Tarun Chitra on whether Code is Law | Layer Zero
Bankless
Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2022
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tarun Chitra, in addition to being Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, is a gigabrain, polymath type in the Ethereum space. His fluency in mathematics results in a creative, almost artistic approach to a traditionally rigorous and analytical field.
Perhaps related to his search for beauty, Tarun observes the structural changing of massive systems happening in the broader geopolitical ecosystem today. We explore the relationship between regulation and finance in a unique light. Finance itself is fundamentally a legal practice—it’s money plus law.
Finance becomes more elegant with smart contracts, and we muse on the idea that broader governance structures can improve with smart contracts as well. Is code law? Can we generalize capital efficiency?
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Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro
4:30 Tarun Chitra
8:15 New York City & Boom Cities
14:00 Global Crypto
18:00 Leapfrogging the US
27:45 Governance & Regulation
31:55 The Fundamental Crypto Shift
35:53 The Great Re-Shuffling
43:08 What Works vs What Doesn’t
48:07 Core Blockchain Governance
52:40 Scaling with DAOs
1:00:00 Upgrading Financial Law
1:09:00 Code is Law
1:14:05 Tarun’s Approach to Life
1:20:34 Optimism through Beauty
1:26:00 Basins and Sinking to Elegance
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Resources:
Tarun on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ
Gauntlet:
https://twitter.com/gauntletnetwork?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ
Episode with Santi Siri:
https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-santiago-siri-layer-zero?s=w
Fundamental Theorem of Algebra
https://www.britannica.com/science/fundamental-theorem-of-algebra
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Layer 0. |
| 0:08.6 | Layer 0 is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. |
| 0:13.4 | Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people. |
| 0:15.9 | In each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. |
| 0:19.8 | CypherPunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and |
| 0:23.0 | Layer 0 focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, |
| 0:27.5 | and it always has been. |
| 0:29.0 | Today, on Layer 0, I'm talking with Terune Chitra, who's generally known as one of those |
| 0:33.7 | gigabrain math wizards on crypto Twitter and around. |
| 0:38.6 | And Terune is so good at math, so fluent in math, that he actually comes out the other |
| 0:43.6 | side, and he's actually really creative about it. |
| 0:46.3 | So he's like a creative math geek, I'd say, and you can definitely see that in his style |
| 0:51.7 | of his clothes and apparel. |
| 0:53.2 | But this episode turned out to be less about the creative side of math and the beauty |
| 0:56.4 | of math. |
| 0:57.4 | And that at the end, but more about the relationship between regulation and finance. |
| 1:03.5 | And we talk about how smart contracts are more of an innovation in the legal space, more |
| 1:07.8 | than they are in the financial space. |
| 1:10.2 | And we unpack the fact that finance is really just the combination of money and law. |
| 1:15.4 | Money in contracts is how you create finance, and we talk about how United States regulation |
| 1:20.4 | is perhaps holding back the truer manifestation of this world of finance, not just inside |
| 1:25.6 | a crypto, but outside of crypto, and how this incumbent regulation actually slows us down |
... |
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