BUILD BRIDGES

“this actually had a compounding effect in that, there's a lot of positions on Aave because they rehypothecate the ETH collateral quite heavily. This liquidity issue now turns into a solvency issue on the USD markets potentially. So that the there's a lot of positions there that are ETH collateral borrowing stable coins. And so, normally, when the market is is there's there's enough liquidity, the liquidations on a ETH USD position can function just fine. The problem is is that with an impairment in the ETH market, if the price of ETH drops, there's no more liquidity to sell and then recap like, recapitalize or basically pay off the loans that are reaching margin calls.”

“And in Hollywood, this has been a really good lesson as well. Like you'd be surprised how many people here are like, I will work with you even if your talent is lower than other people, if you show up on time and you respond to emails and you're a part of the project and you're respectful to everybody. Like people think of celebrities getting special treatment and they do, but everybody would rather not be giving a celebrity special treatment. They would rather work with somebody who is maybe not quite as good, but just better to work with.”

“I think a lot of people were caught off guard by the fact that, like, you know, Aave, which is kind of like a core pillar of the the industry, through this smaller relatively collateral RSEs, they've had exposure to, you know, what turned out to be a pretty unsafe, like, bridging setup. And it's pretty challenging to, like, map out this whole dependency graph of, you know, you're just a depositor in Aave Eth. It's you you know, on the face of it, it seems like it should be a very safe asset, but you're actually exposed, you know, through a couple layers of intermediation to, you know, a one of one DDN bridge.”

“So I'm about at the right area. It's midnight. I've been on this bus for 10 hours. And finally I see headlights on the side of the road and I tell the driver, I'm like, let me off, let me off. I just get off the bus, the bus drives away and the headlights also drive away. It wasn't him. It was so cold. Like my hands were dead. And I found out that he wasn't on a car. He was on his elementary school friend's motorcycle. And I knew it was his elementary school friend's motorcycle because his elementary school friend was also on the motorcycle. So we three person motorcycled it in the dark with my suitcases all the way back to the village.”

“And the feedback from the publishers in 2018 and 2019 was the book is not pro-China and it's not anti-China, so it has no market in America. You could be either pro-China or anti-China. That's it. Yeah, like either you're pro or you're against, but there's no room for comedy and life and reality. And so I was like, I thought that was kind of bullshit.”

“DeFi and just the whole crypto industry, it is kinda playing on hard mode because, we can't rely on just, like, moral hazard and someone bailing us out. If anything, like, maybe the closest, we have in crypto to, like, a lender of last resort would be someone like a Binance or a Tether, where they're extremely profitable. They have a huge balance sheet. They have a lot of sort of excess reserves where, they can backstop, losses. You know, private got hacked. Binance, had a loan out to them to make sure that they could still cover withdrawals.”

“we need sort of, like, independent risk ratings within within DeFi. Right now, there's, like, a a, like, an incentive problem with, with, like, the the managers of these risk curators, I guess, is the term that's used. So, like, basically, the ones who are optimizing for growth, revenue are the same ones that are underwriting the risk of the collateral that are being onboarded. And so this is not what happens in in TradFi. There's, like, the risk side and the growth side are two separate and, like, you know, walled off entities such that the growth side submits a proposition to the risk side and the risk side from purely risk, like, sort of perspective says if it's if it's a go or no go and what the concerns are.”

“you can do, DeFi custody in the right way, and it's been actually, some of the oldest protocols have been doing this the right way, which is, governance under time locks. And where there are multisigs that have, like, custody of funds, they need to be under time locks. And then for immediate reaction time, you have these, like, freezing multisigs that can react right away, but you need this, like, the custodian of the assets to always like, any sort of, like, unexpected movement that can be done with the assets, you need this under a time lock. This is a this is a massive, deterrence, to North Korea.”

“I think Bitcoin's totally fine. I do though think that they will burn those coins or freeze them or do something. They're not gonna let a $100,000,000,000 of Bitcoin get burned. But what I think the sorry, using another analogy here, but the other analogy of an ideological movement doing this is like the church, which everyone loves to compare Bitcoin to. I think it'll be fine. I mean, the church kinda went through this when they had to reconcile with the Roman emperor and, like, you and I wouldn't care about this, but in Christianity, you can only worship one god. Roman emperors were version like, worshiped as gods. How do you reconcile?”

“And then out from behind the ship, this little vessel comes out, like a little power boat, and it was the Japanese Coast Guard. And they start yelling at me in Japanese. And I'm like, I'm the comedian. They realized I was supposed to be on the ship. So they let me board the Coast Guard vessel, and we start chasing the ship out to sea. And eventually, they're like, he's supposed to be on the ship. And they threw down, I'm not joking, a rope ladder. And so at speed, I had, so I brought a suitcase and a duffel bag, and I put the duffel bag around me and tightened it. So I could kind of like wear the suitcase as an uneven backpack as I walked up four flights of rope ladder.”

“So what happened is that there is, a bridging mechanism for RS e to go to other chains. This is called a lock and mint bridge. So, basically, the RSE is is natively issued on Ethereum. And so if you want to go to, another chain like Arbitrum, you would then lock the RSE in the this is a layer zero bridge on Ethereum, and then it would send a message which would mint the, RSC. It's like an IOU for the backing that's sitting on Ethereum. So what happened is that, there was a forged message, from the security mechanism within the layer zero ecosystem. Again, this North Korea was able to penetrate deeply into the infrastructure layer here.”

“Arbitrum took what I or off chain labs, I think, took what I thought was a great move, which was they froze about, you know, between around $65,000,000 worth of these stolen assets. But I see some people saying that, well, this is MultisigFi instead of DeFi, and we kinda to me, I interpret this as this is the ideological backbone of crypto colliding with the real world. Well, I think, you know, North Korea not having $65,000,000 in that money going back to users, like, the outcome is unambiguously good.”

“It's really kind of scary because it's like, when I started getting into Chinese cultural exchange, I was like, surely there are hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of these cultural bridges. But nowadays, it's like, every year, there's fewer. A lot of the bridges are being destroyed purposefully, which is really disgusting. I always figured like, if the bridges died, it would be from like atrophy. But I never thought somebody would like purposely take a hammer to something like the Fulbright program to purposely destroy the exchange.”

“The best one I found if I wanted to talk about, just like I saw this in society. If I said I saw it on my Ponyo Char, like the circles, WeChat circles, everybody had the highest trust for WeChat circles, WeChat moments. Which I always thought was interesting because that's like in some way the least regulated because it's just a timeline feed. It shows you all your fault, everybody you're friends with, everything they share in a timeline feed with no editing. And weirdly enough, that's the most trust we can get now out of the media is like no triage of important or unimportant. The fact that it all shows up means it's the least censored news we get.”

“In order to do a setup well as a comedian, you need to know what the audience knows and what they don't know. So in America, if I say, like, you know, oh, my family is middle class, my mom drove a Toyota Camry. That kind of like, that reference is an anchor for people, but my mom driving a Toyota Camry means very different things in China. As a comedian, in order to make the joke work, you need to know your audience well enough to set them up well, so that when I tell the funny story or have the reveal or the reversal, I'm able to express that reversal in a way that they are not only understand, but are comfortable with and actually feel on an emotional level.”

“The other the other kind of weak point here was that the KelpDAO team used, like, a one of one DBN, which means that you're just relying on the layer zero laps, sort of core infrastructure. If they had used, you know, a deviant set that required two of three or something like this with different independent operators, it would have been this much harder for North Korea to, like, compromise each of these independent organizations. So I think that was that was clearly a failure as well as is using a one of one implementation was, you know, not the right choice.”

“AI in general, you know, North Korea, I don't know, you know, I have no idea what their operation is like. But, like, assume there's some number of humans that are incredibly intelligent that are, like, working through and doing these hacks. But, you know, humans are, you know, I did security and and, you know, university and stuff. It's incredibly, like, taxing on human minds to kind of go through binary and stuff. It's it's it's super hard. Computers, AI are are are very good at this. So, like, for me, like, you know, I I just think it's there's certain number of human beings that are are doing this are now being leveraged, like, probably 10 x.”

“Master Ding, as my teacher, one of his big things that he was like, fundamentally, this is what it means to be a professional comedian, is you show up for the show. You like, you might not kill every night. That's the way comedy works. Some nights you don't do a good job, but a professional shows up for the show. He was like, I just don't care. You said you were going to be here. Like I can deal with people who are not funny and they get better. I can't deal with people who say they're going to show up and they don't.”

“And you know where he wanted to go? The number one place he wanted to go. Is this random parking lot in Monterey Park, because there's a Chinese influencer on Xiaohongshu, on Red Note, who's called Ding Pongzi, and Ding Pongzi has basically is running a channel about living in America as a homeless person. So he was homeless in California legally, as a legal resident, and started blogging about basically being a activist, for lack of a better term, for illegal workers in America. This is one of my days when I realized that old Hollywood is over. That this guy from China who grew up watching Hollywood movies comes to LA, and the place he wants to go is a parking lot, because of social media.”