Shufti – Fighting AI Fraud With AI
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Margin Trade – One Account, Every Market
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Ouinex – Getting Retail Out of the Shark Tank
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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oneBanking – The AI App For Finance
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Cherry Servers – Building Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Mitrade – Trading the Great Convergence
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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nGRND – The Gold That Pays You to Leave It in the Ground
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Sleepagotchi – The Intelligence Layer for the Wellness Economy
The Crypto Conversation
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...
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Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral
The Crypto Conversation
Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at , 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...
info_outlineKise 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.
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