MoneyNeverSleeps

This week nearly half the companies on the OKX-ICE tokenized stock list opted out, and in the same week DTCC went live on Canton with JPMorgan signed up. That had me questioning my long-held view that TradFi would eventually fold into DeFi, so I asked Benedetto Biondi, co-founder and CEO of crosschain lending protocol Folks Finance and one of our Techstars Web3 mentors. He thinks DeFi’s early cybe...

Alejandro Gutierrez of Superteam Ireland is back to take on Matt Walsh's challenge: are tokenized funds a new kind of asset, or the same fund on new rails? Off the back of BlackRock and Ondo putting model portfolios onchain, we get into the six ways people are tokenizing a share, whether a Terra moment or a regulator forces them to consolidate, and what happens to a fund's operating model...

Pete Townsend is joined by Eoghan Powell, who runs WorkIQ, a new innovation centre for founders and early-stage companies in Tallaght, on the edge of Dublin. This is Part 2 of a pair on the Irish startup scene, after Derek O'Doherty of West x West on the capital side . Where Derek covered how founders find the money, Eoghan goes underneath that, to where founders come from in the first place....

Pete Townsend is joined by Derek O'Doherty, founder of West x West, the two-day tech, venture and culture festival in Castlebar, Mayo that brings Irish founders together with global investors. Derek spent thirty years in capital markets across London, Sydney and New York, and until last week a year inside Enterprise Ireland building international VC relationships for scaling companies. They ge...

Steve Whyman spent 20 years trading fixed income at Bear Stearns, ABN AMRO, and BlackRock, then ran digital assets and tokenization inside Fidelity International, before leaving in 2025 to build onchain-native. In this episode he makes the case for tokenization from the one seat almost nobody tells it from: the trading desk. What pulled him out was seeing blockchain put every instrument on the sam...

Justin Swart, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, joins Pete Townsend to make the case that tokenization is doing to finance what the shipping container did to global trade (standardizing the box, not the cargo - h/t Aleks Larsen, Blockchain Capital), whether that's real containerization or just the same fragmentation problem moved onchain, how BITKRAFT's early bet on Roundhill's record-brea...

Andrea Miele is co-founder and CEO of Beezie , a gamified commerce platform Pete Townsend backed through Techstars in 2024, joins Pete to talk about why the "TCG" label never captured what Beezie actually is, what it took to raise a second round after some of the best-known funds in the space passed on her more than once, and what's next now that Beezie has expanded to Base and Solan...

James McCann, CEO and founder of Everhaze , joins Pete Townsend to talk about the 80/20 problem breaking PR agency economics, how an agentic layer turns hundreds of daily regulatory mentions into a 10-minute digest for a fintech client, where the human side of PR (the trust, the intros, the relationships) still does the heavy lifting, and why VC skepticism about AI-wrapped software didn't stop...

Elaine Deehan is back on MoneyNeverSleeps for her third appearance, and this one has been a long time coming. As Ireland Country Manager of Monzo Bank Europe, Elaine is doing what she's always done: building something that makes banking feel genuinely human, and genuinely Irish. Download the Monzo app and open your account at : https://monzo.com/ie Monzo went fully live in Ireland on April 14t...

Sheila Lynch has been in the room for three of the biggest financial shocks of the last five years — COVID at CQS, the Russian invasion of Ukraine at BlackRock with live Eastern European assets in the funds, and the SVB collapse. When systems go under stress, what's actually there gets revealed. Culture, training, processes — either they hold or they don't. This episode is about what found...

How can you use the world's most powerful AI models without ever exposing your sensitive data? Rami Akeela has spent twenty years building privacy and cryptographic infrastructure that most people didn't know they needed yet, and now, as founder of Nera Systems , he's solving the conundrum that's about to define enterprise AI — the more valuable your data, the less you can use it....

Citi Institute's "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street OnChain" puts a number on it: $5.5 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. Alejandro Gutierrez, who leads Solana Superteam Ireland and returns for another appearance on the show, joins me to stress-test that forecast — what Citi gets right with DTCC, NYSE and Nasdaq embedding tokenization into core infrastructure, and what we think it misses, includin...

Martin Watkins is CEO of Montis Group , which is building a blockchain-native central securities depository — the settlement and issuance layer that makes tokenized assets work as real financial products. With 30 years inside Euroclear, AtosEuronext and EY, Martin chose to build the infrastructure the market was missing rather than keep advising on the existing system. We get into what a digital C...

Pete Townsend is joined by Eric Ries, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, for a conversation about the invisible structural forces that corrupt even the most mission-driven companies, and what founders can do about it before it's too late. Eric's new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay...

Pete Townsend is joined by Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN and Managing Partner at A100x Ventures, for a conversation about how to tell the difference between a token that represents ownership of the value-creating thing and one that's an accelerant bolted onto something else. Sal has been underwriting these decisions at A100x at the pre-seed and seed stage. He walks through what's actually chan...

You Can't Code Your Way Out | Amor Sexton, Blockdaemon In the last few weeks, Drift and Kelp lost $577 million between them. Neither one was a code exploit. Both were operational and governance failures. Amor Sexton, Chief Operating Officer at Blockdaemon, was last on MoneyNeverSleeps in October 2022 (EP 193) talking about how institutional client expectations of resilient processes would drive bl...

Dan Gold is founder and CEO of Stratiphy, and as far as anyone knows, the only platform offering tax-efficient crypto exposure to UK retail investors right now. The path got narrow fast. The FCA lifted the retail crypto ETN ban in October 2025. HMRC then closed the stocks-and-shares ISA route at the start of this tax year, leaving crypto ETNs eligible only for Innovative Finance ISAs, which no mai...

Tokenization has a perception problem. The industry keeps selling it as an efficiency play — less friction, more transparency, better infrastructure. But if tokenization doesn't help you sell more of whatever you've tokenized, it's irrelevant. Alejandro Gutierrez leads Solana Superteam Ireland and has been building in this space since before most people knew what tokenization meant. Co-founder of...

Brian McNulty has been building toward this moment for a decade. When he co-founded the Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group with the London Stock Exchange back in 2015, he was helping the industry imagine what tokenized funds might one day look like. On April 21st 2026, he rings the bell at that same exchange to launch DVF — Lingfeng Capital's Digital Venture Fund — and the circle closes. In t...

Who's watching the agent? That's the question at the heart of this episode — and it's one that's going to define the next decade of finance. Rob Viglione spent his career figuring out how machines make decisions in high-stakes environments. From the US Air Force to Afghanistan, and now as Co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, he's building the cryptographic trust infrastructure f...

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not. John Hill, VP of Story at Whop, has spent his career watching founders in Cape Town, Lagos, and Medellín build something real — and then hit a wall the moment they try to get paid. Whop is an AI-backed platform where anyone can build a digital business in minutes, and in February 2026 it closed a $200 million investment from Tether to embed stable...

Markets don't close when the exchange does. They just move somewhere else. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Alex Pollak of 21Shares about why crypto ETPs are not just surviving the rise of onchain finance — they're about to become part of it. Alex Pollak is Managing Director and Head of UK and New Markets at 21Shares, which provides the largest suite of crypto...

DeFi transparency means every onchain trade is visible. Which means the moment a strategy works, the market can copy it. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Matteo Manzi , co-founder and CEO of Orion Finance , about a structural challenge emerging in onchain asset management: the same transparency that makes blockchain markets verifiable can also expose the intellectual...

Money doesn’t become digital overnight. It becomes digital when the rails of finance begin to change. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Emma Landriault of JPMorgan about why stablecoins and bank-issued deposit tokens may end up reinforcing, rather than replacing, each other. Emma Landriault is Executive Director at JPMorgan and global product lead for JPM Coin , a dep...

Money doesn’t become geopolitical overnight. It becomes geopolitical when the rails start to change. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend is joined by Sean Lee for a focused conversation on what China is really building with the digital yuan and why this moment is about infrastructure, not currency replacement. Drawing on recent meetings with the People’s Bank of China, Sean explains...