The Crypto Conversation

Peter Anthony is the co-founder of Perceptron Network, a decentralised data infrastructure purpose-built for AI. A crypto native since 2019, Peter also runs The House of Crypto — one of the fastest-growing crypto YouTube channels — where years of speaking with founders convinced him that the next wave of blockchain projects would be defined by real revenues, real users, and real-world utility. Perceptron, which merged with the 700,000-node BlockMesh network in mid-2025, is his bet on what he sees as AI's biggest unsolved bottleneck: access to high-quality, affordable, real-time data. Why you should listen Data, not compute, is the real AI bottleneck. Peter opens by arguing that while the market has spent the last few years obsessing over GPUs and compute networks like Aethir and Akash, the harder problem sits upstream — the high-quality training data AI models actually need is locked behind paywalls. OpenAI reportedly pays Reddit around $70 million a year, with similar eye-watering cheques going to X, and that pay-to-play economy effectively freezes out smaller AI startups. Research groups like Epoch AI project the stock of public text data will be fully exhausted somewhere between 2026 and 2032, and even Sam Altman now concedes data — not compute — is the binding constraint. Perceptron's pitch is that a decentralised network can fix this by turning users' idle bandwidth into a globally distributed vantage point on the live web, at roughly a 90% cost advantage to traditional centralised data providers. A thousand eyes, one vision. Perceptron's architecture combines Perceptron Nodes — a software client that sits quietly in the background of a user's browser or Android device and lends out unused bandwidth — with Perceptron Agents embedded in Discord, Telegram and WeChat communities, plus a human-in-the-loop Questing app where contributors annotate datasets. The point isn't to harvest anyone's personal data; it's to aggregate geographically diverse viewpoints of the public web. Peter walks through the use cases this unlocks: an e-commerce operator seeing how their products rank simultaneously in New Zealand, the UK and the US; a quant desk arbitraging cross-border discrepancies in gold, oil or crypto prices in real time; a crypto trader spotting a sentiment shift across thousands of Telegram groups before it shows up on price. Perceptron is already supplying data to Everlyn AI, a text-to-image and text-to-video platform that would have been priced out through traditional suppliers. Freshness, sovereignty and a universal basic data income. Peter makes the case that data freshness is becoming the decisive edge for frontier models, because a ChatGPT or Claude answering questions about a fast-moving crypto market on four-month-old data is flying blind. He also makes a pointed argument about annotation bias — that when a narrow set of labellers with their own agendas decide what a dataset "means," the models downstream inherit those opinions — and contends that decentralised annotation is the counter. In the hot-take round Peter calls himself a multi-chain opportunist who still holds Bitcoin as the anchor, argues we're in a 2020-style bull market (not a 2022 bear), and reckons the real 10-year story of AI is that it will displace a lot of jobs but open up far more opportunity for anyone willing to pick up the tools now — pointing to Claude Code as a live example of a non-developer being able to ship working software in minutes. His sci-fi pick: Avatar — fittingly, recorded the day before a trip to Zhangjiajie, the real-world mountain range that inspired Pandora. Supporting links Stabull Finance Perceptron Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

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

Raees Chowdhury is the co-founder and chief investment officer of Tok-Edge, a London-based regulated DeFi hedge fund built around a novel cryptoasset structure called the Redemption Token. With a career spanning senior roles at BCG and Bain Capital, a managing partner position at Revolt Ventures — a fund sitting beneath a $10 billion AUM vehicle — and deep roots in on-chain markets dating back to the ICO era of 2016–17, Raees brings rare dual fluency in institutional finance and DeFi to one of crypto's most ambitious new fund structures. Why you should listen Tok-Edge emerged from stealth on the day of this recording, and the timing is deliberate. Raees argues that the current drawdown — with Bitcoin sitting roughly 50% off all-time highs and many altcoins down 90% or more — is precisely the moment to be allocating capital to DeFi. The fund is built on a contrarian but rigorous thesis: that crypto is a genuinely new liquid asset class, that existing token models are structurally flawed, and that the teams best positioned to capture the next cycle are those who can hold TradFi infrastructure and DeFi-native thinking in the same hand. The centrepiece of what Tok-Edge is building is the Redemption Token — a new category of cryptoasset designed to solve what Raees calls the duality problem that has undermined most token models to date. Unlike governance tokens, which trend towards zero, or utility tokens, which are constrained to their native blockchain, the Redemption Token is permissionless and composable in DeFi while carrying a genuine defined function: the ability for fund investors to redeem underlying fund shares at net asset value. The model Raees reaches for by analogy is MicroStrategy — a structure designed first, then deployed as a product. Tok-Edge is doing the same, with the Redemption Token as the architecture and the Tok-Edge Fund as its first application. The fund itself is built to institutional standard — custodians, regulated directors, and governance structures you'd expect from any tier-one equities vehicle — but applied entirely to crypto and DeFi strategies. Raees walks through the team's approach to on-chain yield generation, active capital allocation between strategies, and why sitting in stablecoins and earning on-chain yield is a feature rather than a concession. He also shares his conviction that DeFi yields are far from dead, why on-chain flows will identify the winners of the next cycle before most people see them coming, and how the Berkshire Hathaway model — long-only, actively managed, comfortable holding cash — translates surprisingly well to liquid crypto asset management. With a TGE capped at $21 million targeting a $100 million first close later in 2026, this is a conversation worth hearing early. Supporting links Stabull Finance Tok-Edge Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Marco Kowalewski is the managing partner at MovitOn, a Dubai-headquartered startup building what it describes as the Uber for delivery. Originally from Germany, Marco spent years in management roles and as a business lecturer before diving into blockchain around eight years ago. He is a three-time author on topics spanning cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and tokenisation, and joined the MovitOn team roughly eight months ago after an advisory relationship evolved into a leadership role. Why you should listen The global logistics industry is worth trillions, yet sending a single document internationally through legacy couriers like DHL or FedEx can still cost well over a hundred dollars and take a week to arrive. MovitOn is attacking that inefficiency with a peer-to-peer model that connects senders directly with travellers who have spare luggage capacity. The concept is deceptively simple: if someone is already flying from Medellín to Frankfurt, they can carry your parcel for a fraction of the traditional cost and get it there within 24 hours instead of seven days. Marco walks Andy through exactly how a shipment works — from personal handovers and smart IoT terminal pickups at airports, through to delivery at the destination — and explains why the platform targets prices 25 to 50 per cent lower than incumbent services while paying couriers anywhere from 50 to 100 dollars per delivery. What sets MovitOn apart from a simple marketplace is the infrastructure being built underneath it. The MVON utility token powers a smart contract escrow system: when a courier picks up a high-value item like a laptop, a deposit is locked on-chain and only released upon confirmed delivery, removing the trust gap that would otherwise kill peer-to-peer logistics at scale. On top of that, the team is developing physical smart terminals — MovitBoxes — equipped with AI-powered security scanners, initially deployed at airports, that verify parcels contain nothing prohibited or dangerous. An AI compliance engine navigates the regulatory patchwork of import and export rules across jurisdictions in real time, guiding users through what can and cannot be shipped between specific countries. It is an ambitious blend of atoms and bits that Marco acknowledges is significantly harder than a pure software play, but one the team believes is necessary to make the model safe, scalable, and compliant. The project has just closed a two-million-dollar community pre-sale round, with a public sale currently underway and a centralised exchange listing expected shortly after. Early adoption markets include Dubai — where the company is headquartered and which serves as a natural hub for international travellers — along with the European Union, with Germany as a priority. Eastern Europe and parts of Asia are next, followed by the United States and South America, with a target of operating in over 100 countries by 2030 and onboarding half a million users. Marco also shares his honest read on the current crypto market: he had been expecting Bitcoin to pull back toward the 50,000-dollar range but concedes that recent price stability and upward momentum may be shifting the picture. Supporting links Stabull Finance MovitOn Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

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