Maggie MacDonald

Introduction

The AI-powered Podcast Player