The Rollup

Lincoln Murr breaks down why Coinbase is building toward a post-AGI economy where autonomous agents hold their own financial accounts and transact using digital assets rails. He also unpacks the geopolitics of AI regulation, from potential government stakes in frontier labs to the rise of cheaper Chinese models challenging U.S. dominance. Lincoln Murr is the Head of AI Product at Coinbase, leading...

Michael Egorov breaks down why FX markets are slowly but inevitably moving onchain, driven by real demand from crypto-native fintechs rather than a big institutional push. He also explains how Curve is evolving its concentrated liquidity design to support currency pairs beyond stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps, and why dollars that enter the chain tend to stay there. Michael Egorov is the Founder and...

Niklas Kunkel breaks down the strange divergence between record institutional bullishness on digital assets and the apathy in digital asset-native circles. He also details Chronicle's path to becoming the leading oracle, the mechanics of an upcoming token, and why the next phase of tokenization is just beginning. Niklas Kunkel is the Founder and CEO of Chronicle Labs, the oracle infrastructure...

Gracy Chen breaks down how Bitget evolved into a universal platform offering tokenized stocks, ETFs, bonds, forex, and pre-IPO positions, shares the 10% vision she pitched to BlackRock CEO Rob Goldstein, and explains why stablecoin issuers and Solana's RWA positioning are the biggest winners of the tokenization wave. One of the most globally-minded CEO perspectives we've had on the show. G...

Amos joins us to break down why inference is the new oil and companies will hedge inference costs the same way airlines hedge jet fuel, why AntSeed is open router without open router in the middle, and why all network revenue goes to buy and burn with no company capturing value. 14 years in crypto. This is what he's building next. Amos Meiri is Co-Founder of AntSeed, an open-source P2P marketp...

Yesterday Robinhood hosted their “The World is Flat” event where they announced the Robinhood chain mainnet & deepened relationship with Lighter, amidst many other digital asset focused initiatives. Lighter was named the official perps partner of Robinhood and will be directly integrated within the Robinhood wallet. Vladimir Novakovski is CEO and Co-Founder of Lighter, a decentralized perpetua...

VirtualBacon Dennis Liu breaks down why Bitcoin at 58K is deep value territory, why the four year cycle has repeated exactly as expected and isn't going anywhere, and why HYPE and Lighter are the cleanest expressions of the tokenization trade while ETH wins the underlying technology stack. Plus his hot take on MicroStrategy's real liquidation level and why the $1.25B Bitcoin sale is barely...

MoneyGram CEO Anthony Soohoo breaks down why launching MGUSD was a vertical integration play straight out of Apple's microprocessor playbook, why MoneyGram's 500,000 physical locations are an unbeatable moat in a stablecoin world, and why their new Kraken partnership lets anyone cash out crypto at a MoneyGram or Walmart location worldwide. Anthony Soohoo is Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, a...

Evan Fisher breaks down why blockchain is more analogous to legal technology than financial technology, why AI-proof moats in crypto are network effects, liquidity, and trust rather than code, and why momentum investors who mistake good metrics for durable value will be this cycle's biggest losers. Evan Fisher is Founder of Portal Ventures, a pre-seed blockchain investment firm managing $120M...

Se Yong Park breaks down why FOMO is building the trading app for the rest of us... any chain, any asset, never miss out again, why AI will commoditize content but can never commoditize money and risk, making social the most defensible moat in on-chain finance, and why FOMO raised $75M from Benchmark, Robinhood, and Coinbase without touching a single venture dollar before closing the round. Se Yon...

Jess Houlgrave breaks down why 2026 is the year of non-USD stablecoins with USDC losing Mica compliance, 30 European banks now issuing a euro stablecoin, and HKD, JPY, SEK and CHF versions all coming to market. She covers WalletConnect's $6B per week in stablecoin volume, why broad asset support is the key to reducing merchant and much more. Jess Houlgrave is CEO of WalletConnect, the leading...

Bernardo Brites breaks down why the Brazilian real is uniquely positioned for a stablecoin, why being pro-banking rather than anti-banking is the only path to the next hundreds of millions of stablecoin users, and how Trace processed $10B of payment volume on just $4M in seed capital before closing a $32M Series A.Bernardo Brites is Co-Founder of Trace Finance, a cross-border payments and stableco...

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce breaks down the state of digital asset regulation in the USA. She joins us to talk through the Rule 611 trade-through proposal that's been 20 years in the making, why the innovation exemption is deliberately narrow, her views on synthetic tokenized securities, and why self-custody and financial privacy are non-negotiable principles she wants embedded into every r...

Sam Boboev breaks down why stablecoins are the native currency of AI agents, why Mastercard's $1.8B blockchain acquisition and Visa's OpenAI partnership signal the payment giants have accepted their stablecoin future, and why the real killer use case for stablecoins isn't consumer payments. Sam Boboev is Founder of Fintech Wrap Up, a media and analytics platform covering AI, stablecoin...

Alexander Cutler breaks down the state of investing in tokens, why Aerodrome is already the number one onchain exchange for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and FX volume, why 100% value redistribution is the only sustainable moat in onchain finance just like Hyperliquid proved in derivatives, and why predictive allocation is an entirely new primitive that lets capital allocators bet on where liquidity needs to...

From pioneering the Transformer architecture now used in every AI stack to building the rails for the agent economy, NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin connects the full arc in this inaugural episode of “Inside NEAR,” a new quarterly series on The Rollup. Illia breaks down NEAR’s early architectural bets that are now paying off, why privacy had to be a base-layer choice, and how it all culminates in...

Vladimir Novakovski sits down with Andy & Robbie to break down the Lighter bull thesis from The Tokenization Tower in NYC. We discuss Lighter's escape hatch design that lets every participant exit through Ethereum even if the protocol fails, why the RFQ model is the key to bootstrapping liquidity for pre-IPO and RWA perps, and why getting Citadel and US institutional capital on chain is th...

David Schamis breaks down why PERE now holds over 10% of HYPE's circulating supply, why the Coinbase and Circle deal added $200M in annual buybacks that the market didn't price in for a full day, and why Hyperliquid's price discovery on Cerebus and SpaceX may make investment bankers irrelevant to the IPO process. David Schamis is CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, a publicly traded company...

Jake Brukman breaks down why a swarm of decentralized agents beat Google's quantum circuit research in a week, why decentralized training on consumer hardware is now provably cheaper than data centers, and why winning just 10% of AI training automatically locks in revenue from a $1 trillion inference market. He published this thesis in September 2022, before ChatGPT existed. Jake Brukman is Fo...

Sam Kazemian breaks down why the Genius Act's 120-day default acceptance is the most bullish structural change for compliant stablecoins, why you can't vibe code liquidity or DeFi integrations regardless of AI, and why the stablecoin supply step function could arrive in 6 to 8 months. Sam Kazemian is Founder of Frax Finance, the protocol behind FRAX USD, a Genius-compliant decentralized st...

DeFi Dad breaks down why lighter's ETH escape hatch makes it the most underrated security feature versus HyperLiquid, why RWA tokenization will eventually eclipse all native crypto tokens by market cap, and why ETH staking yield is effectively the native T-bills rate of the entire DeFi economy. The most convicted ETH bull case you'll hear right now. DeFi Dad is one of the most prominent lo...

Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi breaks down why Bitcoin is not an honest macro asset, why domestic perps will disappoint compared to offshore, and why BNB has been outearning Hyperliquid for years yet nobody wants to talk about it. The most contrarian read on digital assets you'll hear this week. Haseeb Qureshi is Managing Partner at Dragonfly, a leading digital assets venture capital firm. The...

Illia and Mert break down why the Zcash situation is a known ZK circuit trade-off and not the infinite mint catastrophe the market priced in, why Project Tachyon's formal verification is the most bullish upgrade in Zcash history, and why NEAR Intents generated $150K in a single volatile day, buying back NEAR while everyone else was selling. Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, and...

Sal Ternullo joins this episode of AI Supercycle and breaks down why NEAR is a very unique asset in digital assets right now, how intents are building toward a real-economy TAM that dwarfs crypto-to-crypto swaps, and why the path to NEAR going deflationary is closer than the market thinks. The institutional inbound is at record levels, and the market is finally catching up, or so he says. Sal Tern...

Capital Flows and Jaymes Rosenthal join The Rollup to discuss how the PUR gamma squeeze is already happening. Capital Flows and Jaymes Rosenthal are macro traders and HyperLiquid analysts. The Rollup is where the leaders of digital assets and finance converge. Live from the financial capital of the world. Timestamps 00:00 Intro And Disclosures 01:04 Capital Flows Macro Background 04:37 Jaymes Poke...