Meanwhile - Bitcoin Life Insurance
The Crypto Conversation
Zac Townsend is CEO and Co-Founder of Meanwhile, the first life insurance provider denominated and operating in Bitcoin. Life Insurance serves a critical role in developed economies, and Meanwhile is building a defining financial institution for the global Bitcoin economy. Why you should listen Meanwhile is the world’s first fully Bitcoin‑denominated life insurance company, licensed and regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. Operating out of Hamilton, Bermuda, it offers Bitcoin Whole Life policies that allow users to pay premiums in BTC, accumulate savings denominated in Bitcoin, and...
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Ryze Labs - Web3, AI, Crypto and Beyond
The Crypto Conversation
Matthew Graham is the Managing Partner at Ryze Labs, a fund investing in blockchain innovators worldwide who are building Web3 applications to drive adoption and expand access to the next generation of the internet. Why you should listen In this conversation, Matthew Graham, managing partner at Ryze Labs, discusses the intersection of AI and crypto, the investment thesis of Ryze Labs, and the potential of Web3. He emphasizes the importance of stablecoins in the financial infrastructure, describing stablecoins as the “best product-market fit in crypto,” especially for emerging...
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Idea-L® - From Idea to Funded Startup
The Crypto Conversation
Peter Goodwin is the CEO and founder of Idea-L®, the platform that combines generative AI and real-time validation to help anyone go from idea to funded startup, without gatekeepers. Think: “AI x AngelList meets Product Hunt — but fully decentralized.” Why you should listen idea‑L® is an AI-powered, Web3-native platform designed to accelerate the journey from concept to launch. At its heart is a step-by-step process—Imagine, Design, Execute, Accelerate, and Live—providing founders with a structured framework to turn bold ideas into viable ventures without the usual guesswork....
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Kaia - Stablecoins for mini-Dapps on Superapps
The Crypto Conversation
John Cho is Vice President of Partnerships at Kaia DLT Foundation, a non-profit organization established to accelerate the Kaia blockchain’s global adoption and ecosystem maturity. Why you should listen Kaia is a mobile-first superapp that’s rapidly becoming one of the most intriguing Web3 platforms to watch. Originally known as Klaytn, Kaia rebranded and repositioned itself in 2024 with a bold vision: make crypto invisible. By integrating blockchain seamlessly into daily mobile life, Kaia’s goal is to onboard the next billion users without them even realizing they’ve crossed...
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tBTC - The Bitcoin Standard for DeFi
The Crypto Conversation
Callan, also known as “Sap” is the Co-Founder of Threshold Labs, the managing team behind Threshold Network’s tBTC, a trust-minimized bridge enabling native Bitcoin in DeFi. Why you should listen Threshold Network is a decentralized infrastructure protocol that leverages threshold cryptography to provide privacy and access control services on public blockchains. It was formed through the merger of two projects, Keep and NuCypher, with the aim of enabling secure and decentralized custody and data privacy. One of its core offerings is tBTC, a decentralized bridge that allows users to bring...
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Algorand Foundation - Why TVL is a Poor Metric For Investment Decisions
The Crypto Conversation
Staci Warden is the Algorand Foundation CEO, and Dr. Matthew Brigida is Chief Economist at Algorand Foundation. In June, the Algorand Foundation’s tokenomics team released a new study questioning the assumption that TVL is a meaningful investment signal. Despite being widely cited as a proxy for legitimacy, the research found that TVL doesn’t correlate with token performance, even when adjusted for known distortions like double-counting. Why you should listen The team analyzed 300+ cryptocurrencies from 2023–2024, simulating weekly long/short strategies based on TVL rankings. The result?...
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Coinpass - The UK Crypto Platform for Businesses
The Crypto Conversation
Jeff Hancock is the CEO of Coinpass, a UK-based crypto exchange acquired by OANDA in 2023. He’s bringing crypto and traditional finance closer together in a secure, regulated way. Why you should listen Born in London in 2018, Coinpass climbed the regulatory mountain early, securing an FCA crypto-asset registration and then catching the eye of multi-asset heavyweight OANDA, which snapped up a majority stake in August 2023. Now the exchange enjoys the deep pockets and risk-management chops of a global FX giant while keeping its Union-Jack credentials intact. Coinpass is...
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Pi Squared - The Verifiable Settlement Layer for AI and Crypto
The Crypto Conversation
Grigore Roșu is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois and a former NASA engineer, where he developed the K Framework - an open-source “Rosetta Stone” for programming language semantics. A day-one contributor to the Ethereum Foundation, he later founded Runtime Verification, now the leading formal verification company in Web3. In 2023, he founded Pi Squared with the vision of bringing the next million developers to Web3 by utilizing his revolutionary K Framework. Why you should listen Pi Squared solves the fragmentation and trust limitations of today’s blockchain...
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Signals - Fixing NFT Launches
The Crypto Conversation
Nick Sainato, the Co-Founder of Gamma, has just launched Signals to fix NFT launches. Signals is a first-of-its-kind go-to-market platform that uncovers hidden demand signals and helps determine a fair market price for items within any launch, on any blockchain, on any drop site. Why you should listen NFT launches are famously chaotic: dummy wallets farm allow-lists, creators guess at a mint price, and traders pray the gas-war gods are kind. Signals flips that script. Built by the Gamma team, the Signals platform lets any collection on any chain list a drop in a neutral pre-launch lobby where...
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Gaia - Decentralized AI Inferencing
The Crypto Conversation
Shashank Sripada merges institutional rigor with systemic change. After managing $7B+ in assets and advising the White House, he co-founded Gaia to prove decentralized models can scale equitably. Gaia aims to empower anyone—from individual knowledge workers to domain experts—to build, launch, scale, and monetize their own AI agents. Why you should listen Gaia aims to empower anyone—from individual knowledge workers to domain experts—to build, launch, scale, and monetize their own AI agents. Each agent runs as a Gaia “node,” a lightweight, sandboxed runtime powered by technologies...
info_outlineSrini Parthasarathy is the CTO of Shardeum - an EVM-based autoscaling blockchain. Shardeum's architecture addresses the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and security.
Why you should listen
Shardeum is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to tackle the blockchain trilemma—scalability, decentralization, and security—without compromise. Utilizing dynamic state sharding, Shardeum achieves linear scalability, meaning that each additional node increases the network's transaction throughput. This architecture ensures consistently low gas fees, even as the network grows.
The platform employs a hybrid consensus mechanism combining Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-Quorum (PoQ), enhancing security and decentralization. Transactions are processed individually at the transaction level rather than in blocks, allowing for faster and more efficient processing.
Shardeum's native token, SHM, serves multiple purposes within the ecosystem, including transaction fees, staking, governance, and rewards. The tokenomics are designed to support the network's sustainability and growth.
The project boasts a robust and growing ecosystem, with over 150 projects and counting. These include decentralized exchanges like Tegro, NFT marketplaces like Zezu, and infrastructure tools like NodeOps.
Shardeum is community-driven, with over 1.3 million community members and more than 400 Proof of Community events across 19 countries. The mainnet launch is scheduled for May, 2025, marking a significant milestone in its development.
For developers, Shardeum offers comprehensive resources, including detailed documentation, a testnet for experimentation, and support for Solidity and Vyper smart contracts. The platform's design ensures that building and deploying decentralized applications is both accessible and efficient.
Shardeum presents a compelling solution to the scalability challenges faced by blockchain networks, combining innovative technology with a strong community focus to pave the way for broader adoption of decentralized applications.
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