Afleveringen
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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 listenSolayer 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.
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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 β late by bull-run standards, as he admits, but with a clear view of the gap he wanted to fill.
Why you should listenLarbi'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 cafΓ© 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 β 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 β much of it the French-speaking InteractivTrading community β 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 β and whether β we trade at all, and unashamedly nostalgic for the original Avatar.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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 listenSebastian'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.
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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 β work that left her unusually fluent in what crypto teams actually need from their infrastructure.
Why you should listenThe 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 β AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, even Oracle β 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 β choose your disks, your storage, your RAM, and pay only for what the workload demands β 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 β she doubts AWS will keep handing startups six-figure credit grants for signing up to an accelerator β 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 β 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.
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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 listenCam 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.
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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 β she has written operational and hazard-standards systems for the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP β 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 listenWilson'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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β before signing off with a charmingly vintage sci-fi pick in the British fantasy series Catweazle.
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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 β five years in investment banking and debt capital markets, then five more in product management building the actual rails β 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 listenCharlie'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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β independent node operators, cryptographic consensus, geographic redundancy β is what lets GSIBs sign off on production deployments. Charlie pulls in the standards-and-scale argument with sharp historical analogies: rail gauges for industrialisation, standardised shipping containers for global trade, US GAAP for capital allocation, TCP/IP for the internet. Financial markets need standards before they can scale, and no institution wants to integrate ten different blockchains ten different ways. The hot take round delivers a multi-chain opportunist stance, a contrarian view on tokenised equity headlines, a 10-year vision in which blockchain rails disappear entirely from the user experience, and a callout to the recent DTCC Collateral AppChain announcement β built on Chainlink's CRE, slated for Q4 2026 β as the first glimpse of an onchain capital markets future that's already arriving.
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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 listenSleep 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.
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Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at Rootstock Labs, a core contributor to Rootstock, the Bitcoin sidechain that has been quietly running for eight years and now anchors a growing slice of institutional Bitcoin DeFi. Based in London, Green came to crypto through fifteen years in traditional finance β a decade at Bloomberg working with banks and high-frequency trading desks, followed by a stint at Circle building out the European stablecoin business β 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 listenGreen'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 β Fireblocks, Fordefi and Utila β 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 β illiquid stores of value that Bitcoin, once composable through chains like Rootstock, can simply do better. He is candid about the risks, too: concentration in a handful of ETFs and the dominance of Strategy as the largest non-Satoshi holder are not trivial, even if he thinks the diversification of providers is happening fast enough. His closing critique is one the institutional crowd will recognize β 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.
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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 listenKosala'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 β 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 β any proprietary fix would lock users in and break the very portability that makes self-custody meaningful β 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, 10β15% 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 β bridge to Aave or Compound β lend β 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 β 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 $5β$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.
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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 β starting in Texas the moment the state deregulated β 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 listenMost 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 β the same forecasting and optimization engine that powers its wholesale trading desk and its battery storage business across ERCOT and CAISO β 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 β 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 β they are critical grid resources, capable of fully shutting down when supply tightens in a way AI data centers (which often demand five-nines uptime) simply cannot. On the AI-versus-Bitcoin debate, Kise sees coexistence rather than replacement: miners with land and interconnects are partnering with AI customers, and new flexible load is still arriving in Texas. The hot take round closes things out with thoughts on a 10-year vision of Gridmatic as "the power company of the future," why every professional should be using AI now rather than fearing it, and a fitting May the 4th nod to The Martian.
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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 β one of the fastest-growing crypto YouTube channels β 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 listenData, 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 β 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 β not compute β 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 β a software client that sits quietly in the background of a user's browser or Android device and lends out unused bandwidth β 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 β that when a narrow set of labellers with their own agendas decide what a dataset "means," the models downstream inherit those opinions β 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 β 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 β fittingly, recorded the day before a trip to Zhangjiajie, the real-world mountain range that inspired Pandora.
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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 β 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 listenA real-world stablecoin case study: The Philippines pulls in close to $100 billion a year in foreign inflows β 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 5β6% in fees, which remittance pioneers like Remitly and MoneyGram dragged down to 2β4%. Wei walks through how stablecoin rails are collapsing those costs further still β Coins.ph has run USDC flows with Circle at just 20β30 basis points β 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 β 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 β from Bitcoin pairs to tokenised securities and real-world assets β 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.
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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 β a fund sitting beneath a $10 billion AUM vehicle β and deep roots in on-chain markets dating back to the ICO era of 2016β17, Raees brings rare dual fluency in institutional finance and DeFi to one of crypto's most ambitious new fund structures.
Why you should listenTok-Edge emerged from stealth on the day of this recording, and the timing is deliberate. Raees argues that the current drawdown β with Bitcoin sitting roughly 50% off all-time highs and many altcoins down 90% or more β 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 β 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 β 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 β custodians, regulated directors, and governance structures you'd expect from any tier-one equities vehicle β 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 β long-only, actively managed, comfortable holding cash β 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.
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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 listenThe 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 MedellΓn 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 β from personal handovers and smart IoT terminal pickups at airports, through to delivery at the destination β 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 β MovitBoxes β 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 β where the company is headquartered and which serves as a natural hub for international travellers β 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.
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Wael Rajab is the CMO of PerpTools and co-founder and director of DEXT Ventures, the capital arm of DEXTools β 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 listenDEXTools built its reputation as the go-to platform for on-chain token analytics β 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 β 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 β all self-custodial and permissionless.
The roadmap is where things get genuinely interesting. AI trading agents β back-tested to average 20% monthly returns β 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.
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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 β non-directed kidney donors who give a kidney to a complete stranger β and it's being distributed exclusively via blockchain streaming starting March 26th.
Why you should listenThis 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β a picture of Stuff.io as essential cultural infrastructure, not just another streaming app.
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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 β including a stint at ASX-listed payments platform Tyro and a superannuation startup she founded and sold β 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 listenCrypto has a reputation problem, and Kent and Jessica argue it's largely structural. Most tokens are created, pump briefly, and go to zero β 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 β 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 β exchange bundles, early ETF attempts β 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 β 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 β from retail investors all the way to pension funds β 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.
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Bisher Khudeira is the COO of Stormrake, 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 listenBisher 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 Stormrake in 2022, bought into the business, and has helped scale it from fewer than a hundred clients β mostly friends and family β 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 β clients walk away with more Bitcoin per transaction than they would going it alone on a single exchange.
The conversation covers Stormrake's 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 β fully institutional grade with insurance, separation of funds, and cold storage as default β while stressing that Stormrake 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 β 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.
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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 β and why that matters as payments, AI agents, and real-world asset tokenization all converge on the same rails.
Why you should listenJoshua'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 β using it as a tool to improve transaction reliability and throughput β 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 β 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 β removing the onboarding friction that kills adoption on new L1s β 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.
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