Episodes

  • Why Tokenization is Inevitable with Charles d'Haussy of dYdX Foundation

    Why Tokenization is Inevitable with Charles d'Haussy of dYdX Foundation
    Nov 10 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of perpetual futures and global crypto hubs with returning guest Charles d'Haussy, CEO of the dYdX Foundation. Listen in as Charles explains how dYdX helped bring perpetual futures to the masses, with $1.5 trillion in lifetime trading volume, and how traders used it to trade oil over the weekend when the Iran war broke out. He explains why tokenized stocks still lack a common standard, why fighting tokenization is "futile," and why TradFi, not other crypto exchanges, is DeFi's biggest competitor. Alex and Charles also get into his new book, Arabian Crypto. They cover why he calls the UAE "a mini America," how Dubai and Abu Dhabi differ for crypto founders, why 36% of globally traded RWAs are issued out of Abu Dhabi, and how AI is raising the stakes on crypto security.
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    38 mins
  • Born to Build: Companies, Canada, and a New Musical Instrument with Serial Entrepreneur Daniel Debow

    Born to Build: Companies, Canada, and a New Musical Instrument with Serial Entrepreneur Daniel Debow
    Oct 26 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of building in Canada with special guest Daniel Debow, Founder of Debow Musical Instruments and chair of Build Canada. Listen in as Daniel, the serial founder behind Workbrain, Rypple and Helpful and a former Shopify VP, introduces Torch. It's a new electroacoustic "campfire instrument" made of real wood, and it has first-timers playing a song in minutes. He explains how magnets vibrate the wood to make sound, why 90% of beginner guitarists quit within a year, and why he calls Torch a "mission project" rather than a passion project. Alex and Daniel also get into Shopify's hypergrowth years and why applications build platforms, not the other way around. They cover how Build Canada grew from AI-drafted policy memos into polls, candidate surveys and meetups across the country, and why Canada should aim to be number one rather than settle for keeping pace.
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • How Decentralized Compute Markets Solve AI Bottlenecks with Greg Osuri of Akash Network

    How Decentralized Compute Markets Solve AI Bottlenecks with Greg Osuri of Akash Network
    Oct 21 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of AI compute with returning guest Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network. Listen in as Greg explains why one lab's soft quarter says little about real demand when only 2.4 million people use agents and supply chains are already maxed out, with four-year waits for transformers and fourteen-year waits for turbines. He explains why AI will become a utility like the internet rather than a subscription like the news, why a $200 plan buying roughly $8,000 of compute means the subsidized party is ending, and how Akash is nearing a trillion tokens a month while doubling monthly. Alex and Greg also get into what's really stalling the build-out — energy, permits, community pushback and the leverage behind the CoreWeave jitters — how the shift from training to inference opens the door to homes, offices and 10-kilowatt clusters, why frontier GPUs now trade only through bilateral contracts and what tradable compute contracts could change, and why Greg believes "homes will be the future of AI."
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    49 mins
  • The Man in the Arena: Olympic Wrestler Turned Founder Jeff Adamson of Neo Financial on Why Canada Is Playing to Win

    The Man in the Arena: Olympic Wrestler Turned Founder Jeff Adamson of Neo Financial on Why Canada Is Playing to Win
    Sep 28 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of fintech with special guest Jeff Adamson, co-founder of Neo Financial and Skip the Dishes. Listen in as Jeff traces the path from a five-time national wrestling champion training in the attic of a Saskatoon furniture warehouse to building two of Canada's best-known startups — and why seeing someone from the block over become a champion is what makes ambition feel possible. He explains how Skip nearly died the day it added delivery, why he calls 2008 "the best marketing coup the banks could have ever asked for," and how Neo negotiates wholesale deposit rates on behalf of billions to pass the savings back, Costco-style. Alex and Jeff also get into what breaks when stablecoins, real-time rails, open banking and agentic finance arrive at once — hot money sweeping between institutions overnight, and bidding wars in the split second between tap and approval — why credit bureaus built before women could vote are still gating home ownership, and why being great in Canada isn't enough.
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    54 mins
  • Will Aave Eat Wall Street? with Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo of Aave Labs

    Will Aave Eat Wall Street? with Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo of Aave Labs
    Sep 23 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo, Chief Strategy and Business Officer at Aave Labs. Listen in as they trace how a peer-to-peer ETH lending experiment called ETHLend became the largest lending protocol in crypto — $80 billion in deposits and roughly $40 billion in loans at peak, on under a thousand lines of code and no back office. Luigi explains why overcollateralized lending doesn't care who you are, what borrowers actually do with the money, and why flows moved to Aave when Celsius and BlockFi blew up. Plus: why Clarity failing may advantage the risk-tolerant, why bank deposit economics break when the floor on a checking account rises, why every fintech he speaks to is already building on DeFi, and why tokenized equities are the most interesting thing to hit crypto since stablecoins.
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    39 mins
  • Economic TruthMaxxing with Stefan Rust of Truflation

    Economic TruthMaxxing with Stefan Rust of Truflation
    Sep 16 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation and former CEO of Bitcoin.com. Listen in as they dig into the number behind the number: why the government still measures inflation by survey using a methodology unchanged in a hundred years, and what changes when you aggregate hundreds of millions of daily data points instead. Stefan explains why $130 trillion is tied to the official print, how Truflation runs ~41 days ahead of the government, and why its number is sometimes lower than CPI, not higher. Plus: what actually drives Fed decisions, why Bitcoin and gold traded like risk assets, and the case that tokenized dollars are what keeps borrowing costs down.
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    40 mins
  • These Two Companies Might Dominate the Next Era of Finance with Gordon Liao of Circle and Ken Ng of Uniswap Labs

    These Two Companies Might Dominate the Next Era of Finance with Gordon Liao of Circle and Ken Ng of Uniswap Labs
    Sep 10 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto, fintech and AI with special guests Gordon Liao, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Circle, and Ken Ng, Head of Ecosystem at Uniswap Labs. Listen in as Gordon explains why Circle is building Arc — a layer one purpose-built for stablecoin finance, with USDC as gas and the settlement finality institutions need to move trillions in real-world assets — and why another chain doesn't mean another silo. Ken makes the case that Uniswap is the real everything exchange: list once and you're listed everywhere, across a permissionless platform where Fidelity deployed liquidity without telling anyone first. Together they get into what a shared compliance layer would unlock, whether someone in the Philippines will ever hold BUIDL in $100 increments, and why bearer instruments — a centuries-old idea — are the key to tokenized assets. Plus: Circle's $400M all-stock acquisition and stablecoins as global payment rails, what's actually happening at the long end of the bond market, why stablecoins may become the stickiest buyer of short-term government debt, and how AI agents will use crypto — not just to pay each other, but to raise capital.
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    38 mins
  • "It's in the Vault" — Breaking Down Crypto's Hot New Thing with Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic of Steakhouse Financial

    "It's in the Vault" — Breaking Down Crypto's Hot New Thing with Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic of Steakhouse Financial
    Sep 1 2026
    Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, Co-Founder of Steakhouse Financial. Listen in as they unpack the buzziest topic in DeFi right now: vaults. Adrian explains what a vault actually is (and why the word is as broad as "token"), why most vault capital sits in lending markets, and how onchain vaults can strike a NAV in real time in ways traditional funds and ETFs can't. They dig into Steakhouse's role as one of the largest risk curators in onchain finance — curating close to half the stablecoin deposits on Morpho and serving as the exclusive risk curator of Robinhood Earn — and what a curator can and can't do with your assets. Alex and Adrian also cover the "physics of DeFi," the regulatory road ahead for vaults and the CLARITY Act, who absorbs the losses when things go wrong, and why reimagining finance from first principles is the real frontier.
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    36 mins