The Crypto Conversation

Marc Ryan is Co-Founder and CEO of Spout Finance, a Solana lending protocol that lets people borrow USDC against tokenized US stocks without paying interest. Based in New York, Marc first got into crypto during the 2017 ICO boom and stayed through DeFi summer and the NFT cycle. Meanwhile he worked as a technology investment banker at HSBC, covering fintech, software and hardware, and that experience showed him how cheaply wealthy clients could borrow against their portfolios compared with everyone else. Why you should listen Spout starts from an argument about who tokenized stocks are really for. Marc points out that anyone with meaningful capital, almost anywhere in the world, can already open an Interactive Brokers account and buy US equities, so putting shares on a blockchain is not much of a breakthrough by itself. The more interesting question is what onchain stocks can do that brokerage stocks can't. His answer is a lending pool that works like Aave or Kamino, with one structural difference. Instead of charging borrowers interest, Spout sells covered calls on their collateral every week, set well above the current price, and uses the premiums to pay lenders. Borrowers can take out up to half the value of their tokenized shares in USDC. The cost shows up as a small cap on their upside, which Marc estimates averages under half a percent a year, compared with margin rates of roughly 4.5% at the cheap end and 20% or more at some emerging-market brokers. Lenders, meanwhile, earn premium income that doesn't depend on whether the stock goes up or down. The conversation also covers how a small startup positions itself in a sector that is now attracting major institutions. Marc says most of the investors in Spout's recent $2 million round were chosen for what they bring beyond money. Anchorage Digital provides the institutional custody that large funds require, Solana is the chain he considers best suited for bringing retail onto financial assets, and former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo advises on navigating US regulation. Marc also explains why Spout gave up issuing its own tokenized shares. Running issuance alongside a lending protocol created too much legal and corporate overhead, so the team chose to be a permissionless layer that works with every issuer instead of competing with them. Most of those issuers wrap shares held with a custodian such as Alpaca. Marc contrasts that with native issuance from firms like Securitize and Superstate, where the shares themselves live onchain and can be self-custodied. That distinction frames his view of the current regulatory fight. After a batch of companies objected to having their shares tokenized on OKXICE, the joint venture between OKX and NYSE owner ICE, under the SEC's new Innovation Exemption, Marc argues that wrappers will keep serving offshore investors. US access, in his view, will come through native issuance or closer work with the DTCC. He is candid that a Spout token is undecided. If one launches, it would boost lender rates and allow options to be sold further out of the money. In the hot take round, Marc places himself between Bitcoin maximalism and multi-chain opportunism. He says every public equity will eventually move onchain, describes how AI agents now run parts of his own business, and names Back to the Future as his favorite film. Supporting links Stabull Finance Spout Finance Spout Finance on Twitter Marc on Twitter 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.

Michael Steuer is President and CTO of the Casper Association, the Swiss non-profit behind Casper Network, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 built for regulated real-world assets and payments between AI agents. Born in Amsterdam and based in Los Angeles for more than two decades, Michael has spent around 30 years in technology. That includes a stint as CTO for mobile at THQ, where his team shipped some of the first downloadable mobile games. He then co-founded Casper in 2018, built much of its ecosystem tooling through his company MAKE, and returned to lead the project in 2024. Why you should listen Casper's origin story starts inside Ethereum's own research group, where its proof-of-stake design was first developed. Michael and his co-founders wagered that enterprises would need something Ethereum wasn't going to deliver quickly: a chain that companies with thousands of existing engineers could build on using the languages, testing and deployment processes they already have. Just as important was certainty. Michael explains why the probabilistic finality retail users tolerate, waiting through confirmations before an exchange releases funds, is unacceptable for an institution moving billions. During that window nobody can say who is legally responsible for the money, so Casper was designed so that a transaction belongs to the recipient from the very next block. He applies the same realism to tokenization. Minting a token that claims to represent an asset takes a minute, he says, but making that token confer enforceable rights is the hard part. Through the ERC-3643 standard and the T-REX Network, Casper is working to make compliance data, such as investor eligibility, jurisdictional limits and holding periods, travel with an asset as it moves between chains. The second half of the conversation turns to what Michael sees as the larger opportunity. Cloudflare now reports that bots generate more web traffic than humans, yet almost no website can sell anything to them. Sign-ups, logins, card forms and terms-and-conditions boxes were all built for people. His answer is x402, a dormant payment code from the early HTTP specification that Coinbase and Circle revived as a standard for agents to pay per request. Casper is a founding member of the x402 Foundation, which now sits under the Linux Foundation, and settles those payments in its own dollar stablecoin, csprUSD. Payouts.com recently adopted Casper as the settlement rail for its AI agent products. Michael argues that companies blocking agents are turning away most of their visitors. He also expects stablecoin tribalism to disappear, because an agent shouldn't care which dollar it spends. That emphasis on ease of use is the thread through the final stretch. Michael says crypto's usage remains in the single-digit percentages of the global population after 16 years largely because the industry made it so hard to use, from seed phrases to incompatible wallets, and warns against repeating that mistake with agents and tokenized assets. He makes the case for the CSPR token as a utility asset whose value tracks network usage, citing a staking yield he puts at around 10 to 11 percent alongside native liquid staking, and the recent Kraken listing for US access. In the hot take round he calls himself a multi-chain opportunist and argues that blockchain should never try to be the answer to everything. He predicts a decade defined by the convergence of TradFi and DeFi and by agentic traffic approaching totality. He also notes that most people don't realize they can hold tokenized stock exposure in a wallet and borrow against it, and names Foundation as his sci-fi pick. Supporting links Stabull Finance Casper Network Casper on Twitter Michael on Twitter 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.

Ran Hammer is CEO at Orbs, a decentralized Layer-3 blockchain that works behind the scenes for DEXs. It gives smart contracts the automation and execution logic they lack on their own, which powers limit orders, TWAP, liquidity aggregation and perpetual futures across dozens of venues. Ran is an Israeli based in London and a former high-tech M&A lawyer. He has been with Orbs since its 2017 beginnings, working as general counsel, then in business development, then as chief business officer, before taking over as CEO in September. Why you should listen Ran came to crypto the way many lawyers of his generation did. In 2015 a university friend and future Orbs co-founder, Daniel Peled, told him he had raised money for his startup in Bitcoin. Within two years Ran was the rare attorney at a reputable firm who understood the technology, and he spent the 2017 ICO boom advising clients who wanted to do things by the book when no book existed yet. Nine years into Orbs, he explains plainly what the project is: a proof-of-stake network with no TVL or DEXs of its own, which supplies the automation and logic that smart contracts can't perform by themselves. That makes Orbs nearly invisible to the traders who use it. Ran is candid that this is good for users and difficult for a project whose token benefits from retail recognition. He also acknowledges that the market has moved enough that a small pivot is needed for Orbs to stay relevant. His view of the current market is sober. The yield chasing of DeFi summer has mostly gone. Many retail traders left after the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade and did not return. The activity that remains is increasingly professional, ranging from two-person trading teams running bots to BlackRock buying spot assets for its ETFs, which is why Ran prefers the term "on-chain finance." He calls Hyperliquid the most successful dApp to date. He also argues that most DEXs, even ones that dominate their ecosystems, cannot build Hyperliquid-level order book depth. Orbs' answer is Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0, an intent-based model in which hedgers take the other side of trades and offset them across Binance, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Variational, Aster and other venues. Users get pairs from all of those markets on whatever chain they're on, with a single collateral. QuickSwap has already made it the default perps engine across its chains. Ran says he rarely opens Google or Gmail anymore. He runs most of his online life through a Telegram bot on OpenClaw, with Anthropic and OpenAI models working in loops. That habit led Orbs to repackage its products as an MCP and an agent skill, and to think seriously about how a protocol gets discovered when an AI agent, rather than a person, chooses which tools to use. He says the Orbs swap skill now outranks bigger, better-funded projects on adoption, while noting that actual agentic trading volume is still smaller than the hype suggests. He also covers the recently passed OIP-9 DAO vote, upcoming Season 1 tokenomics built on revenue-funded buybacks and burns, and record staking levels despite a token he openly says is underpriced. In the hot take round, Ran calls himself 80 percent Bitcoin maximalist. He predicts that within ten years banks will provide liquidity and trade through AMMs instead of OTC desks, and says most people still underestimate what today's AI tools can do. Supporting links Stabull Finance Orbs Orbs on Twitter Ran on Twitter 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.

Eli Hylands is the founder of Flow Crypto, a New Zealand on and off ramp that launched about a month before this recording. He has been involved in crypto for roughly ten years, and before Flow he worked as a software developer and business analyst at IAG. He built the platform largely by himself over about a year, alongside his day job, after seeing a gap open in the local market. Why you should listen When Swyftx acquired Easy Crypto in 2025 and began moving its New Zealand customers across, the country's best-known retail exchange effectively left the market. Hylands saw the gap. Flow Crypto is his answer: a Kiwi-owned, non-custodial service where customers send New Zealand dollars from their bank account and receive crypto directly in their own wallet, with selling running the other way. It charges a flat 0.79 percent fee, supports up to 50 assets, and is registered on the Financial Service Providers Register. Hylands says the software was the easy part. Securing a bank account took about six months, and the hardest work was compliance: meeting reporting obligations to the Department of Internal Affairs while not asking customers for so much information that signing up becomes a chore. His customers, he says, skew toward altcoins rather than Bitcoin, and span all ages, which surprised him. Supporting links Stabull Finance Flow Crypto Flow Crypto on LinkedIn Flow Crypto on Instagram 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.

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.