The Chopping Block: Venezuela Sanctions Drama + Polymarket Insider Trading + Zcash Foundation Exodus

The first thing is like looking at it as an investor. It's pretty clear that there were some real big diligence failures here by everybody who underwrote this. And just, you know, you don't touch you don't you don't mess with sanctions. Sanctions are really, really serious. And the your exposure under US law, sanctions are strict liability. It's not enough to say like, oh, I didn't, whoopsie daisy. Doesn't matter. Strict liability means that you violated sanctions, punishments come on you regardless of what your intent was. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two fun. Now your losses are on someone else's knowledge. Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm in the trading firms who are very involved. I like that heat of the ultimate possibility. DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first, we got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. We also got Robert, the crypto connoisseur and czar of Super State. Good morning. Yes. We got Tarun, the giga brain, and grand poobah at gauntlet. Yo. And I am Asib, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see choppingblock.xyz for more disclosures. So, it's a very joyous time in America because a new colony just dropped. Apparently, we are now taking over Venezuela. So surprise, it's morning in America. And, unfortunately, Venezuela has been a little bit of a complicated situation for so for those of you who are living under a rock, the president of Venezuela was basically picked up, very kindly by, you know, American military and brought to New York where he's now facing charges. And as part of this invasion of Venezuela, turns out crypto actually had a lot of intersections with what happened in the takeover of Venezuela. So, first there was a rumor, turned out to be unfounded, that Venezuela had an enormous portion of their holdings in Bitcoin. This, it looks like this has been invalidated. It seems to be not true that, but however, it is proven that they were using Tether very extensively in their purchases of oil to get around. Obviously, they were they were sanctioned, and so it was difficult for them to transact in dollars. And so as a workaround, apparently, they were using quite a bit of Tether, to get access to this. Now there's a a bunch of companies on the ground in Venezuela that were growing quite rapidly before the invasion of Venezuela took place or, you know, whatever, not invasion, whatever you wanna call it. The capture of Maduro took place. And one of these companies is a company called Contigo. So Contigo was …