The Crypto Conversation

Nikita Monastyrskiy is chief marketing officer at Keeper, the self-custodial wallet formerly known as Tonkeeper. He started in crypto in 2018, running bounty and Bitcointalk signature campaigns while still at university, then spent four years at a crypto marketing agency, rising from community manager to senior growth strategist. He went on to join the marketing team at Ethereum layer two Mode, helping take it from launch to exchange listings, before moving to Wallet in Telegram in 2025 as head of partner marketing. He later switched from the custodial side to the self-custodial one, joining Tonkeeper to lead its marketing. Why you should listen Tonkeeper built its reputation as the leading wallet on TON, and last month it gave up the name. Monastyrskiy explains why: users had stopped living on a single chain, and were juggling several apps to hold stablecoins on TRON, Bitcoin, Ethereum and assets on layer twos. The "TON" in the name tied the brand to one network, so the team dropped it and kept the rest. Keeper now supports seven networks, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON and Base, and launched mobile-first, because that is where the data showed younger users transacting. He is direct about the trade-off at the heart of self-custody. Keeper cannot access, freeze or recover user funds, and he argues that the risk people associate with self-custody comes down to how they store their recovery phrase. Keep it offline and secure, and the main danger disappears. The harder part, in his view, is psychological: when an exchange gets hacked, users have someone to blame, but with self-custody the responsibility is entirely theirs. He sees the wallet as stage one of crypto adoption, the place where someone buys their first Bitcoin, and stage two as giving those users access to everything else on-chain, from tokenized stocks and prediction markets to simpler perpetual futures trading, which he says remains too complicated for newcomers. Looking further out, Monastyrskiy describes his ideal wallet as one users barely see: connected to an AI assistant, taking voice commands to swap or trade, with no thought given to gas or withdrawals. He thinks a supervised version, where users still sign each transaction, is about a year away, and full automation further off. He also reports a pickup in on-chain activity since May, with volumes rising again this quarter. In the hot take round, he argues that real adoption will come from everyday payments in emerging markets rather than institutions, and picks Nineteen Eighty-Four as the science fiction he fears could become reality. Supporting links Stabull Finance Keeper Keeper on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later. Why you should listen THORChain spent late September in the middle of crypto's loudest argument. After attackers took roughly $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September, portions of the proceeds were routed through THORChain into Bitcoin, and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen made a public, formal request that the protocol refuse service to the attacker addresses. The answer was no — though Chad's first move in this conversation is to reject the premise of the question. It was not his answer, because he does not own, operate or control THORChain. There is no mechanism in the code base to block a wallet or a transaction, and never has been. Even if the community wanted one, validator consensus takes between three days and two weeks to reach a two-thirds majority, by which point a swap observed an hour ago is long settled. To make blocking practical you would have to install an admin key and redesign the protocol around centralization — at which point, as he puts it, you have rebuilt traditional finance on a different technology stack and he is no longer interested in the problem. The obvious counter is that THORChain's own node operators did pause the network in May, when a flaw in its threshold signature scheme let an attacker drain $10.7 million from one of six vaults and the protocol went dark for 39 days. Chad's distinction is between protecting the protocol and policing its users: validators on any chain have a security obligation to the network they are paid to secure, which is why Bitcoin's own miners forked away the value overflow bug in August 2010 after someone minted 184 billion coins out of nothing. A halt is not a selective freeze. What genuinely puzzles him is the singling out — six or more DEXs handled Bitget-linked flows, Uniswap among the venues in the broader conversation, and nobody asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reject tainted transactions. On where responsibility actually sits, he is blunt: stolen funds have to exit to dollars eventually, and that exit runs through centralized exchanges, which are the entities that can stop it and have not always chosen to. Supporting links Stabull Finance THORChain THORChain on X Chad Barraford on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X 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.

Cris Blanco is chief strategy officer at Beldex, the privacy-first layer one that began in 2018 as a fork of Monero and now runs a suite of privacy applications for messaging, browsing, networking and payments. He has spent more than 15 years across Web3, frontier technology and digital platforms, working at founding-team and senior-leadership level on go-to-market, ecosystem strategy and partnerships. Most recently he was part of the founding team at Humanity Protocol, where he helped scale testnet adoption to more than three million users in 90 days. Why you should listen Blanco has moved from a project about proving who you are to one about keeping that private, and he argues the two are the same problem. His work on identity convinced him that people want to prove specific facts about themselves without exposing everything else, and that privacy has to be part of a system's architecture from the start. He applies the same logic to crypto itself. Blockchains solved verification without a middleman, he says, but verifying that a transaction is valid does not require publishing everyone's balance, salary and coffee purchases to the world permanently. That view explains why Beldex builds a whole stack rather than a single app. Blanco points out that privacy fails at the weakest layer: an encrypted chat tied to a phone number, a hidden IP address undone by a public payment. So alongside private BDX payments, Beldex offers BChat for messaging without a phone number or email, BelNet as a decentralized VPN, the Beldex Browser, and a naming service for human-readable addresses. Blanco says BChat accounts for roughly two thirds of the ecosystem's 1.5 million installs, which he reads as evidence that messaging, not payments, is the easiest way to bring non-crypto users into privacy tools. On the tension between privacy coins and regulators, he argues that banks and hospitals hold sensitive data without publishing it and still comply with the law. Exchanges and fiat gateways carry the compliance obligations, and users should be able to disclose specific information to specific parties. Beldex has published a MiCA white paper to that end. AI, he argues, makes the case stronger. People already hand AI assistants their documents and private thoughts, and as businesses route payroll and payments through agents the exposure grows. Blanco says Beldex is testing encrypted agent-to-agent communication as a next product. In the hot take round, he describes success in ten years as the point where nobody talks about privacy because it has become as standard as HTTPS, and explains why rereading Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics feels different in the age of AI alignment. Supporting links Stabull Finance Beldex Beldex on X Cris Blanco on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

John Lilic is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance platform for spending, trading and earning across chains. One of crypto's longest-serving builders, he worked at the Bitcoin Center in New York City in 2014 before joining ConsenSys as one of its first employees, spending six years helping to build the Ethereum ecosystem. Why you should listen Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria's pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs. The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria's infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties. In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum's reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether. Supporting links Stabull Finance Tria Tria on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

Gracie Lin is Regional CEO for Singapore and Australia and Head of VIP Growth at OKX. She spent the first decade of her career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, covering banking supervision before moving into markets, then held roles at sovereign wealth fund GIC and at Southeast Asian super app Grab, where she led regional strategy and economics. She joined OKX in 2024 to run its Singapore business as it received its Major Payment Institution license from MAS, and has since taken on Australia and a global remit for the exchange's VIP clients. Why you should listen It is unusual to hear a crypto executive defend regulators without reluctance, and Lin does it from experience. Having sat on the other side of the table, she frames regulation as a set of hard trade-offs rather than an obstacle: supervisors want innovation but must also protect consumers, protect the financial system, keep a level playing field, and watch what every other jurisdiction is doing. Her argument is that the consequences of a regulator getting risk wrong are far larger than those facing any single company, which is why she thinks industry has to engage constantly and constructively. It is also the thread running through her hot take, that a regulated future is a source of growth rather than a constraint, because adoption depends on trust. On the ground, she is candid about the commercial cost. Singapore's strict marketing rules make it harder to reach a broad consumer base and slower to bring products to market, but because every licensed player faces the same restrictions, OKX has built accordingly, and she says the business has grown meaningfully since licensing, anchored by accredited and sophisticated investors. Australia, where OKX launched in 2024 with a derivatives license, is now moving through the country's new Digital Assets Framework, and Lin says the exchange is seeking the additional authorizations needed to offer a fuller product range. She also explains the less visible half of her job: harmonizing how OKX defines and serves VIP clients globally, and why sophisticated traders, whatever their size, end up asking for the same things, from collateral management across positions to separating trading risk from custody risk. The wider picture is a shift in what crypto-native users want to hold. Lin says OKX is seeing interest move toward tokenized real-world assets, including equity derivatives and pre-IPO exposure to AI companies, products the exchange now offers in several markets though not yet in Singapore or Australia. She discusses the strategic partnership with Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and what each side brings. For an example of the future already arriving, she points to the OKX Card, which lets Singapore users spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted while the merchant is simply paid in local currency. For New Zealand listeners, she confirms OKX is watching the market closely. And her science fiction pick, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, arrives with a local connection: Taika Waititi's adaptation, shot in Wānaka and Auckland, is due in cinemas next month. Supporting links Stabull Finance OKX OKX Singapore OKX Australia OKX on X Gracie Lin on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin