So 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 it. You don't mess with sanctions. Sanctions are really, really serious. And your exposure under U.S. law, sanctions are strict liability. It's not enough to say like, oh, I didn't. Oh, ha ha, whips a daisy. It 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 pawn. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed to trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eat is the ultimate problem. DFI protocol is part of the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks of four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick and chose. So you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. We've got Robert, the Cryptoconisur, and Tsar of Superstate. Good morning. We got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And I am a sieb, 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 chopping

block that 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 a morning in America.

And unfortunately, Venezuela has been a little bit of a

complicated situation. So for those of you who are living under Iraq, the president of Venezuela

was basically picked up very kindly by American military and brought to New York, where he's now

facing charges. And as part of this invasion of Venezuela, it 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.

It looks like this has been invalidated. It seems to be not true. But however, it is proven that they were using tether very extensively in their purchases of oil to get around. Obviously, they were sanctioned. And so it was difficult for them to transacting dollars. And so as a workaround, apparently they were using quite a bit of tether to get access to this. Now, there's a bunch of companies on the ground in Venezuela that were growing quite rapidly

before the invasion of Venezuela took place or whatever, not invasion, whatever you want to call it,

the capture of Maduro took place.

And one of these companies is a company called Contigo.

So Contigo was founded relatively recently.

It was a YC company, but Y Combinator, which is a big startup incubator in Silicon Valley.

And so Contigo, interestingly, they got hacked just a couple of days before the capture of Maduro.

So this was perceived to be a little strange, just the timing of this, of like, okay, wait, the money is gone,

seemingly right before Maduro is either seized or potentially some people speculate that he

may have been given up by some people who are inside the administration, who collaborated,

perhaps, and wanted to see some turnover in the power structure in Venezuela.

And then just on January 11th, FinTech Business Weekly dropped a gigantic expozee on this

company Contigo.

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