Bits and Borders

Christian Catalini is a co-founder of Lightspark, co-creator of Libra and founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making intelligence cheap while verification remains scarce, and how businesses can compete by owning proprietary information and standing behind AI-generated work. They also discuss why he expects most everyday agentic commerce to use e...

Welcome to the Intent Layer, a special Bits and Borders miniseries exploring the agentic finance frontier Our first episode is with Erik Reppel: creator of x402, a Coinbase advisor on agentic commerce and the former head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform. He joins host Aaron Stanley live from Ai4 to discuss how pay-per-use payments let agents buy data, content and API access while comp...

Rony Vernet is an electronic engineer, physics researcher and Brazi's leading UAP researcher. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss his argument that the race for artificial intelligence may also be a race to reverse-engineer UAP technology. Rony recounts his own close encounters and investigations in Varginha, the Amazon, the Atacama Desert and Antarctica. They also examine what broader disc...

Kristin Smith is President of the Solana Policy Institute. She joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why the Clarity Act stalled in the US Senate. Kristin explains how the politics around President Trump, opposition from the banking lobby and a shifting Democratic electorate derailed the bill, and why she believes the industry still came out ahead as the SEC and CFTC move to write rules on their own...

Marcos Allende is CEO and co-founder of Blerify. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making passwords, selfie checks and passport scans obsolete as a way to prove identity online. Marcos explains how Blerify's identity wallets and blockchain-based trust registry allow digital IDs to be verified across borders, and why companies and governments need to adopt post-quantum cryptograp...

Didier Lavallée is the CEO of Tetra Digital Group, the Canadian trust company behind CAD Digital (CADD), a Canadian dollar stablecoin that launched in May. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why Canada went so long without a usable domestic stablecoin, and how Tetra grew out of the QuadrigaCX collapse into the country's first qualified digital asset custodian. They get into the early deman...

Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio to discuss the shift from crypto wallet to everyday finance app, where users save, spend and invest dollars in one place. In August, daily payment transactions on the wallet overtook daily trading transactions for the first time in its eight-year history. Kan explains why he expects payments and trading apps to co...

Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital. He joins host Aaron Stanley for a deep dive on quantum computing, which has become one of the main factors weighing on crypto markets in 2026. Gean breaks down the March paper from Google Quantum AI that cut the estimated hardware requirement for breaking Bitcoin twentyfold, explains why roughly 6.9 million bitcoins already have their public keys expo...

Raagulan Pathy is the CEO of Kast. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio 2026, a year after his first appearance and roughly $80 million in Series A funding later. Rags explains why he thinks the stablecoin neobank market is winner take most, why Kast scrapped its planned token airdrop in favor of equity, and what the company found when 20 to 30% of its users started running business spend...

Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso Business' Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing identity fraud. Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month, and Brovin describes a clear shift over the past year: criminals have stopped faking documents by hand and started training agents to attempt verification programmaticall...

Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li are co-founder/CEO and co-founder/CTO of Knowidea. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas to discuss why they're betting on formally verified, deterministic AI instead of the 95 percent confidence models most companies accept. The two explain their neurosymbolic architecture, which forces AI agents to produce a mathematical proof for every...

Luca Prosperi is CEO and co-founder of M0. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss the state of stablecoin infrastructure in 2026, two years after his first appearance on the show. They cover the wallet-centric shift in finance, the fight over stablecoin yield, and why Prosperi thinks local-currency stablecoins, not on-chain FX, will be the next big trend. Prosperi also breaks down what M0's pa...

Joao Reginatto of M0, Monica Ramirez of Anchorage Digital, Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs, and Sheraz Shere of Solana Foundation join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss stablecoin readiness and the gap between corporate intent and implementation. The tech and the regulatory picture have mostly caught up, but companies are still stuck on account...

Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. She joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss why distribution, not issuance, is the hardest problem left to solve in tokenized real world assets. We talk through Open Trade's B2B2C stablecoin yield model gaining traction across LATAM and APAC, a coming wave of consolidation among crypto neobanks and car...

Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss El Dorado's new $9 million Series A round, led by Paradigm with Coinbase Ventures participating. Goncalvez explains how El Dorado is taking the liquidity network it built serving over a million consumers across Latin America and redeploying it for a new B2B produc...

Rafael Luz and Bernardo Brites are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss the company's $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin. The company recently raised a $32 million round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, and oth...

Ezra Kebrab is co-founder of Caliza. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss cross-border stablecoin payments in Latin America. Recorded live at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City. Caliza handles cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume flowing between Brazil, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, and the US. Kebrab traces his path from Visa, where he watched Pix transform real...

Robson Silva Junior is Co-Founder of Pods. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DeFi's mixed retail adoption led Pods to build modular yield infrastructure for Latin America's neobanks. Recorded live at the Token Nation event in São Paulo, the conversation traces Silva's path from naval engineering to early AMM research during Singapore's ICO era. Silva explains why Pods aban...

Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why cross-border stablecoin payments are still broken, and how Checker is building the infrastructure layer to fix it. Chong's path from Hong Kong to Oxford to a language school in Jordan to building st...

David Z. Morris is a financial journalist and author of S tealing the Future , a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss what the criminal trial revealed that earlier books missed, why Michael Lewis's account functionally serves as a defense of the fraud, and how the ideology that shaped Sam Bankman-Fried cont...

Luiz Octavio Gonçalves Neto is the founder and CEO of DUX, a company building financial infrastructure for the creative economy in Brazil. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DUX uses invoice factoring and blockchain-based liquidity to serve a $2.5 trillion global sector that traditional banks have largely ignored. DUX buys receivables from creative economy companies, marketing agencies, ev...

Sthefano Batista is Head of Latam at Figment, the world's largest institutional provider of staking services with $18 billion in assets staked. Recorded live at Merge Sao Paulo, Sthefano joins host Aaron Stanley to break down how Figment is building the staking market across Latin America, why major institutions like BlackRock, Nubank, and Robinhood trust Figment with their crypto yield strate...

Rodrigo Coelho is CEO of Edge & Node. In this episode, recorded live at Merge Sao Paulo, joins host Aaron Stanley to explore the cutting edge of agentic commerce and blockchain data infrastructure. Rodrigo shares how Edge & Node, the original team behind The Graph protocol - built the indexing layer that quietly powers much of Web3 today, and how their new product, AMP, is modernizing that...

Owen Healy has spent five years matching blockchain talent with crypto projects around the world - and he's built a 50,000-follower LinkedIn following doing it. In this episode, Aaron sits down with the Ireland-based recruiter to explore how the blockchain talent market actually works: how recruiters get paid, how candidates can trust a headhunter is acting in their interest, and why referrals...

Rodrigo Trindade is an investor at Iporanga Ventures. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss his comprehensive research on local stablecoin adoption across Brazil and Latin America. Rodrigo built his own tracking dashboard monitoring on-chain metrics including supply, holders, transaction volumes, and DeFi activity for regional stablecoins. He argues that while USD-denominated stablecoins will rem...