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Ault Blockchain – Silver First, Then Everything Else Oct 27, 2026

Show notes

Milton "Todd" Ault III is the founder of Ault Blockchain and executive chairman of Hyperscale Data (NYSE American: GPUS). Hyperscale Data is an AI data center company whose subsidiaries are building two things: Ault Blockchain, a finance-first, EVM-compatible layer one, and Ault Markets, the trading venue that sits on top of it. Ault has spent 37 years in traditional finance, starting at Dean Witter and running a hedge fund for much of that time. He has been involved with Bitcoin since 2011, later spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a mining operation, and says he was debanked around ten times before the US regulatory climate changed.

Why you should listen

Most new layer ones are built to trade perpetual futures. Ault thinks the bigger gap is in spot commodities. Trillions of dollars of metals trade every year, yet only about $5 billion has been tokenized, and buying physical silver still usually means a trip to a local dealer. Ault Markets opened to invited users in early October, and the group has since tokenized its first 5,000 troy ounces of silver, vaulted at The Wyoming Reserve. Ault describes the end goal: trade silver, gold, platinum, and palladium around the clock without KYC, complete KYC only when you want physical delivery, and have the metal shipped within one to three days. Behind the metals he plans tokenized convertible loans and structured notes, and he wants roughly 400 real-world assets on chain within two years. New offices in Dubai and Singapore are part of that push.

Ault is unusually candid about what he would do differently. Ault Blockchain distributes its token through capped mining node licenses with a ten-year emissions schedule and no public token sale. He says he would not use that model again: the node sales raised a few million dollars, a small sum next to what he has spent. He also credits them with building a following of around 4,000 node holders. The token economics follow Hyperliquid, with nearly all DEX revenue going to buy back the protocol token. He says vendors have told him he is the first founder they have met who did not care about the token price.

He is just as frank about Bitcoin. His company sold Bitcoin to help fund its Michigan campus, which has switched off its miners and moved to AI hosting under a contract the company values at up to $1.2 billion. Ault does not expect miners to switch back. He compares AI to the early internet, with one difference: the internet had an adoption problem, while AI has a capacity problem. He still calls himself something of a Bitcoin maximalist. He describes Bitcoin as the pristine collateral at the base of future finance and gives credit to Michael Saylor for reading the history of money correctly.

The hot take round adds more. Ault calls himself multi-chain and predicts that reserve banking as we know it is finished. He expects more than $10 trillion in tokenized assets within a decade, and he wants the US to hold Bitcoin as a strategic reserve and issue Bitcoin-backed debt. For a sign that the future is already here, he points to onchain perps: when he asks rooms of Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley advisors whether they have used Hyperliquid, almost nobody raises a hand. On sci-fi, he names Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars before settling on The Matrix. Then, live on air, he asks his AI assistant Jenna to look up Andy, and she does.

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Ault Markets

Ault Blockchain

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Ault Blockchain on Twitter

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Spout Finance – Let Your Stocks Pay the Interest Oct 22, 2026

Show notes

Marc Ryan is Co-Founder and CEO of Spout Finance, a Solana lending protocol that lets people borrow USDC against tokenized US stocks without paying interest. Based in New York, Marc first got into crypto during the 2017 ICO boom and stayed through DeFi summer and the NFT cycle. Meanwhile he worked as a technology investment banker at HSBC, covering fintech, software and hardware, and that experience showed him how cheaply wealthy clients could borrow against their portfolios compared with everyone else.

Why you should listen

Spout starts from an argument about who tokenized stocks are really for. Marc points out that anyone with meaningful capital, almost anywhere in the world, can already open an Interactive Brokers account and buy US equities, so putting shares on a blockchain is not much of a breakthrough by itself. The more interesting question is what onchain stocks can do that brokerage stocks can't. His answer is a lending pool that works like Aave or Kamino, with one structural difference. Instead of charging borrowers interest, Spout sells covered calls on their collateral every week, set well above the current price, and uses the premiums to pay lenders. Borrowers can take out up to half the value of their tokenized shares in USDC. The cost shows up as a small cap on their upside, which Marc estimates averages under half a percent a year, compared with margin rates of roughly 4.5% at the cheap end and 20% or more at some emerging-market brokers. Lenders, meanwhile, earn premium income that doesn't depend on whether the stock goes up or down.

The conversation also covers how a small startup positions itself in a sector that is now attracting major institutions. Marc says most of the investors in Spout's recent $2 million round were chosen for what they bring beyond money. Anchorage Digital provides the institutional custody that large funds require, Solana is the chain he considers best suited for bringing retail onto financial assets, and former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo advises on navigating US regulation. Marc also explains why Spout gave up issuing its own tokenized shares. Running issuance alongside a lending protocol created too much legal and corporate overhead, so the team chose to be a permissionless layer that works with every issuer instead of competing with them. Most of those issuers wrap shares held with a custodian such as Alpaca. Marc contrasts that with native issuance from firms like Securitize and Superstate, where the shares themselves live onchain and can be self-custodied.

That distinction frames his view of the current regulatory fight. After a batch of companies objected to having their shares tokenized on OKXICE, the joint venture between OKX and NYSE owner ICE, under the SEC's new Innovation Exemption, Marc argues that wrappers will keep serving offshore investors. US access, in his view, will come through native issuance or closer work with the DTCC. He is candid that a Spout token is undecided. If one launches, it would boost lender rates and allow options to be sold further out of the money. In the hot take round, Marc places himself between Bitcoin maximalism and multi-chain opportunism. He says every public equity will eventually move onchain, describes how AI agents now run parts of his own business, and names Back to the Future as his favorite film.

Supporting links

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Spout Finance

Spout Finance on Twitter

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Andy on Twitter

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Casper – Why AI Agents Need Their Own Payment Rails Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

Michael Steuer is President and CTO of the Casper Association, the Swiss non-profit behind Casper Network, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 built for regulated real-world assets and payments between AI agents. Born in Amsterdam and based in Los Angeles for more than two decades, Michael has spent around 30 years in technology. That includes a stint as CTO for mobile at THQ, where his team shipped some of the first downloadable mobile games. He then co-founded Casper in 2018, built much of its ecosystem tooling through his company MAKE, and returned to lead the project in 2024.

Why you should listen

Casper's origin story starts inside Ethereum's own research group, where its proof-of-stake design was first developed. Michael and his co-founders wagered that enterprises would need something Ethereum wasn't going to deliver quickly: a chain that companies with thousands of existing engineers could build on using the languages, testing and deployment processes they already have. Just as important was certainty. Michael explains why the probabilistic finality retail users tolerate, waiting through confirmations before an exchange releases funds, is unacceptable for an institution moving billions. During that window nobody can say who is legally responsible for the money, so Casper was designed so that a transaction belongs to the recipient from the very next block. He applies the same realism to tokenization. Minting a token that claims to represent an asset takes a minute, he says, but making that token confer enforceable rights is the hard part. Through the ERC-3643 standard and the T-REX Network, Casper is working to make compliance data, such as investor eligibility, jurisdictional limits and holding periods, travel with an asset as it moves between chains.

The second half of the conversation turns to what Michael sees as the larger opportunity. Cloudflare now reports that bots generate more web traffic than humans, yet almost no website can sell anything to them. Sign-ups, logins, card forms and terms-and-conditions boxes were all built for people. His answer is x402, a dormant payment code from the early HTTP specification that Coinbase and Circle revived as a standard for agents to pay per request. Casper is a founding member of the x402 Foundation, which now sits under the Linux Foundation, and settles those payments in its own dollar stablecoin, csprUSD. Payouts.com recently adopted Casper as the settlement rail for its AI agent products. Michael argues that companies blocking agents are turning away most of their visitors. He also expects stablecoin tribalism to disappear, because an agent shouldn't care which dollar it spends.

That emphasis on ease of use is the thread through the final stretch. Michael says crypto's usage remains in the single-digit percentages of the global population after 16 years largely because the industry made it so hard to use, from seed phrases to incompatible wallets, and warns against repeating that mistake with agents and tokenized assets. He makes the case for the CSPR token as a utility asset whose value tracks network usage, citing a staking yield he puts at around 10 to 11 percent alongside native liquid staking, and the recent Kraken listing for US access. In the hot take round he calls himself a multi-chain opportunist and argues that blockchain should never try to be the answer to everything. He predicts a decade defined by the convergence of TradFi and DeFi and by agentic traffic approaching totality. He also notes that most people don't realize they can hold tokenized stock exposure in a wallet and borrow against it, and names Foundation as his sci-fi pick.

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Orbs – DeFi's Next Big Users Are Banks and Bots Oct 15, 2026

Show notes

Ran Hammer is CEO at Orbs, a decentralized Layer-3 blockchain that works behind the scenes for DEXs. It gives smart contracts the automation and execution logic they lack on their own, which powers limit orders, TWAP, liquidity aggregation and perpetual futures across dozens of venues. Ran is an Israeli based in London and a former high-tech M&A lawyer. He has been with Orbs since its 2017 beginnings, working as general counsel, then in business development, then as chief business officer, before taking over as CEO in September.

Why you should listen

Ran came to crypto the way many lawyers of his generation did. In 2015 a university friend and future Orbs co-founder, Daniel Peled, told him he had raised money for his startup in Bitcoin. Within two years Ran was the rare attorney at a reputable firm who understood the technology, and he spent the 2017 ICO boom advising clients who wanted to do things by the book when no book existed yet. Nine years into Orbs, he explains plainly what the project is: a proof-of-stake network with no TVL or DEXs of its own, which supplies the automation and logic that smart contracts can't perform by themselves. That makes Orbs nearly invisible to the traders who use it. Ran is candid that this is good for users and difficult for a project whose token benefits from retail recognition. He also acknowledges that the market has moved enough that a small pivot is needed for Orbs to stay relevant.

His view of the current market is sober. The yield chasing of DeFi summer has mostly gone. Many retail traders left after the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade and did not return. The activity that remains is increasingly professional, ranging from two-person trading teams running bots to BlackRock buying spot assets for its ETFs, which is why Ran prefers the term "on-chain finance." He calls Hyperliquid the most successful dApp to date. He also argues that most DEXs, even ones that dominate their ecosystems, cannot build Hyperliquid-level order book depth. Orbs' answer is Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0, an intent-based model in which hedgers take the other side of trades and offset them across Binance, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Variational, Aster and other venues. Users get pairs from all of those markets on whatever chain they're on, with a single collateral. QuickSwap has already made it the default perps engine across its chains.

Ran says he rarely opens Google or Gmail anymore. He runs most of his online life through a Telegram bot on OpenClaw, with Anthropic and OpenAI models working in loops. That habit led Orbs to repackage its products as an MCP and an agent skill, and to think seriously about how a protocol gets discovered when an AI agent, rather than a person, chooses which tools to use. He says the Orbs swap skill now outranks bigger, better-funded projects on adoption, while noting that actual agentic trading volume is still smaller than the hype suggests. He also covers the recently passed OIP-9 DAO vote, upcoming Season 1 tokenomics built on revenue-funded buybacks and burns, and record staking levels despite a token he openly says is underpriced. In the hot take round, Ran calls himself 80 percent Bitcoin maximalist. He predicts that within ten years banks will provide liquidity and trade through AMMs instead of OTC desks, and says most people still underestimate what today's AI tools can do.

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Flow Crypto - The New Exchange for Kiwis Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

Eli Hylands is the founder of Flow Crypto, a New Zealand on and off ramp that launched about a month before this recording. He has been involved in crypto for roughly ten years, and before Flow he worked as a software developer and business analyst at IAG. He built the platform largely by himself over about a year, alongside his day job, after seeing a gap open in the local market.

Why you should listen

When Swyftx acquired Easy Crypto in 2025 and began moving its New Zealand customers across, the country's best-known retail exchange effectively left the market. Hylands saw the gap. Flow Crypto is his answer: a Kiwi-owned, non-custodial service where customers send New Zealand dollars from their bank account and receive crypto directly in their own wallet, with selling running the other way. It charges a flat 0.79 percent fee, supports up to 50 assets, and is registered on the Financial Service Providers Register. Hylands says the software was the easy part. Securing a bank account took about six months, and the hardest work was compliance: meeting reporting obligations to the Department of Internal Affairs while not asking customers for so much information that signing up becomes a chore. His customers, he says, skew toward altcoins rather than Bitcoin, and span all ages, which surprised him.

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Keeper - Why Tonkeeper Went Multichain Oct 11, 2026

Show notes

Nikita Monastyrskiy is chief marketing officer at Keeper, the self-custodial wallet formerly known as Tonkeeper. He started in crypto in 2018, running bounty and Bitcointalk signature campaigns while still at university, then spent four years at a crypto marketing agency, rising from community manager to senior growth strategist. He went on to join the marketing team at Ethereum layer two Mode, helping take it from launch to exchange listings, before moving to Wallet in Telegram in 2025 as head of partner marketing. He later switched from the custodial side to the self-custodial one, joining Tonkeeper to lead its marketing.

Why you should listen

Tonkeeper built its reputation as the leading wallet on TON, and last month it gave up the name. Monastyrskiy explains why: users had stopped living on a single chain, and were juggling several apps to hold stablecoins on TRON, Bitcoin, Ethereum and assets on layer twos. The "TON" in the name tied the brand to one network, so the team dropped it and kept the rest. Keeper now supports seven networks, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON and Base, and launched mobile-first, because that is where the data showed younger users transacting.

He is direct about the trade-off at the heart of self-custody. Keeper cannot access, freeze or recover user funds, and he argues that the risk people associate with self-custody comes down to how they store their recovery phrase. Keep it offline and secure, and the main danger disappears. The harder part, in his view, is psychological: when an exchange gets hacked, users have someone to blame, but with self-custody the responsibility is entirely theirs. He sees the wallet as stage one of crypto adoption, the place where someone buys their first Bitcoin, and stage two as giving those users access to everything else on-chain, from tokenized stocks and prediction markets to simpler perpetual futures trading, which he says remains too complicated for newcomers.

Looking further out, Monastyrskiy describes his ideal wallet as one users barely see: connected to an AI assistant, taking voice commands to swap or trade, with no thought given to gas or withdrawals. He thinks a supervised version, where users still sign each transaction, is about a year away, and full automation further off. He also reports a pickup in on-chain activity since May, with volumes rising again this quarter. In the hot take round, he argues that real adoption will come from everyday payments in emerging markets rather than institutions, and picks Nineteen Eighty-Four as the science fiction he fears could become reality.

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THORChain: Math Doesn't Take Requests Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later.

Why you should listen

THORChain spent late September in the middle of crypto's loudest argument. After attackers took roughly $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September, portions of the proceeds were routed through THORChain into Bitcoin, and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen made a public, formal request that the protocol refuse service to the attacker addresses. The answer was no — though Chad's first move in this conversation is to reject the premise of the question. It was not his answer, because he does not own, operate or control THORChain. There is no mechanism in the code base to block a wallet or a transaction, and never has been. Even if the community wanted one, validator consensus takes between three days and two weeks to reach a two-thirds majority, by which point a swap observed an hour ago is long settled. To make blocking practical you would have to install an admin key and redesign the protocol around centralization — at which point, as he puts it, you have rebuilt traditional finance on a different technology stack and he is no longer interested in the problem.

The obvious counter is that THORChain's own node operators did pause the network in May, when a flaw in its threshold signature scheme let an attacker drain $10.7 million from one of six vaults and the protocol went dark for 39 days. Chad's distinction is between protecting the protocol and policing its users: validators on any chain have a security obligation to the network they are paid to secure, which is why Bitcoin's own miners forked away the value overflow bug in August 2010 after someone minted 184 billion coins out of nothing. A halt is not a selective freeze. What genuinely puzzles him is the singling out — six or more DEXs handled Bitget-linked flows, Uniswap among the venues in the broader conversation, and nobody asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reject tainted transactions. On where responsibility actually sits, he is blunt: stolen funds have to exit to dollars eventually, and that exit runs through centralized exchanges, which are the entities that can stop it and have not always chosen to.

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Beldex – The Case For A Full Privacy Stack Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

Cris Blanco is chief strategy officer at Beldex, the privacy-first layer one that began in 2018 as a fork of Monero and now runs a suite of privacy applications for messaging, browsing, networking and payments. He has spent more than 15 years across Web3, frontier technology and digital platforms, working at founding-team and senior-leadership level on go-to-market, ecosystem strategy and partnerships. Most recently he was part of the founding team at Humanity Protocol, where he helped scale testnet adoption to more than three million users in 90 days.

Why you should listen

Blanco has moved from a project about proving who you are to one about keeping that private, and he argues the two are the same problem. His work on identity convinced him that people want to prove specific facts about themselves without exposing everything else, and that privacy has to be part of a system's architecture from the start. He applies the same logic to crypto itself. Blockchains solved verification without a middleman, he says, but verifying that a transaction is valid does not require publishing everyone's balance, salary and coffee purchases to the world permanently.

That view explains why Beldex builds a whole stack rather than a single app. Blanco points out that privacy fails at the weakest layer: an encrypted chat tied to a phone number, a hidden IP address undone by a public payment. So alongside private BDX payments, Beldex offers BChat for messaging without a phone number or email, BelNet as a decentralized VPN, the Beldex Browser, and a naming service for human-readable addresses. Blanco says BChat accounts for roughly two thirds of the ecosystem's 1.5 million installs, which he reads as evidence that messaging, not payments, is the easiest way to bring non-crypto users into privacy tools. On the tension between privacy coins and regulators, he argues that banks and hospitals hold sensitive data without publishing it and still comply with the law. Exchanges and fiat gateways carry the compliance obligations, and users should be able to disclose specific information to specific parties. Beldex has published a MiCA white paper to that end.

AI, he argues, makes the case stronger. People already hand AI assistants their documents and private thoughts, and as businesses route payroll and payments through agents the exposure grows. Blanco says Beldex is testing encrypted agent-to-agent communication as a next product. In the hot take round, he describes success in ten years as the point where nobody talks about privacy because it has become as standard as HTTPS, and explains why rereading Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics feels different in the age of AI alignment.

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Tria – Every Company With An Audience Is Becoming A Financial Company Sep 26, 2026

Show notes

John Lilic is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance platform for spending, trading and earning across chains. One of crypto's longest-serving builders, he worked at the Bitcoin Center in New York City in 2014 before joining ConsenSys as one of its first employees, spending six years helping to build the Ethereum ecosystem.

Why you should listen

Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria's pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs.

The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria's infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties.

In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum's reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether.

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Gracie Lin, OKX – Why the future of crypto is regulated Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Gracie Lin is Regional CEO for Singapore and Australia and Head of VIP Growth at OKX. She spent the first decade of her career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, covering banking supervision before moving into markets, then held roles at sovereign wealth fund GIC and at Southeast Asian super app Grab, where she led regional strategy and economics. She joined OKX in 2024 to run its Singapore business as it received its Major Payment Institution license from MAS, and has since taken on Australia and a global remit for the exchange's VIP clients.

Why you should listen

It is unusual to hear a crypto executive defend regulators without reluctance, and Lin does it from experience. Having sat on the other side of the table, she frames regulation as a set of hard trade-offs rather than an obstacle: supervisors want innovation but must also protect consumers, protect the financial system, keep a level playing field, and watch what every other jurisdiction is doing. Her argument is that the consequences of a regulator getting risk wrong are far larger than those facing any single company, which is why she thinks industry has to engage constantly and constructively. It is also the thread running through her hot take, that a regulated future is a source of growth rather than a constraint, because adoption depends on trust.

On the ground, she is candid about the commercial cost. Singapore's strict marketing rules make it harder to reach a broad consumer base and slower to bring products to market, but because every licensed player faces the same restrictions, OKX has built accordingly, and she says the business has grown meaningfully since licensing, anchored by accredited and sophisticated investors. Australia, where OKX launched in 2024 with a derivatives license, is now moving through the country's new Digital Assets Framework, and Lin says the exchange is seeking the additional authorizations needed to offer a fuller product range. She also explains the less visible half of her job: harmonizing how OKX defines and serves VIP clients globally, and why sophisticated traders, whatever their size, end up asking for the same things, from collateral management across positions to separating trading risk from custody risk.

The wider picture is a shift in what crypto-native users want to hold. Lin says OKX is seeing interest move toward tokenized real-world assets, including equity derivatives and pre-IPO exposure to AI companies, products the exchange now offers in several markets though not yet in Singapore or Australia. She discusses the strategic partnership with Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and what each side brings. For an example of the future already arriving, she points to the OKX Card, which lets Singapore users spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted while the merchant is simply paid in local currency. For New Zealand listeners, she confirms OKX is watching the market closely. And her science fiction pick, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, arrives with a local connection: Taika Waititi's adaptation, shot in Wānaka and Auckland, is due in cinemas next month.

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