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Demetrios, Sam Partee, and Rahul Parundekar unpack the chaos of AI agent tools and the evolving world of MCP (Model Context Protocol). With sharp insights and plenty of laughs, they dig into tool permissions, security quirks, agent memory, and the messy path to making agents actually useful.// BioSam ParteeSam Partee is the CTO and Co-Founder of Arcade AI. Previously a Principal Engineer leading the Applied AI team at Redis, Sam led the effort in creating the ecosystem around Redis as a vector database. He is a contributor to multiple OSS projects including Langchain, DeterminedAI, LlamaIndex and Chapel amongst others. While at Cray/HPE he created the SmartSim AI framework which is now used at national labs around the country to integrate HPC simulations like climate models with AI. Rahul ParundekarRahul Parundekar is the founder of AI Hero. He graduated with a Master's in Computer Science from USC Los Angeles in 2010, and embarked on a career focused on Artificial Intelligence. From 2010-2017, he worked as a Senior Researcher at Toyota ITC working on agent autonomy within vehicles. His journey continued as the Director of Data Science at FigureEight (later acquired by Appen), where he and his team developed an architecture supporting over 36 ML models and managing over a million predictions daily. Since 2021, he has been working on AI Hero, aiming to democratize AI access, while also consulting on LLMOps(Large Language Model Operations), and AI system scalability. Other than his full time role as a founder, he is also passionate about community engagement, and actively organizes MLOps events in SF, and contributes educational content on RAG and LLMOps at learn.mlops.community.// Related LinksWebsites: arcade.devaihero.studio~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreMLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Rahul on LinkedIn: /rparundekarConnect with Sam on LinkedIn: /samparteeTimestamps:[00:00] Agents & Tools, Explained (Without Melting Your Brain)[09:51] MVP Servers: Why Everything's on Fire (and How to Fix It)[13:18] Can We Actually Trust the Protocol?[18:13] KYC, But Make It AI (and Less Painful)[25:25] Web Automation Tests: The Bugs Strike Back[28:18] MCP Dev: What Went Wrong (and What Saved Us)[33:53] Social Login: One Button to Rule Them All[39:33] What Even Is an AI-Native Developer?[42:21] Betting Big on Smarter Models (High Risk, High Reward)[51:40] Harrison's Bold New Tactic (With Real-Life Magic Tricks)[55:31] Async Task Handoffs: Herding Cats, But Digitally[1:00:37] Getting AI to Actually Help Your Workflow[1:03:53] The Infamous Varma System Error (And How We Dodge It)
The recent hack of crypto exchange Coinbase, where criminals working with rogue insiders managed to get access to customer information and demanded $20m to keep it quiet, is an example of how KYC can go wrong, says Shiven Moodley, macro strategist at 80eight. Moneyweb Crypto news articles
We explore the Coinbase customer data breach, vulnerabilities in KYC systems, and the increasing risk of physical attacks against crypto holders.You're listening to Bitcoin Season 2. Subscribe to the newsletter, trusted by over 12,000 Bitcoiners: https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.comToday, Janusz joins us to dive into the recent Coinbase customer data breach where overseas support agents were bribed to steal user information. We explore the fundamental vulnerabilities in KYC systems, the rising trend of physical attacks targeting crypto holders, and sophisticated phishing operations. Yanis offers practical alternatives to centralized exchanges and discusses how to maintain privacy while navigating regulatory requirements in the crypto space.Notes:- Coinbase hackers demanded $20M in Bitcoin ransom- Less than 1% of Coinbase customers affected- Physical crypto attacks increasing since 2022- Support agents bribed to copy customer data- P2P alternatives avoid additional KYC exposure- Constitutional rights may extend to anonymous paymentsTimestamps:00:00 Start01:15 Easy targets03:09 Coinbase breach timeline04:15 Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Video06:58 The pitfalls of KYC15:29 Junseth scam call17:29 Arch Network18:31 Know the risks22:31 Protecting yourself-
Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: Why is Boston such a good sports city? Price inflation in dinosaur skeletons Cryptopunks IP is sold Machinsky is sentenced Nakamoto Holdings launches Meta wants to add stablecoins to its platforms Exchanges are honeypots for KYC data Coinbase suffers a data breach The GENIUS act is going to a vote next week GENIUS act new provisions More Movement shenanigans Thailand is launching a $150m crypto token Content mentioned in this episode: Tuongvy Le and Austin Campbell published a paper, "Crypto and The Evolution of Capital Markets", which dissects the current market structure for securities trading and settlement and discusses how blockchain networks can improve this architecture.
//The Wire//2300Z May 16, 2025////ROUTINE////BLUF: CRYPTOCURRENCY EXCHANGE COINBASE HACKED, CUSTOMER DATA BREACHED. MASS GRAVE SITE FOUND IN MEXICO. CARTEL OBSERVATION POSTS DESTROYED ON USA/MEX BORDER.// -----BEGIN TEARLINE------International Events-Mexico: Earlier this week a mass grave and Cartel corpse processing center was discovered at an abandoned ranch roughly 40 miles west of Guadalajara. The discovery was made by local private citizens attempting to find the bodies of known Cartel victims, and this site had been known to serve in a variety of roles over the years by members of the CJNG Cartel.AC: This site is not a new revelation; a hostage recovery operation was conducted at this exact compound last year. This ranch was formerly used as a hitman training site, but over the years was relegated to serving as an extermination camp. As this was a well known site, there was some speculation that the compound had probably been used as burial site as well. Because local authorities were not interested in investigating this, a small group of local citizens gained access to the compound to search for human remains, of which many were found. Local authorities (which have now been forced to acknowledge the site), have urged local citizens to help identify the clothing found in six mass graves found at the site. Due to the high-profile nature of this discovery, civil unrest has been reported throughout several cities in Mexico, as citizens express dissatisfaction with the Cartels engaging in this kind of brutality on an industrial scale.-HomeFront-Arizona: Two Cartel-affiliated Observation Posts were destroyed yesterday morning. The first OP was located west of Ajo, and the second was located near Nogales.Washington D.C. - Scandal has emerged surrounding a post made by former FBI Director James Comey, in which he posted a photo on Instagram that contained a threatening reference commonly used as a coded incitement of violence against President Trump. Comey posted a photo containing the numbers "8647", which has become a term very commonly used by malign actors in the United States to express their desire to "86" (or dispose of) the 47th President, Donald Trump. James Comey has since removed the post and stated that he did not know what it meant.USA: Another major scandal has emerged regarding a major cryptocurrency exchange failing to protect customer data. A few days ago Coinbase (arguably the biggest crypto exchange in the world) announced that they had been hacked. The hackers claimed to have accessed most private customer data on the site, and have demanded $20 million as a ransom for not posting this information on the internet.-----END TEARLINE-----Analyst Comments: This morning, statements from Coinbase and the CEO have shed light on what really happened...and it doesn't look good. In short, Coinbase outsourced their customer support services to the Third World. As it turns out, when you hire employees from an impoverished nation and pay them peanuts while giving them unchecked access to private customer information...they might be inclined to accept a bribe to leak that data. Right now, this appears to be what happened. American politicians are also not entirely off the hook for this scandal either. The reason that there is so much data to steal in the first place is due to KYC or "Know Your Customer" laws that make privacy illegal. Many people who are not involved in the world of cryptocurrency do not know that it's not an anonymous experience by any means...buying and selling crypto is the hard part since 100% of crypto exchanges based in the United States and Europe have to abide by KYC laws that force customers to hand over their drivers license, bank account numbers, social security number, home address, IRS tax information, a series of selfie photos or a 3d scan of a person's head...pretty much all of t
Commonweath Bank was in the news this week, first because of its reported results, and second because of its “draconian” handling of what is called the Know Your Customer or KYC rules. CBA reported a flat cash profit of a $2.6 billion during the third quarter of the 2025 financial year pretty much in line … Continue reading "Are They Banking On Their Own Futures; Not Yours?"
Gründer Jacob Wende erzählt im Gespräch mit Host André Bajorat von der Gründung des Fintechs und welche Chancen er dank Künstlicher Intelligenz im Bereich Betrugsprävention sieht.
Episode 283 - Blockzeit 896710 - von und mit Felix, Johannes und MarkusChapters0:29 Willkommen zu Folge 2831:04 Projekt WaveSpace vorgestellt2:27 Schnurz und Paraguay4:44 Die Stärke des deutschen Passes7:01 Reichsbürger und ihre Ansichten7:48 Axel Rose und Bitcoin9:11 Lightning Wallets in Japan13:12 Wallet of Satoshi Diskussion17:00 Einführung von Wavespace19:59 Mieten und Bitcoin-Zahlungen24:02 KYC und regulatorische Hürden30:59 Sicherheitsaspekte von KYC44:19 Felix' Bitcoin-Reise47:13 Bitcoin akzeptiert in Dubai54:20 Software und Geopolitik54:46 Open-Source-Revolution55:50 Streaming-Anbieter im Wandel56:24 Digitale Selbstsouveränität57:18 Deutsche Bank und MicroStrategy59:46 Anlageentscheidungen und Diversifikation1:00:58 Peer-to-Peer-Protokolle1:03:47 Kredite und persönliche Finanzen1:06:04 Schulden und Kaufkraft1:08:16 Risiko und Rendite1:10:52 Meinungsfreiheit und Zensur1:11:53 Verantwortung und Entscheidungen1:14:05 Aktuelle Kreditbedingungen1:15:14 Wirtschaft und Zentralbanken1:16:52 Shoutouts und Tipps1:17:55 Popkultur und gesellschaftliche Themen1:19:57 Kanye West und Kontroversen1:23:11 Antisemitismus und Musikindustrie1:24:38 Meinungsfreiheit und Radikalisierung1:29:19 Medienreaktionen und Diskurs1:33:48 Weltbilder und gesellschaftliche Normen1:40:28 Individualität und MeinungsvielfaltSponsoren und FreundeBitBox02 Bitcoin-only Edition - 5% Rabatt für die EINUNDZWANZIG Community mit Code “einundzwanzig” — 10% für 10 BitBoxes mit Code “einundzwanzig10”.Stack Deine Sats mit Pocket Bitcoin.EINUNDZWANZIG Merch bei Copiaro.Bei ShopinBit kannst du um die Welt reisen, Autos kaufen sowie alle deine Träume erfüllen mit unserem Concierge Service. Und nebenbei auch noch 1.000.000 Produkte mit Bitcoin kaufen. Code EINUNDZWANZIG für 5€ Rabatt.
When a phishing scam nearly cost him his life savings, Andy White turned that wake-up call into Closinglock, a cybersecurity platform now protecting billions in real estate closings. Dive in as he shares how title agents can fight back against wire fraud, seller impersonation, and deepfake threats using tools like KYC, MFA, and secure workflows. If you're still relying on email and outdated wire systems, this conversation is your signal to upgrade before it's too late. What you'll learn from this episode How Andy's wife's real estate story sparked the birth of Closinglock The role of AI and deepfakes in modern cybersecurity risks Innovations in identity verification, KYC, and payment automation Common misconceptions about security and simplicity Actionable steps to reduce wire fraud exposure today Resources mentioned in this episode Otter.ai Chick-fil-A Wells Fargo Keller Williams FedNow ChatGPT Fedwire Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell | Paperback, Hardcover, and Kindle About Andy WhiteAndy is the CEO and Co-founder of ClosingLock. In 2017 my wife and I founded ClosingLock to help protect title companies, lenders, and property buyers/sellers from wire fraud. Prior to that, I worked as a computer engineer for various tech companies – from a startup that raised over $100M to the globally-recognized tech giant Samsung. Prior to that, I completed a BS, MS, and PhD in Computer and Electrical Engineering at Auburn University. Connect with Andy Website: Closinglock LinkedIn: Andy White, Ph.D. Connect With UsLove what you're hearing? Don't miss an episode! Follow us on our social media channels and stay connected. Explore more on our website: www.alltechnational.com/podcast Stay updated with our newsletter: www.mochoumil.com Follow Mo on LinkedIn: Mo Choumil Stop waiting on underwriter emails or callbacks—TitleGPT.ai gives you instant, reliable answers to your title questions. Whether it's underwriting, compliance, or tricky closings, the information you need is just a click away. No more delays—work smarter, close faster. Try it now at www.TitleGPT.ai. Closing more deals starts with more appointments. At Alltech National Title, our inside sales team works behind the scenes to fill your pipeline, so you can focus on building relationships and closing business. No more cold calling—just real opportunities. Get started at AlltechNationalTitle.com. Extra hands without extra overhead—that's Safi Virtual. Our trained virtual assistants specialize in the title industry, handling admin work, client communication, and data entry so you can stay focused on closing deals. Scale smarter and work faster at SafiVirtual.com.
Episode 225: The EU intends to ban all privacy-coins and non-KYC wallets, education giant Pearson had a data breach, Peertube App v1 is out, and more!Welcome to the Surveillance Report - featuring Techlore & The New Oil to keep you updated on the newest security & privacy news.❤️ Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/surveillancepod
In this episode of FinTech Layer Cake, host Reggie Young welcomes back Simon Taylor—fintech thought leader, writer of Fintech Brainfood, and Head of Strategy & Content at Sardine.They explore the rapidly emerging world of agentic payments and what Visa's new tokenization framework means for AI-driven commerce. Simon also unpacks real-world use cases, from “vibe shopping” to automated business purchasing, and what hurdles—like consumer trust and fraud—still stand in the way.The conversation then shifts to Sardine's groundbreaking Agentic Oversight Framework, which shows how AI agents can safely handle complex compliance tasks like KYC.Whether you're building AI tools, working in compliance, or just curious about the next frontier in payments—this is an essential listen.
BUY GOLD HERE: https://firstnationalbullion.com/schedule-consult/ Avoid CBDCs and work with Mark Gonzales! HELP SUPPORT US AS WE DOCUMENT HISTORY HERE: https://gogetfunding.com/help-wam-cover-history/ GET NON-MRNA FREEZE DRIED MEAT HERE: https://wambeef.com/ Use code WAMBEEF to save 20%! GET HEIRLOOM SEEDS & NON GMO SURVIVAL FOOD HERE: https://heavensharvest.com/ USE Code WAM to save 5% plus free shipping! GET YOUR APRICOT SEEDS at the life-saving Richardson Nutritional Center HERE: https://rncstore.com/r?id=bg8qc1 Josh Sigurdson talks with Mark Gonzales about the closure of another 42 banks including many Bank of America, Chase and U.S. Bank locations. This is the latest in a long trend of banks shuttering as the system reaches a breaking point. The banks are bankrupt. Their cash to deposit ratios are much of the time under 1%. The FDIC cannot insure the debts. 63 central banks are implementing Basel III to bring in Bail-In Regimes. This means they basically empty your bank account. In 2024, banks closed 1,043 branches nationwide and this year's trends see a massive acceleration. So far we have seen 272 locations shuttered in just the first quarter. Simultaneously alongside the banks collapsing, retail continues to collapse as well in what they call the "retail apocalypse" as Rite Aid files for a second bankruptcy, Subway closes countless locations and the company that founded Canada, the Hudson Bay Company closes all locations. What we are witnessing is historic, so it's suspicious to say the absolute very least to see AI being propped up by both leftist and right wing governments worldwide as the so-called "solution." Elon Musk at the recent Milken Conference called for AI to replace government as he also says it will replace nearly all jobs and we will live with Universal Basic Income, UBI. This is the agenda of the World Economic Forum and via carbon credit allotments in 15 Minute Cities and the use of digital IDs with CBDCs, we are facing down total technocratic enslavement and dependence. The European Union is banning privacy coins by 2027 restricting people from doing anything digitally without total centralized surveillance and the EU is also releasing their CBDC by October this year at the latest. With the STABLE and GENIUS Acts passing in the United States, a centralized Stablecoin system is being implemented essentially creating a CBDC in the United States complete with KYC. Interestingly, gold is skyrocketing. It's almost like people see what's clearly coming and they're doing something about it... Prepare yourselves. Stay tuned for more from WAM! Get local, healthy, pasture raised meat delivered to your door here: https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life/bonus15?oid=6&affid=321 USE THE LINK & get 20% off for life and $15 off your first box! DITCH YOUR DOCTOR! https://www.livelongerformula.com/wam Get a natural health practitioner and work with Christian Yordanov! Mention WAM and get a FREE masterclass! SIGN UP FOR HOMESTEADING COURSES NOW: https://freedomfarmers.com/link/17150/ Get Prepared & Start The Move Towards Real Independence With Curtis Stone's Courses! GET YOUR WAV WATCH HERE: https://buy.wavwatch.com/WAM Use Code WAM to save $100 and purchase amazing healing frequency technology! GET ORGANIC CHAGA MUSHROOMS HERE: https://alaskachaga.com/wam Use code WAM to save money! See shop for a wide range of products! GET AMAZING MEAT STICKS HERE: https://4db671-1e.myshopify.com/discount/WAM?rfsn=8425577.918561&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=8425577.918561 USE CODE WAM TO SAVE MONEY! GET YOUR FREEDOM KELLY KETTLE KIT HERE: https://patriotprepared.com/shop/freedom-kettle/ Use Code WAM and enjoy many solutions for the outdoors in the face of the impending reset! PayPal: ancientwonderstelevision@gmail.com FIND OUR CoinTree page here: https://cointr.ee/joshsigurdson JOIN US on SubscribeStar here: https://www.subscribestar.com/world-alternative-media For subscriber only content! Pledge here! Just a dollar a month can help us alive! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2652072&ty=h&u=2652072 BITCOIN ADDRESS: 18d1WEnYYhBRgZVbeyLr6UfiJhrQygcgNU World Alternative Media 2025
This is the Catchup on 3 Things by The Indian Express and I'm Flora Swain.Today is the 30th of April and here are the headlines.Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired the second Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) meeting following the Pahalgam terror attack that killed at least 26 people. Key ministers including Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, and S. Jaishankar attended. Modi also led meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) and the Cabinet Economic Affairs Committee (CCEA). A cabinet briefing is scheduled for 4 PM. Meanwhile, the Pakistan Army continued “unprovoked firing” across Jammu and Kashmir's LoC for the sixth night, with the Indian Army responding proportionately, officials told PTI.A newly constructed wall at the Simhachalam temple in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, collapsed early Tuesday, killing seven and injuring six. The collapse followed heavy rain and occurred during the Akshaya Tritiya festival, with crowds gathering from 4 AM. Officials said the wall gave way when people leaned on it near a ticket counter. Home Minister V Anita noted the toll could have been higher if many hadn't stepped back after noticing the wall weakening. The structure had been built recently near the temple's special entrance staircase.The Supreme Court, citing the right to digital access as part of life and liberty, ordered changes to digital KYC norms to aid people with vision impairment and acid attack survivors. The ruling came from Justices J B Pardiwala and R Mahadevan in response to two writ petitions. The court directed authorities to revise KYC procedures to ensure accessibility and inclusion for those with visual disabilities, emphasizing that digital rights must be inclusive. The decision marks a step toward equitable access to essential digital identification systems in India.The Delhi Anti-Corruption Branch filed an FIR against former Deputy CM Manish Sisodia and former PWD Minister Satyendar Jain over alleged corruption in constructing 12,748 classrooms during AAP's rule. The scam is reportedly worth Rs 2,000 crore. ACB chief Madhur Verma confirmed the FIR, stating major cost escalations, delays, and deviations were observed. None of the works were completed on time. Officials alleged the contracts were awarded to parties close to the AAP. The investigation highlights serious irregularities in infrastructure development under the previous administration.Former US President Donald Trump held a rally in Warren, Michigan, to mark 100 days since returning to office. Addressing a large crowd, he celebrated what he called major economic achievements and attacked Democrats, especially Joe Biden, over immigration. Trump said he missed the campaign trail and used the Michigan rally—his first major public event since January 20—to reignite his base. The location was symbolic, being a center of the auto industry, where Trump emphasized jobs, the economy, and America-first policies during his address.That's all for today. This was the Catchup on 3 Things by The Indian Express.
Titus Kevalny, VP of Go-to-Market Strategy at Civic, discussed his role in promoting Civic's products, which protect apps from Sybil attacks and ensure KYC compliance. He explained the evolution of Civic from Ethereum to Solana, Civic Pass, a verification tool with over a million passes, and Civic Auth, a simpler authentication method for developers. Kevalny emphasized the importance of multiple authentication methods to combat AI bots and deep fakes.
Any donation is greatly appreciated! 47e6GvjL4in5Zy5vVHMb9PQtGXQAcFvWSCQn2fuwDYZoZRk3oFjefr51WBNDGG9EjF1YDavg7pwGDFSAVWC5K42CBcLLv5U OR DONATE HERE: https://www.monerotalk.live/donate TODAY'S SHOW: In this episode Douglas Tuman talks with xenu of The Anti-Moonboy channel. xenu shares his experience launching the Anti Moonboy channel and his series 'Attack of the Poison Outputs', which has grown to 30 episodes focusing on Monero privacy and security analysis. xenu details his entry into cryptocurrency through sports betting in 2016, initially using Bitcoin before discovering Monero. The discussion covers the current state of cryptocurrency markets, with xenu expressing skepticism about widespread adoption while emphasizing the importance of actual usage over price speculation. The conversation then shifts to dark market adoption of Monero, with xenu revealing statistics about Archetype, a Monero-only market with over 600,000 users. They discussed the evolution of cryptocurrency usage in dark markets, noting that four of the six most reputable markets are Monero-only, with the remaining two supporting both Monero and Bitcoin. They also cover technical aspects of Monero, including the upcoming full chain membership proofs update and potential future improvements to the protocol. TIMESTAMPS: (00:02:36) - xenu's background in cryptocurrency and discovering Monero. (00:04:18) - xenu's Anti Moon Boy News podcast. (00:12:09) - Collaborations and projects. (00:15:35) - Monero's role as peer-to-peer digital cash. (00:19:46) - Comparison of user experience between traditional banking systems and Monero. (00:20:40) - Challenges of mainstream adoption. (00:25:39) - Observations on darknet market adoption influencing clearnet adoption. (00:31:42) - Critique of Bitcoin community post-2020. (00:35:07) - Debate on KYC exchanges. (00:37:52) - Best practices when acquiring Monero. (00:42:09) - Upcoming projects including Darknet Market Maximalism. (00:46:25) - Insights from Chainalysis reports and navigating darknet markets. (00:56:17) - Significance of full chain membership proofs. (01:00:30) - Zcash vs. Monero comparison. (01:07:40) - Political climate analysis under Trump administration regarding privacy coins and regulatory threats. (01:15:28) - Aspirations for Monero normalization. (01:24:43) - Views on second-layer solutions for Monero and comparisons with Bitcoin's scaling issues. (01:27:26) - Closing remarks. LINKS: https://x.com/xenumonero Purchase Cafe & tip the farmers w/ XMR! https://gratuitas.org/ Purchase a plug & play Monero node at https://moneronodo.com SPONSORS: Cakewallet.com, the first open-source Monero wallet for iOS. You can even exchange between XMR, BTC, LTC & more in the app! Monero.com by Cake Wallet - ONLY Monero wallet (https://monero.com/) StealthEX, an instant exchange. Go to (https://stealthex.io) to instantly exchange between Monero and 450 plus assets, w/o having to create an account or register & with no limits. WEBSITE: https://www.monerotopia.com CONTACT: monerotalk@protonmail.com ODYSEE: https://odysee.com/@MoneroTalk:8 TWITTER: https://twitter.com/monerotalk FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/MoneroTalk HOST: https://twitter.com/douglastuman INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/monerotalk TELEGRAM: https://t.me/monerotopia MATRIX: https://matrix.to/#/%23monerotopia%3Amonero.social MASTODON: @Monerotalk@mastodon.social MONERO.TOWN: https://monero.town/u/monerotalk
Adrian Mendoza founded Mendoza Ventures to take an in-depth-focused approach to venture capital, looking for founders who demonstrate domain expertise in one of his three focus areas across fintech, AI, and cybersecurity. #financialsystem #blockchain #cybersecurity================All Episodes can be found at www.thecryptopodcast.org All about Roy / Brain Gym & Virtual Assistants athttps://roycoughlan.com/------------------ About my Guest Adrian Mendoza :Adrian is the founder and general partner at Mendoza Ventures which is both Latinx and woman-owned and the first Latinx-founded VC fund on the East Coast based in Boston. With 20 years' of experience in building technology products and teams, Adrian is an experienced entrepreneur, operator, and veteran of the Boston startup ecosystem. Adrian founded Mendoza Ventures to take an in-depth-focused approach to venture capital, looking for founders who demonstrate domain expertise in one of his three focus areas across fintech, AI, and cybersecurity. Adrian prides himself on being a hands-on investor by setting up companies for success beyond just writing a check, creating strong funding syndicates, making customer introductions, and assisting with partnership conversations. What we Discussed: 00:30 Who is Adrian Mendoza01:30 Who is the VC Puppy02:50 Why he Choose Ai & Cyber Security05:45 Is there hope for having a better Payment System12:30 Is there any Systems to simplyify Crypto transfers16:40 KYC and not owning the Crypto20:40 Tracable Fraud with Blockchain24:30 Is there companies that work on a % of retrival from fraud27:40 Can we have an Ai that provides True Answers36:20 Finding Talent with their VC Fund38:00 The Process for Pitching40:50 Do they put Someone on the Board42:40 Protecting your Business from too much Dilution45:45 Different Exit Strategies48:00 Working with his Wife and how to make it workHow to Contact Adrian Mendoza :https://mendoza-ventures.com/https://x.com/AdrianMendozaVChttps://www.youtube.com/@MendozaVentures/featuredhttps://www.instagram.com/adrianmendozavc/https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmendozavc/ ------------------All about Roy / Brain Gym & Virtual Assistants at https://roycoughlan.com/ ___________________
"The thing that's most fascinating, we talk a lot about how complex North Korea is here but when you compare it to some of the other illicit groups, particularly those that are sanctioned, say your terrorist organization that's soliciting donations on Telegram or some other social media outlet understanding what that difference in the level of complexity is, I think is really fascinating to actually know about. When we're talking about DPRK, we're talking about laundering of funds through tens of thousands. By the time we're done, it'll be hundreds of thousands of wallets. And then on the other end of it, We have a terrorist organization that was, sanctioned mid last year for facilitating on behalf of Hamas. After they got sanctioned and their addresses that they were using, got seized and disrupted. They got annoyed and they tried to bridge funds with their new Ethereum wallet after they received a few donations and they didn't even have the gas fees to facilitate it. And the transaction, when we're talking about the difference in the level of complexity here, it is really fascinating to know the nuance and it's not to say that, other nation states, like Russia or Iran don't have any level of complexity. They certainly do." - Andrew Fierman, Head of National Security Intelligence at Chainalysis Inc Fresh out of the studio, Andrew Fierman, Head of National Security Intelligence at Chainalysis, provides an in-depth analysis of the recent $1.5 billion Bybit hack orchestrated by North Korea's Lazarus Group. Starting from his career journey from traditional banking to blockchain analytics, Andrew shares his expertise on how sanctioned entities operate in the cryptocurrency space and the sophisticated techniques employed by state-sponsored hackers. He explains how blockchain's transparency enables tracking of stolen funds. Andrew details how sanctioned states are increasingly turning to stablecoins and decentralized finance to evade traditional banking controls, while emphasizing the importance of KYC procedures and blockchain analytics in disrupting illicit activities. Last but not least, Andrew shares his perspectives on emerging threats in cryptocurrency security, including how AI-powered deepfakes and digital identity forgery are lowering barriers to sophisticated attacks. Audio Episode Highlights: [00:46] Quote of the Day by Andrew Fierman #QOTD [02:38] Introduction of Andrew Fierman, Head of National Security Intelligence at Chainalysis [05:54] Differences between traditional financial monitoring and blockchain transparency [08:22] Explanation of the Bybit hack and how the hack occurred through a third-party vendor [12:06] Lazarus Group's operational methods and their technical advancement [15:10] Evolving tactics in the laundering process [16:18] The importance of patience in tracking and disrupting funds [19:39] Role of blockchain analytics in identifying and mitigating risks [19:47] Challenges in tracing through bridges and DeFi protocols [22:17] Comparison of North Korea's sophistication versus other sanctioned groups [24:51] How exchanges can bolster their defenses against attacks [27:52] Discussion of the Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report [31:24] Secondary sanctions and their impact on international crypto payments [35:28] Regulatory challenges around decentralized finance platforms [37:42] Dusting attacks and their implications for everyday users [40:43] Emerging threats in the crypto space [41:38] Lowering barriers to sophisticated attacks through AI and deepfakes [44:11] What success means for the crypto industry in fending off sanctioned groups [46:35] Closing Profile: Andrew Fierman, Head of National Security Intelligence at Chainalysis Inc https://www.chainalysis.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-fierman-87511611/ Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report: https://go.chainalysis.com/2025-Crypto-Crime-Report.html Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast. Analyse Asia Main Site: https://analyse.asia Analyse Asia Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1kkRwzRZa4JCICr2vm0vGl Analyse Asia Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/analyse-asia-with-bernard-leong/id914868245 Analyse Asia YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AnalyseAsia Analyse Asia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/analyse-asia/ Analyse Asia X (formerly known as Twitter): https://twitter.com/analyseasia Analyse Asia Threads: https://www.threads.net/@analyseasia Sign Up for Our This Week in Asia Newsletter: https://www.analyse.asia/#/portal/signup Subscribe Newsletter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7149559878934540288
Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years published once a month. These are N of one conversations with N of one people. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the best investors of the past decade—Josh Kushner, founder and managing partner of venture firm, Thrive Capital. Josh started Thrive in 2010 and launched its first institutional fund in 2011. That first institutional fund was $40 million and, in it, Thrive led Warby Parker's Series A, invested in Instagram, and incubated a business, which Josh co-founded, called Oscar. Their portfolio is stage agnostic and their track record includes many of the best known businesses from the past decade, including Spotify, Unity, Stripe, and Twitch among many more. Please enjoy my great conversation with Josh Kushner. Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. WorkOS is a developer platform that enables SaaS companies to quickly add enterprise features to their applications. With a single API, developers can implement essential enterprise capabilities that typically require months of engineering work. By handling the complex infrastructure of enterprise features, WorkOS allows developers to focus on their core product while meeting the security and compliance requirements of Fortune 500 companies. Visit WorkOS.com to Transform your application into an enterprise-ready solution in minutes, not months. ----- This episode is brought to you by Passthrough. Passthrough streamlines subscription documents, KYC, and AML compliance, so you can focus on running your fund, not managing paperwork. New SEC Update 31 CFR hits investment firms in under a year, and managers are getting ready for it now. If you think basic OFAC screening is enough, think again. You'll need continuous monitoring of your investors and all their beneficial owners across multiple watchlists, plus a comprehensive anti money laundering program. Passthrough has already processed 50,000 LPs and built the complete solution. Don't risk SEC deficiency letters, fines, or regulatory enforcement. Visit passthrough.com to get compliant now. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:05:14) Why do this podcast (00:08:14) The development of taste and quality (00:12:20) CS Lewis tweet; The Inner Ring (00:18:14) Overview the founding story of Oscar Health (00:25:18) Learning to identify good problems and creating a business to solve it (00:27:43) The birth story of Thrive Capital (00:32:14) Lessons learned from creating the first three Thrive funds (00:39:44) Talent, recruiting and seeing potential in younger generations of people (00:47:40) Investments he made during the early foundation of Thrive that had significant impact (00:51:12) His analogy for investing in early versus late stage and styles of real estate investing (00:56:22) The current macro environment (01:00:57) Why he sold small stakes of Thrive (01:05:10) His philosophy on what makes a good product (01:10:10) His absence from crypto and why he refrained during the boom in 2021 (01:12:33) Thoughts about the opportunity set in FinTech today writ large (01:15:39) Lessons learned from his time spent with Marc Andreessen (01:17:43) Lessons learned from Stan Druckenmiller, Henry Kravis, and David Geffen (01:22:09) Firm values he thinks are very important (01:31:15) Vision as a key ingredient for founders (01:34:19) His view of the investment industry in the world today writ large (01:44:48) The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
The third and final episode that we recorded at MPE Berlin 2025, Europe's largest merchant payments conference. We produced the show in partnership with Ecommpay, a global acquirer, payment gateway and orchestrator that offers fully customisable payments solutions to its clients. Our guests for this episode were: 1/ Fabian Mansfeld, Chief Acceptance Strategy Officer, European Payment Initiative 2/ Sandra Mianda, Founder, Paypr.work 3/ Antony Jordan, Head of Payments and KYC, ODDSET Sportwetten GmbH 4/ Galit Shani-Michel, VP Payments, Forter 5/ Kestas Saulis, Head of Payments, Nord Security 6/ Aadit Gandhi, Vice President, Apis Partners 7/ Aravinda Korala, CEO, KAL 8/ Arda Cagaptay, Consultant - Merchant Wallets 2.0
Title: Blockchain DXB & Society X - LinkedIn LiveUnfiltered Chat – Weekly Crypto, Blockchain & AIDate & Time: 12:00pm GST, 27th March 2025Hosts:Markose Chentittha (Oort Foundation + Society X)RA George (Blockchain DXB + Bitcoin DXB)Special Guest:Jermaine Anderson (Founder of Sociallocket)This week on Unfiltered Chat, we dive into the latest developments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain, featuring insights from Jermaine Anderson, Markose Chentittha, and RA George. Topics include Bitcoin fundamentals, decentralized applications, economic factors influencing crypto markets, and regulatory updates.Background in the crypto spaceProjects and protocols he is currently working onWhere listeners can get more informationHow Jermaine defines BitcoinDaily-used Dapps by JermainePotential effects of tariffs on BTC & cryptocurrency pricesPerspectives from Jermaine, Markose, and GeorgeShort-term volatility vs. long-term impactInflation trends and global investmentsUSA: $4 TrillionUAE & USA: $1.4 TrillionSaudi Arabia: $600BTaiwan Semiconductor: $200BApple: $500BAI Investments (Softbank, Oracle, Sam Altman, DAMAC - $20B)Tornado Cash sanctions lifted – A win for privacy and cryptoUS Treasury's stance and legal proceedingsCoinbase Legal Lawyer Paul Grewal's responseRoman Storm in custody, Roman Semenov missingCase implications under a new administrationAlexey Pertsev released on Feb 6, 2025Physically backed Bitcoin strategyDifference between ETF (USA) and ETP (EU)Regulatory aspects: SEC (USA) vs. EU Financial Authorities (BaFin, FINMA)Institutional vs. retail investor impactFAIR Act 2023 - Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration ActStronger property rights protectionsLegal representation for indigent ownersLimits on arbitrary seizures and structuring offensesTransparency requirements for authoritiesKentucky's House Bill 701: Protecting self-custody and mining/stakingSEC vs. Immutable: No enforcement action takenRipple vs. SEC settlement ($50M fine, down from $125M) and its impact on XRPStablecoin volume drop indicates increased fiat-to-crypto buyingPancakeswap leads 24hr DEX volumeBinance receives $2B investment from MGXTether USDT overtakes XRP in market capDubai Land Department's Tokenization ProjectCollaboration with Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and Dubai Future Foundation (DFF)DAMAC Group's $1B tokenized assets on MANTRA blockchainQuestions on KYC and sanctioned-country buyersADGM & Chainlink partnership for tokenization and interoperabilityEvents focused on AI, blockchain standards, proof of reservesMarkose's Update: Latest news from Oort FoundationMark Robinson Update: Any relevant developmentsJermaine's Update: Project and protocol insightsRA George's Update: Blockchain DXB & Bitcoin DXB progressUpcoming Beginner-Level Series: Bitcoin vs. Cryptocurrency for newcomersApril 5th: Arabian Warriors - An OCR eventUse code George20 for 20% discount
Blockchain DXB & Society X - AI Review of Our ConversationUnfiltered Chat – Weekly Crypto, Blockchain & AIDate & Time: Noon GST, 27th March 2025Hosts:Markose Chentittha (Oort Foundation + Society X)RA George (Blockchain DXB + Bitcoin DXB)Special Guest:Jermaine Anderson (Founder of Sociallocket)This episode of Unfiltered Chat is entirely AI-generated, providing an in-depth review of our main conversation using Google's Notebook LM. AI has analyzed and structured key insights from our discussion, highlighting crucial developments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. For the full discussion, listen to the main conversation on the Blockchain DXB Podcast.AI Analysis of how Jermaine defines BitcoinCommonly used Dapps and their significanceAI Insights on how tariffs could influence BTC & cryptocurrency pricesSummarized perspectives from Jermaine, Markose, and GeorgeShort-term volatility vs. long-term market stabilityInflation trends and global investment breakdown:USA: $4 TrillionUAE & USA: $1.4 TrillionSaudi Arabia: $600BTaiwan Semiconductor: $200BApple: $500BAI Investments (Softbank, Oracle, Sam Altman, DAMAC - $20B)AI Review of Tornado Cash sanctions being lifted and its implicationsSummary of US Treasury's stance and Coinbase Legal Lawyer Paul Grewal's responseStatus of key figures (Roman Storm in custody, Roman Semenov missing, Alexey Pertsev released)Possible case implications under new administrationAI Comparison of ETF (USA) vs. ETP (EU) and their impact on institutional & retail investorsRegulatory perspectives from the SEC and EU Financial AuthoritiesAI Breakdown of the FAIR Act 2023 and its benefits for Bitcoin holdersKentucky's House Bill 701 and its protection for self-custody and crypto miningSEC's investigation into Immutable concluded with no enforcement actionRipple vs. SEC settlement analysis ($50M fine, down from $125M)AI Evaluation of stablecoin volume decline and its market implicationsPancakeswap's dominance in 24hr DEX volumeBinance's $2B investment from MGXTether USDT surpassing XRP in market capAI Overview of Dubai Land Department's Real Estate Tokenization ProjectCollaboration with Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and Dubai Future Foundation (DFF)DAMAC's $1B tokenization on MANTRA blockchainAI's perspective on KYC and regulatory challengesADGM & Chainlink partnership for tokenization and interoperabilityAI Insights on blockchain standards, proof of reserves, and regulatory developmentsMarkose's Update: AI Analysis of the latest news from Oort FoundationMark Robinson Update: Any notable developmentsJermaine's Update: AI Summary of project and protocol insightsRA George's Update: AI Review of Blockchain DXB & Bitcoin DXB progressUpcoming Beginner-Level Series: AI Perspective on Bitcoin vs. Cryptocurrency for newcomersApril 5th: Arabian Warriors - An OCR eventUse code George20 for 20% discount
Mentor Sessions Ep.004: In this explosive episode of Mentor Sessions, Scott Horton—libertarian legend, director of the Libertarian Institute, and author of Provoked—joins us to unravel how fiat money powers global conflicts, from Ukraine/Russia to Israel/Gaza. Dubbed a "walking encyclopedia" of the last century's wars, Scott exposes how the USA's central banking system hides the true cost of foreign interventions, leaving us less safe and millions lost around the globe. Could Bitcoin dismantle this war machine? We dive into the fiat printer's role in crises like Ukraine's catastrophe and Gaza's turmoil, and explore if sound money offers a way out. A must-listen for Bitcoiners and truth-seekers alike! Connect with Scott Horton: Website: scotthorton.org YouTube: youtube.com/@ScottHortonShow Twitter/X: @scotthortonshowBooks: Fool's Errand, Enough Already, Provoked—Grab them at libertarianinstitute.orgSupport the Cause:The Libertarian Institute is fundraising NOW! Help fight fiat-fueled wars with a donation—$25K in matching funds available. Visit libertarianinstitute.org/donate for books, tote bags, and more rewards. Bitcoiners, your sats can make a difference! Schedule a Free Discovery Session with Nathan to learn more about how Bitcoin Mentor can Fast-Track your Bitcoin Education and Level Up your Self-Custody Security: https://bitcoinmentor.io/?fluent-booking=calendar&host=nathan-1712797202&event=30minFREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Get Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger FREE! Click here: bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Learn Bitcoin Self-Custody:Master your Bitcoin game with personalized guidance at bitcoinmentor.io. From hardware to multisig, we've got you covered! Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don't miss out—subscribe and follow us: BTC Sessions: x.com/BTCsessionsNathan: x.com/theBTCmentorGary: x.com/GaryLeeNYCBITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6Mine Bitcoin like a pro!
Interested in advertising on Billboard?Email us at adrevolution@joinnextblock.comIn this episode of 'Flirting with Bitcoin,' Mandana & Ian explore the contrasting worlds Bitcoiners inhabit and the concept of sovereignty in the context of digital currency. They discuss the idea of living on a Bitcoin standard, the role of KYC (Know Your Customer) in modern financial systems, and the challenges of developing truly sovereign lifestyles. The conversation touches upon Bitcoin as an innovative force, the growth of new technologies like Nostr, and how platforms like Strike are helping bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized worlds. They also delve into the cognitive dissonance among Bitcoiners, who often must navigate a world that doesn't fully understand or accept Bitcoin. The episode wraps up with musings on long-term goals for Bitcoin adoption and the hurdles of achieving complete independence from established systems.03:19 Living with Bitcoin: Practical Advice05:45 The Role of KYC in Bitcoin Transactions17:52 Decentralized Verification and Risk Management22:23 Mitigating Risks in a Fraudulent World24:14 The Role of KYC in Modern Platforms25:33 Engaging with Critics28:50 Historical Parallels: Facebook and Early Internet30:21 Conspiracy Theories: Google Plus and Media Control35:37 Proton Email: A Secure Alternative37:57 Balancing Sovereignty and Realism42:24 The Path to Sovereignty and RevolutionCreate Your Strike Account TodaySign up For NextBlockgenerated by underlord Get full access to Flirting With Bitcoin at www.flirtingwithbitcoin.com/subscribe
Leave feedback!Today I am speaking with Holger Arians, the Chairman and CEO at Banxa. Holger leads Banxa, a global crypto payment infrastructure provider that enables users to convert their fiat currency to crypto through integrated solutions with major platforms like Binance, OKX, and MetaMask, handling all regulatory compliance and KYC requirements for partners reaching over a billion people worldwide.Growing up in Germany, Holger developed his business acumen early by working in his father's car dealership during school holidays. After studying business in the Netherlands, he embarked on his entrepreneurial journey by launching juice bars in Germany before moving to Australia, where he discovered Bitcoin in 2013 when his business partner received mining machines from China. This serendipitous introduction to crypto led to founding Banxa in 2014.In our conversation, Holger shares insights about Banxa's evolution from a B2C crypto retailer to a B2B2C infrastructure provider, the transformative potential of stablecoins for global remittances, and the challenges of navigating banking relationships as a crypto company. He also discusses their "embedded crypto" vision, which mirrors what Stripe did for payments, and his excitement about applying blockchain technology to real-world financial use cases. Show Notes and TranscriptsThe GRTiQ Podcast takes listeners inside web3 and The Graph (GRT) by interviewing members of the ecosystem. Please help support this project and build the community by subscribing and leaving a review.Twitter: GRT_iQwww.GRTiQ.com
CTO Arun Kumar discusses how Socure leverages AWS and generative AI to collect billions of data points each day in order to combat sophisticated online fraud at scale.Topics Include:Introduction of Arun Kumar, CTO of SocureWhat does Socure specialize in?KYC and anti-money laundering checksMission: eliminate 100% fraud on the internetFraud has increased since COVIDSocure blocks fraud at entry pointWorks with top banks and government agenciesCTO responsibilities include product and engineeringFocus on increasing efficiency through technologyTwo goals: internal efficiency and combating fraudCountering tools like FraudGPT on dark webMeasuring success through reduced human capital needsFraud investigations reduced from hours to minutesImproved success rates in uncovering fraud ringsDetecting multi-hop connections in fraud networksQuestion: Who's winning - fraudsters or AI?It's a constant "cat and mouse game"Creating a fraud "red team" similar to cybersecurityPartnership details with AWSAmazon Bedrock provides multiple LLM optionsBuilding world's largest identity graph with NeptuneReal-time suspicious activity detectionBlocking account takeovers through phone number changesSuccess story: detecting deepfake across 3,000 IDsCollecting hundreds of data points per identityChallenges: adding selfie checks and liveness detectionFuture strategy: 10x-100x performance improvementsCreating second and third-order intelligence signalsInternal efficiency applications of generative AIAI-powered sales tools and legal document reviewParticipants:Arun Kumar – Chief Technical Officer, SocureSee how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/
Bitcoiners, imagine being so financially resilient that you can say "NO" to anything—bad jobs, toxic deals, or fiat traps. In this empowering episode of Mentor Sessions (recorded Feb 19, 2025), Marko from Whiteboard Finance —a sat-stacking pro since 2018—reveals how deleveraging unlocks your financial invulnerability. Marko praises Bitcoiners' savvy, then drops actionable strategies to fortify your stack and ditch debt. From dodging fiat liabilities to blending Bitcoin with real assets, this is your guide to stacking sats from a position of pure strength. Pokémon cards to sound money—Marko's journey will inspire you to stand tall and say NO when it matters.Timestamps: • 00:00:00 - Intro and Guest Introduction• 00:01:41 - Avoiding Debt to Stack Bitcoin• 00:08:20 - Bitcoin Allocation and Buying Strategy• 00:21:06 - Practical Cash Management Advice• 00:31:30 - Advice for Young Investors• 00:39:02 - Motivations and Financial Freedom• 00:50:13 - Book Recommendations for Personal Finance• 00:55:00 - Closing Thoughts on Long-Term WealthConnect with Marko: • Twitter/X: @WhiteboardFin • YouTube: Whiteboard Finance - www.youtube.com/@WhiteBoardFinance• Instagram: @whiteboardfinance • Community: Whiteboard Finance University (Check his channel for more!)FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Grab a free copy of Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger! CLICK THE LINK:https://bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Don't have enough time to learn Bitcoin Self-Custody? Get Personalized, Expert guidance at Bitcoin Mentor. Check out https://bitcoinmentor.io/ Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don't miss an episode—hit that subscribe button and follow us: • BTC Sessions: https://x.com/BTCsessions • Nathan: https://x.com/theBTCmentor• Gary: https://x.com/GaryLeeNYC BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6Mine Bitcoin like a pro!
BULLET SUMMARY:Bitcoin faces critical resistance at $84K-$86.7K rangeEthereum whales accumulated $815M worth of ETH in five daysDogecoin struggles below $0.20 with death cross patternSolana shows bearish pressure with resistance at $146SEGA launching NFT card game on Sui blockchainPi Coin dropped 20% amid KYC issues and verification chaosGoldman Sachs cites increased competition from crypto firmsKaito AI suffered social media hack with potential token price manipulationTelegram founder Pavel Durov relocated to Dubai after French arrest
In this electrifying episode of Mentor Sessions, we dive deep with NVK, the enigmatic founder of Coinkite and mastermind behind the Coldcard wallet, including the sleek new Coldcard Q (yes, I'm a fan too!). NVK unpacks adversarial thinking—the paranoid art of outsmarting attackers before they strike. From designing bulletproof Bitcoin hardware to everyday OpSec blunders (porn and banking on the same browser, anyone?), NVK reveals why only the paranoid survive in a world of infinite threats. Plus, hilarious tangents, real-world horror stories, and a surprising twist on staying invisible. Are you ready to rethink security?Timestamps: • 00:00 – Intro: Meet NVK & Coinkite's Coldcard Legacy • 00:57 – What is Adversarial Thinking? (Spoiler: It's Not Just Paranoia) • 06:39 – Coldcard's Battle-Tested Edge: $1M Attacks & Beyond • 19:45 – Epic Fails: How Smart People Lose Bitcoin • 31:10 – Inside Coldcard's Silicon: Trust-Minimized Genius • 40:35 – Must-Have Hardware Wallet ChecklistConnect with NVK: • Twitter/X: @nvk • Nostr: primal.net/nvkExplore Coinkite: • Website: coinkite.com • Bitcoin Security Guide: bitcoinsecurity.org • Podcast: Bitcoin Review - https://bitcoin.review/FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Grab a free copy of Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger! CLICK THE LINK:https://bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Don't have enough time to learn Bitcoin Self-Custody? Get Personalized, Expert guidance at Bitcoin Mentor. Check out https://bitcoinmentor.io/ Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don't miss an episode—hit that subscribe button and follow us: • BTC Sessions: https://x.com/BTCsessions • Nathan: https://x.com/theBTCmentor• Gary: https://x.com/GaryLeeNYC BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 8% off anything in their store:https://qrco.de/bfiDBVMine Bitcoin like a pro!
Are we really still in a crypto bull market, or have we all been asleep well into the bear market? Many traders are convinced that the market is still bullish, but only the data tells the full story. In this video, Ran will share the latest charts, key indicators, and market trends to reveal the truth about where crypto stands! ___________________________________________
Are you trusting Big Tech with your data? In this premiere episode of Mentor Sessions, we sit down with Matt Hill, CEO of Start9, to uncover the hidden dangers of cloud computing. Matt breaks down The Four Critical Flaws and explains why the cloud is a ticking time bomb for your digital life. Discover how sovereign computing offers a way out, empowering you to reclaim control with self-hosted, privacy-focused solutions. From the convenience trap to the future of open-source tech, this conversation is a wake-up call for anyone online today.Handsome Host: Gary Lee Mahmoud - x.com/GaryLeeNYCSmart Host: Nathan Fitzsimmons - x.com/theBTCmentorTimestamps: • 00:00 – Intro: Meet Matt Hill & Start9 • 02:14 – What is Sovereign Computing? • 15:23 – The Four Flaws of Cloud Computing Unveiled • 47:35 – Start9's Solution: Own Your Server • 59:38 – Top Tools to Start With (Vaultwarden, Nextcloud)Connect with Matt Hill: • Twitter/X: @_MattHill_ • LinkedIn: Matt HillExplore Start9: • Website: start9.com • Twitter/X: @start9labs • Community Forum: community.start9.com • Private Support: start9.me (Access code required)FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Grab a free copy of Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger! CLICK THE LINK:https://bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Don't have enough time to learn Bitcoin Self-Custody? Get Personalized, Expert guidance at Bitcoin Mentor. Check out https://bitcoinmentor.io/ Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don't miss an episode—hit that subscribe button and follow us: • BTC Sessions: https://x.com/BTCsessions • Nathan: https://x.com/theBTCmentor• Gary: https://x.com/GaryLeeNYC BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6Mine Bitcoin like a pro!
The Bybit hack was one of the biggest in crypto history, with hackers stealing $1.5 billion. In this exclusive post-mortem, Ran sits down with expert investigators to uncover mind-blowing new details about how it happened, who was behind it, and what it means for the future of crypto security. Don't miss this deep dive into one of the most shocking heists ever!
The Crypto Summit is almost here and Ran is sounding the alarm! This event could be a total disaster for crypto. Everyone expects a bullish outcome, but the reality might be far worse. If things go wrong, our altcoins could get wrecked.
Looking for the best U.S. altcoins to buy in preparation for the Crypto Summit? In this video, Ran is ranking the top-performing altcoins in a tier list, breaking down which ones have the highest profit potential and which ones to avoid! ___________________________________________
Stephan discusses the evolution of Bitcoin and the challenges of self-custody with Philip Hoenisch, co-founder of Lendasat. They explore the transition from traditional finance to on-chain solutions, the importance of self-custody, and the ideological divides within the Bitcoin community. Philipp shares his insight on the intricacies of Bitcoin lending, focusing on liquidation processes, collateralization ratios, and the role of technology in managing these aspects. He explains the cost structures associated with lending, including origination fees and transaction costs, and explores the potential for loan rollovers and credit lines. The discussion also touches on the future of stablecoins amidst regulatory risks and the growth of the lending market, particularly from the perspective of lenders. Finally, the conversation highlights the impact of technological innovations like CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) on the Bitcoin ecosystem.Takeaways
GenAI is revolutionizing finance! Hear from the winners of AIR's NextGenAI Call for Papers: Delicia Reynolds Hand, Dr. Henry Balani & Dr. Adrienne Heinrich. They discuss GenAI's impact on consumer protection, financial crime & ethical governance.
"Compliance has a cost. Compliance is difficult. But unfortunately, compliance is not optional," says Chrystel Erotokritou of Access Partnership. As global regulators tighten rules around telecommunications and cloud services, companies must adapt quickly to remain compliant while maintaining efficiency. At Cloud Connections 2025, Erotokritou will lead a roundtable discussion on navigating regulatory landscapes in cloud technology, offering providers critical insights into compliance, fraud prevention, and risk mitigation. Regulatory Crackdowns on Telecom Providers Governments worldwide are introducing stricter compliance measures to curb fraud and illegal activities. Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations, numbering resource restrictions, and privacy laws such as the GDPR are reshaping how telecom providers operate. In the U.S., the FCC recently fined a provider $1 million for transmitting a deepfake robocall mimicking President Joe Biden, highlighting the growing consequences of non-compliance. KYC & Numbering Resource Challenges Erotokritou emphasizes that KYC requirements are expanding, forcing providers to implement rigorous identity verification before offering services. These measures increase operational costs, create onboarding delays, and require new fraud prevention strategies. Meanwhile, numbering resources—essential for service delivery—are becoming harder to obtain, as regulators limit the suballocation of numbers and tighten usage restrictions. Mitigating Risk While Staying Competitive To navigate evolving compliance landscapes, providers must develop strategic regulatory frameworks that ensure adherence while preserving business efficiency and profitability. At Access Partnership, Erotokritou and her team help companies obtain telecom licenses, secure numbering resources, and implement best practices to remain compliant without sacrificing growth. Join the Discussion at Cloud Connections 2025 Erotokritou's interactive roundtable will provide a practical roadmap for telecom providers facing these regulatory challenges. The session will offer real-world strategies for mitigating risk, optimizing compliance, and maintaining competitive advantages in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Event: Cloud Connections 2025 Location: St. Petersburg, FL More Info: cloudcommunications.com/connections Learn More About Access Partnership: accesspartnership.com
Interested in advertising on Billboard?Email us at adrevolution@joinnextblock.comIn this episode of 'Flirting with Bitcoin,' Mandana & Ian explore the contrasting worlds Bitcoiners inhabit and the concept of sovereignty in the context of digital currency. They discuss the idea of living on a Bitcoin standard, the role of KYC (Know Your Customer) in modern financial systems, and the challenges of developing truly sovereign lifestyles. The conversation touches upon Bitcoin as an innovative force, the growth of new technologies like Nostr, and how platforms like Strike are helping bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized worlds. They also delve into the cognitive dissonance among Bitcoiners, who often must navigate a world that doesn't fully understand or accept Bitcoin. The episode wraps up with musings on long-term goals for Bitcoin adoption and the hurdles of achieving complete independence from established systems.03:19 Living with Bitcoin: Practical Advice05:45 The Role of KYC in Bitcoin Transactions17:52 Decentralized Verification and Risk Management22:23 Mitigating Risks in a Fraudulent World24:14 The Role of KYC in Modern Platforms25:33 Engaging with Critics28:50 Historical Parallels: Facebook and Early Internet30:21 Conspiracy Theories: Google Plus and Media Control35:37 Proton Email: A Secure Alternative37:57 Balancing Sovereignty and Realism42:24 The Path to Sovereignty and RevolutionCreate Your Strike Account TodaySign up For NextBlockgenerated by underlord Get full access to Flirting With Bitcoin at www.flirtingwithbitcoin.com/subscribe
Can tokenization unlock financial access for millions?In this episode of Web3 with Sam Kamani, I sit down with Jose from OwnChain, live at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong, to discuss how OwnChain is bringing real-world assets (RWA) on-chain and revolutionizing financial markets.
KeywordsBitcoin mining, Adit board, modular systems, open source, community collaboration, heat reuse, project management, market insights, future of mining, Bitcoin, market trends, investment strategies, privacy, KYC, regulatory challenges, Bitcoin mining, community support, educationSummaryThis conversation explores the intersection of fitness technology and Bitcoin mining, discussing personal anecdotes, the AddIt board, modular mining systems, and the importance of open-source standards. The participants share insights on community collaboration, project management, and the future of mining, emphasizing the potential for innovation and growth in the industry. In this conversation, the speakers delve into the cyclical nature of Bitcoin trends, sharing personal experiences with market volatility and investment strategies. They discuss the importance of privacy and anonymity in Bitcoin transactions, the implications of KYC regulations, and the future of privacy tools. The conversation also touches on regulatory challenges facing Bitcoin services, community support for the Samurai Wallet case, innovative uses of Bitcoin mining, and the critical role of communication and education in Bitcoin adoption.TakeawaysThe AddIt board is a USB adapter for Antminer hash boards, enhancing modularity.Modular mining systems allow for customization and flexibility in setups.Open-source standards are crucial for the future of Bitcoin mining.Community collaboration can drive innovation in mining projects.Heat reuse in mining can create new business opportunities.Effective project management is key to successful outcomes in tech projects.Market insights reveal the current state of Bitcoin mining and its challenges.The conversation emphasizes the importance of resilience in the face of market fluctuations. The Bitcoin market is cyclical, with trends changing over time.Personal experiences in the market can shape investment strategies.Long-term investment strategies include automated dollar-cost averaging.Privacy in Bitcoin transactions is crucial to protect user identity.KYC regulations pose challenges for Bitcoin users seeking anonymity.There are always options for those who have used KYC services.The future of privacy tools in Bitcoin is uncertain but necessary.Regulatory challenges can impact the development of Bitcoin services.Community support is vital for projects like Samurai Wallet.Effective communication is essential for educating non-technical users about Bitcoin.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Fitness and Technology03:05 Bar Fight Stories and Personal Anecdotes06:02 Understanding the AddIt Board09:10 Modular Mining Systems and Open Source Standards11:53 The Future of Bitcoin Mining and Heat Reuse15:05 Project Management and Team Dynamics17:58 Community Engagement and Project Updates20:46 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions37:13 Innovative Entrepreneurship in the Bitcoin Era43:22 The Future of Bitcoin Mining and Energy Solutions49:01 Navigating Bitcoin's Price Cycles and Market Psychology55:18 Privacy and Anonymity in the Bitcoin Ecosystem01:08:23 Innovative Heating Solutions for Winter01:10:17 Creative Deck Heating Ideas01:11:57 The Legend of the Massachusetts Teacher01:14:10 Support for the 256 Foundation01:16:40 The Importance of Strategic Communication01:28:39 Bridging the Gap in Understanding Bitcoin01:32:33 Exciting Developments at the 256 Foundation
Invest Like the Best: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years published once a month. These are N of one conversations with N of one people. There's nobody I've met quite like Doug Leone. Doug led one of the world's most successful venture firms, Sequoia, for over 25 years after he was given responsibility for the firm by its founder, Don Valentine, in 1996. Alongside Mike Moritz, the pair managed its expansion from a single $150m early-stage fund into an $85 billion global powerhouse. It was a privilege to sit down with Doug and learn from him. We talk about his tough start at Sequoia, get into the technicalities of great go-to-market motions, and survey his advice for other investors in the industry. A key theme that will stick with me from this conversation is Doug's insistence on keeping things simple and clear. I listen to this at least once a year. I hope you enjoy it. Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Passthrough. Passthrough streamlines subscription documents, KYC, and AML compliance, so you can focus on running your fund, not managing paperwork. New SEC Update 31 CFR hits investment firms in under a year, and managers are getting ready for it now. If you think basic OFAC screening is enough, think again. You'll need continuous monitoring of your investors and all their beneficial owners across multiple watchlists, plus a comprehensive anti money laundering program. Passthrough has already processed 50,000 LPs and built the complete solution. Don't risk SEC deficiency letters, fines, or regulatory enforcement. Visit passthrough.com to get compliant now. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:00:00] Welcome to Invest Like the Best [00:05:21] What Don Valentine's heart was like [00:08:30] The most productive and unproductive parts of Don's toughness [00:12:55] Why it's so important to understand someone's core motivations [00:18:44] The most formative experiences he had prior to becoming an investor that impacted his investing the most [00:22:37] What venture looks like to him today relative to his prior career [00:28:37] Whether or not he'd go into venture today if he was in his late 20s [00:34:10] Helping companies circumnavigate mediocre positioning [00:39:15] How interacting with companies early on has changed over the ears [00:43:12] Whether or not new entrants into venture should build firms with enterprise value [00:48:14] Sussing out the killer gene in somebody [00:51:04] How successful people can instill the lessons learned from hardship into their children [00:54:30] Whether or not competitive advantage can be architected ahead of time when building a company [00:57:21] The early 2000s clawback at Sequoia and what navigating that period was like [01:01:06] What he's learned about picking the right LPs and partnering with them [01:04:18] Making sure that performance is on everyone's minds all the time [01:09:59] The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years published once a month. These are N of one conversations with N of one people. There's nobody I've met quite like Doug Leone. Doug led one of the world's most successful venture firms, Sequoia, for over 25 years after he was given responsibility for the firm by its founder, Don Valentine, in 1996. Alongside Mike Moritz, the pair managed its expansion from a single $150m early-stage fund into an $85 billion global powerhouse. It was a privilege to sit down with Doug and learn from him. We talk about his tough start at Sequoia, get into the technicalities of great go-to-market motions, and survey his advice for other investors in the industry. A key theme that will stick with me from this conversation is Doug's insistence on keeping things simple and clear. I listen to this at least once a year. I hope you enjoy it. Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Passthrough. Passthrough streamlines subscription documents, KYC, and AML compliance, so you can focus on running your fund, not managing paperwork. New SEC Update 31 CFR hits investment firms in under a year, and managers are getting ready for it now. If you think basic OFAC screening is enough, think again. You'll need continuous monitoring of your investors and all their beneficial owners across multiple watchlists, plus a comprehensive anti money laundering program. Passthrough has already processed 50,000 LPs and built the complete solution. Don't risk SEC deficiency letters, fines, or regulatory enforcement. Visit passthrough.com to get compliant now. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:00:00] Welcome to Invest Like the Best [00:05:21] What Don Valentine's heart was like [00:08:30] The most productive and unproductive parts of Don's toughness [00:12:55] Why it's so important to understand someone's core motivations [00:18:44] The most formative experiences he had prior to becoming an investor that impacted his investing the most [00:22:37] What venture looks like to him today relative to his prior career [00:28:37] Whether or not he'd go into venture today if he was in his late 20s [00:34:10] Helping companies circumnavigate mediocre positioning [00:39:15] How interacting with companies early on has changed over the ears [00:43:12] Whether or not new entrants into venture should build firms with enterprise value [00:48:14] Sussing out the killer gene in somebody [00:51:04] How successful people can instill the lessons learned from hardship into their children [00:54:30] Whether or not competitive advantage can be architected ahead of time when building a company [00:57:21] The early 2000s clawback at Sequoia and what navigating that period was like [01:01:06] What he's learned about picking the right LPs and partnering with them [01:04:18] Making sure that performance is on everyone's minds all the time [01:09:59] The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
Today's episode is with Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase. We talked about building browser infrastructure for AI agents, the future of agent authentication, and their open source framework Stagehand.* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:04:46] AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructure* [00:07:05] Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsing* [00:12:26] Running headless browsers at scale* [00:18:46] Geolocation when proxying* [00:21:25] CAPTCHAs and Agent Auth* [00:28:21] Building “User take over” functionality* [00:33:43] Stagehand: AI web browsing framework* [00:38:58] OpenAI's Operator and computer use agents* [00:44:44] Surprising use cases of Browserbase* [00:47:18] Future of browser automation and market competition* [00:53:11] Being a solo founderTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very blessed to have our friends, Paul Klein, for the fourth, the fourth, CEO of Browserbase. Welcome.Paul [00:00:21]: Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've been lucky to know both of you for like a couple of years now, I think. So it's just like we're hanging out, you know, with three ginormous microphones in front of our face. It's totally normal hangout.swyx [00:00:34]: Yeah. We've actually mentioned you on the podcast, I think, more often than any other Solaris tenant. Just because like you're one of the, you know, best performing, I think, LLM tool companies that have started up in the last couple of years.Paul [00:00:50]: Yeah, I mean, it's been a whirlwind of a year, like Browserbase is actually pretty close to our first birthday. So we are one years old. And going from, you know, starting a company as a solo founder to... To, you know, having a team of 20 people, you know, a series A, but also being able to support hundreds of AI companies that are building AI applications that go out and automate the web. It's just been like, really cool. It's been happening a little too fast. I think like collectively as an AI industry, let's just take a week off together. I took my first vacation actually two weeks ago, and Operator came out on the first day, and then a week later, DeepSeat came out. And I'm like on vacation trying to chill. I'm like, we got to build with this stuff, right? So it's been a breakneck year. But I'm super happy to be here and like talk more about all the stuff we're seeing. And I'd love to hear kind of what you guys are excited about too, and share with it, you know?swyx [00:01:39]: Where to start? So people, you've done a bunch of podcasts. I think I strongly recommend Jack Bridger's Scaling DevTools, as well as Turner Novak's The Peel. And, you know, I'm sure there's others. So you covered your Twilio story in the past, talked about StreamClub, you got acquired to Mux, and then you left to start Browserbase. So maybe we just start with what is Browserbase? Yeah.Paul [00:02:02]: Browserbase is the web browser for your AI. We're building headless browser infrastructure, which are browsers that run in a server environment that's accessible to developers via APIs and SDKs. It's really hard to run a web browser in the cloud. You guys are probably running Chrome on your computers, and that's using a lot of resources, right? So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system. And that infrastructure is, like, super painful. And I know that firsthand, because at my last company, StreamClub, I was CTO, and I was building our own internal headless browser infrastructure. That's actually why we sold the company, is because Mux really wanted to buy our headless browser infrastructure that we'd built. And it's just a super hard problem. And I actually told my co-founders, I would never start another company unless it was a browser infrastructure company. And it turns out that's really necessary in the age of AI, when AI can actually go out and interact with websites, click on buttons, fill in forms. You need AI to do all of that work in an actual browser running somewhere on a server. And BrowserBase powers that.swyx [00:03:08]: While you're talking about it, it occurred to me, not that you're going to be acquired or anything, but it occurred to me that it would be really funny if you became the Nikita Beer of headless browser companies. You just have one trick, and you make browser companies that get acquired.Paul [00:03:23]: I truly do only have one trick. I'm screwed if it's not for headless browsers. I'm not a Go programmer. You know, I'm in AI grant. You know, browsers is an AI grant. But we were the only company in that AI grant batch that used zero dollars on AI spend. You know, we're purely an infrastructure company. So as much as people want to ask me about reinforcement learning, I might not be the best guy to talk about that. But if you want to ask about headless browser infrastructure at scale, I can talk your ear off. So that's really my area of expertise. And it's a pretty niche thing. Like, nobody has done what we're doing at scale before. So we're happy to be the experts.swyx [00:03:59]: You do have an AI thing, stagehand. We can talk about the sort of core of browser-based first, and then maybe stagehand. Yeah, stagehand is kind of the web browsing framework. Yeah.What is Browserbase? Headless Browser Infrastructure ExplainedAlessio [00:04:10]: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe how you got to browser-based and what problems you saw. So one of the first things I worked on as a software engineer was integration testing. Sauce Labs was kind of like the main thing at the time. And then we had Selenium, we had Playbrite, we had all these different browser things. But it's always been super hard to do. So obviously you've worked on this before. When you started browser-based, what were the challenges? What were the AI-specific challenges that you saw versus, there's kind of like all the usual running browser at scale in the cloud, which has been a problem for years. What are like the AI unique things that you saw that like traditional purchase just didn't cover? Yeah.AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructurePaul [00:04:46]: First and foremost, I think back to like the first thing I did as a developer, like as a kid when I was writing code, I wanted to write code that did stuff for me. You know, I wanted to write code to automate my life. And I do that probably by using curl or beautiful soup to fetch data from a web browser. And I think I still do that now that I'm in the cloud. And the other thing that I think is a huge challenge for me is that you can't just create a web site and parse that data. And we all know that now like, you know, taking HTML and plugging that into an LLM, you can extract insights, you can summarize. So it was very clear that now like dynamic web scraping became very possible with the rise of large language models or a lot easier. And that was like a clear reason why there's been more usage of headless browsers, which are necessary because a lot of modern websites don't expose all of their page content via a simple HTTP request. You know, they actually do require you to run this type of code for a specific time. JavaScript on the page to hydrate this. Airbnb is a great example. You go to airbnb.com. A lot of that content on the page isn't there until after they run the initial hydration. So you can't just scrape it with a curl. You need to have some JavaScript run. And a browser is that JavaScript engine that's going to actually run all those requests on the page. So web data retrieval was definitely one driver of starting BrowserBase and the rise of being able to summarize that within LLM. Also, I was familiar with if I wanted to automate a website, I could write one script and that would work for one website. It was very static and deterministic. But the web is non-deterministic. The web is always changing. And until we had LLMs, there was no way to write scripts that you could write once that would run on any website. That would change with the structure of the website. Click the login button. It could mean something different on many different websites. And LLMs allow us to generate code on the fly to actually control that. So I think that rise of writing the generic automation scripts that can work on many different websites, to me, made it clear that browsers are going to be a lot more useful because now you can automate a lot more things without writing. If you wanted to write a script to book a demo call on 100 websites, previously, you had to write 100 scripts. Now you write one script that uses LLMs to generate that script. That's why we built our web browsing framework, StageHand, which does a lot of that work for you. But those two things, web data collection and then enhanced automation of many different websites, it just felt like big drivers for more browser infrastructure that would be required to power these kinds of features.Alessio [00:07:05]: And was multimodality also a big thing?Paul [00:07:08]: Now you can use the LLMs to look, even though the text in the dome might not be as friendly. Maybe my hot take is I was always kind of like, I didn't think vision would be as big of a driver. For UI automation, I felt like, you know, HTML is structured text and large language models are good with structured text. But it's clear that these computer use models are often vision driven, and they've been really pushing things forward. So definitely being multimodal, like rendering the page is required to take a screenshot to give that to a computer use model to take actions on a website. And it's just another win for browser. But I'll be honest, that wasn't what I was thinking early on. I didn't even think that we'd get here so fast with multimodality. I think we're going to have to get back to multimodal and vision models.swyx [00:07:50]: This is one of those things where I forgot to mention in my intro that I'm an investor in Browserbase. And I remember that when you pitched to me, like a lot of the stuff that we have today, we like wasn't on the original conversation. But I did have my original thesis was something that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is take the GPT store, the custom GPT store, all the every single checkbox and plugin is effectively a startup. And this was the browser one. I think the main hesitation, I think I actually took a while to get back to you. The main hesitation was that there were others. Like you're not the first hit list browser startup. It's not even your first hit list browser startup. There's always a question of like, will you be the category winner in a place where there's a bunch of incumbents, to be honest, that are bigger than you? They're just not targeted at the AI space. They don't have the backing of Nat Friedman. And there's a bunch of like, you're here in Silicon Valley. They're not. I don't know.Paul [00:08:47]: I don't know if that's, that was it, but like, there was a, yeah, I mean, like, I think I tried all the other ones and I was like, really disappointed. Like my background is from working at great developer tools, companies, and nothing had like the Vercel like experience. Um, like our biggest competitor actually is partly owned by private equity and they just jacked up their prices quite a bit. And the dashboard hasn't changed in five years. And I actually used them at my last company and tried them and I was like, oh man, like there really just needs to be something that's like the experience of these great infrastructure companies, like Stripe, like clerk, like Vercel that I use in love, but oriented towards this kind of like more specific category, which is browser infrastructure, which is really technically complex. Like a lot of stuff can go wrong on the internet when you're running a browser. The internet is very vast. There's a lot of different configurations. Like there's still websites that only work with internet explorer out there. How do you handle that when you're running your own browser infrastructure? These are the problems that we have to think about and solve at BrowserBase. And it's, it's certainly a labor of love, but I built this for me, first and foremost, I know it's super cheesy and everyone says that for like their startups, but it really, truly was for me. If you look at like the talks I've done even before BrowserBase, and I'm just like really excited to try and build a category defining infrastructure company. And it's, it's rare to have a new category of infrastructure exists. We're here in the Chroma offices and like, you know, vector databases is a new category of infrastructure. Is it, is it, I mean, we can, we're in their office, so, you know, we can, we can debate that one later. That is one.Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsingswyx [00:10:16]: That's one of the industry debates.Paul [00:10:17]: I guess we go back to the LLMOS talk that Karpathy gave way long ago. And like the browser box was very clearly there and it seemed like the people who were building in this space also agreed that browsers are a core primitive of infrastructure for the LLMOS that's going to exist in the future. And nobody was building something there that I wanted to use. So I had to go build it myself.swyx [00:10:38]: Yeah. I mean, exactly that talk that, that honestly, that diagram, every box is a startup and there's the code box and then there's the. The browser box. I think at some point they will start clashing there. There's always the question of the, are you a point solution or are you the sort of all in one? And I think the point solutions tend to win quickly, but then the only ones have a very tight cohesive experience. Yeah. Let's talk about just the hard problems of browser base you have on your website, which is beautiful. Thank you. Was there an agency that you used for that? Yeah. Herb.paris.Paul [00:11:11]: They're amazing. Herb.paris. Yeah. It's H-E-R-V-E. I highly recommend for developers. Developer tools, founders to work with consumer agencies because they end up building beautiful things and the Parisians know how to build beautiful interfaces. So I got to give prep.swyx [00:11:24]: And chat apps, apparently are, they are very fast. Oh yeah. The Mistral chat. Yeah. Mistral. Yeah.Paul [00:11:31]: Late chat.swyx [00:11:31]: Late chat. And then your videos as well, it was professionally shot, right? The series A video. Yeah.Alessio [00:11:36]: Nico did the videos. He's amazing. Not the initial video that you shot at the new one. First one was Austin.Paul [00:11:41]: Another, another video pretty surprised. But yeah, I mean, like, I think when you think about how you talk about your company. You have to think about the way you present yourself. It's, you know, as a developer, you think you evaluate a company based on like the API reliability and the P 95, but a lot of developers say, is the website good? Is the message clear? Do I like trust this founder? I'm building my whole feature on. So I've tried to nail that as well as like the reliability of the infrastructure. You're right. It's very hard. And there's a lot of kind of foot guns that you run into when running headless browsers at scale. Right.Competing with Existing Headless Browser Solutionsswyx [00:12:10]: So let's pick one. You have eight features here. Seamless integration. Scalability. Fast or speed. Secure. Observable. Stealth. That's interesting. Extensible and developer first. What comes to your mind as like the top two, three hardest ones? Yeah.Running headless browsers at scalePaul [00:12:26]: I think just running headless browsers at scale is like the hardest one. And maybe can I nerd out for a second? Is that okay? I heard this is a technical audience, so I'll talk to the other nerds. Whoa. They were listening. Yeah. They're upset. They're ready. The AGI is angry. Okay. So. So how do you run a browser in the cloud? Let's start with that, right? So let's say you're using a popular browser automation framework like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium. Maybe you've written a code, some code locally on your computer that opens up Google. It finds the search bar and then types in, you know, search for Latent Space and hits the search button. That script works great locally. You can see the little browser open up. You want to take that to production. You want to run the script in a cloud environment. So when your laptop is closed, your browser is doing something. The browser is doing something. Well, I, we use Amazon. You can see the little browser open up. You know, the first thing I'd reach for is probably like some sort of serverless infrastructure. I would probably try and deploy on a Lambda. But Chrome itself is too big to run on a Lambda. It's over 250 megabytes. So you can't easily start it on a Lambda. So you maybe have to use something like Lambda layers to squeeze it in there. Maybe use a different Chromium build that's lighter. And you get it on the Lambda. Great. It works. But it runs super slowly. It's because Lambdas are very like resource limited. They only run like with one vCPU. You can run one process at a time. Remember, Chromium is super beefy. It's barely running on my MacBook Air. I'm still downloading it from a pre-run. Yeah, from the test earlier, right? I'm joking. But it's big, you know? So like Lambda, it just won't work really well. Maybe it'll work, but you need something faster. Your users want something faster. Okay. Well, let's put it on a beefier instance. Let's get an EC2 server running. Let's throw Chromium on there. Great. Okay. I can, that works well with one user. But what if I want to run like 10 Chromium instances, one for each of my users? Okay. Well, I might need two EC2 instances. Maybe 10. All of a sudden, you have multiple EC2 instances. This sounds like a problem for Kubernetes and Docker, right? Now, all of a sudden, you're using ECS or EKS, the Kubernetes or container solutions by Amazon. You're spending up and down containers, and you're spending a whole engineer's time on kind of maintaining this stateful distributed system. Those are some of the worst systems to run because when it's a stateful distributed system, it means that you are bound by the connections to that thing. You have to keep the browser open while someone is working with it, right? That's just a painful architecture to run. And there's all this other little gotchas with Chromium, like Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome, by the way. You have to install all these fonts. You want emojis working in your browsers because your vision model is looking for the emoji. You need to make sure you have the emoji fonts. You need to make sure you have all the right extensions configured, like, oh, do you want ad blocking? How do you configure that? How do you actually record all these browser sessions? Like it's a headless browser. You can't look at it. So you need to have some sort of observability. Maybe you're recording videos and storing those somewhere. It all kind of adds up to be this just giant monster piece of your project when all you wanted to do was run a lot of browsers in production for this little script to go to google.com and search. And when I see a complex distributed system, I see an opportunity to build a great infrastructure company. And we really abstract that away with Browserbase where our customers can use these existing frameworks, Playwright, Publisher, Selenium, or our own stagehand and connect to our browsers in a serverless-like way. And control them, and then just disconnect when they're done. And they don't have to think about the complex distributed system behind all of that. They just get a browser running anywhere, anytime. Really easy to connect to.swyx [00:15:55]: I'm sure you have questions. My standard question with anything, so essentially you're a serverless browser company, and there's been other serverless things that I'm familiar with in the past, serverless GPUs, serverless website hosting. That's where I come from with Netlify. One question is just like, you promised to spin up thousands of servers. You promised to spin up thousands of browsers in milliseconds. I feel like there's no real solution that does that yet. And I'm just kind of curious how. The only solution I know, which is to kind of keep a kind of warm pool of servers around, which is expensive, but maybe not so expensive because it's just CPUs. So I'm just like, you know. Yeah.Browsers as a Core Primitive in AI InfrastructurePaul [00:16:36]: You nailed it, right? I mean, how do you offer a serverless-like experience with something that is clearly not serverless, right? And the answer is, you need to be able to run... We run many browsers on single nodes. We use Kubernetes at browser base. So we have many pods that are being scheduled. We have to predictably schedule them up or down. Yes, thousands of browsers in milliseconds is the best case scenario. If you hit us with 10,000 requests, you may hit a slower cold start, right? So we've done a lot of work on predictive scaling and being able to kind of route stuff to different regions where we have multiple regions of browser base where we have different pools available. You can also pick the region you want to go to based on like lower latency, round trip, time latency. It's very important with these types of things. There's a lot of requests going over the wire. So for us, like having a VM like Firecracker powering everything under the hood allows us to be super nimble and spin things up or down really quickly with strong multi-tenancy. But in the end, this is like the complex infrastructural challenges that we have to kind of deal with at browser base. And we have a lot more stuff on our roadmap to allow customers to have more levers to pull to exchange, do you want really fast browser startup times or do you want really low costs? And if you're willing to be more flexible on that, we may be able to kind of like work better for your use cases.swyx [00:17:44]: Since you used Firecracker, shouldn't Fargate do that for you or did you have to go lower level than that? We had to go lower level than that.Paul [00:17:51]: I find this a lot with Fargate customers, which is alarming for Fargate. We used to be a giant Fargate customer. Actually, the first version of browser base was ECS and Fargate. And unfortunately, it's a great product. I think we were actually the largest Fargate customer in our region for a little while. No, what? Yeah, seriously. And unfortunately, it's a great product, but I think if you're an infrastructure company, you actually have to have a deeper level of control over these primitives. I think it's the same thing is true with databases. We've used other database providers and I think-swyx [00:18:21]: Yeah, serverless Postgres.Paul [00:18:23]: Shocker. When you're an infrastructure company, you're on the hook if any provider has an outage. And I can't tell my customers like, hey, we went down because so-and-so went down. That's not acceptable. So for us, we've really moved to bringing things internally. It's kind of opposite of what we preach. We tell our customers, don't build this in-house, but then we're like, we build a lot of stuff in-house. But I think it just really depends on what is in the critical path. We try and have deep ownership of that.Alessio [00:18:46]: On the distributed location side, how does that work for the web where you might get sort of different content in different locations, but the customer is expecting, you know, if you're in the US, I'm expecting the US version. But if you're spinning up my browser in France, I might get the French version. Yeah.Paul [00:19:02]: Yeah. That's a good question. Well, generally, like on the localization, there is a thing called locale in the browser. You can set like what your locale is. If you're like in the ENUS browser or not, but some things do IP, IP based routing. And in that case, you may want to have a proxy. Like let's say you're running something in the, in Europe, but you want to make sure you're showing up from the US. You may want to use one of our proxy features so you can turn on proxies to say like, make sure these connections always come from the United States, which is necessary too, because when you're browsing the web, you're coming from like a, you know, data center IP, and that can make things a lot harder to browse web. So we do have kind of like this proxy super network. Yeah. We have a proxy for you based on where you're going, so you can reliably automate the web. But if you get scheduled in Europe, that doesn't happen as much. We try and schedule you as close to, you know, your origin that you're trying to go to. But generally you have control over the regions you can put your browsers in. So you can specify West one or East one or Europe. We only have one region of Europe right now, actually. Yeah.Alessio [00:19:55]: What's harder, the browser or the proxy? I feel like to me, it feels like actually proxying reliably at scale. It's much harder than spending up browsers at scale. I'm curious. It's all hard.Paul [00:20:06]: It's layers of hard, right? Yeah. I think it's different levels of hard. I think the thing with the proxy infrastructure is that we work with many different web proxy providers and some are better than others. Some have good days, some have bad days. And our customers who've built browser infrastructure on their own, they have to go and deal with sketchy actors. Like first they figure out their own browser infrastructure and then they got to go buy a proxy. And it's like you can pay in Bitcoin and it just kind of feels a little sus, right? It's like you're buying drugs when you're trying to get a proxy online. We have like deep relationships with these counterparties. We're able to audit them and say, is this proxy being sourced ethically? Like it's not running on someone's TV somewhere. Is it free range? Yeah. Free range organic proxies, right? Right. We do a level of diligence. We're SOC 2. So we have to understand what is going on here. But then we're able to make sure that like we route around proxy providers not working. There's proxy providers who will just, the proxy will stop working all of a sudden. And then if you don't have redundant proxying on your own browsers, that's hard down for you or you may get some serious impacts there. With us, like we intelligently know, hey, this proxy is not working. Let's go to this one. And you can kind of build a network of multiple providers to really guarantee the best uptime for our customers. Yeah. So you don't own any proxies? We don't own any proxies. You're right. The team has been saying who wants to like take home a little proxy server, but not yet. We're not there yet. You know?swyx [00:21:25]: It's a very mature market. I don't think you should build that yourself. Like you should just be a super customer of them. Yeah. Scraping, I think, is the main use case for that. I guess. Well, that leads us into CAPTCHAs and also off, but let's talk about CAPTCHAs. You had a little spiel that you wanted to talk about CAPTCHA stuff.Challenges of Scaling Browser InfrastructurePaul [00:21:43]: Oh, yeah. I was just, I think a lot of people ask, if you're thinking about proxies, you're thinking about CAPTCHAs too. I think it's the same thing. You can go buy CAPTCHA solvers online, but it's the same buying experience. It's some sketchy website, you have to integrate it. It's not fun to buy these things and you can't really trust that the docs are bad. What Browserbase does is we integrate a bunch of different CAPTCHAs. We do some stuff in-house, but generally we just integrate with a bunch of known vendors and continually monitor and maintain these things and say, is this working or not? Can we route around it or not? These are CAPTCHA solvers. CAPTCHA solvers, yeah. Not CAPTCHA providers, CAPTCHA solvers. Yeah, sorry. CAPTCHA solvers. We really try and make sure all of that works for you. I think as a dev, if I'm buying infrastructure, I want it all to work all the time and it's important for us to provide that experience by making sure everything does work and monitoring it on our own. Yeah. Right now, the world of CAPTCHAs is tricky. I think AI agents in particular are very much ahead of the internet infrastructure. CAPTCHAs are designed to block all types of bots, but there are now good bots and bad bots. I think in the future, CAPTCHAs will be able to identify who a good bot is, hopefully via some sort of KYC. For us, we've been very lucky. We have very little to no known abuse of Browserbase because we really look into who we work with. And for certain types of CAPTCHA solving, we only allow them on certain types of plans because we want to make sure that we can know what people are doing, what their use cases are. And that's really allowed us to try and be an arbiter of good bots, which is our long term goal. I want to build great relationships with people like Cloudflare so we can agree, hey, here are these acceptable bots. We'll identify them for you and make sure we flag when they come to your website. This is a good bot, you know?Alessio [00:23:23]: I see. And Cloudflare said they want to do more of this. So they're going to set by default, if they think you're an AI bot, they're going to reject. I'm curious if you think this is something that is going to be at the browser level or I mean, the DNS level with Cloudflare seems more where it should belong. But I'm curious how you think about it.Paul [00:23:40]: I think the web's going to change. You know, I think that the Internet as we have it right now is going to change. And we all need to just accept that the cat is out of the bag. And instead of kind of like wishing the Internet was like it was in the 2000s, we can have free content line that wouldn't be scraped. It's just it's not going to happen. And instead, we should think about like, one, how can we change? How can we change the models of, you know, information being published online so people can adequately commercialize it? But two, how do we rebuild applications that expect that AI agents are going to log in on their behalf? Those are the things that are going to allow us to kind of like identify good and bad bots. And I think the team at Clerk has been doing a really good job with this on the authentication side. I actually think that auth is the biggest thing that will prevent agents from accessing stuff, not captchas. And I think there will be agent auth in the future. I don't know if it's going to happen from an individual company, but actually authentication providers that have a, you know, hidden login as agent feature, which will then you put in your email, you'll get a push notification, say like, hey, your browser-based agent wants to log into your Airbnb. You can approve that and then the agent can proceed. That really circumvents the need for captchas or logging in as you and sharing your password. I think agent auth is going to be one way we identify good bots going forward. And I think a lot of this captcha solving stuff is really short-term problems as the internet kind of reorients itself around how it's going to work with agents browsing the web, just like people do. Yeah.Managing Distributed Browser Locations and Proxiesswyx [00:24:59]: Stitch recently was on Hacker News for talking about agent experience, AX, which is a thing that Netlify is also trying to clone and coin and talk about. And we've talked about this on our previous episodes before in a sense that I actually think that's like maybe the only part of the tech stack that needs to be kind of reinvented for agents. Everything else can stay the same, CLIs, APIs, whatever. But auth, yeah, we need agent auth. And it's mostly like short-lived, like it should not, it should be a distinct, identity from the human, but paired. I almost think like in the same way that every social network should have your main profile and then your alt accounts or your Finsta, it's almost like, you know, every, every human token should be paired with the agent token and the agent token can go and do stuff on behalf of the human token, but not be presumed to be the human. Yeah.Paul [00:25:48]: It's like, it's, it's actually very similar to OAuth is what I'm thinking. And, you know, Thread from Stitch is an investor, Colin from Clerk, Octaventures, all investors in browser-based because like, I hope they solve this because they'll make browser-based submission more possible. So we don't have to overcome all these hurdles, but I think it will be an OAuth-like flow where an agent will ask to log in as you, you'll approve the scopes. Like it can book an apartment on Airbnb, but it can't like message anybody. And then, you know, the agent will have some sort of like role-based access control within an application. Yeah. I'm excited for that.swyx [00:26:16]: The tricky part is just, there's one, one layer of delegation here, which is like, you're authoring my user's user or something like that. I don't know if that's tricky or not. Does that make sense? Yeah.Paul [00:26:25]: You know, actually at Twilio, I worked on the login identity and access. Management teams, right? So like I built Twilio's login page.swyx [00:26:31]: You were an intern on that team and then you became the lead in two years? Yeah.Paul [00:26:34]: Yeah. I started as an intern in 2016 and then I was the tech lead of that team. How? That's not normal. I didn't have a life. He's not normal. Look at this guy. I didn't have a girlfriend. I just loved my job. I don't know. I applied to 500 internships for my first job and I got rejected from every single one of them except for Twilio and then eventually Amazon. And they took a shot on me and like, I was getting paid money to write code, which was my dream. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very lucky that like this coding thing worked out because I was going to be doing it regardless. And yeah, I was able to kind of spend a lot of time on a team that was growing at a company that was growing. So it informed a lot of this stuff here. I think these are problems that have been solved with like the SAML protocol with SSO. I think it's a really interesting stuff with like WebAuthn, like these different types of authentication, like schemes that you can use to authenticate people. The tooling is all there. It just needs to be tweaked a little bit to work for agents. And I think the fact that there are companies that are already. Providing authentication as a service really sets it up. Well, the thing that's hard is like reinventing the internet for agents. We don't want to rebuild the internet. That's an impossible task. And I think people often say like, well, we'll have this second layer of APIs built for agents. I'm like, we will for the top use cases, but instead of we can just tweak the internet as is, which is on the authentication side, I think we're going to be the dumb ones going forward. Unfortunately, I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the tasks that we do online, which means that it will be able to go to websites, click buttons on our behalf and log in on our behalf too. So with this kind of like web agent future happening, I think with some small structural changes, like you said, it feels like it could all slot in really nicely with the existing internet.Handling CAPTCHAs and Agent Authenticationswyx [00:28:08]: There's one more thing, which is the, your live view iframe, which lets you take, take control. Yeah. Obviously very key for operator now, but like, was, is there anything interesting technically there or that the people like, well, people always want this.Paul [00:28:21]: It was really hard to build, you know, like, so, okay. Headless browsers, you don't see them, right. They're running. They're running in a cloud somewhere. You can't like look at them. And I just want to really make, it's a weird name. I wish we came up with a better name for this thing, but you can't see them. Right. But customers don't trust AI agents, right. At least the first pass. So what we do with our live view is that, you know, when you use browser base, you can actually embed a live view of the browser running in the cloud for your customer to see it working. And that's what the first reason is the build trust, like, okay, so I have this script. That's going to go automate a website. I can embed it into my web application via an iframe and my customer can watch. I think. And then we added two way communication. So now not only can you watch the browser kind of being operated by AI, if you want to pause and actually click around type within this iframe that's controlling a browser, that's also possible. And this is all thanks to some of the lower level protocol, which is called the Chrome DevTools protocol. It has a API called start screencast, and you can also send mouse clicks and button clicks to a remote browser. And this is all embeddable within iframes. You have a browser within a browser, yo. And then you simulate the screen, the click on the other side. Exactly. And this is really nice often for, like, let's say, a capture that can't be solved. You saw this with Operator, you know, Operator actually uses a different approach. They use VNC. So, you know, you're able to see, like, you're seeing the whole window here. What we're doing is something a little lower level with the Chrome DevTools protocol. It's just PNGs being streamed over the wire. But the same thing is true, right? Like, hey, I'm running a window. Pause. Can you do something in this window? Human. Okay, great. Resume. Like sometimes 2FA tokens. Like if you get that text message, you might need a person to type that in. Web agents need human-in-the-loop type workflows still. You still need a person to interact with the browser. And building a UI to proxy that is kind of hard. You may as well just show them the whole browser and say, hey, can you finish this up for me? And then let the AI proceed on afterwards. Is there a future where I stream my current desktop to browser base? I don't think so. I think we're very much cloud infrastructure. Yeah. You know, but I think a lot of the stuff we're doing, we do want to, like, build tools. Like, you know, we'll talk about the stage and, you know, web agent framework in a second. But, like, there's a case where a lot of people are going desktop first for, you know, consumer use. And I think cloud is doing a lot of this, where I expect to see, you know, MCPs really oriented around the cloud desktop app for a reason, right? Like, I think a lot of these tools are going to run on your computer because it makes... I think it's breaking out. People are putting it on a server. Oh, really? Okay. Well, sweet. We'll see. We'll see that. I was surprised, though, wasn't I? I think that the browser company, too, with Dia Browser, it runs on your machine. You know, it's going to be...swyx [00:30:50]: What is it?Paul [00:30:51]: So, Dia Browser, as far as I understand... I used to use Arc. Yeah. I haven't used Arc. But I'm a big fan of the browser company. I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff in consumer. As far as I understand, it's a browser where you have a sidebar where you can, like, chat with it and it can control the local browser on your machine. So, if you imagine, like, what a consumer web agent is, which it lives alongside your browser, I think Google Chrome has Project Marina, I think. I almost call it Project Marinara for some reason. I don't know why. It's...swyx [00:31:17]: No, I think it's someone really likes the Waterworld. Oh, I see. The classic Kevin Costner. Yeah.Paul [00:31:22]: Okay. Project Marinara is a similar thing to the Dia Browser, in my mind, as far as I understand it. You have a browser that has an AI interface that will take over your mouse and keyboard and control the browser for you. Great for consumer use cases. But if you're building applications that rely on a browser and it's more part of a greater, like, AI app experience, you probably need something that's more like infrastructure, not a consumer app.swyx [00:31:44]: Just because I have explored a little bit in this area, do people want branching? So, I have the state. Of whatever my browser's in. And then I want, like, 100 clones of this state. Do people do that? Or...Paul [00:31:56]: People don't do it currently. Yeah. But it's definitely something we're thinking about. I think the idea of forking a browser is really cool. Technically, kind of hard. We're starting to see this in code execution, where people are, like, forking some, like, code execution, like, processes or forking some tool calls or branching tool calls. Haven't seen it at the browser level yet. But it makes sense. Like, if an AI agent is, like, using a website and it's not sure what path it wants to take to crawl this website. To find the information it's looking for. It would make sense for it to explore both paths in parallel. And that'd be a very, like... A road not taken. Yeah. And hopefully find the right answer. And then say, okay, this was actually the right one. And memorize that. And go there in the future. On the roadmap. For sure. Don't make my roadmap, please. You know?Alessio [00:32:37]: How do you actually do that? Yeah. How do you fork? I feel like the browser is so stateful for so many things.swyx [00:32:42]: Serialize the state. Restore the state. I don't know.Paul [00:32:44]: So, it's one of the reasons why we haven't done it yet. It's hard. You know? Like, to truly fork, it's actually quite difficult. The naive way is to open the same page in a new tab and then, like, hope that it's at the same thing. But if you have a form halfway filled, you may have to, like, take the whole, you know, container. Pause it. All the memory. Duplicate it. Restart it from there. It could be very slow. So, we haven't found a thing. Like, the easy thing to fork is just, like, copy the page object. You know? But I think there needs to be something a little bit more robust there. Yeah.swyx [00:33:12]: So, MorphLabs has this infinite branch thing. Like, wrote a custom fork of Linux or something that let them save the system state and clone it. MorphLabs, hit me up. I'll be a customer. Yeah. That's the only. I think that's the only way to do it. Yeah. Like, unless Chrome has some special API for you. Yeah.Paul [00:33:29]: There's probably something we'll reverse engineer one day. I don't know. Yeah.Alessio [00:33:32]: Let's talk about StageHand, the AI web browsing framework. You have three core components, Observe, Extract, and Act. Pretty clean landing page. What was the idea behind making a framework? Yeah.Stagehand: AI web browsing frameworkPaul [00:33:43]: So, there's three frameworks that are very popular or already exist, right? Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium. Those are for building hard-coded scripts to control websites. And as soon as I started to play with LLMs plus browsing, I caught myself, you know, code-genning Playwright code to control a website. I would, like, take the DOM. I'd pass it to an LLM. I'd say, can you generate the Playwright code to click the appropriate button here? And it would do that. And I was like, this really should be part of the frameworks themselves. And I became really obsessed with SDKs that take natural language as part of, like, the API input. And that's what StageHand is. StageHand exposes three APIs, and it's a super set of Playwright. So, if you go to a page, you may want to take an action, click on the button, fill in the form, etc. That's what the act command is for. You may want to extract some data. This one takes a natural language, like, extract the winner of the Super Bowl from this page. You can give it a Zod schema, so it returns a structured output. And then maybe you're building an API. You can do an agent loop, and you want to kind of see what actions are possible on this page before taking one. You can do observe. So, you can observe the actions on the page, and it will generate a list of actions. You can guide it, like, give me actions on this page related to buying an item. And you can, like, buy it now, add to cart, view shipping options, and pass that to an LLM, an agent loop, to say, what's the appropriate action given this high-level goal? So, StageHand isn't a web agent. It's a framework for building web agents. And we think that agent loops are actually pretty close to the application layer because every application probably has different goals or different ways it wants to take steps. I don't think I've seen a generic. Maybe you guys are the experts here. I haven't seen, like, a really good AI agent framework here. Everyone kind of has their own special sauce, right? I see a lot of developers building their own agent loops, and they're using tools. And I view StageHand as the browser tool. So, we expose act, extract, observe. Your agent can call these tools. And from that, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about generating playwright code performantly. You don't have to worry about running it. You can kind of just integrate these three tool calls into your agent loop and reliably automate the web.swyx [00:35:48]: A special shout-out to Anirudh, who I met at your dinner, who I think listens to the pod. Yeah. Hey, Anirudh.Paul [00:35:54]: Anirudh's a man. He's a StageHand guy.swyx [00:35:56]: I mean, the interesting thing about each of these APIs is they're kind of each startup. Like, specifically extract, you know, Firecrawler is extract. There's, like, Expand AI. There's a whole bunch of, like, extract companies. They just focus on extract. I'm curious. Like, I feel like you guys are going to collide at some point. Like, right now, it's friendly. Everyone's in a blue ocean. At some point, it's going to be valuable enough that there's some turf battle here. I don't think you have a dog in a fight. I think you can mock extract to use an external service if they're better at it than you. But it's just an observation that, like, in the same way that I see each option, each checkbox in the side of custom GBTs becoming a startup or each box in the Karpathy chart being a startup. Like, this is also becoming a thing. Yeah.Paul [00:36:41]: I mean, like, so the way StageHand works is that it's MIT-licensed, completely open source. You bring your own API key to your LLM of choice. You could choose your LLM. We don't make any money off of the extract or really. We only really make money if you choose to run it with our browser. You don't have to. You can actually use your own browser, a local browser. You know, StageHand is completely open source for that reason. And, yeah, like, I think if you're building really complex web scraping workflows, I don't know if StageHand is the tool for you. I think it's really more if you're building an AI agent that needs a few general tools or if it's doing a lot of, like, web automation-intensive work. But if you're building a scraping company, StageHand is not your thing. You probably want something that's going to, like, get HTML content, you know, convert that to Markdown, query it. That's not what StageHand does. StageHand is more about reliability. I think we focus a lot on reliability and less so on cost optimization and speed at this point.swyx [00:37:33]: I actually feel like StageHand, so the way that StageHand works, it's like, you know, page.act, click on the quick start. Yeah. It's kind of the integration test for the code that you would have to write anyway, like the Puppeteer code that you have to write anyway. And when the page structure changes, because it always does, then this is still the test. This is still the test that I would have to write. Yeah. So it's kind of like a testing framework that doesn't need implementation detail.Paul [00:37:56]: Well, yeah. I mean, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Slenderman were all designed as testing frameworks, right? Yeah. And now people are, like, hacking them together to automate the web. I would say, and, like, maybe this is, like, me being too specific. But, like, when I write tests, if the page structure changes. Without me knowing, I want that test to fail. So I don't know if, like, AI, like, regenerating that. Like, people are using StageHand for testing. But it's more for, like, usability testing, not, like, testing of, like, does the front end, like, has it changed or not. Okay. But generally where we've seen people, like, really, like, take off is, like, if they're using, you know, something. If they want to build a feature in their application that's kind of like Operator or Deep Research, they're using StageHand to kind of power that tool calling in their own agent loop. Okay. Cool.swyx [00:38:37]: So let's go into Operator, the first big agent launch of the year from OpenAI. Seems like they have a whole bunch scheduled. You were on break and your phone blew up. What's your just general view of computer use agents is what they're calling it. The overall category before we go into Open Operator, just the overall promise of Operator. I will observe that I tried it once. It was okay. And I never tried it again.OpenAI's Operator and computer use agentsPaul [00:38:58]: That tracks with my experience, too. Like, I'm a huge fan of the OpenAI team. Like, I think that I do not view Operator as the company. I'm not a company killer for browser base at all. I think it actually shows people what's possible. I think, like, computer use models make a lot of sense. And I'm actually most excited about computer use models is, like, their ability to, like, really take screenshots and reasoning and output steps. I think that using mouse click or mouse coordinates, I've seen that proved to be less reliable than I would like. And I just wonder if that's the right form factor. What we've done with our framework is anchor it to the DOM itself, anchor it to the actual item. So, like, if it's clicking on something, it's clicking on that thing, you know? Like, it's more accurate. No matter where it is. Yeah, exactly. Because it really ties in nicely. And it can handle, like, the whole viewport in one go, whereas, like, Operator can only handle what it sees. Can you hover? Is hovering a thing that you can do? I don't know if we expose it as a tool directly, but I'm sure there's, like, an API for hovering. Like, move mouse to this position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you can trigger hover, like, via, like, the JavaScript on the DOM itself. But, no, I think, like, when we saw computer use, everyone's eyes lit up because they realized, like, wow, like, AI is going to actually automate work for people. And I think seeing that kind of happen from both of the labs, and I'm sure we're going to see more labs launch computer use models, I'm excited to see all the stuff that people build with it. I think that I'd love to see computer use power, like, controlling a browser on browser base. And I think, like, Open Operator, which was, like, our open source version of OpenAI's Operator, was our first take on, like, how can we integrate these models into browser base? And we handle the infrastructure and let the labs do the models. I don't have a sense that Operator will be released as an API. I don't know. Maybe it will. I'm curious to see how well that works because I think it's going to be really hard for a company like OpenAI to do things like support CAPTCHA solving or, like, have proxies. Like, I think it's hard for them structurally. Imagine this New York Times headline, OpenAI CAPTCHA solving. Like, that would be a pretty bad headline, this New York Times headline. Browser base solves CAPTCHAs. No one cares. No one cares. And, like, our investors are bored. Like, we're all okay with this, you know? We're building this company knowing that the CAPTCHA solving is short-lived until we figure out how to authenticate good bots. I think it's really hard for a company like OpenAI, who has this brand that's so, so good, to balance with, like, the icky parts of web automation, which it can be kind of complex to solve. I'm sure OpenAI knows who to call whenever they need you. Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll have a great partnership.Alessio [00:41:23]: And is Open Operator just, like, a marketing thing for you? Like, how do you think about resource allocation? So, you can spin this up very quickly. And now there's all this, like, open deep research, just open all these things that people are building. We started it, you know. You're the original Open. We're the original Open operator, you know? Is it just, hey, look, this is a demo, but, like, we'll help you build out an actual product for yourself? Like, are you interested in going more of a product route? That's kind of the OpenAI way, right? They started as a model provider and then…Paul [00:41:53]: Yeah, we're not interested in going the product route yet. I view Open Operator as a model provider. It's a reference project, you know? Let's show people how to build these things using the infrastructure and models that are out there. And that's what it is. It's, like, Open Operator is very simple. It's an agent loop. It says, like, take a high-level goal, break it down into steps, use tool calling to accomplish those steps. It takes screenshots and feeds those screenshots into an LLM with the step to generate the right action. It uses stagehand under the hood to actually execute this action. It doesn't use a computer use model. And it, like, has a nice interface using the live view that we talked about, the iframe, to embed that into an application. So I felt like people on launch day wanted to figure out how to build their own version of this. And we turned that around really quickly to show them. And I hope we do that with other things like deep research. We don't have a deep research launch yet. I think David from AOMNI actually has an amazing open deep research that he launched. It has, like, 10K GitHub stars now. So he's crushing that. But I think if people want to build these features natively into their application, they need good reference projects. And I think Open Operator is a good example of that.swyx [00:42:52]: I don't know. Actually, I'm actually pretty bullish on API-driven operator. Because that's the only way that you can sort of, like, once it's reliable enough, obviously. And now we're nowhere near. But, like, give it five years. It'll happen, you know. And then you can sort of spin this up and browsers are working in the background and you don't necessarily have to know. And it just is booking restaurants for you, whatever. I can definitely see that future happening. I had this on the landing page here. This might be a slightly out of order. But, you know, you have, like, sort of three use cases for browser base. Open Operator. Or this is the operator sort of use case. It's kind of like the workflow automation use case. And it completes with UiPath in the sort of RPA category. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. And then there's Agents we talked about already. And web scraping, which I imagine would be the bulk of your workload right now, right?Paul [00:43:40]: No, not at all. I'd say actually, like, the majority is browser automation. We're kind of expensive for web scraping. Like, I think that if you're building a web scraping product, if you need to do occasional web scraping or you have to do web scraping that works every single time, you want to use browser automation. Yeah. You want to use browser-based. But if you're building web scraping workflows, what you should do is have a waterfall. You should have the first request is a curl to the website. See if you can get it without even using a browser. And then the second request may be, like, a scraping-specific API. There's, like, a thousand scraping APIs out there that you can use to try and get data. Scraping B. Scraping B is a great example, right? Yeah. And then, like, if those two don't work, bring out the heavy hitter. Like, browser-based will 100% work, right? It will load the page in a real browser, hydrate it. I see.swyx [00:44:21]: Because a lot of people don't render to JS.swyx [00:44:25]: Yeah, exactly.Paul [00:44:26]: So, I mean, the three big use cases, right? Like, you know, automation, web data collection, and then, you know, if you're building anything agentic that needs, like, a browser tool, you want to use browser-based.Alessio [00:44:35]: Is there any use case that, like, you were super surprised by that people might not even think about? Oh, yeah. Or is it, yeah, anything that you can share? The long tail is crazy. Yeah.Surprising use cases of BrowserbasePaul [00:44:44]: One of the case studies on our website that I think is the most interesting is this company called Benny. So, the way that it works is if you're on food stamps in the United States, you can actually get rebates if you buy certain things. Yeah. You buy some vegetables. You submit your receipt to the government. They'll give you a little rebate back. Say, hey, thanks for buying vegetables. It's good for you. That process of submitting that receipt is very painful. And the way Benny works is you use their app to take a photo of your receipt, and then Benny will go submit that receipt for you and then deposit the money into your account. That's actually using no AI at all. It's all, like, hard-coded scripts. They maintain the scripts. They've been doing a great job. And they build this amazing consumer app. But it's an example of, like, all these, like, tedious workflows that people have to do to kind of go about their business. And they're doing it for the sake of their day-to-day lives. And I had never known about, like, food stamp rebates or the complex forms you have to do to fill them. But the world is powered by millions and millions of tedious forms, visas. You know, Emirate Lighthouse is a customer, right? You know, they do the O1 visa. Millions and millions of forms are taking away humans' time. And I hope that Browserbase can help power software that automates away the web forms that we don't need anymore. Yeah.swyx [00:45:49]: I mean, I'm very supportive of that. I mean, forms. I do think, like, government itself is a big part of it. I think the government itself should embrace AI more to do more sort of human-friendly form filling. Mm-hmm. But I'm not optimistic. I'm not holding my breath. Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I think I'm about to zoom out. I have a little brief thing on computer use, and then we can talk about founder stuff, which is, I tend to think of developer tooling markets in impossible triangles, where everyone starts in a niche, and then they start to branch out. So I already hinted at a little bit of this, right? We mentioned more. We mentioned E2B. We mentioned Firecrawl. And then there's Browserbase. So there's, like, all this stuff of, like, have serverless virtual computer that you give to an agent and let them do stuff with it. And there's various ways of connecting it to the internet. You can just connect to a search API, like SERP API, whatever other, like, EXA is another one. That's what you're searching. You can also have a JSON markdown extractor, which is Firecrawl. Or you can have a virtual browser like Browserbase, or you can have a virtual machine like Morph. And then there's also maybe, like, a virtual sort of code environment, like Code Interpreter. So, like, there's just, like, a bunch of different ways to tackle the problem of give a computer to an agent. And I'm just kind of wondering if you see, like, everyone's just, like, happily coexisting in their respective niches. And as a developer, I just go and pick, like, a shopping basket of one of each. Or do you think that you eventually, people will collide?Future of browser automation and market competitionPaul [00:47:18]: I think that currently it's not a zero-sum market. Like, I think we're talking about... I think we're talking about all of knowledge work that people do that can be automated online. All of these, like, trillions of hours that happen online where people are working. And I think that there's so much software to be built that, like, I tend not to think about how these companies will collide. I just try to solve the problem as best as I can and make this specific piece of infrastructure, which I think is an important primitive, the best I possibly can. And yeah. I think there's players that are actually going to like it. I think there's players that are going to launch, like, over-the-top, you know, platforms, like agent platforms that have all these tools built in, right? Like, who's building the rippling for agent tools that has the search tool, the browser tool, the operating system tool, right? There are some. There are some. There are some, right? And I think in the end, what I have seen as my time as a developer, and I look at all the favorite tools that I have, is that, like, for tools and primitives with sufficient levels of complexity, you need to have a solution that's really bespoke to that primitive, you know? And I am sufficiently convinced that the browser is complex enough to deserve a primitive. Obviously, I have to. I'm the founder of BrowserBase, right? I'm talking my book. But, like, I think maybe I can give you one spicy take against, like, maybe just whole OS running. I think that when I look at computer use when it first came out, I saw that the majority of use cases for computer use were controlling a browser. And do we really need to run an entire operating system just to control a browser? I don't think so. I don't think that's necessary. You know, BrowserBase can run browsers for way cheaper than you can if you're running a full-fledged OS with a GUI, you know, operating system. And I think that's just an advantage of the browser. It is, like, browsers are little OSs, and you can run them very efficiently if you orchestrate it well. And I think that allows us to offer 90% of the, you know, functionality in the platform needed at 10% of the cost of running a full OS. Yeah.Open Operator: Browserbase's Open-Source Alternativeswyx [00:49:16]: I definitely see the logic in that. There's a Mark Andreessen quote. I don't know if you know this one. Where he basically observed that the browser is turning the operating system into a poorly debugged set of device drivers, because most of the apps are moved from the OS to the browser. So you can just run browsers.Paul [00:49:31]: There's a place for OSs, too. Like, I think that there are some applications that only run on Windows operating systems. And Eric from pig.dev in this upcoming YC batch, or last YC batch, like, he's building all run tons of Windows operating systems for you to control with your agent. And like, there's some legacy EHR systems that only run on Internet-controlled systems. Yeah.Paul [00:49:54]: I think that's it. I think, like, there are use cases for specific operating systems for specific legacy software. And like, I'm excited to see what he does with that. I just wanted to give a shout out to the pig.dev website.swyx [00:50:06]: The pigs jump when you click on them. Yeah. That's great.Paul [00:50:08]: Eric, he's the former co-founder of banana.dev, too.swyx [00:50:11]: Oh, that Eric. Yeah. That Eric. Okay. Well, he abandoned bananas for pigs. I hope he doesn't start going around with pigs now.Alessio [00:50:18]: Like he was going around with bananas. A little toy pig. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What else are we missing? I think we covered a lot of, like, the browser-based product history, but. What do you wish people asked you? Yeah.Paul [00:50:29]: I wish people asked me more about, like, what will the future of software look like? Because I think that's really where I've spent a lot of time about why do browser-based. Like, for me, starting a company is like a means of last resort. Like, you shouldn't start a company unless you absolutely have to. And I remain convinced that the future of software is software that you're going to click a button and it's going to do stuff on your behalf. Right now, software. You click a button and it maybe, like, calls it back an API and, like, computes some numbers. It, like, modifies some text, whatever. But the future of software is software using software. So, I may log into my accounting website for my business, click a button, and it's going to go load up my Gmail, search my emails, find the thing, upload the receipt, and then comment it for me. Right? And it may use it using APIs, maybe a browser. I don't know. I think it's a little bit of both. But that's completely different from how we've built software so far. And that's. I think that future of software has different infrastructure requirements. It's going to require different UIs. It's going to require different pieces of infrastructure. I think the browser infrastructure is one piece that fits into that, along with all the other categories you mentioned. So, I think that it's going to require developers to think differently about how they've built software for, you know
Harsha & Stephan discuss the challenges Bitcoin businesses face regarding regulation, particularly the tightening KYC and AML requirements. Harsha highlights the implications of these regulations on the Bitcoin ecosystem and the role of custodians. The discussion also touches on the evolving regulatory landscape, the impact of political administrations on crypto regulation, and the future of stablecoins. Harsha emphasizes the need for clarity in regulations and the importance of maintaining a balance between compliance and the freedom that Bitcoin offers. The conversation also highlights the challenges developers face in creating tools that respect user privacy while navigating regulatory landscapes. They conclude by exploring the potential future of Bitcoin upgrades and the importance of lobbying for less restrictive regulations to foster industry growth.Takeaways
Are stablecoins too centralized? Is there a way to get high yields without sacrificing decentralization?In this episode of Web3 with Sam Kamani, I sit down with Jean from Smardex, live at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong, to discuss how Smardex is pushing the boundaries of stablecoins with USDN—the first fully decentralized synthetic dollar.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce discusses her new role as head of the SEC Crypto Task Force and its impact on crypto regulation. We explore the repeal of SAB 121, how the task force aims to bring clarity to token issuances, and potential pathways for retroactive relief for crypto projects. Peirce also shares insights on SEC-CFTC collaboration, no-action letters, and her approach to prioritizing key industry issues. A must-listen for understanding the future of crypto regulation and policy shifts at the SEC! ------
Financial crime is surging. Hear Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan discuss AI-driven scams, deepfakes vs. KYC, and why traditional fraud controls fail. Listen and learn how to fight back. Watch this episode as a video here and check out the full show notes here.
In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) is joined by Zeke Faux, investigative reporter at Bloomberg and author of Number Go Up, to discuss stablecoins and crypto fraud. They dive into Tether's controversial history, the senate's emerging GENIUS act, and how crypto enables various types of financial crime. The conversation explores how Tether went from a “quilted collection of red flags” to becoming crypto's dominant stablecoin, its noteworthy relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, and its current political maneuvering. They also discuss the societal value of financial regulation versus laissez-faire approaches to consumer protection.–Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/zeke-faux-stablecoins-tether/–Sponsors: CheckCheck is the leading payroll infrastructure provider and pioneer of embedded payroll. Check makes it easy for any SaaS platform to build a payroll business, and already powers 60+ popular platforms. Head to checkhq.com/complex and tell them patio11 sent you.–Recommended in this episode:Number Go Up: https://zekefaux.com/Anyone Seen Tether's Billions? Zeke Faux, Bloomberg Businessweek: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether Patrick's review of Number Go Up: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/a-review-of-number-go-up-on-crypto-shenanigans/ Doesn't Matter, That's Reg E: https://suno.com/song/173bbd67-92f7-4868-930f-efeca4b373c0–Twitter:@zekefaux@patio11–Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(00:45) The GENIUS act of 2025(02:28) Tether's audit controversy(05:49) The origins and impact of Tether(08:17) Investigative reporting and red flags(12:58) Tether's shady business practices(19:23) Tether meets SBF(21:40) Sponsor: Check(22:51) New anecdotes in the Number Go Up paperback(28:53) The role of stable coins in crime(38:20) The importance of AML and KYC rules(44:21) Financial privacy(45:18) Sam Bankman-Fried's conference in the Bahamas(47:14) Loot NFTs(49:34) Axie Infinity: a case study(52:30) Crypto's real-world consequences(58:15) Regulation and financial safety(01:05:40) Stablecoin bill and ownership limits(01:06:50) Political realignment and crypto(01:14:40) Citizen journalists and the crypto-skeptic community(01:20:36) The abilities and limitations of institutional journalists(01:26:00) Wrap
Today's blockchain and cryptocurrency news Bitcoin is down slightly at $97,807 Eth is down slightly at $2,690 XRP, down slightly at $2.48 North Carolina introduces bill to invest in digital currencies. Binance & SEC put legal case on pause OpenSea dismisses KYC speculation Gumi to buy $6M in BTC hacker pleads guilty over SEC tweet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ripple's four-year legal battle with the SEC may soon settle as regulatory shifts favor crypto. A spot XRP ETF is gaining traction, while Binance's case is paused under new SEC leadership. OpenSea denies KYC airdrop rumors, Gumi Inc. invests in Bitcoin, and Cardano eyes an ETF. Crypto's regulatory landscape is evolving fast.RESOURCEShttps://www.theblock.co/post/339894/binance-and-sec-file-joint-motion-to-halt-legal-dispute-for-60-days?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/02/11/opensea-denies-airdrop-related-rumors-over-enforced-kychttps://www.theblock.co/post/339867/japanese-game-maker-gumi-announces-6-6-million-bitcoin-purchase?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rsshttps://fortune.com/crypto/2025/02/10/kanye-west-douses-memecoin-rumor-dave-portnoy-memecoin-solana/https://decrypt.co/305216/binance-co-founder-cz-i-havent-bought-a-single-meme-coin-or-nfthttps://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/02/11/grayscale-etf-application-helps-cardano-s-ada-outshine-bitcoin-and-etherSecure your Business & Digital Life with Cyber Strategy Institute https://www.thegrowmeco.com/course/https://cyberstrategyinstitute.com/warden/ https://csi-store.samcart.com/products/wardenguard-personal-1device-annual/?coupon=DCN_Wardenhttps://csi-store.samcart.com/products/wardenvault-personal-managed-1device-annual?coupon=DCN_Warden WHERE TO FIND DCNhttps://substack.com/@dcndailycryptonewshttps://twitter.com/DCNDailyCrypto Trader Cobb X: @TraderCobbEMAIL USmatt@dailycryptonews.net——————————————————————***NOT FINANCIAL, LEGAL, OR TAX ADVICE! JUST OPINION! I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I DO NOT GUARANTEE A PARTICULAR OUTCOME I HAVE NO INSIDE KNOWLEDGE! YOU NEED TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS! THIS IS JUST EDUCATION & ENTERTAINMENT! ©Copyright 2024 Matthew Aaron Podcasts LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Susie Ward discusses her advocacy for Bitcoin in the UK, focusing on media misrepresentation and regulatory challenges. She critiques the BBC's negative coverage of Bitcoin, highlighting the importance of accurate information and the impact of misinformation on public perception. The conversation then shifts to the FATF travel rule, exploring its implications for privacy and the ineffectiveness of traditional financial regulations in combating money laundering. Susie emphasizes the need for a better understanding of Bitcoin's technology and the dangers of overregulation. Susie and Stephan also discuss the implications of compliance and regulation on Bitcoin adoption, the dangers of debanking, and the political divides affecting financial freedom. The discussion highlights the need for better understanding and education around Bitcoin and the potential risks of centralized control over financial systems. Takeaways