The Defiant

Michael Saylor built his entire identity around one promise: he would never sell Bitcoin. Last week, that promise ended. Strategy's board voted to authorize selling Bitcoin to cover dividend payments and build cash reserves — in the middle of MSTR and STRC crashing to record lows, the yield blowing up, and confidence in the whole experiment starting to crack. Is this a rational pivot? Or the b...

The Ethereum Foundation just cut 20% of its staff and 40% of its budget. Two co-executive directors are gone. And the talent exodus has been quiet but real.  But the community didn't wait. In a matter of weeks, 50 institutions and Ethereum leaders came together to form ETH Labs — a new organization backed by Sharp Link, Joe Lubin, and Bitmain, with a mandate to build what the Foundation decide...

Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Commerce forced Anthropic to shut down Fable V for the entire world. One government, one decision, zero global access. Is this the definitive case for decentralized AI? Jake Brukhman (Coin Fund), Jesus Rodriguez (Sentora), and Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly) debate the hottest topic at the intersection of crypto and AI: whether frontier AI can and should be decentral...

How close did DeFi come to a real systemic collapse? In this episode, Camila Russo sits down with Mike Silagadze, co-founder and CEO of Ether.fi, to break down the Kelp exploit, the DeFi United rescue effort, and why Mike believes the default path could have been far worse if nobody had stepped in. He explains why the bigger lesson is not just smart contract risk, but operational security, app-lay...

April saw some of the worst DeFi losses in recent memory, and even OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz warned people to get out. But while CT feels gloomy, institutions are not stepping back - they're leaning in with more diligence, stronger infrastructure requirements, and growing demand for onchain yield. In this livestream, Camila Russo is joined by John Zettler of Kraken, Sunand Raghupath...

Top Ethereum talent is leaving. The Ethereum Foundation is shrinking. And one question now hangs over the entire ecosystem: what happens to ETH if the EF steps back? In this livestream, Camila Russo is joined by Dankrad Feist, Laura Shin, Ajit Tripathi, and William Mougayar to break down the EF departures, leadership turmoil, the cypherpunk mandate, the debate over tokenomics, and whether Ethereum...

DeFi is approaching a breaking point. After a wave of hacks and growing concerns around smart contract risk, liquidity risk, and hidden dependencies, the biggest question in crypto is no longer just how much yield you can earn, but whether that yield is actually worth the risk. In this debate, Camila Russo is joined by Santiago Roel Santos of Inversion, Daniele Ugolini of Rysk Finance, and Maurici...

Explosive debate: after one of DeFi's biggest attacks left Aave facing bad debt, DeFi United raised more than $300M to stop the contagion. But did the ecosystem prove its strength - or expose hidden trust assumptions, opaque risk, and the need for a real DeFi backstop? The Defiant's Camila Russo is joined by Dean Eigenmann (Markets Inc.), binji (Ethereum Foundation), and David Phelps (Conf...

The Arbitrum Security Council just made one of the most controversial decisions in DeFi history — freezing $70M in ETH stolen by North Korean hackers from the KelpDAO bridge exploit. But was it the right move? And what does it say about the systems we're building? Griff Green (Giveth Co-Founder and Arbitrum Security Council member) and Gabe Shapiro / Lex_node (crypto lawyer, MetaLex founder, Z...

Two new research papers just intensified one of crypto’s most serious long-term risks: quantum computing. In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Camila Russo sits down with Alex Pruden, co-founder and CEO of Project 11, to unpack what the latest quantum breakthroughs actually mean for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the broader crypto ecosystem. Alex explains why the new papers matter, how quantum compute...

A new DeFi exploit triggered millions in losses, but the deeper story is about risk. In this episode, Omer Goldberg, founder of Chaos Labs, explains how the attack unfolded, why the damage spread across lending markets, what vault curators got wrong, and whether DeFi is truly ready for mainstream adoption. If you want to understand stablecoin risk, oracle design, curator incentives, and the future...

What happens when the institution at the center of U.S. market plumbing starts putting securities onchain? In this episode of The Defiant, Chris Storaker sits down with Tom Sullivan, Managing Director at DTCC Digital Assets, to discuss how DTCC is approaching tokenization, why regulatory clarity changed the game, and what it means for U.S. Treasuries, stocks, ETFs, collateral, and 24/7 markets. To...

New Podcast with Aave founder Stani Kulechov just dropped: Aave is at a turning point - will the Aave Will Win proposal lead to innovation or chaos? Aave is navigating a pivotal moment with the recent "Aave will win" proposal. This initiative aims to redirect 100% of protocol revenue back to the Aave DAO, a move that many in the community have embraced. But with any major change comes sc...

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Camila Russo sits down with Jing Wang to discuss how Optimism is evolving and why the debate over what counts as a “real” Ethereum L2 might be missing the point. Jing argues that the most important question isn’t whether a chain is an L1, L2, or sidechain. It’s whether the architecture actually serves users and real-world use cases. “If it looks like an L1,...

Layer 2 was supposed to scale Ethereum. But what if it fragmented it instead? I n this episode, we break down: • Why public chains are “expensive databases” • Why composability is Ethereum’s real value • Why stablecoins don’t need blockchains • Why L2 may be weakening Ethereum’s core Is scaling helping Ethereum — or hollowing it out? Explore The Defiant ✨

Bitcoin Renaissance or JPEG Hype? In 2023, Bitcoin had what many called a renaissance. NFTs on Bitcoin. BRC-20 tokens. Runes.10x transaction spikes. Fee revenue surging to levels not seen since 2017.And then — just as quickly — it cooled. So was the Bitcoin renaissance just a flash in the pan? Or did Ordinals, BRC-20s, and Runes permanently change Bitcoin? In Episode 2 of our Beyond Digital Gold d...

"In a decentralized governance system, it's unavoidable to develop politics." Rune Christensen explains why DAO governance becomes a struggle for resources, how the "iron law of bureaucracy" emerges, and why Sky redesigned its architecture to survive it. From USDS growth to the Atlas rulebook and Genesis Capital — this is Sky's long-term vision for sustainable decentral...

Robinhood is opening the testnet for its Arbitrum-based Ethereum Layer 2. In this episode, we sit down with the fintech’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, to discuss the strategic move to build on Ethereum. He believes institutions can get the privacy and compliance guarantees they need on public chains like Ethereum, so building on private chains doesn’t make sense as they are just a “fancy databa...

Stablecoins have quietly become the most successful use case in crypto. In this episode, Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Circle, explains why USDC is more than a digital dollar — it’s a global financial network. We discuss economic inclusion, internet-scale finance, programmable payments, emerging markets, AI-driven payments, and why stablecoins are becoming the backbone...

2025 marked a turning point for crypto. In this episode, Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, sits down with Camila Russo to explain why institutional adoption accelerated last year. From ETFs and stablecoin regulation to banks using public blockchains in production, crypto crossed a line it can’t uncross. We explore how Coinbase evolved from a retail exchange into a global financial inf...

Kain Warwick —DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix and Infinex —is back on The Defiant Podcast with Camila Russo for a no-BS conversation at a pivotal moment: Infinex just ran its INX token sale and is heading into its TGE. We get into: Why Kain believes DeFi’s biggest bottleneck isn’t “more decentralization,” but UX + distribution The hard lesson OG DeFi learned: users won’t “learn to love complexity...

In this interview, Camila Russo sits down with Danny Ryan — former Ethereum Foundation researcher and a key leader behind Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake — now Co-Founder & President at Etherealize , to talk about the next big wave for crypto: institutional adoption of Ethereum . Recorded in Buenos Aires during Devconnect , Danny breaks down why the mood inside banks has flipped from “we ca...

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Chris Storaker sits down with Alex Garn, Chief Product Officer at Borderless, to unpack how stablecoins are quietly transforming cross-border payments — and what it actually takes to move money at scale across jurisdictions. Alex walks through Borderless’ role as an orchestration layer for global on- and off-ramps, why the company stays out of the flow of fu...

For consumer crypto to thrive it needs to embrace financialization to deliver a better experience, and maker sure crypto disappears everywhere else. Projects doing this right sit in an emerging sector called fantech. In this episode of the Avalanche Ecosystem Series, we explore the rise of Fantech: a new category where sports fans, music fans, creators, and event-goers become participants in real...

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams joins us right as the UNIfication (Unification) proposal has moved to a final governance vote—a sweeping plan from Uniswap Labs + the Uniswap Foundation that would activate protocol fees, introduce a programmatic UNI burn, and realign how value accrues across the Uniswap ecosystem. We go deep on what’s actually inside the propos...