The Chopping Block: Did Blur Cause a Decline in the NFT Market? - Ep. 567

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, they explore the enigmatic 'unhinged scale' metric, consider whether recent layoffs could have been anticipated, and examine the challenges facing the NFT market. They also provide a somewhat critical look at the events of the recent BAYC Apefest and share their takeaways on how Solana survived the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX fiasco. 

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights: 

• What the unhinged scale metric is and why SBF ranks the highest in that metric
• Whether the companies doing layoffs could have predicted the market moves in a better way
• Whether people and the press are being too harsh on the companies reducing their workforce
• How the NFT market is a much harder environment than everything else, given the extreme volatility
• Whether the model used by Blur caused the value of NFTs to go down
• What’s more important in the NFT market: the supply or the demand
• The BAYC ‘Apefest’ that caused eye damage to some participants and whether someone sabotaged the meetup
• Tarun’s takeaways from the recent Solana conference in Amsterdam
• Whether the people who survived the Solana market crash are like ‘cockroaches after a explosion’
• Why Haseeb believes that Solana represents the most incredible story in the history of Layer 1s
• Whether crypto gaming studios should focus on building ‘dumber’ games rather than AAA ones
• Why “nature is a Ponzi scheme,” according to Tarun

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly 
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly 
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures

• Previous episodes of Unchained and The Chopping Block debating NFT Royalties:
• The Chopping Block: Two on Two Debate: NFT Royalty Throwdown!
• Are NFT Royalties the Way? How to Build a Sustainable Creator Economy
• Decrypt: 
• Ava Labs Confirms Layoffs, Affecting 12% of Avalanche Studio's Employees
• Did Blur Really Crash the NFT Market?
• Cryptotimes.io: Blur Jumps Nearly 30% Within Days While OpenSea Layoffs
• Cointelegraph: OpenSea lays off 50% of staff with severance in preparation for version 2.0 launch

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