Podcasts about kyb

For episode 766 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Elisa Lu, COO and Co-founder of Memoket, an AI hardware company building the context layer between the physical world and AI. Before Memoket, she spent nearly a decade in brand commercialization and marketing leadership at Anker Innovations, where she grew brand revenue 6x in three years. At Memoket, she leads international operations and Marketing and is building the company she wished existed during years of running businesses on back-to-back conversations. Stop briefing your AI from scratch after every meeting. Memoket Gem ships August 2026. Grab your early bird spot for US$179 at memoket.ai — only 2,000 available!

For episode 765 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Alladan Flinn, the founder of Based Trading Cards, a California-based premium collectibles company built around Bitcoin culture, original art, nostalgia, education, transparency, and true scarcity. Through Based Trading Cards, he has created limited-run releases that combine collector-first print runs, rare chase cards, specialty finishes, and award-winning production quality. The brand’s latest collection, The Simulation, was produced in partnership with RRD and features advanced embellishments including thermal inks, glow effects, sunlight-revealed inks, and raised 3D holographic patterns. Flinn is focused on raising standards in the trading card industry by creating cards that are not only fun to rip, but meaningful to collect, grade, hold, and preserve.New Based Trading Cards collection Orange Pill in a Pack Series 4 - The Simulation' and it's premium bundle called 'The Experience Box'. See links below. https://basedtradingcards.com/pages/opp-s4-the-simulation https://basedtradingcards.com/pages/opp-s4-experience-box

For episode 764 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Joe Vollono the Chief Commercial Officer at STBL, where he leads global commercial strategy to scale the STBL Protocol and its RWA-backed financial ecosystem. Previously, Joe led Business Development for central banking and stablecoin (RLUSD) at Ripple, advising commercial banks, central banks, and finance ministries on digital asset policy, stablecoin design, and financial infrastructure. He has advised and presented to multiple international forums on stablecoins and tokenized assets, including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the University of Oxford. Earlier in his career, Joe spent nearly a decade in capital markets at Morgan Stanley, where he was recognized as a Barron’s Top 50 Institutional Consultant (2020). He previously served as a nuclear-trained officer in the U.S. Navy Submarine Force. Joe holds an MBA from the University of Oxford, an MPP from Georgetown University, and a BS from the United States Naval Academy. He serves on the Board of the Marines Memorial Foundation.

For episode 763 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by David Wei Liang from the Conflux Network, where they are building the L1 infrastructure for seamless payments, global remittances, and decentralized finance.

For episode 762 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Kelly Ann Collins, Founder of SheCrypto. SheCrypto is where women across Bitcoin, blockchain, and Web3 come together to learn, connect, and grow through podcasts, newsletters, events, and original content.

https://youtu.be/jPTlkjF8M-c Tanner Taddeo, CEO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea, is driven by a mission to bring Wall Street-grade financial services to Main Street while embodying the principle Stay Put in Your Convictions. By combining blockchain technology, stablecoins, tokenized capital markets, and AI advisory services, Tanner helps businesses access investment opportunities, put idle cash to work, and move money globally with greater speed, transparency, and capital efficiency. In this conversation, Tanner introduces The Lionel Messi Startup Framework—Develop a High-Level Thesis, Talk With and Learn From the Market, Run 30-Day A/B Tests, Iterate Your Offering, and Stay Resolute With Your Convictions. He explains why founders should observe patiently, validate their ideas with customers, and act decisively when market opportunities emerge. Tanner also discusses balancing long-term conviction with continuous experimentation, unlocking 24/7 liquidity through tokenized capital markets, reducing friction in cross-border payments, and finding urgent “morphine” problems that customers cannot afford to leave unsolved. — Stay Put in Your Convictions with Tanner Taddeo  Hello everyone. Steve Preda here, and my guest today is Tanner Taddeo, the CEO and Co-Founder at Stable Sea, an autonomous treasury management platform that helps finance teams and global businesses access capital market products and move money around the globe to 40 currencies with the cheapest FX rates. Tanner, welcome to the show.  Steve, thanks for having me. Excited for the conversation today.  It’s very interesting that this is how you position your business because most businesses in your industry, as I see them, position themselves with low transaction fees, but really their money is made on the FX. So if you do preferential FX rates or cheap FX rates, that can be a very transparent way of getting business. So I don’t know if that connects to your personal why, but I’d love to learn about your personal why and how you manifest it in your business.  Yeah, definitely. At Stable Sea, we’re very mission-driven in terms of everything that we do. The team itself comes from Block, which was formerly known as Square. Yeah. And everyone on the team has been focused on building products for the real economy, for consumer use cases, for business use cases, et cetera, over the course of everyone’s career.  And so when we started at Stable Sea, our primary thesis was, with blockchain, with stablecoins, with some of the tokenized capital markets products like money market funds, bonds, equities, et cetera, that are coming on-chain, how can you really take Wall Street-grade financial services and provision them out to Main Street for businesses that need them the most? And so the why for Stable Sea, for myself, for the team, is really around helping businesses drive greater capital efficiency in their operations. And we service businesses in the real economy that typically make widgets or some sort of physical hardware devices, and they need to send them around the world.  We help them because we give them access to different types of capital markets products, so money markets and private credit and fixed-income products, et cetera. And then we help them move their money around the globe a little bit more efficiently than they could with either their state bank or their credit union or some third-party cross-border payments provider. Because our firm thesis has always been, if you and I ran Coca-Cola or a large organization, we would have the best-in-class transaction banks helping us put our idle capital to work at every point in time during the day.  If you and I ran a steel manufacturing company in Missouri, you typically have a checking account and QuickBooks, and that’s about it. And so for us, it was always about helping businesses grow, save more money, and then operate more efficiently with some of the new technologies that are out there today.Share on X  So that means, presumably, that what you focus on is more about the investment side of the business rather than crypto and blockchain, and helping people access financial products through the blockchain. Help me understand a little bit what you do and how it is different from what people can get from banks?  Yeah. So everything that we do, all the technology that we build and provision, is on-chain. So all of the capital markets products are tokenized. So tokenized bonds, tokenized equities, tokenized fixed income, tokenized money markets. All of the payment services and settlement services that we offer are through the use of stablecoins, and we can send that around the globe, settle it instantly, and then have low FX rates off the back of that. And then we have some of our AI advisory services.  But from a broad paintbrush perspective, at Stable Sea, you’ve got three products that hang off of our platform. You’ve got capital markets, you’ve got global settlement, and you’ve got advisory services. And then with all of that, we share a common architecture, and that architecture is built across many different blockchains. And then we utilize stablecoins and we utilize RWA tokens, or real-world asset tokens, to provision those use cases.  So everything that we do is stablecoin-native, but we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective. And the reason we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective is that if you and I ran a bakery here in Brooklyn, New York, and we had a point-of-sale terminal that just got offered RTP access from the Fed for instant settlement, the bakery owner doesn’t really care about the technology underneath it.  They just care, “Do I trust it? Is it going to get me my money quicker, and is it going to be cheaper than my current alternative?” How it happens, not very many people care unless you’re in the industry and you’re a builder, product manager, et cetera, and you want to nerd out on the actual mechanical nature of how the product works. But for us, it’s always been leading with the narrative of, what is the value proposition and how can we drive greater value to the businesses? So that’s how we lead. But to your point on what the difference is, with any new technological paradigm that occurs, rarely is it so disruptive in nature that folks can’t recognize it.  Everything that happens in terms of the innovation paradigm is typically you stand on the shoulders of giants and you make things incrementally better. And so for us, what we do with capital markets is, the first value proposition is that many businesses in the United States just don’t have access to a diverse array of capital markets products. So the first thing that we have done is just provision access, which is an innovation in and of itself because in the traditional markets, if you want to access a money market fund or a fixed-income product, you typically have high hurdle rates, meaning that as a business, you need to invest at least $10 million at the asset manager in question.  You need to hold that there so then you can get access to all these products. With us, you don’t. There’s only a $1 minimum to clear, so I think most folks can handle a $1 minimum. And then secondly, as things go on-chain, the value proposition there is that you have 24/7, 365 liquidity and tradability. And so what that means is that, just from a money market fund perspective, the interest accrues daily and it pays out daily.  So you get this interest that is dripped into your account daily as opposed to waiting for a month. You also have the ability—so let’s say that you and I run this bakery in Brooklyn. Let’s say that we close our business on Friday, and we’ve got $100,000 sitting in our checking account, and we’re closed on Saturday, Sunday because it’s the July 4th holiday. So we know $100,000 is just going to be sitting in our checking account Saturday, Sunday, not being put to work. With Stable Sea, you can put that to work in a tokenized money market fund because it operates 24/7, 365.  So what we see is businesses now that close their books on Friday can just do an auto-sweep into a money market fund, generate yield Saturday, Sunday, get back to U.S. dollars for their open of business. And again, it’s one of those things where it might not sound like the most revolutionary concept in the world, but if you can help businesses, especially in the mid-market, lower mid-market, operate a little bit more efficiently, I mean, saving an additional $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year is a big value-add to them in the real economy, right? If you’re a large Fortune 100 company, you probably don’t care, or it’s not as valuable. But for us, the companies that run on us, these small increments, standing on the shoulders of giants, a small derivation in innovation is actually really valuable for the end user.Share on X  Well, I think it is because, looking at the inverse of it, I used to be in banking, and I know that one of the biggest moneymakers for banks is float. Yeah. So it’s basically the money that doesn’t earn interest, which they have access to just because they cash the check a day later or make the wire two days instead of one day. And essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking this money from the bank and you’re giving it to the company that actually should have it in the first place, right? Yep.  Then the question is, how are the banks going to survive if you take away their bread?  Yeah. That is the debate that’s happening right now. I think if you’re one of your G-SIBs, your major banks, you’re going to be okay. So the top 25 banks in the U.S. are going to be just fine, and they make money in tons of different ways, and you’re not going to disrupt that trust ultimately. In the long tail is where I worry because a lot of credit unions and a lot of state banks, they just don’t offer—they’re smaller banks, right?  So they’re not managing—they don’t have a ton of money by virtue of assets under management. So with the deposits that they receive, they need to turn around and recycle that because it’s fractional depository lending, meaning that if I have a checking account, I put 10 grand into it, the bank is then turning around with that 10 grand, making money on it somehow. And you have to think, how does the bank actually make money on that? Well, they typically make it through debt facilities, so mortgages, auto loans, student loans, cards, et cetera.  They’re putting it to work in high-margin financial products back into the economy. They’re not taking that and then buying some money market fund from an asset manager where they make 10 basis points and provisioning that out to the businesses, right? There, I think that we’re seeing a lot of companies move off. They’re taking their money from their checking account, moving it to Stable Sea because we can put it in these capital markets products.  I think that overall, that’s a net positive for the business because the business now has a higher degree of operating capital on hand that they can make money with. But by the same token, if the state banks and the credit unions don’t wake up and respond to this, their depository base will be, if not fully eroded, tarnished and diminished. And what that means for local community health, I’m not sure because banks do play a very important role, especially credit unions and local banks.  You know your local community the best, and so you lend back into that community with the deposits that you receive from that community. So there’s a cyclicality to it which has some poetry in it. And so it’s not apparently clear to me that some of this stuff is going to be a net positive. But at the same time, living in one of the most capitalistic countries and markets in the world, there’s a clear demand for this, and if the banks aren’t going to wake up and serve it, we’ll be there to help businesses do what’s best for them.  Yeah. It’s the invisible hand, right? You increase the efficiency, which will force the banks to also increase their efficiency. And yeah, the smaller banks might have to be more innovative. But they are more nimble, so maybe there are other ways that they can serve the community.  So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about frameworks. So this is a podcast of frameworks, and 350 episodes in, I’m always looking for some kind of a framework, shortcut, a mental model that you have come across or developed yourself that helps you make more sense of the world around you, get something done. It can be explained in three to five steps, something like that, which the listeners might get some ideas out of and be able to improve their businesses. So what comes to mind for you?  Yeah, two things. I’ll start with a high-level analogy and then go a little deeper. It’s the World Cup right now, so I don’t know if you or any of your listeners are following the World Cup. But if you watch Messi play, his playing style is a great analogy for startups. And whether that be a startup externally where you raise venture capital, or even just intrapreneurship if you’re inside of a big company and you’re on an innovation team, et cetera.  From the outside, it looks like startups are always building things and they’re always moving fast, et cetera. But in reality, if you watch Messi play, Messi really doesn’t move that much on the pitch. He just sits around, he observes, he watches, and then when a hole opens up and some opportunity opens up, he breaks for it, and then he goes and executes. But he spends the vast majority of time just sitting there, tinkering, observing, watching. And then if you’re watching him, you’re like, “He’s not working that hard. He’s just sitting around.”  And then he goes and executes. But he’s always observing, he’s always watching, and there’s a real learning in that. I feel like Silicon Valley, as it relates to startups, there’s this pressure that you always have to be building, you always have to be shipping, you always have to be constantly grinding. I think that wisdom is actually counterintuitive because you want to have a thesis in the market, and then you want to be able to test that thesis quickly. So in some respects, you do want to be shipping all the time.  But you don’t want to be working for the sake of work. You want to have a thesis in the market. You want to be building towards that thesis that will happen in the next six months, 12 months, two years. And then you always want to be learning and talking to the market because when that hole does open up, you’ll have the right product at the right time to go and execute on. So I think that's something that we have learned: being patient and staying resolute in your conviction that what you're building is right.Share on X And it can’t just be a gut feeling. It has to be validated by the market.  So we do a bunch of A/B tests every 30 days where we have an idea about a feature or a product or a direction we want to take it. And the thing is, if you can’t get five CEOs on the phone in 30 days to validate if a product is going to be interesting or not, then that’s a signal in and of itself, right? So for anything that we do, we always have a thesis on the market, and then we spend 30 days testing it. And at the end of those 30 days, we get some feedback.  The reason why we do these A/B tests, just to drill down into one level further, is that the idea of a startup or a product that you have in your head, it’s a living entity. It’s always evolving on the basis of who you talk to, what your team is thinking, what you’re reading in the market, et cetera.  And then you’re trying to take that living concept and plug it into a market. But the market itself is also living, right?  You’ve got regulations, you’ve got different macroeconomic cycles, you’ve got companies that have budget, don’t have budget, people getting laid off in different organizations. The market itself is living and evolving. So you have this idea that is living and evolving, and you have a market that is living and evolving, and you need those two things to stick together. And so for us, we’re always wedded to this concept that product at time A is not going to be product at time Z. You need to constantly be doing A/B tests to figure out what that right fit is.  And then when you have that fit, you need to double down on it and grow it into a line of business. But you also need to recognize that there are very few businesses in this world that have been around for more than 200 years, if at all. So whatever your original product idea is, or whatever the feature that gave you product-market fit is today, you have to consciously be aware that, “Hey, that’s not going to be the thing that gets us to IPO in five years’ time.” So you can’t be lulled into this false sense of security. You always have to be waiting, observing, testing, experimenting, growing, and then if you see opportunity, you strike.  Yeah, this is fascinating. Especially now, things are moving very fast with AI creating capabilities all the time for people to test products or to create capabilities that then get disrupted in a couple of months. So it’s interesting that you say that you have to stay resolute in your conviction. So there is a tension there. You build a thesis and you stay resolute, but then you’re testing and the market might tell you not to be resolute.  And then you also told me that companies don’t live forever. So how do you resolve this tension of being stable with your thesis and not letting your conviction be upended, but also being nimble in the changing market dynamics and everything to respond to? So how do you manage the tension?  Yeah, it’s a good question. There has to be a high-level thesis, right? So for us at Stable Sea, it is as simple as: In 10 years from now, will more finance teams and businesses be on-chain or off-chain than today? And so our high-level conviction is, in 10 years’ time, more businesses will be running their treasury stack on-chain. So that’s our conviction. We know, come hell or high water, that is going to be where the puck is going to be in the future, and we’re going to skate to that future.  So if you start with this high-level conviction that more companies are coming on-chain, that is what we’re building for. Now, how they come on-chain is a matter of debate, which is where the A/B test comes in, right? We originally thought it was going to be for payments. So we built all the stablecoin infrastructure to do global payments in 40 different markets.  Turned out to be not the case, actually. And then we started tinkering as we saw the data coming in and were like, “Okay, some companies are using stablecoins for payments, but there’s a bunch of inefficiencies. That world’s still going to take two or three years to wake up. Where is the wedge in the market today?” And so when we started experimenting with capital markets products, we found that there was this massive opportunity that businesses just didn’t have access to a diverse array of yield-bearing strategies, and they wanted that.  And so that was where we were like, okay, let’s get businesses into the on-chain economy through capital markets. And then what we’re finding is, as folks come onto the platform, everyone uses us today for capital markets, and then 20, 30% of our companies say, “Actually, I do have a cross-border payment need, and I already hold money with you. Can you facilitate that payment or that settlement to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, et cetera?”  So for us, when I say you need to stay resolute in your conviction, our why is always: We want to take Wall Street-grade financial services and provision them out to Main Street.Share on X The conviction behind that is that you can do that through on-chain technology. And then in 10 years from now, more businesses will be on-chain than off-chain. How we get to that future in 10 years, who knows, right? And that’s where the fun of the startup is.  You’re always testing. And so for us, we’ve waxed and waned on different product strategies, primarily because the market has changed. And as people start to educate themselves on what the value props are, you see where folks find value, and then you build to that value. And in theory, in three, five, seven years, we should be living in a world where more companies are operating on-chain, and then they might use that full product suite.  But out of the gate, it’s kind of like, where is that value, that wedge? You charge as hard as you can into that wedge, and then you continue to expand your product set over time. All with that high-level conviction of, in 10 years from now, we believe that more businesses will be on-chain than off-chain.  So basically, you want to find the point where you can penetrate that market opportunity, and then it’s a land-and-expand kind of thing. And then you expand from there as the market opportunities evolve over time. But you already have a customer, you’re already building trust with them, and now they’re going to be more disposed to buying from you.  Yeah, that’s right. And I think it’s interesting from a mental place being a startup because you’re forced to think so short-term because you just need to generate revenue, get to the next capital round, et cetera. So you’re always building for the moment. But what we try to do at Stable Sea is we try to think as if we were already a Vanguard and a large company, to the extent that we have the luxury of planning for 10 years.  If you think about it in that regard, it takes a lot of the day-to-day anxiety away. It’s a little bit like, if you listen to Warren Buffett, any time that there’s volatility in the market, he’s like, “Well, it doesn’t really bother me because I’m investing for 50 years.” So, is it up 20%, down 20%? Who cares? In 50 years, it’s going to be up 200%, so that’s all I’m worried about, right? And there’s a real luxury when you come and think about it that way. So that’s why I think if you’re founding anything, or if you’re starting something inside of a company as an intrapreneur, you need to have a strong conviction on where the market’s headed in five or 10 years, and then you need to test towards that future. But that also makes the day-to-day operations of the business a little bit more palatable.  So often, you can get caught up in this whipsaw of, “Big Company A launched this product. Regulation came down, wiped out this company. This competitor raised a Series C, and they have way more money in the bank than we do.” And so you can get caught up in all this minutiae, but it doesn’t really matter if you sit back and you say, “I know that I’m going to find a way to make this business exist for the next 10 years.” In 10 years’ time, what does the future look like? Do I feel strongly that that’s going to be the case? Cool. I’m going to build towards that future. And then whatever the headwinds are in the interim, they’re just short-term temporal problems that kind of come and go along.  Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. And interestingly, 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, I didn’t feel like I had enough time to think that long term. But now that I’m older, I actually am more patient to have the long view, which is very counterintuitive.  And Dan Sullivan, who is a coach and the founder of Strategic Coach, he is now, I think, north of 80, and he has this thesis that even at his age, he has a 25-year plan, and that allows him to actually create more value. So that’s fascinating. So switching gears here, what drives growth in your business right now?  Yeah. So we govern the business with an assets under management model. So we have USDC, we’ve got money market funds, we’ve got fixed-income products, we’ve got Bitcoin on platform. So we just look at overarching platform balance. And so that’s the primary, very simple heuristic for how we define success: Is that thing growing month over month, quarter over quarter? That’s how we define growth and measure our growth.  But again, the value prop in terms of what drives that, why do companies actually sign up to Stable Sea? Primarily because they just don’t have access. Almost every business that we have talked to so far, and honestly every business that I’ve interacted with, has idle cash sitting in a checking account someplace. Full stop. And that idle cash could sit there for the weekend, i.e., two days, or it could sit for a quarter. If you’re gearing up for quarterly bonuses in Q1, you will escrow a million, $2 million in Q4 so you can pay out in Q1. Not just the U.S. economy, but every economy, there’s just cash sitting around at a bank, and it’s being underutilized.  And so for us, when we go and finally chat to businesses in the mid-market, lower mid-market, even SMBs, we have a customer on platform that invests $2,500 every week. It almost looks like a checking account, or almost looks like retail behavior in some ways. But they do it because they say, “Hey, I don’t make a lot of money with my business, but if I can eke an additional two, three grand at the end of the year, that’s valuable to me.” And there’s a real poetry to that because they’ve never had access to it. They’ve always wanted it.  But banks, large and small, won’t go build for the long tail of the economy. And so finally, we show up and we say, “Hey, here’s your menu of investment options. Here’s the risk profiles. Here’s how you should think of it. Based on the seasonality of your business, we can get you into the right products.” There’s real utility there, and that’s what kind of drives the value proposition and the growth of the business and the business’s assets under management overall.  So you’re looking for opportunities where you can be additive to customers, where there’s a situation where maybe there’s a gap in the market or there’s friction that they are experiencing with investing their money, and you can be the wedge in that situation and offer them a 3X better solution.  Yeah. Correct. Correct. And again, our tagline internally is, “Keep your bank, upgrade your capital.” Because we really don’t want to compete with the checking account. Where you run payroll, where your invoices land if someone pays you, your day-to-day spend, keep your banking relationships because it’s very difficult to usurp that. And also, we don’t want to get into that. That puts us squarely in this neobank realm where you’ve got great companies like Mercury and Rho and Ramp and Brex and a thousand other companies there.  We don’t really want to go compete with that. We’re more of, if you had the privilege of working with some of the largest transaction banks in the world, that’s what we’re trying to be and essentially provision those services out to the real economy, which is typically access to capital markets, access to global foreign exchange for payments and settlement, and then advisory services, tax reporting, et cetera.  Almost like a democratized private banking service.  Yeah. Yeah. All of us at Stable Sea, we’re trying really hard to steer away from the banking narrative, but yes, in the future, if you take that 10-year perspective, yeah, we will most likely be a private banking solution, a democratized version of that.  Yeah. Fascinating. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out right now in your business?  Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, the one thing that we’re actively trying to figure out is two things, really. One is, so we build directly into ERP systems like QuickBooks or NetSuite or Oracle or SAP, and we have advisory services. So we take a lot of that data, we build our own model weights on top of it, and then we offer that out to our customers so that they can essentially query their own transaction data and use it for different services.  Now, we’ve got strong signal on the first value proposition for that, but I’m curious mostly for owner-operators in the real economy: What are their biggest back-office pain points? And that’s something that we’re trying to figure out because we hear a lot, “Yes, we don’t have access to savings products.” Okay, we can solve that today. “Yes, cross-border payments are frustrating, slow, and expensive.” Yes, we solve that today.  So we’re looking for that third pillar. One of our VCs always talks to us about morphine versus vitamins, where it’s kind of a crude analogy, but if you go to the hospital and you’re in dire pain, you don’t want to be sold vitamins. You want some morphine, and that’s what you’re going there for, right? And when you’re in a startup and you create products, you’re really looking for that morphine of, people just cannot live without this product. And then you can sell all the value-added services around it, which are essentially the vitamins.  And so for us, we’ve found two morphine-like products where there’s a real pain point for accessing capital markets. Primarily, there is no ability to access that today. And then second, cross-border payments: slow, difficult, expensive, opaque, all the things. Solved that. So the third one that we’re trying to figure out now is: How do we A/B test quickly enough to figure out—we have a treasure trove of data building into ERP systems—what is the highest signal-to-noise product that we can build using a diverse data set to help owners operate their back office a little more efficiently?  So you say highest signal-to-noise. Is it the ratio of signal to noise? So what is the product value which you can detect as being a need in the market? Is this what you mean by that? Yeah, yeah. It’s like, what is that one pain point that is so resolute that people are like, “I would do anything to have this thing solved”? There’s all these value-adds like cash flow reporting and automating some of your tax stuff at the end of the year, which are all nice-to-haves. We’re curious. We’re trying to figure out what it is that folks will say, “I’ve got all this data in my ERP system. I would love to know one, two, three things and have A, B, C automated so my back office can run a little bit more efficiently and my accountant doesn’t have to ask me every quarter-end, ‘Where is X, Y, and Z statement?'”  Yeah. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I’m sure that you’ve already thought about most of it, so I’m not going to share them. So if someone is listening to this who is a small business or medium-sized business, and they’ve got some cash just sitting around, or they’d like to invest, but they don’t have big enough balances or the transaction costs are prohibitive for their size of investment, whatever the reason, but they are curious about exploring how to have access to better FX rates, more investment products, where can they learn more, and how can they connect with you?  Of course. Well, connect with me on LinkedIn, Tanner Taddeo, pretty easy to find. And then the platform is stablesea.com. So, free to sign up, no cost whatsoever. Also, no cost to use the platform at all. So feel free to sign up right online, and then, yeah, typically it takes us two days to run through the KYB document requests, and then you’re up and running. So, pretty simple. Stablesea.com, free to sign up and start putting your capital to work. Awesome. We try and make it as seamless as possible.  So I’m just wondering, the name of the company, is it something to do with stablecoin? Is it a sea of opportunities for stablecoin?  It was stablecoin for sure. So we started with the word “stable” and then “sea” because we wanted to provide a sea of liquidity. Both for FX, because we do B2B settlements, which are typically large transactions, low volume. You’re not doing twenty $10 million transactions a day. You’re typically doing one $10 million transaction a week or every other week. But you need a deep pool of liquidity to service that.  And then also, from a capital markets perspective, we wanted to be able to provide a sea of liquidity there for different investment options that companies could access based on the seasonality of their cash flow or the risk tolerance that they have as a business. So stable meets sea, so Stable Sea.  Okay. Well, if you want to keep your bank but upgrade your capital, then reach out to Tanner Taddeo, the CEO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea. He’ll get you more investment opportunities that maybe you have not had access to. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts. Do not miss any episode with exciting entrepreneurs like Tanner. So thanks, Tanner, for coming, and thank you for listening.  Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Tanner's LinkedIn Tanner's website

Jay Wilson talks about his role with Yamaha Japan in developing the production bikes versus his racing, what life is like in Japan for him and his family, how he ended up there, his relationship with the Lawrence's and Eddie Warren, his racing in the USA, bike talk and much more. --- CHAPTERS --- 01:18 Intro and Jay Wilson welcome 02:51 Jay's Tenere adventure bike tour in Japan 08:06 Japanese championship season and wrist injury recovery 12:25 Commercial 13:41 Developing young Japanese riders (Shoma, Nakajima) 15:08 Testing role vs race prep balance at Yamaha 21:34 How Jay became a skilled test rider 25:06 Honda's production/race team synergy with Lawrence brothers 27:38 Yamaha's shootout success and Honda chasing Yamaha's feel 45:43 Mud races and brutal Japanese track conditions 45:43 Frame/hanger/spoke torque testing minutiae 50:18 Next big innovation in production motocross bikes 51:53 Why Yamaha's KYB suspension stays consistent 53:53 Tim Gajser's struggles vs Jeffrey Herlings switch to Honda 56:34 Jay's Motocross of Nations near-miss and injury story 59:22 Why Jay moved to Japan and signed with Yamaha 1:06:28 Life in Japan with wife Misty and daughter Poppy 1:13:21 Commercial 1:14:05 Jay's US Supercross privateer/Star Racing experience 1:21:57 Possible return to race an MXGP for testing 1:21:57 Growing up with Hunter and Jett Lawrence 1:25:37 Hunter Lawrence's rise and riding efficiency 1:30:03 Darren Lawrence's coaching genius 1:32:48 Steve's YZ450F gripes: motor, clutch, chassis 1:36:57 Wrap-up and thanks to Jay Wilson 1:38:15 Sign-off

For episode 761 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar to discuss his initiatives in modernizing Nevada’s election system, business portal and preparing Nevadans for artificial intelligence.Before being elected Nevada Secretary of State, Cisco Aguilar built a career spanning law, business, media, sports, and education. He served for 12 years as General Counsel for Agassi Graf and the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, advised the Nevada System of Higher Education, and worked with several NBC affiliates. He later founded the sports technology company Blueprint Sports & Entertainment and completed a fellowship with Adidas’ Brand Sustainability team in Germany. Aguilar holds degrees in finance, accounting, business, and law from the University of Arizona and is licensed to practice law in Nevada, California, and Arizona. He is also the founding chairman of Cristo Rey St. Viator College Preparatory High School and previously served eight years on the Nevada Athletic Commission, including two years as chairman.

Merchant onboarding is where growth goes to die, and where fraud quietly sneaks in. We sit down with Noam Izhaki, Co-founder and CEO of Ballerine, to unpack why the payments stack can feel real-time and automated while KYC, KYB, underwriting, and compliance still depend on slow investigations, scattered systems, and ever-growing analyst teams.We walk through Noam's journey from building early online platforms in Tel Aviv to learning hard lessons in remittances and then at Wix, where the same merchant risk challenges showed up at scale. That experience led to Ballerine: a platform designed to help merchant acquirers, PSPs, marketplaces, card ecosystem players, and banks bring their policies and data into one place and use AI agents to automate decisions across the seller lifecycle, from onboarding through ongoing monitoring. We also dig into how this differs from traditional fraud and compliance point solutions that provide signals but still leave the hardest part, judgment, to humans.Then we zoom out to the future of payments: agentic commerce, agents buying from other agents, and a world where creating “a business” is cheap, fast, and sometimes fake. Noam shares what he's seeing around fraud industrialization, including transaction laundering as a service, and why the biggest advantage may be becoming a true trust layer for the internet with real-time, global risk decisions.If you're building for scale, ask yourself whether your plan requires hiring your way out of risk. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a payments leader who's feeling the pressure, and leave a review with your biggest question about AI in merchant risk.

For episode 760 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Jason Hitchcock, CEO of Greenlane. Mr. Hitchcock is a technology executive with over 15 years of experience building and scaling revenue engines across SaaS, blockchain infrastructure, and decentralized finance. Mr. Hitchcock most recently served as Head of Business Development at thirdweb, a leading open-source Web3 developer tools and infrastructure platform. In that role, he built and led the company's enterprise go-to-market strategy, scaling a program across more than 150 blockchain networks and structuring channel partnerships to drive developer tool adoption among startups building in web3.

For episode 759 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Jared Gutstadt, CEO of Rebel Audio, an AI-powered podcasting platform designed to radically simplify how podcasts are created, produced, and scaled. Based and backed by Nashville, TN - Rebel Audio will allow users to record, edit and upload episodes directly to all major podcast platforms, unlocking the next generation of breakout voices.  For more information - visit www.rebelaudio.ai  

SPONSORED CONTENT: This video is a paid partnership with 1inch. It was produced in collaboration with 1inch and is separate from Unchained's editorial coverage. 1inch cofounder Sergej Kunz says up to 85% of DeFi's liquidity sits idle. He walks through Aqua, the self-custodial product built to put that capital back to work. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠1inch - Swap crypto at the best rates in DeFi with 1inch — and get an early look at Aqua, their new protocol that lets your liquidity do more than one job at a time https://1inch.io  ======================================================== Discover Aqua, their new shared-liquidity protocol that lets your capital power multiple DeFi strategies at once — without leaving your wallet. Learn more at https://1inch.io 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz says he built Aqua after getting sandwiched by MEV bots while providing his own liquidity, and after 1inch's research found up to 85% of concentrated liquidity across DeFi sits idle. Kunz walks through why he thinks liquidity pools fragment capital by design, and how Aqua's intent-based, self-custody model tries to fix that without asking users to give up control of their assets. He covers Aqua's sub-wallet structure, how professional market makers settle trades after passing 1inch's compliance and KYB checks, and the rollout across 13 networks including Base and Robinhood's chain. Kunz also details 1inch DAO's plan to distribute USDC to liquidity providers. Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠André Beganski - Host Guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sergej Kunz - Cofounder of 1inch Timestamps

For episode 758 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Dave Trier where he serves as CEO of ModelOp, where he leads the company with a clear focus on customer value, product innovation, and enterprise execution. A builder at heart, Dave brings deep technical fluency and real-world operating experience to the challenge of helping global enterprises unlock the transformational power of AI.

SPONSORED CONTENT: This video is a paid partnership with 1inch. It was produced in collaboration with 1inch and is separate from Unchained's editorial coverage. 1inch cofounder Sergej Kunz says up to 85% of DeFi's liquidity sits idle. He walks through Aqua, the self-custodial product built to put that capital back to work. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠1inch - Swap crypto at the best rates in DeFi with 1inch — and get an early look at Aqua, their new protocol that lets your liquidity do more than one job at a time https://1inch.io  ======================================================== Discover Aqua, their new shared-liquidity protocol that lets your capital power multiple DeFi strategies at once — without leaving your wallet. Learn more at https://1inch.io 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz says he built Aqua after getting sandwiched by MEV bots while providing his own liquidity, and after 1inch's research found up to 85% of concentrated liquidity across DeFi sits idle. Kunz walks through why he thinks liquidity pools fragment capital by design, and how Aqua's intent-based, self-custody model tries to fix that without asking users to give up control of their assets. He covers Aqua's sub-wallet structure, how professional market makers settle trades after passing 1inch's compliance and KYB checks, and the rollout across 13 networks including Base and Robinhood's chain. Kunz also details 1inch DAO's plan to distribute USDC to liquidity providers. Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠André Beganski - Host Guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sergej Kunz - Cofounder of 1inch Timestamps

For episode 757 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Vitali Dervoed, Founder and CEO of Ekiden. Vitali Dervoed is a tech entrepreneur and operator with over 10 years of experience across banking, fintech, capital markets, crypto infrastructure, and DeFi. Ekiden is an institutional derivatives exchange on Canton Network. Raised $3.8M, onboarded 12+ tier-1 market makers, and grew the platform to 20,000+ users through growth marketing, referral loops, community-led acquisition, and distribution partnerships.

For episode 756 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Lex Karushin, Partnerships Manager for Finchtrade.Lex has over five years of experience in the crypto space, with most of his career spent in Web3 startups, helping teams scale through new business development, strategic partnerships, and capital raising. His background spans DeFi, NFTs, and token launches, and with a foundation in management and finance.

For episode 755 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Andrew Nalichaev, a systems-level blockchain expert who serves as CEO of Haia — an AI-powered, non-custodial operating system for digital assets — and CTO of Haust Network, a ZK Layer 2 protocol built with Polygon CDK. He is also the Blockchain Domain Expert at Innowise, where he leads architecture and strategic engagements for fintechs, banks, exchanges, and institutional crypto clients — covering custody design, tokenization, DeFi infrastructure, custom blockchain builds, and the emerging class of AI-native financial products. Innowise architected and shipped the full engineering stack for both Haia and Haust Network, and Andrew's dual role bridges deep product ownership on the founder side with hands-on client delivery on the consulting side. Andrew combines a background in software engineering, applied mathematics, and securities and cryptocurrency markets to evaluate blockchain systems across five dimensions — architecture, incentives, resilience, market fit, and execution. Over 8+ years in finance, economics, and blockchain, he has evaluated 600+ blockchain business concepts, contributed to the launch of 4 L1/L2 ecosystems, and helped startups and established companies navigate the crypto space with sharp tech insight and hands-on business sense. Andrew is the author of unique strategies for working with DeFi protocols, and has designed and taught blockchain courses to 3,500+ students. Learn more about Andrew's work at andrewnalichaev.com, and about Innowise's blockchain and AI development expertise at innowise.com.

For episode 754 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Marcos Santillana, VP of Digital Asset Services, Institutional at Uphold.Marcos Santillana is VP of Digital Asset Services at Uphold, a crypto platform licensed across the US, UK and EU. He works directly with crypto foundations and protocol teams on listing, treasury management and wider ecosystem partnerships. With deep exposure to hundreds of blockchain projects assessed through a regulatory, commercial and technical lens, Marcos brings rare cross-jurisdictional fluency across US and UK frameworks.Layer-1 and Layer-2 protocols and crypto foundations can get in touch with Marcos to discuss the full range of services Uphold offers. 

For episode 753 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Anton Lobintsev, Co-founder of Mosta. Anton is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years in the technology industry, building companies at the intersection of infrastructure, compliance, and product innovation. Mosta is AI-native business banking for global teams and AI agents, built on SquareFi's financial infrastructure. It combines accounts, cards, cross-border payments, invoicing, and stablecoin infrastructure in one platform.

For episode 752 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Varun Choudhary, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ORO. Varun is an IIT graduate and entrepreneur with a proven track record of building and scaling ventures across global markets. At ORO, he leads the company’s strategic vision, product direction, and growth architecture, bringing a rare combination of technical depth, market instinct, and execution rigor.

For episode 751 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Quinten van Welzen, leading growth at Zano. Zano is an open-source cryptocurrency and ecosystem with enterprise-grade privacy, security, and scalability that operates as a robust foundation for confidential assets and decentralized applications (dApps).

For episode 750 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Aigerim Omarbekova, the Head of Ecosystem at Fasset, a banking and investment platform focused on financial inclusion in emerging markets. At Fasset, Aigerim leads the platform’s full stakeholder and community ecosystem, spanning investor relations, regional market development across Southeast Asia and MENA, and outreach to global Muslim investor bases through Fasset’s Shariah-compliant finance programs. Fasset is an American-founded banking and investment platform focused on enhancing financial inclusion in emerging markets, enabling individuals and businesses to securely invest from anywhere in the world. Founded by Mohammad Raafi Hossain and Daniel Ahmed, Fasset has raised more than $78 million in funding and holds regulatory approvals in several countries, including the UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, the EU, Türkiye, Pakistan, and others.

For episode 749 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Chris Loeffler, CEO & Co-founder of Caliber Wealth Management. 

For episode 748 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Brian Oakes, an IT escalation engineer, early crypto miner, and author of Undermined, a gripping firsthand account of losing over $150 million in cryptocurrency through a devastating SIM swap attack. Since his last appearance on BlockHash, Brian has been targeted in a second hack that wiped him out of crypto entirely—adding an even darker and more urgent chapter to his story. Through raw honesty, sharp insight, family resilience, and hard-earned perspective, Brian speaks openly about cybersecurity, corporate negligence, data privacy, and the emotional toll of surviving digital theft. His story is part financial thriller, part cautionary tale, and a wake-up call for anyone living in today’s connected world.Want more of the story? Get the Undermined book: Amazon Link

Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly, breaks down the one rule that separates investors who actually get rich from those who don't: staying in the market when everything says to get out. A former professional poker player turned VC, he shares how he survived 2018 and FTX without selling, and why he defended Ethereum and Solana when nobody else would.THE SHIFT NEWSLETTER

In this episode, we discuss the state of the AI market and what to expect heading into July of 2026.

Eric Larchevêque, co-founder of Ledger, shares why everything you've been told about owning money is wrong - and how losing his savings to a corrupt bank, having his gold seized, and watching his co-founder get kidnapped for €10 million in Bitcoin proved it.THE SHIFT NEWSLETTER

For episode 747 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Bret Kenwell, a US Investment and Options Analyst at eToro. eToro is a retail brokerage platform offering access to crypto and traditional asset classes to 40 million users globally. They allow users to trade diverse financial assets like stocks, cryptocurrencies, and ETFs.

For episode 746 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Tristan Thompson to discuss the intersection of Sports, Tech and Capital at Bitcoin 2026 and becoming a Founding partner of Introduction.com.

Stellar (XLM) has been one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies in recent weeks, fueled by growing speculation surrounding its role in the future of tokenized finance and digital asset infrastructure. I break down the recent surge in XLM, the significance of the DTCC announcement, and why institutional adoption narratives are once again putting Stellar in the spotlight. We discuss tokenization, blockchain-based settlement, real-world asset infrastructure, and whether Stellar is positioned to play a meaningful role in the next generation of financial markets. Is this the beginning of a larger move for XLM, or just another short-term rally?

For episode 745 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Ilies Larbi, CEO of Ouinex, a next-generation financial trading platform designed to bridge the gap between decentralized and institutional finance. Before founding Ouinex, Ilies was Managing Director and Head of Global Partnerships at one of the world's leading brokerages. There, he managed global capital markets, regulatory strategy, and institutional deal-making across multiple jurisdictions.

For episode 744 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Sebastian Salomon, CGO and Co-Founder of oneBanking, one of Europe's most exciting fintech ventures (est. 2024), and co-founder of oneBots, an AI-powered automation platform making intelligent banking accessible to everyone.

For episode 743 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Andrej Bencic, CEO and Co-Founder of Tenderly, the simulation company for onchain institutions. An engineer by background, he co-founded Tenderly in 2018 and has spent the last eight years building it into the operational layer beneath crypto's most sophisticated protocols, enabling engineering, finance, and risk teams to model every onchain action against the live system before any capital or customer is exposed.  

For episode 742 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Chi Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Kite, which is building the base layer for the agentic internet. Her extensive background encompasses AI, big data, and product management.

For episode 741 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO of Conviva.Keith Zubchevich is president and CEO of Conviva, where he helps digital businesses understand what their customers actually experience — not just what dashboards say is happening. He leads Conviva's work at the intersection of agentic AI, real-time analytics, and customer experience, with a focus on measuring outcomes, friction, and risk once AI is deployed in production. Learn how Conviva gives AI agents context at conviva.ai  

For episode 740 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Kenny Wood, CEO of Sleepagotchi, a next-generation AI health data platform that started with sleep and is rapidly expanding into the broader wellness economy.The company just closed a $6.5M raise backed by Sfermion, Inception, 6th Man, and 1kx and launched its first personalised AI Sleep Coach on 19 May. Before joining Sleepagotchi, Kenny was CTO at Moonlander, a next-generation game creation studio successfully acquired by Alpha 3D. His career began in AAA games, shipping chart-topping franchises including Transformers (#1 in the UK console charts), Formula 1, and World Rally Championship. A builder and technologist with rare breadth, spanning AAA studios, R&D labs, defence simulation, and applied AI, Kenny brings a perspective on behaviour change and AI-driven systems that most founders in the wellness space simply don't have. 

For episode 739 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by David Lucatch, the Chair of nGRND, the Gold Protocol that converts stranded in-ground gold into liquid, reward-bearing digital assets, without extraction or environmental cost. David brings 40+ years of global entrepreneurial experience to this moment. He was an early architect of eCommerce payment infrastructure in Canada during Web1, built an AI/ML-powered engagement platform used by over 200 million people in Web2, and has spent Web3 at the intersection of blockchain, digital identity, and real-world asset tokenisation. He's a Forbes Business Council member, Rolling Stone Culture Council member, NY Emmy-nominated Executive Producer, and part of a team that holds a Guinness World Record in the online space.

For episode 738 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Sergii Gerasymovych, the Co-Founder and CEO of EZ Blockchain, a bootstrapped data center and computing infrastructure company he founded in 2017. He pioneered flare gas Bitcoin mining, invented the world's first mobile immersion cooling mining container, and is now transitioning his infrastructure to power AI workloads. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe. Speaker at Bitcoin 2021 and 2022 Conferences. Featured in Bitcoin Magazine and CoinDesk. 

For episode 737 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Jesse Shrader, CEO & Co-founder of Amboss, where they are building the backbone for enterprise Lightning adoption and decentralized finance through several key initiatives.

Angela Strange speaks with Dileep Thazhmon, founder and CEO of Jeeves, about building a global financial operating system for enterprises across Latin America using stablecoins and AI. The conversation covers the challenges of building localized financial infrastructure across 25 countries, from regulation and payments to underwriting and compliance. They also discuss why stablecoin adoption is accelerating in Latin America, and how AI is helping Jeeves scale billions in payment volume while automating underwriting, customer support, reconciliation, and KYB workflows.   Resources: Follow Dileep Thazhmon on X: https://x.com/thazhmon Follow Angela Strange on X: https://x.com/astrange Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For episode 736 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Beau Turner, CEO of Abundant Mines, a vertically integrated, U.S. based Bitcoin mining and hosting company built on transparency, uptime, and investor trust.They help individual investors, high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and business owners transform their portfolios through Bitcoin-denominated cash flow, with full ownership of their hardware, institutional-grade reporting, and the same tax benefits that used to be reserved for insiders and specialists. 

For episode 735 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Bobby Shell of Voltage, an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure platform that specializes in "Lightning-as-a-Service" (LaaS). It allows businesses, fintechs, and financial institutions to easily set up, manage, and scale Bitcoin and Lightning Network nodes without the burden of maintaining physical servers.

For episode 734 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Morgan Lekstrom, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Streamex. He is a seasoned mining executive and corporate strategist with over 17 years of experience building and transforming resource companies. As Chairman and Co-Founder of Streamex, he brings deep expertise in capital markets, strategic M&A, and commodities to guide the company's vision of tokenizing real-world assets. Morgan recently served as CEO of NexMetals Mining Corp., where he led the redevelopment of critical metals projects in Botswana with backing from a US$150 million letter of interest from the Export-Import Bank of the United States.  

For episode 733 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Wasim Ahmad, CEO of Vault12. Vault12 is a non-custodial crypto security and digital inheritance platform. It enables cryptocurrency owners to protect and back up their wallet seed phrases, private keys, and digital assets (like NFTs) by distributing encrypted data shards across a decentralized network of trusted friends, family, and devices.  

For episode 732 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Miles Paschini, CEO and Co-founder of FV Bank.FV Bank is a fully licensed and regulated U.S. digital bank and qualified custodian designed to bridge the gap between traditional banking and digital asset management. They provide banking services to businesses, fintech companies, and individuals globally.

For episode 731 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Sumsub at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas. Tailored to your risk appetite, market demands, and use cases, Sumsub is powered by adaptive AI intelligence to support global scale while keeping your business compliant and future-ready.

For episode 730 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Stepan Uherik, CFO of Trezor.Trezor is a pioneering brand of cryptocurrency hardware wallets. Known for launching the world's first hardware wallet, Trezor provides "cold storage" solutions and physical devices that keep private keys offline to protect digital assets from online hackers, malware, and data leaks. 

For episode 729 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Przemek Kowalczyk, Co-founder & CEO of Ramp Network, where he has spent the past eight years tackling the challenges of crypto onboarding. With a background in physics and computer science, Przemek has led high-performing product and tech teams, shaping user-centric solutions in the Web3 space.  Ramp Network is a financial technology company building solutions that connect the crypto economy with today's global financial infrastructure. Through its core on- and off-ramp products, Ramp Network provides businesses and individuals across 150+ countries with a streamlined and smooth experience in converting between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. Ramp Network is fully integrated with the world's major payment methods, including debit and credit cards, bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Pix, and more. 

For episode 728 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Neil Steinhardt, COO of Nexo US.Nexo is a premier digital assets wealth platform designed to empower clients to grow, manage, and preserve their crypto holdings. Their mission is to lead the next generation of wealth creation by focusing on customer success and delivering tailored solutions that build enduring value, supported by 24/7 client care. 

For episode 727 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Matt Luongo from Mezo, a Bitcoin finance app that empowers people to live off their Bitcoin without spending it. Flagship features include Mezo Borrow and MUSD.