The Crypto Conversation

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.

Shufti – Fighting AI Fraud With AI 07/15/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/42098020

Margin Trade – One Account, Every Market 07/01/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41925690

Ouinex – Getting Retail Out of the Shark Tank 06/22/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41733710

oneBanking – The AI App For Finance 06/21/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41717340

Cherry Servers – Building Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure 06/16/2026

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/ /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41657585

Mitrade – Trading the Great Convergence 06/11/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41617480

nGRND – The Gold That Pays You to Leave It in the Ground 06/07/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41565865

Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3 06/04/2026

Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3 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 – 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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41539600

Sleepagotchi – The Intelligence Layer for the Wellness Economy 06/01/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41498905

Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral 05/24/2026

Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral 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 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 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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41409535

MyEtherWallet – The Next Decade of On-Chain Finance 05/17/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41325665

Gridmatic – AI-Powered Energy for Flexible Loads 05/12/2026

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 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/41258745

Perceptron Network – A Thousand Eyes, One Vision for Decentralized AI Data 04/22/2026

Perceptron Network – A Thousand Eyes, One Vision for Decentralized AI Data Peter Anthony is the co-founder of Perceptron Network, a decentralised data infrastructure purpose-built for AI. A crypto native since 2019, Peter also runs The House of Crypto — one of the fastest-growing crypto YouTube channels — where years of speaking with founders convinced him that the next wave of blockchain projects would be defined by real revenues, real users, and real-world utility. Perceptron, which merged with the 700,000-node BlockMesh network in mid-2025, is his bet on what he sees as AI's biggest unsolved bottleneck: access to high-quality, affordable, real-time data. Why you should listen Data, not compute, is the real AI bottleneck. Peter opens by arguing that while the market has spent the last few years obsessing over GPUs and compute networks like Aethir and Akash, the harder problem sits upstream — the high-quality training data AI models actually need is locked behind paywalls. OpenAI reportedly pays Reddit around $70 million a year, with similar eye-watering cheques going to X, and that pay-to-play economy effectively freezes out smaller AI startups. Research groups like Epoch AI project the stock of public text data will be fully exhausted somewhere between 2026 and 2032, and even Sam Altman now concedes data — not compute — is the binding constraint. Perceptron's pitch is that a decentralised network can fix this by turning users' idle bandwidth into a globally distributed vantage point on the live web, at roughly a 90% cost advantage to traditional centralised data providers. A thousand eyes, one vision. Perceptron's architecture combines Perceptron Nodes — a software client that sits quietly in the background of a user's browser or Android device and lends out unused bandwidth — with Perceptron Agents embedded in Discord, Telegram and WeChat communities, plus a human-in-the-loop Questing app where contributors annotate datasets. The point isn't to harvest anyone's personal data; it's to aggregate geographically diverse viewpoints of the public web. Peter walks through the use cases this unlocks: an e-commerce operator seeing how their products rank simultaneously in New Zealand, the UK and the US; a quant desk arbitraging cross-border discrepancies in gold, oil or crypto prices in real time; a crypto trader spotting a sentiment shift across thousands of Telegram groups before it shows up on price. Perceptron is already supplying data to Everlyn AI, a text-to-image and text-to-video platform that would have been priced out through traditional suppliers. Freshness, sovereignty and a universal basic data income. Peter makes the case that data freshness is becoming the decisive edge for frontier models, because a ChatGPT or Claude answering questions about a fast-moving crypto market on four-month-old data is flying blind. He also makes a pointed argument about annotation bias — that when a narrow set of labellers with their own agendas decide what a dataset "means," the models downstream inherit those opinions — and contends that decentralised annotation is the counter. In the hot-take round Peter calls himself a multi-chain opportunist who still holds Bitcoin as the anchor, argues we're in a 2020-style bull market (not a 2022 bear), and reckons the real 10-year story of AI is that it will displace a lot of jobs but open up far more opportunity for anyone willing to pick up the tools now — pointing to Claude Code as a live example of a non-developer being able to ship working software in minutes. His sci-fi pick: Avatar — fittingly, recorded the day before a trip to Zhangjiajie, the real-world mountain range that inspired Pandora. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40983130

Coins.ph – Building the Stablecoin Economy 04/20/2026

Coins.ph – Building the Stablecoin Economy Wei Zhou is the CEO of Coins.ph, the largest crypto-native fintech platform in the Philippines, which he acquired in 2022. A former CFO of Binance and long-time finance executive — Wei has been rebuilding Coins.ph as a fully regulated on-ramp between fiat, crypto and stablecoins for Filipino users and businesses, while extending the playbook globally through Coins.xyz. Why you should listen A real-world stablecoin case study: The Philippines pulls in close to $100 billion a year in foreign inflows — roughly $38 billion in retail remittances from nearly 10 million overseas Filipino workers, plus around $50 billion flowing into the country's huge business process outsourcing sector. Historically almost all of it moved over Swift banking rails at 5–6% in fees, which remittance pioneers like Remitly and MoneyGram dragged down to 2–4%. Wei walks through how stablecoin rails are collapsing those costs further still — Coins.ph has run USDC flows with Circle at just 20–30 basis points — and why, post-Covid, everyday Filipino families and businesses with overseas ties are pivoting into stablecoins on their own. A two-sided marketplace with a stablecoin flywheel: Wei thinks of Coins.ph less as an exchange and more as a stablecoin marketplace, with retail users as net buyers of digital dollars on one side, and businesses and institutions sending money into the country as net sellers on the other — a balance that drives liquidity, tightens pricing and fuels growth. The biggest friction, he argues, isn't crypto; it's fiat. Opening up cheap 24/7 deposits and withdrawals is what pulls users in, and weekend trading volumes on Coins already outstrip weekday volumes simply because traditional banks are closed. He also previews a B2B push launching before the end of May, enabling online and offline Coins merchants to accept USDC and USDT payments, alongside partnerships with Circle, HashKey and other licensed players to build out regional stablecoin corridors. Stablecoins as the new unit of account: Looking three to five years out, Wei sees a world where more and more assets — from Bitcoin pairs to tokenised securities and real-world assets — are denominated in stablecoins rather than fiat. The GENIUS Act in the US, along with parallel regimes in the EU, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the UAE, is the unlock: traditional financial institutions can finally engage with stablecoins directly, letting platforms like Coins.ph tap deeper pools of liquidity and bring more investment products to Filipino users. In the hot-take round, Wei calls Bitcoin to a million dollars ("and then sats become the new stablecoin"), argues the AI intelligence layer is already quietly embedded in everything we use, and names Asimov's Foundation and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem as his favourite sci-fi. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40945505

Tok-Edge - The Crypto Hedge Fund with a Token 04/14/2026

Tok-Edge - The Crypto Hedge Fund with a Token Raees Chowdhury is the co-founder and chief investment officer of Tok-Edge, a London-based regulated DeFi hedge fund built around a novel cryptoasset structure called the Redemption Token. With a career spanning senior roles at BCG and Bain Capital, a managing partner position at Revolt Ventures — a fund sitting beneath a $10 billion AUM vehicle — and deep roots in on-chain markets dating back to the ICO era of 2016–17, Raees brings rare dual fluency in institutional finance and DeFi to one of crypto's most ambitious new fund structures. Why you should listen Tok-Edge emerged from stealth on the day of this recording, and the timing is deliberate. Raees argues that the current drawdown — with Bitcoin sitting roughly 50% off all-time highs and many altcoins down 90% or more — is precisely the moment to be allocating capital to DeFi. The fund is built on a contrarian but rigorous thesis: that crypto is a genuinely new liquid asset class, that existing token models are structurally flawed, and that the teams best positioned to capture the next cycle are those who can hold TradFi infrastructure and DeFi-native thinking in the same hand. The centrepiece of what Tok-Edge is building is the Redemption Token — a new category of cryptoasset designed to solve what Raees calls the duality problem that has undermined most token models to date. Unlike governance tokens, which trend towards zero, or utility tokens, which are constrained to their native blockchain, the Redemption Token is permissionless and composable in DeFi while carrying a genuine defined function: the ability for fund investors to redeem underlying fund shares at net asset value. The model Raees reaches for by analogy is MicroStrategy — a structure designed first, then deployed as a product. Tok-Edge is doing the same, with the Redemption Token as the architecture and the Tok-Edge Fund as its first application. The fund itself is built to institutional standard — custodians, regulated directors, and governance structures you'd expect from any tier-one equities vehicle — but applied entirely to crypto and DeFi strategies. Raees walks through the team's approach to on-chain yield generation, active capital allocation between strategies, and why sitting in stablecoins and earning on-chain yield is a feature rather than a concession. He also shares his conviction that DeFi yields are far from dead, why on-chain flows will identify the winners of the next cycle before most people see them coming, and how the Berkshire Hathaway model — long-only, actively managed, comfortable holding cash — translates surprisingly well to liquid crypto asset management. With a TGE capped at $21 million targeting a $100 million first close later in 2026, this is a conversation worth hearing early. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40879290

MovitOn - The Next Uber for Delivery 04/12/2026

MovitOn - The Next Uber for Delivery Marco Kowalewski is the managing partner at MovitOn, a Dubai-headquartered startup building what it describes as the Uber for delivery. Originally from Germany, Marco spent years in management roles and as a business lecturer before diving into blockchain around eight years ago. He is a three-time author on topics spanning cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and tokenisation, and joined the MovitOn team roughly eight months ago after an advisory relationship evolved into a leadership role. Why you should listen The global logistics industry is worth trillions, yet sending a single document internationally through legacy couriers like DHL or FedEx can still cost well over a hundred dollars and take a week to arrive. MovitOn is attacking that inefficiency with a peer-to-peer model that connects senders directly with travellers who have spare luggage capacity. The concept is deceptively simple: if someone is already flying from Medellín to Frankfurt, they can carry your parcel for a fraction of the traditional cost and get it there within 24 hours instead of seven days. Marco walks Andy through exactly how a shipment works — from personal handovers and smart IoT terminal pickups at airports, through to delivery at the destination — and explains why the platform targets prices 25 to 50 per cent lower than incumbent services while paying couriers anywhere from 50 to 100 dollars per delivery. What sets MovitOn apart from a simple marketplace is the infrastructure being built underneath it. The MVON utility token powers a smart contract escrow system: when a courier picks up a high-value item like a laptop, a deposit is locked on-chain and only released upon confirmed delivery, removing the trust gap that would otherwise kill peer-to-peer logistics at scale. On top of that, the team is developing physical smart terminals — MovitBoxes — equipped with AI-powered security scanners, initially deployed at airports, that verify parcels contain nothing prohibited or dangerous. An AI compliance engine navigates the regulatory patchwork of import and export rules across jurisdictions in real time, guiding users through what can and cannot be shipped between specific countries. It is an ambitious blend of atoms and bits that Marco acknowledges is significantly harder than a pure software play, but one the team believes is necessary to make the model safe, scalable, and compliant. The project has just closed a two-million-dollar community pre-sale round, with a public sale currently underway and a centralised exchange listing expected shortly after. Early adoption markets include Dubai — where the company is headquartered and which serves as a natural hub for international travellers — along with the European Union, with Germany as a priority. Eastern Europe and parts of Asia are next, followed by the United States and South America, with a target of operating in over 100 countries by 2030 and onboarding half a million users. Marco also shares his honest read on the current crypto market: he had been expecting Bitcoin to pull back toward the 50,000-dollar range but concedes that recent price stability and upward momentum may be shifting the picture. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40818945

PerpTools – How DEXTools Is Building the Full DeFi Trading Stack 03/31/2026

PerpTools – How DEXTools Is Building the Full DeFi Trading Stack Wael Rajab is the CMO of PerpTools and co-founder and director of DEXT Ventures, the capital arm of DEXTools — one of DeFi's original and most widely used on-chain trading and analytics platforms. With nearly a decade in crypto and a portfolio spanning over 100 investments across 150+ integrated blockchains, Wael has been at the centre of decentralised finance's growth from data dashboard to full trading stack. Why you should listen DEXTools built its reputation as the go-to platform for on-chain token analytics — the place traders head when they want to understand what's happening across chains without needing to be technically fluent. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. DEX volumes have grown nearly eightfold in two years, from $81 billion to roughly $740 billion, and perpetuals trading has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in DeFi. PerpTools is DEXTools' answer: a native perps vertical that gives millions of existing users the ability to trade derivatives without ever leaving the platform they already trust. What makes the PerpTools story compelling isn't just the product — it's the distribution. Most new perp DEXs face a brutal cold-start problem, spending heavily on user acquisition with uncertain results. PerpTools launched into an established audience and reached 40,000 users and over $150 million in traded volume within weeks of its beta. Built on Orderly's shared order book and liquidity layer, the platform is designed for speed and capital efficiency, with sub-200 millisecond latency and leverage up to 100x — all self-custodial and permissionless. The roadmap is where things get genuinely interesting. AI trading agents — back-tested to average 20% monthly returns — are being rolled out in tranches to top community members, with copy trading and vault-based strategies to follow. Prediction markets, a tap-to-earn trading game, and a token generation event targeted within six to eight months round out a product pipeline designed to make the platform as sticky as possible. Wael also opens up on competing in a space where Hyperliquid looms large, the strategic logic behind the Orderly partnership, and why DeFi's permissionless, borderless architecture represents a genuine levelling of the financial playing field. Supporting links If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a five-star review — it helps more people find the show. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40690170

Abundant – What If the Most Radical Act Is Giving? 03/25/2026

Abundant – What If the Most Radical Act Is Giving? Andy sits down with Donald Griswold, director of the new indie documentary feature Abundant, and Sheila Dohmann, Chief Marketing Officer at Stuff.io, the decentralized media platform bringing the film to audiences worldwide. Abundant examines generosity, scarcity and what drives the rarest altruists among us — non-directed kidney donors who give a kidney to a complete stranger — and it's being distributed exclusively via blockchain streaming starting March 26th. Why you should listen This conversation cuts to the heart of what's broken in independent film distribution. Donald explains how the traditional model leaves filmmakers at the mercy of major streamers who treat art as content consumption metrics, with barely-cracked doors for indie creators. His experience pitching Abundant to Hollywood as an original led to an unexpected revelation: a blockchain-native platform could offer something no subscription streamer could — true audience ownership, transparent economics and a real business plan filmmakers can take to investors. For any creator who's ever struggled to answer the question "what's your distribution plan?", this is essential listening. Sheila breaks down exactly how Stuff.io works under the hood, and for a crypto-savvy audience, the architecture is genuinely interesting. The platform shatters media files into millions of encrypted shards stored across IPFS, reassembled second-by-second only when an owner authenticates. It's a fundamentally anti-piracy design that also solves the ownership problem — unlike every major streaming licence that vanishes if the platform shuts down. She tells the cautionary tale of Stuff.io's origin: a successful e-book startup was sold to a VC who simply closed it, and eight million people lost their libraries overnight. That moment sparked the mission to put digital ownership on-chain permanently. The most compelling thread is where the technology meets the cause. Abundant isn't just a film about kidneys — it's a general audience exploration of generosity and scarcity with a twist ending that leaves audiences emotionally moved. Donald explains how blockchain portability enables a gifting strategy where medical practices, transplant centres and kidney community affiliates can buy copies and pass them on, just like a DVD. For a community where most people with kidney disease don't even know they have it, that frictionless sharing could literally save lives. Sheila extends the vision further into banned books on the blockchain, historical document preservation and IP protection for creators — a picture of Stuff.io as essential cultural infrastructure, not just another streaming app. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40623225

Themelia – Custom Crypto Indexes 03/18/2026

Themelia – Custom Crypto Indexes Jessica Ellerm and Kent Grogan are the co-founders of Themelia, a platform building the next infrastructure layer for crypto investment through custom indexing technology. Jessica comes from a fintech background — including a stint at ASX-listed payments platform Tyro and a superannuation startup she founded and sold — while Kent ran a hedge fund for years before moving into portfolio management and FinTech. Together, they're tackling one of the most underserved problems in digital assets: how do you get sensible, risk-adjusted exposure to a market of 52 million tokens without getting wrecked? Why you should listen Crypto has a reputation problem, and Kent and Jessica argue it's largely structural. Most tokens are created, pump briefly, and go to zero — which means a naive index that mirrors the full market is essentially a vehicle for buying failure at scale. The Themelia thesis is that an index needs to do better than that: not just collapse the market into something manageable, but actively filter for tokens with genuine staying power before they've already made their biggest moves. Kent draws a sharp analogy to equities — nobody in TradFi just buys one marquee stock and calls it a portfolio, yet that's essentially what most crypto investors do with Bitcoin. The pair make a compelling case that the infrastructure for smarter diversification is long overdue. The platform's most interesting innovation is the distinction between static and dynamic indexing. Jessica points out that most existing crypto index products — exchange bundles, early ETF attempts — don't move fast enough to keep pace with shifting narratives. Themelia's custom index builder lets users set their own filters, backtest against up to three years of historical data, then execute and auto-rebalance directly through connected exchange accounts like Coinbase, Binance, or Bybit. For those who don't want to build their own, the platform is evolving toward an "ensembling" model — aggregating the token picks of vetted crypto analysts into a curated house index that does the filtering work for you. The bigger picture is a genuine gap in the market. Jessica notes that index products now capture the majority of capital flows in traditional finance — from retail investors all the way to pension funds — yet less than 0.1% of the total crypto market is currently invested through indexes. That's not just an opportunity for Themelia; it's an argument for why the space needs this infrastructure to mature. If the house index can demonstrate better risk-adjusted returns than simply holding Bitcoin, it could become the entry point that brings cautious, sideline-sitting investors into the market for the first time. Supporting links 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 us /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40521465

Stormrake – Old School Brokerage for the Digital Asset Era 03/12/2026

Stormrake – Old School Brokerage for the Digital Asset Era Bisher Khudeira is the COO of , a Melbourne-based digital asset brokerage offering best execution trading, institutional custody, and asset management across Bitcoin, digital assets, and tokenized real-world assets. Bisher joins Andy to explain why the brokerage model beats the exchange model for serious investors, what it takes to build a crypto business in one of the most hostile banking environments in the developed world, and why Stormrake is about to plant its flag in Dallas. Why you should listen Bisher has spent a decade in financial services, starting in foreign exchange brokering in 2015 and buying his first Bitcoin in a McDonald's car park in 2016 via peer-to-peer. He joined in 2022, bought into the business, and has helped scale it from fewer than a hundred clients — mostly friends and family — to over 10,000 across Australia, with a US launch now weeks away. He walks through the core brokerage proposition: Stormrake faces around 20 exchanges and OTC desks simultaneously, aggregates client orders to access deeper liquidity and sharper pricing, and charges a flat commission with no spread markup. The result is what Bisher calls the Satoshi maximiser — clients walk away with more Bitcoin per transaction than they would going it alone on a single exchange. The conversation covers two wholesale funds: the Cumulus class, which targets picks-and-shovels digital assets like Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid, and Chainlink alongside select private equity plays; and the Stratus class, a Bitcoin and gold fund designed to smooth out Bitcoin's volatility while improving on gold's growth profile. Bisher also details the custody offering — fully institutional grade with insurance, separation of funds, and cold storage as default — while stressing that fully supports self-custody for clients who want it. The US expansion into Dallas, two years in the making and launching end of April 2026, is built as a direct lift-and-shift of the Australian model into a jurisdiction where digital asset brokers are treated as normal participants in the economy rather than pariahs. Bisher doesn't hold back on the state of Australian banking, describing three personal debankings and ongoing hostility from the big four toward crypto businesses and their clients. He argues Australia is a decade behind the US on digital asset regulation, with an AFSL licensing regime for digital assets only coming into effect by mid-2026. Despite that, he frames the challenge as deeply rewarding — building a business from zero in a nascent industry with no playbook, bootstrapped the entire way, with the goal of becoming a digital-era complement to the likes of Charles Schwab or E-Trade. The episode closes with Bisher's market outlook: he sees Bitcoin within 10 to 20 percent of its bottom, expects three to four months of sideways chop, and is watching large institutional buyers accumulate aggressively at current levels ahead of what he believes will be a run toward $200,000 and beyond. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40419655

Solayer – Hardware Accelerated Finance at the Speed of Metal 03/11/2026

Solayer – Hardware Accelerated Finance at the Speed of Metal Joshua Sum is the Chief Product Officer at Solayer, a hardware accelerated network built to move money at the speed of metal. Joshua joins Andy Pickering to explain how dedicated chip-level infrastructure is pushing blockchain throughput into territory no software-only chain can reach — and why that matters as payments, AI agents, and real-world asset tokenization all converge on the same rails. Why you should listen Joshua's path to crypto ran through direct-to-consumer e-commerce, a founding quant role at Treehouse, and building CollegeDow into the largest university blockchain network in the world, spanning around 120 campuses globally. He joined Solayer as a founding engineer and has grown with the company over two years into his current role leading product across multiple lines. He walks through how Solayer evolved from pioneering restaking on Solana — using it as a tool to improve transaction reliability and throughput — into building a full hardware accelerated Layer 1 that uses the Solana Virtual Machine but separates consensus across dedicated machines connected by low-latency, high-bandwidth equipment. The result is battle-tested performance of 200,000 to 300,000 transactions per second using messy, real-world transaction types, not the synthetic benchmarks that get loosely thrown around in the space. The conversation covers Solayer's $35 million ecosystem fund and why the team deliberately avoided a grants model in favour of a venture approach, investing in founders building sustainable, revenue-generating businesses rather than handing out free money for narrative-driven experiments. Joshua walks through three early-stage portfolio projects: Docs Exchange, a full-suite DeFi trading platform; BuffTrade, an AI agent launchpad where bots trade on your behalf and back their tokens with actual strategy performance; and SpoutFi, which tokenizes equities and lets users borrow against them the way high-net-worth individuals already do — without selling, and without triggering a tax event. Each use case maps directly back to the throughput thesis: more agents, more users, more overlapping state means you need a chain that can actually handle the load. Joshua also breaks down Solayer's consumer-facing push through Solayer Pay, which includes a mobile app, rotating private addresses for peer-to-peer transfers, and the Emerald crypto card with built-in travel rewards and partner airdrops. He explains why the chain will launch with SOL as its gas token — removing the onboarding friction that kills adoption on new L1s — before introducing a dual-token model with LAYER as the ecosystem matures. The episode closes with Joshua's take on the current market: tough conditions are positive for the long term because they flush out narrative-driven projects and reward teams building real products with real revenue, which is exactly where Solayer wants to be. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40403705

UTEXO – Native USDT Comes Home to Bitcoin 03/08/2026

UTEXO – Native USDT Comes Home to Bitcoin Viktor Ihnatiuk is the co-founder and CEO of UTEXO, a Tether-backed global settlement network for native USDT and Bitcoin payments, powered by the Lightning Network and the RGB protocol. Viktor joins Andy Pickering to walk through a decade-long journey from Ukrainian fintech to the frontline of Bitcoin infrastructure — and to explain why the world's biggest stablecoin is finally coming back to the chain where it was born. Why you should listen Viktor traces his path from launching Ukraine's first peer-to-peer lending platform and first fintech conference — where he discovered Bitcoin in 2015 — through to building Boosty Labs, a 150-person dev shop that served Coinbase, Bitfinex, Ledger, MetaMask, and WalletConnect. That operation evolved into a venture studio, and a chance meeting with Tether at Bitcoin Prague in 2023 set the stage for what became UTEXO. Viktor explains how he helped push RGB to mainnet, and how a joint venture with Tether was rebranded into UTEXO, which has just closed a $7.5 million seed round co-led by Tether, Big Brain Holdings, and Plan B Ventures. The conversation digs into what UTEXO actually delivers: instant USDT and Bitcoin settlement at zero transaction cost, with client-side validation privacy baked in through RGB. Viktor breaks down why this isn't USDT arriving on Bitcoin for the first time — it originally launched on OmniLayer back in 2014 — but rather coming home, rebuilt on infrastructure that finally works. He makes the case that Lightning's scalability leaves every other chain behind, and walks through the key use cases UTEXO is targeting: native BTC-to-USDT swaps, new revenue models for wallets through transaction fee monetization, and cross-exchange high-frequency arbitrage. Viktor also lays out UTEXO's broader thesis on stablecoin adoption and payments. He argues that the biggest growth opportunity for stablecoins isn't in DeFi yield — it's in emerging markets where USDT already functions as everyday money for savings, remittances, and increasingly, point-of-sale payments. UTEXO is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for that shift, working alongside partners like WalletConnect and aligning closely with Tether's distribution strategy. The episode closes with Viktor's take on what blockchain is actually good for — payments, trading, and gambling — and why ten years in the trenches taught him to ignore everything else. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40359085

Open Frontier - The Coalition for Fair Crypto 02/25/2026

Open Frontier - The Coalition for Fair Crypto Open Frontier Executive Director Erik Balsbaugh and board member Amanda Wick join Andy Pickering for a wide-ranging conversation on crypto, politics, and the future of digital finance. The discussion explores why digital assets are too important to be left to partisan trench warfare, and why the real promise of crypto has less to do with speculation and more to do with reducing fees, expanding access, and breaking the grip of extractive financial intermediaries. Erik and Amanda make the case that this is ultimately a fight about fairness, affordability, and who the financial system is built to serve. Why you should listen Erik lays out the mission behind Open Frontier: to ensure progressive and broader public-interest voices stay engaged in shaping digital asset policy before the space is captured by incumbents and centralized financial power. He argues that crypto and fintech can help restore finance to everyday people by lowering remittance costs, reducing predatory fees, and enabling more transparent, accountable financial flows. Rather than letting digital assets become just another tool for concentrated institutions, Open Frontier wants to push for a democratic financial future—one where the benefits of innovation reach workers, immigrants, nonprofits, and small businesses, not just insiders and early winners. Amanda brings hard-earned perspective from the Department of Justice, FinCEN, Chainalysis, and Capitol Hill, and offers one of the episode’s sharpest reframes: crypto doesn’t uniquely create crime—it makes financial activity more visible. She argues that much of the outrage around crypto crime reflects a visibility problem, not a new crime problem, noting that scams, laundering, and illicit finance long predate blockchain. What changed is that crypto put more of it in plain sight. She also takes aim at the media and political tendency to reduce the entire sector to meme coins and scandals, while ignoring the less flashy but genuinely transformative use cases: stablecoins, cheaper cross-border payments, tokenization, digital identity, and financial infrastructure that can return value to consumers instead of extracting it. The conversation closes on the geopolitical and ethical stakes of the current moment. Amanda warns that stablecoins are becoming a major global channel for dollar access, and that U.S. policymakers risk undermining dollar influence if they fail to regulate intelligently and stay competitive while other jurisdictions move faster. At the same time, both guests address the reputational damage caused by political grift and conflicts of interest in crypto, stressing that corruption should be treated as a governance and ethics problem—not as evidence that the underlying technology should be discarded. Amanda ends with a broader call that goes beyond left versus right: in a world increasingly split between the haves and the have-nots, digital assets may be one of the few tools capable of shifting structural power in finance—if people pay attention before the opportunity is lost. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40222305

Transak - The Crypto On-Ramp 02/08/2026

Transak - The Crypto On-Ramp Andy Werner is VP of Partnerships and Strategy at Transak, one of the world’s leading fiat-to-crypto on-ramp providers. Werner shares his journey through fintech — from big banks to startups — and explains how Transak is building the compliance and payments infrastructure that quietly powers hundreds of crypto platforms globally. While the company operates in what he jokingly calls the “boring” side of crypto, Werner argues that boring is exactly what payments infrastructure should be: seamless, reliable, and invisible to the end user. Why you should listen The conversation dives deep into the evolving role of stablecoins, which Werner frames not as ideological crypto instruments but as practical tools for builders. For developers and businesses, stablecoins function like programmable payment rails — enabling instant settlement, global reach, and lower costs through a single integration. He points to the past 18–24 months as a turning point, driven by clearer regulation in the U.S. and frameworks like MiCA in Europe. This regulatory momentum, combined with improving UX abstraction around wallets and compliance, is accelerating enterprise adoption and opening new product categories. Werner also reflects on stablecoin usage through the lens of his Argentine roots, where inflation and currency instability make the value proposition immediately obvious. In markets across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, dollar-backed stablecoins act as a digital escape hatch — giving consumers access to dollar savings, payments, and yield via nothing more than a smartphone. From remittances to trade finance and cross-border payroll, these real-world use cases are driving rapid growth. Transak is already seeing 30–40% of its volume in stablecoins, a figure Werner expects to exceed 50% — possibly 75% — within a year as adoption shifts from speculative crypto assets to everyday financial flows. The discussion closes on regulation and the future of financial services. Werner is strongly in favor of pending U.S. stablecoin legislation, particularly provisions that would allow issuers to pass yield to users — arguing competition with banks ultimately benefits consumers. Looking ahead, his conviction is clear: all financial services will migrate on-chain. His hot takes? He’s 90% Bitcoin maximalist, believes everything will eventually run on blockchain rails, and expects AI — still under-adopted today — to unleash massive productivity gains. His sci-fi pick to wrap it all up: Foundation by Isaac Asimov — a fitting nod to long-range technological inevitability. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/40036825

Veera - The OnChain Neobank 01/29/2026

Veera - The OnChain Neobank Andy sits down with SB, CEO and co-founder of Veera, to unpack a bold attempt at one of crypto’s oldest and most stubborn problems: making it usable for normal people. From launching BlackBerrys and building early mobile ad tech, to challenging Netflix with an Asian streaming platform and exiting a travel startup, SB’s winding entrepreneurial path now lands squarely in on-chain finance. The conversation traces how Veera is positioning itself as a true crypto neobank — not just a wallet with a card — and why user experience, not yield or hype, will decide whether crypto ever really breaks into the mainstream. Why you should listen SB starts by framing Veera as a product-led response to crypto’s stalled adoption curve. Despite hundreds of millions of internet users globally, crypto still lives in the “tens of millions” club, largely because it’s too complex for everyday users. Veera’s core idea is simple but ambitious: your mother should be able to swap tokens, stake assets, or move funds without knowing what a bridge, seed phrase, or protocol is. That philosophy has driven Veera’s focus on passkeys instead of seed phrases, simplified onboarding, and heavy use of abstraction to hide blockchain complexity behind familiar, intuitive design. SB positions himself as a “fresh eyes” builder in Web3 — someone who didn’t grow up native to crypto and therefore isn’t blind to how broken the experience still is. Geographically, Veera is betting on the same adoption arc the internet followed: emerging markets first, then deeper penetration in developed economies. SB points to Latin America, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as the next major growth zones, where access to global financial products is still limited. From there, he lays out Veera’s four-pillar model: Invest, Earn, Spend, and Borrow. That includes tokenized gold, upcoming tokenized equities for users who’ve never had realistic access to global stocks, multi-chain yield in a single interface, a crypto prepaid card with tens of thousands already waitlisted, and a longer-term push into on-chain lending using financial identity and credit scoring. The pitch is clear: a full-stack, crypto-native bank rather than a TradFi app with a blockchain sticker slapped on top. The conversation closes on the bigger picture — institutional capital, regulation, and what actually moves the needle for mass adoption. SB sees the market maturing, citing massive liquidation events that no longer crash the system as a sign of growing resilience and institutional presence. But for consumers, he’s blunt: UX is still the real bottleneck. Yields exist, volatility is slowly compressing, but the experience remains “so, so broken.” In the rapid-fire hot take round, he plants his flag as a multi-chain opportunist, calls Ethereum his firmest conviction, and predicts stablecoins will become the basic financial rails of the next decade. It’s a forward-looking, product-first take on a future where on-chain finance doesn’t feel like crypto anymore — it just feels like money. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/39918285

New Book - The Intelligent Crypto Investor 01/20/2026

New Book - The Intelligent Crypto Investor John Hargrave, CEO of Media Shower and author of The Intelligent Crypto Investor, joins the show to unpack a radically calm, Buffett-inspired approach to crypto investing. From wiring money to Belarus to buy Bitcoin in 2013 to nearly losing his business in the 2018 crypto winter, John shares how hard-earned wisdom led him to a disciplined, diversified strategy that blends traditional assets with a carefully sized slice of high-quality crypto — and why this model has quietly outperformed traditional portfolios over the past several years. Why you should listen John traces his origin story from early Bitcoin believer to battle-tested investor, recounting the moment he and his wife went “all in” on crypto during the 2017 bull run — and the brutal reality check that followed when the market collapsed. That near-death experience for his marketing business reshaped his philosophy around risk, leading him to embrace diversification over maximalism. The result: a framework that treats crypto not as a lottery ticket or ideological crusade, but as a serious asset class that earns its place alongside stocks and bonds. At the core of John’s book is a simple but contrarian portfolio model: a traditional 60/30-style mix of stocks and bonds, plus up to 10% allocated to high-quality crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He argues this small slice has historically captured outsized upside while strictly limiting downside risk — even in worst-case scenarios. John also takes aim at financial advisors for being “a decade behind,” suggesting everyday investors can now build and manage this strategy themselves with the right tools and long-term mindset. Beyond numbers, John brings storytelling and big ideas into the mix, drawing inspiration from legendary investors like Warren Buffett, Ben Graham, and Bill Miller to apply value-investing principles to blockchain projects. He shares his bold conviction that crypto and AI represent unevenly distributed futures — and that a global digital currency is not a question of “if,” but “when.” The conversation closes on sci-fi, Asimov, and the long arc of technological change, framing crypto not just as an investment, but as a bet on the architecture of tomorrow’s financial system. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/39793610

OpenTrade - Stablecoin Infra & Yield for Financial Services 01/08/2026

OpenTrade - Stablecoin Infra & Yield for Financial Services Andy sits down with Dave Sutter, CEO and co-founder of OpenTrade, to unpack why stablecoins are rapidly becoming the most important financial primitive in crypto — and arguably the missing link between digital assets and traditional finance. Why you should listen Dave traces his journey from building early Bitcoin wallets and launching one of the first dollar-backed stablecoins, through years working with major regulated institutions, to founding OpenTrade in 2023. His core thesis is simple but bold: stablecoins are no longer a niche crypto product — they are evolving into internet-native dollars used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide for real payments, savings, and cross-border commerce The conversation dives deep into OpenTrade’s role as institutional-grade “yield-as-a-service” infrastructure for stablecoins, enabling fintechs, neobanks, and platforms to embed yield directly into their apps without building complex financial plumbing themselves. Dave explains how OpenTrade allows users to earn yield across a wide spectrum — from ultra-safe U.S. Treasuries and money market funds, through higher-yield bonds and private credit, to delta-neutral crypto strategies and curated DeFi markets — all while keeping funds liquid and accessible. This shift, he argues, flips the old crypto narrative on its head: stablecoins are no longer just a parking spot between trades, but a competitive alternative to bank savings accounts that offer better yields with fully reserved, transparent structures. Zooming out, Dave makes the case that stablecoins are not just a technological upgrade but a reinvention of money itself — permissionless digital cash that anyone with an internet connection can hold, move, and earn on. He points to growing regulatory clarity, adoption by giants like Visa, PayPal, and Stripe, and even banking lobby warnings about deposit flight as evidence of how disruptive this shift really is. His bold conviction: stablecoin market capitalization will exceed $10 trillion within the next decade. The episode wraps with rapid-fire hot takes on Bitcoin vs multi-chain futures, the convergence of DeFi and real-world finance, and a shared love of science fiction — fitting for a conversation about a financial future that, as Dave puts it, is already here but not evenly distributed. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/39665610

SecondSwap - The Dex For Locked Tokens 01/06/2026

Tria - Live Free, Bank Freer 12/21/2025

Tria - Live Free, Bank Freer Vijit Katta is the CEO and co-founder at Tria, a self-custodial neobank that unifies spending, trading, and earning across all chains — without bridges, gas, or custodians. Why you should listen Vijit explains Tria’s core vision as building both a protocol layer and a consumer layer that abstracts away blockchain complexity for users and businesses. He describes how the fragmentation of chains, gas fees, bridges, failed transactions, and security risks have slowed mass adoption, and how Tria’s infrastructure removes these friction points across Bitcoin, EVM chains, Solana, and beyond. This foundation enabled the launch of Tria’s consumer-facing product, a self-custodial neo-bank experience where users can spend, trade, and earn without needing to understand the underlying blockchain mechanics. The conversation explores Tria’s early traction, including more than 50,000 users in its closed beta generating close to $100 million in transaction volume across spending, swaps, and bridges within just three months. Vijit attributes this growth to Tria’s ability to seamlessly bridge real-world payments and on-chain assets, allowing users to spend thousands of supported tokens directly via cards without manual off-ramps or asset conversions. The emphasis is on maintaining full self-custody while delivering a user experience comparable to traditional Web2 banking apps. Vijit also discusses Tria’s intent-based infrastructure, which routes transactions across multiple paths to reduce failure rates and improve reliability in a multi-chain environment. Rather than relying on single bridges or interoperability layers, Tria processes user intent and dynamically fulfills transactions through the most reliable route, ensuring users receive the outcome they want without being exposed to technical failures. The episode covers Tria’s card offerings, including virtual and physical cards across different tiers, each unlocking varying cashback rates, trading fee discounts, and access to curated DeFi yield strategies. Vijit explains how Tria aims to surface opportunities that are typically inaccessible or too complex for everyday users, while aligning rewards and benefits with long-term usage rather than speculation. Vijit outlines his conviction that blockchain-based payment rails will ultimately replace legacy systems and envisions Tria becoming a primary bank account for millions across emerging markets within the next decade. He also touches on emerging developments such as agent-driven payments, where AI systems initiate transactions on behalf of users, and reflects on the uneven distribution of technological progress. The episode concludes with Vijit sharing his optimism for borderless, accessible finance and his belief that seamless on-chain banking is closer than most people realise. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/39487845

Pixion Games - The Next Generation of Play 12/18/2025

Pixion Games - The Next Generation of Play Kam Punia is the Founder and CEO of Pixion Games, the London based studio behind Fableborne and the $POWER gaming ecosystem. Why you should listen In this episode, Kam Punia, founder and CEO of Pixion Games, shares his background as a long-time game industry veteran and explains how that experience shaped the studio’s approach to building competitive, mobile-first games. He reflects on lessons learned from working on large global franchises such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, including how to scale game universes, balance progression, and design systems that keep players engaged over long periods of time. Kam also discusses the broader state of the gaming market and why mobile remains the dominant platform for global player hours. The conversation focuses on Pixion Games’ flagship title, Fableborne, a mobile action RPG that blends fast-paced combat with strategic base building and asynchronous PvP gameplay. Kam explains the core mechanics of the game, including hero collection, kingdom defence, and raid-based progression, as well as the fantasy setting of the Shatterlands. He outlines how Fableborne is designed to be accessible for casual players while offering deeper strategic layers for more competitive audiences. Kam discusses how Web3 elements are integrated into Fableborne in a way that supports gameplay rather than replacing it. He explains Pixion’s philosophy of optional blockchain participation, where players can enjoy the full game experience without needing to interact with wallets or tokens. The episode explores how Web3 can enable ownership, progression systems, and long-term incentives, while keeping onboarding friction low for traditional gamers. The discussion covers Pixion’s partnerships and ecosystem support, including collaborations with infrastructure providers and investors that help power live operations, scaling, and community engagement. Kam shares insights into how Pixion thinks about player trust, controlled economies, and sustainable reward systems as part of building a long-lasting game. Finally, Kam looks ahead to the future of gaming, outlining why competitive, mobile-first experiences with strong live-ops foundations are likely to lead the next wave of innovation. He explains how community-driven content, evolving game worlds, and optional digital ownership can coexist with proven free-to-play models, and why experienced game designers will play a critical role in shaping the next generation of hybrid games. Supporting links 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. /episode/index/show/thecryptoconversation/id/39461005

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