TRM Talks

North Korea's hackers have pulled off the largest crypto theft on record, $6.36 billion from Binance, and Nick Carlsen, a former FBI analyst and TRM Labs investigator, was the first to pin it on Pyongyang, within a couple of hours of the first outflows. Nick joins Ari Redbord , TRM Labs' Global Head of Policy, to walk through the afternoon the hack unfolded, the on-chain clues that pointed back to...

Lewis Rinaudo Cohen, Co-Head of Cahill Next at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, joins Ari, to explain why he calls his practice "machine law," not AI law. It's about the legal questions that arise when autonomous agents, not humans, execute financial transactions at scale. Ari and Lewis talk about his path from structured and Islamic finance to founding a crypto boutique in 2018 and building Cahill Ne...

Last week TRM announced Ardence, an AI investigation platform that combines on-chain blockchain data with more than 50 off-chain partner sources into a single picture of risk. In this episode of TRM Talks, Ari Redbord, TRM Labs' Global Head of Policy, sits down with two of the people who built Ardence, Simon Warren and Lexie Nappi, to talk about what it takes to build an AI investigations platform...

Sanjeev Bhasker was a federal prosecutor, Digital Currency Counsel at DOJ, cyber counsel in the Biden White House, and acting general counsel in the second Trump administration. He is now at K&L Gates. He joins Ari for his second TRM Talks. Sanjeev tried nearly a hundred cases as a prosecutor and used BSA reporting to trace dark-web crypto cases back through exchanges. At the White House he wo...

Amy Oldenburg spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley — operations, emerging-market FX, the trading desk, then the firm's global emerging-market investing business — before the bank created a Head of Digital Assets seat and asked her to do it full time. In this TRM Talks, Amy joins Ari to talk about how she leveraged over two decades at the Morgan Stanley to accelerate the firm’s exploration into digital...

In this episode, Ari is joined by close friends and two of the most important voices in our space: Rebecca Rettig, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Jito Labs, and Michael Mosier, founding partner of Arktouros and former acting director of FinCEN. Rebecca developed deep subject matter expertise as a financial-services litigator working with the earliest DeFi protocols, including a...

Australia just rolled out its biggest anti-money laundering reform in two decades — and it didn't just tighten existing rules, it more than doubled the number of businesses AUSTRAC regulates almost overnight, from roughly 19,000 to over 50,000, sweeping in lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones for the first time. Brad Brown, AUSTRAC's National...

In 1934, legal scholar Adolf Berle wrote a footnote speculating that someone might one day hold a passive property right in active property — what we'd now call a governance token. He called it a problem for another day. For Teresa Goody Guillén, founding partner of Bellamentis and founder of the legal AI platform Sophie Lex, that day is now, and it's reshaping how she advises clients buil...

Juan Zarate joined the US Treasury just three weeks before September 11, 2001, and helped build the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), transforming Treasury into a cornerstone of American national security. He later chronicled that evolution in Treasury’s War, the definitive account of how financial intelligence, sanctions, and economic power became central tools of US statecraf...

Criminals have no compliance officers and no regulators looking over their shoulder. That means their barrier to adopting new technology — including AI — is effectively zero. They don't need a tool to work for five years. They need it to work for the next five hours. Vatsa Narasimha, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, has been watching this asymmetry define the fraud landscape for years, and his answer i...

On this TRM Talks, Ari sits down with the team behind Unchained DEX in the City — three of the sharpest legal minds in crypto and three of his closest friends — for a wide-ranging conversation about the regulatory questions reshaping the industry in real time. TuongVy Le, Jessi Brooks, and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos bring their distinct backgrounds as prosecutors, general counsels, and enforcement...

If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What's been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week's TRM Talks. Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of P...

Brynly Llyr has deep roots in fintech and blockchain — in-house at eBay, PayPal, and Ripple, where she served as one of the first general counsels in crypto, then founding team at Celo, then Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Now she’s Deputy Commissioner for Digital Financial Assets at the California DFPI, leading the rollout of the Digital Financial Assets Law, wh...

Behind every laundered transaction is a real victim, a real crime, and a real reason to do this work well. That conviction has shaped Sophie Bowler's entire career — from her first job working on the EU's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive as an intern in Brussels, to her current role as Global Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Zodia Custody. In this conversation with Ari Redbord ,...

Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementatio...

When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains. That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dolla...

Crypto investigations are becoming a core part of modern policing. From ransomware and darknet markets to fraud and organized crime, digital assets increasingly appear in criminal investigations. Det. Anoop “Snoop” Dattani of the Regional Organized Crime Unit at West Midlands Police joins Ari to discuss how investigators are adapting. Drawing on nearly two decades in policing and extensive cyber i...

Chee Kin Lam, Head of Legal and Compliance at DBS Bank — one of the world's first major banks to receive a digital payment token license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore — joins Ari on this episode of TRM Talks. Chee Kin shares a career spanning 30-plus years across JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, and DBS Bank, and what he learned along the way about people, culture, and getting things...

Privacy and transparency sit at the heart of the digital asset ecosystem. As blockchain technology continues to reshape global finance, policymakers and builders face a critical question: How can financial systems preserve privacy while still protecting against illicit activity? In this episode, Yaya Fanusie, Global Head of Policy at Aleo, join's Ari to explore the evolving intersection of pri...

Romance and “investment” scams are not random. They are engineered — built on trust, pressure, and highly scripted manipulation. And while crypto is often the payment rail, the underlying crime is familiar: fraud that targets everyday people and drains life savings. In this episode, Detective Matt Hogan of the Connecticut State Police and scam survivor Jackie Crenshaw join Ari to walk through how...

Kah Kit Yip has spent his career turning bold ideas about the future of money into working infrastructure. After nearly two decades at Malaysia’s central bank and leading breakthrough initiatives at the Bank for International Settlements, he helped pioneer new models for instant cross-border payments, programmable compliance, and faster, safer FX settlement. Now, as Head of Blockchain and Digital...

From the Federal Reserve on 9/11 to Capitol Hill during the 2008 financial crisis, Adam Meinhardt’s career spans some of the most pivotal moments in economic policy. Now, as Head of Public Policy at Chainlink, he's helping shape crypto regulation during a historic legislative push. In this episode, Adam joins Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, to explore what it takes to engage policy...

Crypto law has matured quickly — and few people have been closer to that evolution than OG crypto lawyer Joshua Klayman. In this episode of TRM Talks, Joshua Klayman, US Head of Fintech and Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at Linklaters, joins Ari for a wide-ranging conversation on how legal frameworks around digital assets, tokenization, and blockchain-based finance are taking shape in real...

What does the future of crypto look like in 2026? TRM’s global team weighs in. In this special New Year’s edition, Ari is joined by TRM colleagues from around the world — investigators, compliance leaders, product strategists, and policy experts — to share their bold predictions for 2026. Across the episode, TRM team members explore: The end of theory, and the beginning of execution How AI is acce...

2025 was the year of stablecoins — and there’s no better person to look back (and ahead) with than Dante Disparte of Circle. In this Flash TRM Talks, Ari and Dante reflect on Circle’s big year, the passage of the GENIUS Act, shifting US market structure, and accelerating global regulatory alignment. They also share predictions for 2026 — including why privacy and global coordination will define cr...