BusinessInvestingTechnology

The Crypto Conversation

Brave New Coin

Brave New Coin's Crypto Conversation talks to the key people creating the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency future. Hosted by Andy Pickering, learn how this rapidly evolving industry is reshaping the world as we move towards decentralized finance, NFTs and Web3.

Play

Open in

20 episodes
Avg 25 min
English

Episodes 20

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Tuesday · 30 min
THORChain: Math Doesn't Take Requests
Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later. Why you should listen THORChain spent late September in the middle of crypto's loudest argument. After attackers took roughly $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September, portions of the proceeds were routed through THORChain into Bitcoin, and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen made a public, formal request that the protocol refuse service to the attacker addresses. The answer was no — though Chad's first move in this conversation is to reject the premise of the question. It was not his answer, because he does not own, operate or control THORChain. There is no mechanism in the code base to block a wallet or a transaction, and never has been. Even if the community wanted one, validator consensus takes between three days and two weeks to reach a two-thirds majority, by which point a swap observed an hour ago is long settled. To make blocking practical you would have to install an admin key and redesign the protocol around centralization — at which point, as he puts it, you have rebuilt traditional finance on a different technology stack and he is no longer interested in the problem. The obvious counter is that THORChain's own node operators did pause the network in May, when a flaw in its threshold signature scheme let an attacker drain $10.7 million from one of six vaults and the protocol went dark for 39 days. Chad's distinction is between protecting the protocol and policing its users: validators on any chain have a security obligation to the network they are paid to secure, which is why Bitcoin's own miners forked away the value overflow bug in August 2010 after someone minted 184 billion coins out of nothing. A halt is not a selective freeze. What genuinely puzzles him is the singling out — six or more DEXs handled Bitget-linked flows, Uniswap among the venues in the broader conversation, and nobody asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reject tainted transactions. On where responsibility actually sits, he is blunt: stolen funds have to exit to dollars eventually, and that exit runs through centralized exchanges, which are the entities that can stop it and have not always chosen to. Supporting links Stabull Finance THORChain THORChain on X Chad Barraford on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to The Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review.
September 29 · 24 min
Beldex – The Case For A Full Privacy Stack
Cris Blanco is chief strategy officer at Beldex, the privacy-first layer one that began in 2018 as a fork of Monero and now runs a suite of privacy applications for messaging, browsing, networking and payments. He has spent more than 15 years across Web3, frontier technology and digital platforms, working at founding-team and senior-leadership level on go-to-market, ecosystem strategy and partnerships. Most recently he was part of the founding team at Humanity Protocol, where he helped scale testnet adoption to more than three million users in 90 days. Why you should listen Blanco has moved from a project about proving who you are to one about keeping that private, and he argues the two are the same problem. His work on identity convinced him that people want to prove specific facts about themselves without exposing everything else, and that privacy has to be part of a system's architecture from the start. He applies the same logic to crypto itself. Blockchains solved verification without a middleman, he says, but verifying that a transaction is valid does not require publishing everyone's balance, salary and coffee purchases to the world permanently. That view explains why Beldex builds a whole stack rather than a single app. Blanco points out that privacy fails at the weakest layer: an encrypted chat tied to a phone number, a hidden IP address undone by a public payment. So alongside private BDX payments, Beldex offers BChat for messaging without a phone number or email, BelNet as a decentralized VPN, the Beldex Browser, and a naming service for human-readable addresses. Blanco says BChat accounts for roughly two thirds of the ecosystem's 1.5 million installs, which he reads as evidence that messaging, not payments, is the easiest way to bring non-crypto users into privacy tools. On the tension between privacy coins and regulators, he argues that banks and hospitals hold sensitive data without publishing it and still comply with the law. Exchanges and fiat gateways carry the compliance obligations, and users should be able to disclose specific information to specific parties. Beldex has published a MiCA white paper to that end. AI, he argues, makes the case stronger. People already hand AI assistants their documents and private thoughts, and as businesses route payroll and payments through agents the exposure grows. Blanco says Beldex is testing encrypted agent-to-agent communication as a next product. In the hot take round, he describes success in ten years as the point where nobody talks about privacy because it has become as standard as HTTPS, and explains why rereading Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics feels different in the age of AI alignment. Supporting links Stabull Finance Beldex Beldex on X Cris Blanco on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.
September 26 · 26 min
Tria – Every Company With An Audience Is Becoming A Financial Company
John Lilic is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance platform for spending, trading and earning across chains. One of crypto's longest-serving builders, he worked at the Bitcoin Center in New York City in 2014 before joining ConsenSys as one of its first employees, spending six years helping to build the Ethereum ecosystem. Why you should listen Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria's pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs. The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria's infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties. In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum's reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether. Supporting links Stabull Finance Tria Tria on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.
September 24 · 26 min
Gracie Lin, OKX – Why the future of crypto is regulated
Gracie Lin is Regional CEO for Singapore and Australia and Head of VIP Growth at OKX. She spent the first decade of her career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, covering banking supervision before moving into markets, then held roles at sovereign wealth fund GIC and at Southeast Asian super app Grab, where she led regional strategy and economics. She joined OKX in 2024 to run its Singapore business as it received its Major Payment Institution license from MAS, and has since taken on Australia and a global remit for the exchange's VIP clients. Why you should listen It is unusual to hear a crypto executive defend regulators without reluctance, and Lin does it from experience. Having sat on the other side of the table, she frames regulation as a set of hard trade-offs rather than an obstacle: supervisors want innovation but must also protect consumers, protect the financial system, keep a level playing field, and watch what every other jurisdiction is doing. Her argument is that the consequences of a regulator getting risk wrong are far larger than those facing any single company, which is why she thinks industry has to engage constantly and constructively. It is also the thread running through her hot take, that a regulated future is a source of growth rather than a constraint, because adoption depends on trust. On the ground, she is candid about the commercial cost. Singapore's strict marketing rules make it harder to reach a broad consumer base and slower to bring products to market, but because every licensed player faces the same restrictions, OKX has built accordingly, and she says the business has grown meaningfully since licensing, anchored by accredited and sophisticated investors. Australia, where OKX launched in 2024 with a derivatives license, is now moving through the country's new Digital Assets Framework, and Lin says the exchange is seeking the additional authorizations needed to offer a fuller product range. She also explains the less visible half of her job: harmonizing how OKX defines and serves VIP clients globally, and why sophisticated traders, whatever their size, end up asking for the same things, from collateral management across positions to separating trading risk from custody risk. The wider picture is a shift in what crypto-native users want to hold. Lin says OKX is seeing interest move toward tokenized real-world assets, including equity derivatives and pre-IPO exposure to AI companies, products the exchange now offers in several markets though not yet in Singapore or Australia. She discusses the strategic partnership with Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and what each side brings. For an example of the future already arriving, she points to the OKX Card, which lets Singapore users spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted while the merchant is simply paid in local currency. For New Zealand listeners, she confirms OKX is watching the market closely. And her science fiction pick, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, arrives with a local connection: Taika Waititi's adaptation, shot in Wānaka and Auckland, is due in cinemas next month. Supporting links Stabull Finance OKX OKX Singapore OKX Australia OKX on X Gracie Lin on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin
September 18 · 24 min
Hypercall – Options trading for Everyone, Settled on Hyperliquid
Jake Sylvestre is the founder of Hypercall, an on-chain options exchange built on Hyperliquid. He co-founded his first company, the cybersecurity awareness firm PhishTrain, while still in high school, and moved into crypto through incident response work on ransomware attacks. He went on to contribute to btcd, build a Lightning Network yield product, and lead engineering at Synapse, the cross-chain bridge that has processed more than $55bn in volume across 2.5m users. Hypercall is the same team's pivot from moving assets between chains to writing derivatives on top of them. Why you should listen Options are the most-traded retail derivative in the world, and on-chain they remain a rounding error. Sylvestre's explanation for the gap is structural rather than cultural: anyone short an option needs somewhere deep and liquid to delta-hedge, which historically meant building a successful perpetual futures venue before you could launch an options venue at all. Hyperliquid removed that first step. Perp depth Sylvestre describes as at parity with Binance is now available to anyone building on top of it, which is why Hypercall exists where a dozen earlier attempts stalled. He is candid that other barriers remain, by his estimate there are ten to a hundred times more market makers quoting perps than options, and the instruments are harder to price, but the hedging venue was the binding constraint. The part of the conversation most likely to change how you think about capital efficiency is portfolio margin. Under standard margining, Sylvestre says, an exchange will charge ten to fifteen percent of an option's notional value, which means collecting a few cents of premium on a zero-day contract can require thousands of dollars of collateral. Hypercall instead runs span margining across a trader's whole book for a given asset: an xStocks NVIDIA token already in the account counts as collateral, as does a hedging perp position held on Hyperliquid. The risk engine applies more than twenty historically calibrated shocks, Bitcoin down twenty-five percent in a day with volatility collapsing seventy percent, for instance, to determine what has to be posted. Asked what happens in a repeat of last October's cascade, Sylvestre argues that event sits inside those parameters, and makes the sharper point that options exchanges do not auto-deleverage profitable traders the way perp venues did on the day. Beyond the mechanics, the argument is about who options are actually for. Sylvestre is dismissive of the assumption that retail cannot handle them, citing Robinhood and the American chefs and Uber drivers he knows who trade options daily and understand them well. Retail, not market makers, is Hypercall's stated focus, though he makes the case that a two-sided market needs both: holders of large positions seeking yield through covered calls on one side, directional and volatility views on the other. The longer-term prize is breadth, permissionless options on tokenized equities and any other asset with reliable price discovery, rather than the two to five names a major crypto options venue typically lists. Supporting links Stabull Finance Hypercall Hypercall app Hypercall on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review, it helps other people find the show.
September 14 · 24 min
Moca Network - Building the World's Biggest Identity Network
Kenneth Shek is the CEO of Moca Network, the identity ecosystem built by Animoca Brands. Over fifteen years he has founded and operated startups across solar energy, social networking in Los Angeles, cross-border e-commerce between China and the rest of the world, and enterprise AI. He joined Animoca around five years ago and has led Moca Network from its first day. Why you should listen Moca Network starts from a claim that sounds provocative until you sit with it: the most valuable digital asset in the world is your personal data, and you do not own any of it. Meta, Google and Apple do. Shek's argument is that this is not merely unfair but structurally limiting, if you cannot prove who you are to a party of your choosing, you cannot capture the value of being that person. Moca's answer is AIR, an account, identity and reputation layer that Animoca sells to enterprises B2B2C, white-labeled into their own apps with a small "powered by AIR" mark at the bottom. Shek says Animoca's portfolio now exceeds 600 companies, which gives Moca an unusual cold-start advantage: an ecosystem to seed before selling outward to telecoms, entertainment groups and ticketing platforms with user bases in the tens and hundreds of millions. He describes the resulting structure as hub-and-spoke, where each spoke that plugs in to verify and acquire users eventually becomes a hub of its own. The sharpest part of the conversation is about what breaks when agents start transacting. Agentic commerce is arriving fast, but Shek argues the identity layer is not keeping pace, and the gap shows up in ordinary situations. When you log into Cathay Pacific or Marriott Bonvoy yourself, the airline and the hotel know your loyalty tier and price accordingly. Delegate that same booking to an agent reading your calendar and the merchant sees only bot traffic, no status, no history, no preferential rate. Ask an agent to open a bank account or apply for a card and it fails outright, because the agent carries no KYC data and the bank has no way to verify it if it did. Moca's proposal is delegated verification: you prove your identity once, then grant your agent time-bound authority to prove things on your behalf, with the merchant side able to check that the proof is real. Shek says the company is working with Visa, Mastercard and regional point-of-sale operators, and building toward both the casual consumer form factor and the regulated one required by eIDAS 2.0, Europe's digital identity regulation, which obliges member states to offer citizens a digital identity wallet by late 2026. Underneath all of this sits a trade-off Shek. Data sharing is what makes ecosystems grow, the reason open data initiatives exist at all, and privacy is the constraint on it, not a virtue that can simply be maximized. Push privacy to its limit and you have shut down the sharing that creates value; push sharing to its limit and you have built the walled garden again with extra steps. His resolution is control rather than concealment: users decide what to share, with whom, and retain the ability to revoke it, which is also the mechanism that keeps a delegated agent from spraying your personal information across the internet. He also makes the case that first-party issuance is already happening — a hotel issuing a stay record back to the guest, who then presents it at a retail outlet or a beach club to unlock an offer — and that this matters more now that cookie consent has gone opt-in, with something like 70 percent of cross-site traffic arriving anonymous by his estimate. The episode closes on AI more broadly, where Shek lands firmly on the excited side: he expects the vertical knowledge premium to collapse and problem framing, reasoning and first-principles thinking to become the scarce skills, and says the platform of agents he built to run his own company has multiplied his output as a CEO several times over. Supporting links Stabull Finance Moca Network Moca Network on X Kenneth Shek on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to The Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review.
August 3 · 25 min
Greenlane – Why Chain Revenue Is Mostly a Meme
Jason Hitchcock is CEO of Greenlane Holdings (Nasdaq: GNLN), the only US-listed vehicle purpose-built to hold BERA, the native token of the Berachain network, and to put that treasury to work inside the chain's Proof of Liquidity economy. Before taking the job in February he spent fifteen years on the business side of technology startups — a venture studio that sold an app to Amazon, a stint at Twitch, then a liquid token fund launched off the back of a DeFi Summer obsession — and most recently ran business development at thirdweb, where he built out chain infrastructure partnerships across more than 150 networks. Why you should listen Greenlane's origin story was as a cannabis accessories distributor that rode the boom and the bust of that industry before the Berachain Foundation went looking for a public-market proxy for a token with no ETF and no ETP. A $110.7 million private placement led by Polychain Capital — half cash and stablecoins, half BERA — brought in a new board, new management and eventually Jason himself. The legacy business survives as an asset-light drop-shipping operation that helps cover overhead. Everything else points at one asset. Greenlane held roughly 77.7 million BERA at the end of the first quarter, close to a third of circulating supply, and grew BERA-per-share about 44 percent over three months while booking an $18.4 million net loss on fair-value markdowns. That combination — accumulating fast while the mark-to-market bleeds — is the whole digital asset treasury trade in miniature. The argument underneath is more interesting than the balance sheet. Jason's view is that "chain revenue" as the industry reports it is largely a fiction: what those league tables measure is gas burned, money that is destroyed rather than routed to anyone. Berachain inverts the model. Rather than paying the security budget entirely to validators, a large share of emissions is directed to the businesses building on the chain, which use it for customer acquisition and financing, and which bid for those emissions in a validator marketplace — fifty or seventy cents on the dollar for incentives that will grow their protocol. That bid is the revenue, and it flows back to token holders with a claim on it. Protocols like Kodiak, the dominant DEX on the network, and lending market Dolomite are the practical expression of it. Greenlane doesn't just hold the asset; it runs validators, stakes into Proof of Liquidity, and lends its stablecoins into DeFi and onto stable pairs to earn trading fees. Jason frames the company as a signal to the market that there is a buyer in size, permanently. He is candid that this is a rough season to be doing any of it. Equities and precious metals have run while crypto has languished, and he catalogues the disconnect with a certain incredulity: DTCC tokenizing assets, Nasdaq experimenting with blockchain settlement, Stripe with its own chain, Druckenmiller predicting all money becomes stablecoins, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton shipping tokenized funds. Headlines that would have detonated the 2021 market barely register now. His read on what breaks the drought is not a narrative but an invisibility: crypto disappearing into the back end of ordinary products, users earning yield or settling in stablecoins without ever knowing it, and several more zeros of participants arriving without wallets. The CLARITY Act sits in the background as the regulatory unlock, still stalled in the Senate. In the hot take round he lands firmly as a multi-chain opportunist, argues that blockchains are a generic public database technology that will proliferate along distribution lines, and picks Curve Finance as his example of the future already being here — narrow, well-defined DAO governance operating at genuine scale, which he thinks is the model everyone else got wrong. Supporting links Stabull Finance Greenlane Holdings Greenlane on Twitter Jason on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin
July 23 · 27 min
Seasons – DeFi Yield 3.0
Andrey Didovskiy is the CEO of Seasons, a Solana DeFi protocol built around a Yield 3.0 mechanism which pays holders real assets, gold, Bitcoin and dollars, funded by trading activity. A near-decade crypto veteran who broke into the industry writing white papers before running Atleta Network and co-founding the consultancy SYSDK, Andrey brings an operator's eye to a key problem in decentralized finance: yield that vanishes when prices turn. Why you should listen Most DeFi headline rates are a bull-market illusion. A "100% APY" advertised on a token that then falls eighty percent is worth almost nothing, because the yield was tied to price all along. Seasons flips that dependency. As Andrey explains, the protocol harvests a ten percent Transactional Transfer Tax on every $SEAS trade and converts it into a basket of hard assets paid directly to holders — no staking, no lock-ups, nothing to claim. Hold enough $SEAS in a self-custody wallet and you become a "node," and gold, Bitcoin and dollars simply arrive twice a week. Because the engine runs on volume and velocity rather than sentiment, it keeps working whether the market is climbing or bleeding — a design Andrey frames as turning your wallet into something closer to a savings account. Crypto has always moved in seasons, and so does Seasons the protocol, packaging its evolution into discrete chapters. Season one paid out in memecoins, and Andrey is candid that the community verdict was swift: the people who actually want yield do not want meme yield. Season two corrected course to what the team calls "perfect order" — a basket of Tether Gold, Wormhole-wrapped Bitcoin and Jupiter Lend USDC — assets a saver might happily hold for years. Under the hood, the roadmap layers three compounding engines: the live TTT, a Stakeholder Stablecoin Yield Module that puts queued distributions to work in transit, and Yield Asset Vaults, the first of which is slated to deploy on Kamino. Recent distributions have hovered around ten percent, with the team steering toward a sustainable double-digit band rather than the fleeting ninety-percent spikes that briefly followed launch. Solana is the foundation by conviction, not accident — Andrey sees it as one of a handful of settlement layers where the coming agentic economy will actually live, though he's careful not to write off Ethereum's next act. The bigger bet is that the winning move is to hide the blockchain entirely: strip out the jargon, and let a "put your idle assets to work" button sit quietly inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account. That thesis runs all the way to machines, with Seasons' first AI agent, Gaia, now public and a ten-year vision of a million autonomous "agent loans" and on-chain credit that finally functions. In the hot-take round he lands as a mild Bitcoin-leaning multichain pragmatist, argues that blockchain becomes the priceless trust-and-security layer beneath AI, flags longevity as the most unevenly distributed piece of the future. His closing pitch is the one that sticks: treat a node as infinite dollar-cost averaging, spend only the yield, and you keep stacking Bitcoin for as long as you hold. Supporting links Stabull Finance Seasons Seasons on X Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
July 15 · 26 min
Shufti – Fighting AI Fraud With AI
Tom Gadsden is Vice President of Product at Shufti, the London-based identity-verification and fraud-prevention platform built to let businesses onboard and screen users across borders in seconds rather than days. Gadsden has spent more than a decade building identity and financial-crime products, with earlier roles at credit bureau Experian and in card payments, giving him a close view of how fraud has scaled from a cottage problem into an industry. Why you should listen Shufti sits at an awkward and revealing intersection of the crypto economy. Bitcoin was designed to strip out gatekeepers; Shufti, and the compliance layer it represents, exists to put a version of them back. Gadsden doesn't pretend that tension away. He accepts that know-your-customer checks are anathema to part of the crypto community, and that self-hosted wallets will always let people move funds outside the system. But where crypto collides with fiat on- and off-ramps, governments have decided they want to see where money comes from and where it goes, and firms like Shufti, alongside chain-analytics players such as Chainalysis and Elliptic, are how businesses meet that expectation. He reaches for a useful historical parallel: the card-payments crackdown that arrived with Europe's PSD2 rules, when regulators decided the fraud losses banks had quietly tolerated were grey money the wider economy shouldn't have to absorb. Stablecoin growth, he argues, makes that scrutiny more likely, not less. The most gripping stretch of the conversation is on deepfakes, where Gadsden describes an arms race that has already run through several generations. Shufti is on the third iteration of its detection models, having moved past early metadata tells to techniques that examine how synthetic images blend, how their frequency signatures break down, and what shows up outside the visible spectrum where the generators stop trying. What has really changed, he says, is economics: AI dragged the cost of a convincing fake from tens of dollars to cents, turning fraud into something closer to a production line, with the same operator filing attempt after attempt from bed. The surge is real, with Shufti warning of a many-fold jump in deepfaked-document attacks year over year. The counterintuitive twist is that as detection has caught up, the pendulum has swung back toward human beings: real faces recruited down the pub, and money mules who sail through the initial check and only later start moving other people's money. Catching those cases, Gadsden explains, means watching for behavioral tells, funds fanning in and straight back out, high velocity and low retention, the classic setup where someone keeps fifty pounds for passing thousands through their account. Gadsden is also sharp on where the regulatory map is heading. He reads Tether's retreat from Europe, its USDT effectively pulled from regulated EU exchanges under MiCA, and Binance's withdrawn licensing bid in Greece, as a live test of whether hard rules end up pushing offshore the very firms regulators most want to supervise. On the perennial privacy question he's bracingly unsentimental: anyone uneasy about sharing their face should be far more wary of handing over an iris, a pointed nod to Sam Altman's World project, and even the privacy-forward EU Digital Identity Wallet will still ask for your name, date of birth and a biometric. His honest expectation is that a genuinely high-privacy identity system isn't coming for a decade or two. He closes on a contrarian note for his own industry: the physical passport and plastic driver's license that products like Shufti are built to read will, he suspects, erode faster than most insiders think as digital IDs become the default. It's a clear-eyed, occasionally unsettling tour of the machinery now standing between you and the fraudsters. Supporting links Stabull Finance Shufti Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
July 1 · 26 min
Margin Trade – One Account, Every Market
Margie Feng is marketing lead at Solayer, the Solana-compatible layer-one and the team behind Margin Trade, a non-custodial perpetuals platform that lets traders hold crypto, commodities and equities in a single cross-margin account. Feng came to Web3 from Bitmain, the world's largest crypto-mining hardware maker, and before that ran PR and marketing in the automotive industry for luxury marques including BMW and Genesis, an unusual path that informs her core pitch: she markets as the non-technical user she is, translating complicated machinery into something an ordinary trader actually wants. Why you should listen Solayer began life as a Solana restaking protocol before building out InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated chain that already clocks around 330,000 transactions per second on the way to a million-plus, alongside Solayer Pay, a card that lets users spend stablecoins anywhere. Its new flagship is Margin Trade, which reached mainnet in June. Feng's framing of the product is refreshingly concrete. Rather than scatter your collateral across five different positions, one pool backs everything, so a trader can express a view on rates, a chip stock, gold and a token from the same account, with funding, margin and liquidations all settling onchain. The platform was built by contributors from Solayer Labs alongside former traders out of Citadel and Kraken, and that market-structure DNA shows up in details like its auto-deleveraging design, which she argues spreads the pain across many positions instead of bluntly punishing whoever happens to be winning. The conversation's sharpest thread is Feng's view of what "bringing TradFi onchain" should actually mean. The lazy version, she says, is to copy whatever Wall Street is listing. The point instead is to hand anyone the same toolkit without the gatekeeping, collapsing what historically required three separate accounts into one venue. Her clearest proof of concept is Pearl Research (PRL), the GPU-mined token tied to the AI-compute narrative that no other venue, Hyperliquid included, had listed. Margin Trade became the first platform to offer a liquid, leveraged perp on it. The marketing logic follows the same instinct: instead of announcing a listing like everyone else, tell a PRL miner they are already long the token whether they like it or not, then show them how to stop being forced long. The pitch starts from the pain, not the product, and she is candid that in a saturated perps market the only winning move is to play a different game entirely. She situates all of this in a wider migration of equities and real-world assets onchain, and in the demand that platforms like Hyperliquid have proven exists for trading everything in one place. On the mood in Solana's community she is measured rather than hyped, describing a builder base that keeps shipping through the bear market, with payments an especially active corner. The hot-take round lands her as a Bitcoin-leaning holder who keeps most of her stack in cold storage, convinced crypto will reshape the financial system, and genuinely unsure what ten years holds beyond a strong hunch that everyone ends up with a personal AI agent managing their portfolio. Fittingly for someone who thinks the future is already arriving faster than anyone can narrate it, she signs off on Black Mirror and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem as the fiction that keeps feeling less like fiction. Supporting links Stabull Finance Margin Trade Margin Trade on Twitter Solayer on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 22 · 26 min
Ouinex – Getting Retail Out of the Shark Tank
Ilies Larbi is the founder and CEO of Ouinex, a multi-asset trading platform built to fuse crypto and traditional markets in a single account while shielding retail traders from the structural disadvantages of conventional order books. A nearly fifteen-year veteran of New York-based forex broker FXCM, where he climbed from sales associate to Managing Director for Europe and a seat on the executive committee, the Paris-based Larbi stepped into crypto in 2022 — late by bull-run standards, as he admits, but with a clear view of the gap he wanted to fill. Why you should listen Larbi's central argument lands with a memorable image: most crypto exchanges drop retail traders into a tank full of sharks. His culprit is the central limit order book, which works beautifully in regulated venues like the NYSE where institutions compete against each other, but breaks down in crypto, where a trader tapping orders from their phone over café Wi-Fi sits on the same book as a high-frequency desk running millions in low-latency infrastructure around the clock. That asymmetry, he argues, is why retail traders so often see stop losses picked off and price action that feels suspiciously erratic. Ouinex's answer is a no-CLOB execution model: institutions are still welcome to provide liquidity, but they're allowed only to make markets, never to take them, and they get zero visibility into where retail orders are resting since those sit on Ouinex's own servers. The result is a kind of Chinese wall, with liquidity providers forced to compete purely on the best bid and ask while an aggregator passes only the sharpest prices through to traders. Ouinex lets users trade spot crypto and perpetuals alongside forex, gold, indices and equities, using their crypto as collateral rather than cashing out to fiat — and crucially, it routes the TradFi side through hundred-year-old market infrastructure rather than rebuilding it as a thin perpetual. Larbi makes the case with hard numbers, contrasting a euro-dollar or gold trade on Ouinex against the same instrument as a perp on a venue like Hyperliquid, where he claims spreads run several times wider, commissions stack on top, and the order book is far shallower. He also points to early evidence that the multi-asset thesis is working: as geopolitics roiled markets, his traders moved record volume into oil and gold while waiting for crypto to get interesting again, exactly the cross-market hedge the platform was designed to enable. Larbi raised nine million dollars entirely from his own trading community — much of it the French-speaking InteractivTrading community — with no venture capital on the cap table, which he argues leaves the platform answerable to its users rather than to investors holding a bag of future tokens. That native token, OUIX, is heading to an ICO via the company's launchpad, pitched as a low-sell-pressure utility play with fee discounts and trading cashback. He's candid that the product is still maturing, urging listeners to test it on a demo account with virtual funds and lean on Ouinex's human (not chatbot) support. The closing hot-take round rounds him out nicely: a self-described multi-chain pragmatist with unshakeable conviction in blockchain's staying power, convinced AI agents will reshape how — and whether — we trade at all, and unashamedly nostalgic for the original Avatar. Supporting links Stabull Finance Ouinex Ouinex on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 21 · 24 min
oneBanking – The AI App For Finance
Sebastian Salomon is the CGO and co-founder of oneBanking, a Malta-registered fintech building an all-in-one app that fuses everyday banking, crypto, and an AI assistant designed to save users money. A 31-year-old German serial entrepreneur, Sebastian started his first company, an e-commerce sports-nutrition business, straight out of his studies in 2016, then co-founded a business-coaching venture that he says has worked with thousands of founders and small companies, giving him a broad read on where technology and money are heading next. Why you should listen Sebastian's starting point is a gap that European crypto users will recognize. In the wake of the EU's MiCA regime, a number of global platforms pulled back or reshaped their European offerings, leaving Europeans with fewer clean, regulated ways to buy, hold, and cash out of crypto. oneBanking pitches itself as a fully regulated bridge across that divide: a single app where fiat and digital assets sit side by side, where conversions are meant to be near-instant and cheap, and where users can move coins out to self-custody, including via a hardware-wallet integration with Switzerland's Tangem. Layered on top is the project's own oneToken, positioned as the engine of the ecosystem and partly funded by its community. The framing throughout the conversation is that the old, app-by-app model of personal finance is about to be collapsed into one place. The more distinctive idea is what Sebastian means by AI banking. Rather than bolting a chatbot onto a banking app, oneBanking is building what he describes as an AI assistant with the trappings of an actual employee: its own phone number, email, and messaging accounts, hooked into your finances and into thousands of comparison platforms such as Germany's Check24. The promise is that the assistant doesn't just flag that you're overpaying; it acts, switching providers in your name, hunting discounts on insurance, energy, and mobile plans, and even timing a flight booking to a cheaper day. He argues the real payoff is on the business side, where an AI combing through a company's stack can surface duplicate software seats and overpriced contracts, then negotiate them down. He frames small monthly savings as genuinely life-changing for ordinary households, which is the emotional core of the pitch. On timing, Sebastian says the app launches at the end of June, rolling out in stages: IBAN accounts and cards first, then crypto and the AI assistant a few weeks later, with EU passporting and a oneToken offering slated for later in the summer, and a longer-term ambition to extend into sports and real-estate tokenization and well beyond Europe. The conversation closes with the hot take round, where he plants his flag as a Bitcoin guy who has broadened into a wider portfolio through his Web3 work, predicts the legacy banking system will essentially disappear within a decade as AI banking matures and regulation catches up, points to his daily phone calls with oneBanking's own AI as a glimpse of a future that's already here, and lands on Star Wars as his sci-fi pick. Supporting links Stabull Finance oneBanking oneBanking on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 16 · 17 min
Cherry Servers – Building Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure
Lili Hellriegel is head of enterprise solutions at Cherry Servers, a Lithuania-based bare metal cloud provider that pitches itself as a sovereign, Web3-friendly alternative to the US hyperscalers. Before joining Cherry, Lili was head of infrastructure at staking firm Blockdaemon, where she built out data center partnerships, network architecture and the server specs behind validation workloads — work that left her unusually fluent in what crypto teams actually need from their infrastructure. Why you should listen The pitch for European infrastructure has rarely been louder, and Lili makes the case with the confidence of someone who has lived on both sides of it. Every major hyperscaler — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, even Oracle — is a US company, and for a growing cohort of Web3 teams that is no longer a neutral fact. Cherry Servers sits under European jurisdiction, runs its own facility in Lithuania, and operates data centers across Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Chicago, Singapore and a newly opened site in Tokyo. Some of Cherry's customers come for hard compliance reasons; others, Lili says, come for ideological ones, wanting the chains they help secure to live beyond the reach of any single government. The conversation lands at a moment when data sovereignty and distrust of concentrated American cloud power have moved from fringe concern to boardroom agenda. The sharper argument is about economics, and here Lili thinks the industry is approaching an inflection point. She describes a shift from "cloud-first" to "workload-first" thinking: instead of defaulting to a hyperscaler and accepting whatever T-shirt-sized instance you're sold, teams running archival nodes, validators or other niche workloads are discovering they pay more and perform worse than they would on dedicated hardware tuned to the job. Cherry's answer is granular customization — choose your disks, your storage, your RAM, and pay only for what the workload demands — backed by account managers who architect the build rather than just sell a box, with human support that answers in well under a minute. For staking-heavy customers, the model is almost self-funding: a large share pay in crypto, drawing on staking rewards to cover their infrastructure across some thirty different chains. Her forecast for the next eighteen to twenty-four months is the part worth sitting with. Lili argues the era of free cloud credits is ending — she doubts AWS will keep handing startups six-figure credit grants for signing up to an accelerator — and that founders, newly disciplined about runway, will increasingly treat optimized bare metal as a way to extend it. In the closing hot-take round she plants her flag as a multi-chain "Solana maxi," names Bitcoin as the enduring store of value while backing the smaller chains' upside, and offers a builder's creed: the market ultimately rewards people who make useful things on-chain, not those treating tokens purely as speculation — which, she adds, is also why she thinks people should run nodes with smaller providers. The desert-island sci-fi pick, naturally, is Star Wars. https://www.cherryservers.com/
June 11 · 29 min
Mitrade – Trading the Great Convergence
Cam Darlington is Global Strategy Expert at Mitrade, the Australian-founded CFD trading platform regulated by ASIC in Australia and CySEC in Europe, offering forex, commodities, indices, shares, and crypto from a single account. A Nova Scotia native based in Hong Kong for the past eight years, Cam brings a dual perspective: a traditional finance background working with brokers expanding across Asia, and recent experience as co-founder and COO of easy.fun, a social trading app built on Solana and Hyperliquid. Why you should listen Cam has a name for the phenomenon most people inside traditional brokerages never see from the trenches: the convergence. TradFi and crypto are collapsing into a single market structure, and the pivot point, he argues, is Washington. With the CLARITY Act working through the Senate and President Trump signing the Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks executive order in May, digital asset brokers are being ushered toward the core plumbing of the US financial system, including direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails. Add growing regulatory comfort with tokenized stocks trading at parity with their underlying assets, and the discount problem that dogged early real-world-asset experiments like Robinhood's tokenized equities starts to disappear. Tokenized RWAs, Cam says, just became viable. The second-order effects are reshaping market infrastructure itself. When a broker like Robinhood can mint tokenized stocks on its own proprietary chain and handle execution and settlement in-house, it stops feeding liquidity to the public exchanges. Cam frames the exchange's recent moves, including its tokenization partnership with Kraken built on the xStocks framework, as a defensive response to exactly this threat. He speaks from experience here: his team at easy.fun integrated the xStocks API and saw firsthand how thin liquidity gets once you trade beyond Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla. Cam says players most at risk are the centralized crypto exchanges, squeezed between newly crypto-enabled traditional brokerages on one side and purpose-built DeFi venues like Hyperliquid on the other. For traders, Cam's message is about survival. The first year determines whether someone becomes a trader or a statistic, and he is scathing about platforms offering 1,000x leverage to beginners, which he likens to handing a brand-new driver a Ferrari and pointing at the motorway. He makes the case for starting on a regulated platform with guardrails, modest leverage, built-in TradingView charting, and daily strategy feeds, which is precisely the gap Mitrade aims to fill as a companion to a traditional brokerage account. Supporting links Stabull Finance Mitrade Sign up to Mitrade Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 7 · 25 min
nGRND – The Gold That Pays You to Leave It in the Ground
Professor Lisa Wilson is CEO and co-founder of nGRND, a gold protocol that turns verified but unmined "in-ground" gold into a fully backed, reward-bearing digital asset rather than digging it up. An Australian who holds a South African professorship and lives in France, Wilson is a genuine mining insider — she has written operational and hazard-standards systems for the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP — with a parallel career in blockchain, where she helped list the world's first actively managed certificates for investment-grade carbon assets. Why you should listen Wilson's pitch is a contrarian one: the best place to keep gold may be exactly where it already is. Billions of ounces of verified gold sit classified as resources that can't economically advance to production, with mine timelines now stretching toward two decades once permitting, First Nations consultation and environmental compliance are factored in. Gold, she argues, is unusual among metals — it has almost no industrial use, so above-ground stock is mostly worn or stored, which means an ounce in the ground is functionally the same store of value as an ounce in a vault. nGRND acquires long-term rights (30 to 100 years) to independently verified deposits, leaves the metal "in situ," and monetizes it without the environmental decimation of extraction. The mechanics are concrete: for every 35,000 tokens in circulation, at least one ounce of preserved gold is held in the protocol treasury, and every ounce left undisturbed avoids an estimated 792kg of CO2. The more interesting half of the model is what happens on the surface. Because the land above each deposit stays untouched, nGRND layers a second income stream on top of gold's own appreciation — what Wilson calls alternative land-use monetization. That can mean soil-carbon and avoided-mining carbon credits, ecotourism, data cables routed across otherwise off-limits ground, or wind and solar microgrids, with a single site capable of generating millions a year across a multi-decade rights agreement. Brownfield sites are their own opportunity: in Australia a decommissioned site can carry a reclamation bond north of $20 million, and nGRND positions itself as the party that cleans up tailings and restores biodiversity while still capturing the value sleeping below. The token itself is tokenized through a VARA-regulated issuer in Dubai and backed by resources verified to NI 43-101 standards — a structure aimed squarely at the institutional real-world-asset crowd having its moment right now. For all the heavy machinery of the model, nGRND's on-ramp is deliberately playful: its sponsored mobile games Dig It and Gold Fest have pulled in more than 855,000 players across 200-plus countries and accrued roughly $6 million in rewards ahead of the token launch, with TON Foundation backing and a Base expansion planned. Wilson is adamant the ecosystem isn't just for stakers and gamers — she describes participation streams spanning impact, learning and governance, including immersive digital twins of actual project sites. In the closing hot-take round she leans to the Bitcoin side of the spectrum as a self-described early mover, makes the case that crypto literacy should be embedded education for everyone, and sketches a ten-year future in which wealth migrates away from a USD-hedged system toward assets people actually control — before signing off with a charmingly vintage sci-fi pick in the British fantasy series Catweazle. Supporting links Stabull Finance nGRND nGRND on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 4 · 25 min
Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3
div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown"> Charlie Durkin is Principal Solutions Lead at Chainlink Labs, where he works with the world's largest banks, asset managers, and market infrastructures on bringing capital markets onchain. A decade at Citigroup – five years in investment banking and debt capital markets, then five more in product management building the actual rails – gives him a grounded view of the gap between TradFi reality and crypto's promises, and what it will take to close it. Why you should listen Charlie's path from Citi's product team to Chainlink is the perfect frame for this conversation. He's lived inside the legacy plumbing of capital markets and now spends his days helping institutions migrate workflows to blockchain rails without throwing out the existing infrastructure they're built on. His explanation of Chainlink itself is refreshingly concrete: not a competing L1, but the middleware connecting blockchains to each other and to the offchain world – an oracle network at its core, expanded into a full orchestration layer via the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). The "give us an API and we'll connect you securely to the blockchain ecosystem" framing is exactly how Chainlink keeps showing up in the headlines alongside DTCC, Swift, UBS, Euroclear, JPMorgan, BNY Mellon and Franklin Templeton. The tokenization discussion is where Charlie shines. The popular narrative is "tokenize everything"; his lived experience is that the interesting frontier is tokenizing cash. Stablecoins are becoming foundational market infrastructure because instant settlement is too compelling to ignore, but they don't work on a bank's balance sheet – under GENIUS Act rules, stablecoins must be backed one-for-one with HQLA, meaning banks lose the benefit of fractionalized reserves. That's why tokenized deposits are now the hottest conversation in institutional finance: same rails, same settlement story, but compatible with how banks actually run their balance sheets. Charlie also pushes back on the tokenized equities hype, arguing that "mirror tokenization" of stocks bolts complexity onto an already complex system (corporate actions, final settlement, CSD reconciliation), and that the real unlock comes only after cash is natively onchain. At that point native equity and debt issuance starts to make sense on its own terms. Andy and Charlie dig into the harder questions: where the institutional friction actually lives (legal, compliance, security, operational integration – not the business case, which everyone now buys), how procurement teams trained on on-prem-to-cloud transitions are now having to wrap their heads around decentralized infrastructure, and why Chainlink's defense-in-depth architecture – independent node operators, cryptographic consensus, geographic redundancy – is what lets GSIBs sign off on production deployments. Charlie pulls in the standards-and-scale argument with sharp historical analogies: rail gauges for industrialisation, standardised shipping containers for global trade, US GAAP for capital allocation, TCP/IP for the internet. Financial markets need standards before they can scale, and no institution wants to integrate ten different blockchains ten different ways. The hot take round delivers a multi-chain opportunist stance, a contrarian view on tokenised equity headlines, a 10-year vision in which blockchain rails disappear entirely from the user experience, and a callout to the recent DTCC Collateral AppChain announcement – built on Chainlink's CRE, slated for Q4 2026 – as the first glimpse of an onchain capital markets future that's already arriving. Supporting links Stabull Finance Chainlink Chainlink on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
June 1 · 16 min
Sleepagotchi – The Intelligence Layer for the Wellness Economy
Kenny Wood is the newly appointed CEO of Sleepagotchi, the Solana-based platform building what it calls the intelligence layer for the wellness economy. A two-decade veteran of the games industry, Wood cut his teeth as an artist on Mattel's Barbie titles before working on chart-topping franchises including Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, Transformers, Formula 1 and World Rally Championship, later moving into ship-simulation work at VSTEP in the Netherlands and serving as CTO of AI world-generation startup Moonlander prior to its acquisition by Alpha 3D. Why you should listen Sleep is the foundation almost every other health metric rests on, and that is precisely why Wood argues it is the right wedge into a much larger market. Fix sleep and mood, energy and recovery tend to follow; neglect it and the deficit cascades through everything else. Sleepagotchi began life as a gamified sleep-to-earn app, but under Wood the thesis has sharpened: the real prize is not the streak mechanic but the data exhaust it generates. The company reports that roughly three-quarters of users open the app within ten minutes of waking, and its Telegram-based Lite version has touched two million all-time users, the kind of daily habit loop most wellness startups never achieve. The question Wood keeps returning to is who should capture the value of all that biometric signal. The product architecture he describes is ambitious. Rather than a single sleep score, Sleepagotchi runs four cooperating AI agents: a sleep coach that explains causally why a night went the way it did, a wellness agent that checks in on mood, diet, caffeine and alcohol through the day, a meal planner that turns those insights into recipes, and a shopping agent that sources the ingredients or supplements and can have them delivered. If you are tired despite doing everything right, the system might infer low iron and nudge you toward leafy greens, then route that recommendation downstream into an actual basket. A built-in marketplace lets vendors offer supplements, courses and the like, knitting recommendation and commerce into one loop. It is a bold attempt to make wellness advice actionable rather than merely informational, and it leans on integrations with Whoop, Oura and Apple Watch to pull in the raw signal. The thornier and more interesting argument is about ownership. Wearable terms of service generally bar reselling raw device data, a constraint Wood acknowledges candidly, but he draws a line between that raw feed and the processed, AI-derived record of a person's life built on top of it, which he believes the user should own and, eventually, permission or monetize on their own terms via the platform's $SLEEP token. Wood inherits the company from founding CEO Anton Kraminkin, now a strategic advisor, and a cap table that includes Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Inception and others. In a relaxed closing stretch, he talks up the strength of the underlying game IP, its outsized following across Japan, the Philippines and Korea, and the new levels arriving in the months ahead, while staying refreshingly honest about the work still to do. The result is a conversation that doubles as a preview of where the AI agent economy and personal health data may be heading. Supporting links Stabull Finance Sleepagotchi Sleepagotchi on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
May 24 · 23 min
Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral
Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at Rootstock Labs, a core contributor to Rootstock, the Bitcoin sidechain that has been quietly running for eight years and now anchors a growing slice of institutional Bitcoin DeFi. Based in London, Green came to crypto through fifteen years in traditional finance — a decade at Bloomberg working with banks and high-frequency trading desks, followed by a stint at Circle building out the European stablecoin business — before going further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole when emerging-market clients made clear they wanted something more than a dollar wrapper. Why you should listen Green's central argument is that the digital gold narrative, while true, is incomplete and increasingly expensive to leave unchallenged. There is roughly $260 billion in Bitcoin sitting idle on corporate treasuries, ETF balance sheets and miner books, paying 10 to 50 basis points a year in custody fees and earning nothing. That, he says, is what pristine collateral looks like when it has nowhere productive to go. Rootstock's pitch is to change the denominator: keep the security model of Bitcoin, but give holders the ability to borrow against their stack, run it through tokenized real-world asset vaults, or deploy it into native yield strategies without selling a single satoshi. The first product out of the new institutional unit, launching in the next month, is a Bitcoin-collateralized loan aimed squarely at miners who are sitting on inventory but still need to pay the power bill. The proof points are no longer theoretical. Mercado Bitcoin recently deployed $20 million of tokenized private credit on Rootstock, with a $100 million target by April, giving Bitcoin holders Brazilian receivables and corporate debt exposure they would otherwise struggle to access. In Japan, where Green sees an unusually crypto-curious institutional base, Rootstock has partnered with Animoca Brands Japan to bring corporate treasury and BTCFi tooling to a market that historically follows rather than leads but is now reportedly seeing 80% of investors plan crypto allocations within the year. Midas, Hyperithm and other ecosystem builders are stacking institutional-grade vaults on top of the chain, with custody handled through the usual professional suspects — Fireblocks, Fordefi and Utila — and Green argues spreading risk across providers and protocols is the obvious lesson from a year of high-profile DeFi hacks. Where the conversation gets provocative is on what Bitcoin actually competes with. Green draws on Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan's framing of Bitcoin as an out-of-the-money call option on becoming a payment instrument, and argues that the real prize is the roughly half of global savings parked in fine art and real estate — illiquid stores of value that Bitcoin, once composable through chains like Rootstock, can simply do better. He is candid about the risks, too: concentration in a handful of ETFs and the dominance of Strategy as the largest non-Satoshi holder are not trivial, even if he thinks the diversification of providers is happening fast enough. His closing critique is one the institutional crowd will recognize — DeFi has an institutional-grade communications problem, and until protocols learn to handle incidents the way Circle handled its de-peg, the larger pools of capital will keep migrating to centralized custody. Stick around for his sketch of what a five-year transition to Bitcoin-backed mortgages and productive retail BTC actually requires. Supporting links Stabull Finance Rootstock Labs Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
May 17 · 29 min
MyEtherWallet – The Next Decade of On-Chain Finance
Kosala Hemachandra is the founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet (MEW), one of crypto's true OG products and a wallet that has been onboarding users to Ethereum since the network's mainnet launch. Eleven years, three million users, and a team of more than twenty later, MEW is positioning itself as a self-custodial home not just for crypto but for tokenized stocks, bonds, and the broader real-world asset economy now arriving on-chain. Why you should listen Kosala's origin story is a reminder of how far this industry has travelled. A computer engineering graduate who discovered Ethereum through Bitcoin, he built MEW because accessing the network at launch meant the command line and nothing else. The earliest MEW users were almost exclusively technical; today's users, by contrast, often have no idea which chain their assets are sitting on – and that is the point. Andy and Kosala dig into the decade-long tension at the heart of self-custody: balancing genuine user sovereignty with an onboarding experience that doesn't terrify newcomers. Mnemonic phrases have been "bread and butter" for ten years for a reason – any proprietary fix would lock users in and break the very portability that makes self-custody meaningful – but advances like account abstraction, social recovery, and smart contract wallets are finally pointing toward a more humane future. The conversation covers tokenized stocks and real-world assets, where Kosala sees the most profound shift of his career. TradFi went from hostile to crypto eight years ago to actively partnering with it today, and MEW is leaning into that convergence by offering tokenized equities alongside crypto assets in a single self-custodial wallet. Kosala uses his home country of Sri Lanka as an illustration: six months ago, a Sri Lankan investor wanting US stock exposure faced brokerage friction, 10–15% taxes, and layered commissions. Now they can simply hold tokenized Nvidia or Tesla in a MEW wallet. He also walks through the difference between USDC and yield-bearing stablecoins like Ondo's USDY (which is backed by government bonds), and why this category collapses the old workflow of "buy stablecoin → bridge to Aave or Compound → lend → harvest yield" into a single token you just hold. On regulation, Kosala is candid: US users are currently locked out of tokenized assets and there is no shortcut, but the trajectory of the last decade gives him real confidence the rules will catch up. The bigger bet is that MEW evolves into a global, full-service, self-custodial wealth platform – one login, one set of keys, exposure to crypto, fiat, RWAs, and traditional yield instruments without ever surrendering custody. The episode closes with details on MEW's live $100,000 Energy Campaign (points for swaps, transactions, and tweets convert into chances at $5–$10 of tokenized US equities) plus an hourly $5 swap reward for early users. The hot take round delivers Kosala's tidy framing of Bitcoin as gold and Ethereum as USD, a strong vote of confidence in AI-driven portfolio management as a future that's already here for the few, and a Christopher Nolan pick to close things out. Supporting links Stabull Finance MyEtherWallet MEW on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.
May 12 · 21 min
Gridmatic – AI-Powered Energy for Flexible Loads
Kise Shannon is VP of Business Development at Gridmatic, an AI-first power company helping Bitcoin miners and other flexible loads turn energy market volatility into opportunity. Drawing on more than 20 years in the US energy industry – starting in Texas the moment the state deregulated – Kise has built her career across both global energy majors and startups, and now leads Gridmatic's push into the Bitcoin mining vertical from her base in Houston. Why you should listen Most retail electricity providers evolved out of legacy utilities, and it shows: slow innovation, rigid contracts, and pricing models that punish flexibility. Gridmatic was built differently. The company applies foundational AI models – the same forecasting and optimization engine that powers its wholesale trading desk and its battery storage business across ERCOT and CAISO – to the question every miner is trying to answer in real time: when do I run, when do I curtail, and what is my true effective rate? Kise walks Andy through how that AI layer ingests hundreds of thousands of data points to forecast prices down to specific nodal locations, automating the financial trading between day-ahead and real-time markets while the miner stays focused on operations. It's a clear-eyed look at what "AI-powered energy optimization" actually means once you strip away the buzzwords. The conversation then turns to one of the most underdiscussed problems in mining economics: collateral. New mining LLCs have no trade history, which means traditional retail suppliers demand large upfront deposits at exactly the moment a miner is bleeding cash on land, interconnect, containers, and ASICs. Gridmatic has solved this through partnerships with OBM, Synota, and Satoshi Energy's Bitcurrent platform, all of which enable daily settlement in place of monthly invoices. Layer in Strike for Bitcoin-to-USD conversion and miners can effectively pay their power bill in BTC each day without parking working capital as collateral. Kise also explains why contractual flexibility matters more than ever as miners blend ASIC and AI compute on the same site – two very different load profiles requiring very different energy strategies. Kise makes a strong case for why Texas remains the best home for flexible mining despite tightening competition for interconnects. Abundant land, a state government that has actively welcomed the industry, deep renewable penetration, and natural synergies with the oil and gas sector all combine to make ERCOT uniquely suited to flexible loads. More importantly, Bitcoin miners are not just consumers of Texas power – they are critical grid resources, capable of fully shutting down when supply tightens in a way AI data centers (which often demand five-nines uptime) simply cannot. On the AI-versus-Bitcoin debate, Kise sees coexistence rather than replacement: miners with land and interconnects are partnering with AI customers, and new flexible load is still arriving in Texas. The hot take round closes things out with thoughts on a 10-year vision of Gridmatic as "the power company of the future," why every professional should be using AI now rather than fearing it, and a fitting May the 4th nod to The Martian. Supporting links Stabull Finance Gridmatic Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Showing 1–20 of 20 episodes