Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Kendall Cole, Head of Product at NEAR Protocol, a base-layer blockchain designed to provide the ideal environment for dapps by overcoming some of the limitations of competing systems—such as low throughput, low speeds, and poor cross-compatibility. Kendall is in the process of transitioning out of his current role with NEAR to co-found Proximity Labs, a p...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Matthew Schultz, Chairman and Director of CleanSpark. He served as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer from 2014 through October 2019 and has been involved in many capacities with several publicly traded companies. He served as the President and CEO of Amerigo Energy, Inc., creating multiple syndicated offerings of developmental oil production progra...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Dan Martell, CEO, and Founder of SaaS Academy. Dan is a serial entrepreneur having built several multi-million dollar technology companies starting at the age of 17. He's also an award-winning angel investor, having invested in companies like Intercom, Udemy, Hootsuite, Unbounce. Today he's an executive coach focused exclusively on B2B SaaS w...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Micha Benoliel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nodle, a privacy-first, decentralized wireless network for connecting Internet of Things devices and sensors to the Internet, and Coalition Network, a non-profit foundation that provides open-source, secure exposure notification solutions for governments and enterprises to protect their citizens during pandemics....

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Matt Marcus, Chief Product Officer & C0-Founder of Modern Treasury. Matt was responsible for building the payment operations system at LendingHome, which has funded over $3 billion in mortgage loans. When they really started to scale, the number of payments we made exploded — from hundreds to tens of thousands per month — and that’s when they started u...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Marcus New, CEO of InvestX. Marcus New has an accomplished career in the private and public financial markets that spans over three decades and is a pioneer in the pre-IPO asset class. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of InvestX Capital, a trading platform that delivers access and liquidity to the growth equity asset class and empowers the...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Victor Zhang, the CEO of Alphawallet. Alphawallet is the maker of AlchemyNFT, an attestation and remixing protocol for NFTs. One of its first iterations is AutographNFT.io, a platform where anyone can request a verified autograph, authenticated via Twitter profile. The technology that makes this happen is TokenScript, which transforms NFTs by adding ut...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Charlie Silver, CEO of Permission.io. Charlie is a successful entrepreneur who has founded and exited 5 startups in technology, media, and finance. He co-founded Onramp Invest, Blockforce Capital, and Reality Shares which created 7 publicly traded ETFs including the first Blockchain equity ETF(BLCN). In the dot-com era, he built RealAge which was successfu...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Pat Duffy, Co-founder of The Giving Block. Pat along with Alex Wilson created The Giving Block in 2018, developing the leading solutions that charities, universities and other nonprofits use to fundraise cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They quickly established themselves as the leading crypto fundraising experts through the explosive growth of their progra...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Alex Adelman, CEO & Co-founder of Lolli, a rewards application that lets people earn bitcoin when they shop online from 1,000+ top merchants. Alex was previously the CEO & Co-founder of Cosmic, the leading e-commerce gateway, which was acquired by PopSugar in ’15 and then by Ebates in ’17. Alex positioned Cosmic and Lolli as high growth, high v...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Shmulik Fishman, the founder, and CEO of Argyle, which provides a universal, trusted platform for accessing employment records with worker consent. He started Argyle in 2018 after experiencing the complexity of work verification for his previous venture STRATIM. Shmulik is a published author and has an undergraduate degree from Hampshire College where he...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Wagner Ruiz, the Co-Founder and Chief Risk Officer (CRO) of EBANX. Wagner focuses on risk management, strategic partnerships, and regulatory operation, which are the essential pillars in the growth of the fintech company. Prior to being CRO, Wagner served as EBANX's Chief Financial Officer for almost nine years, since its founding in 2012. As CFO,...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Gershie Vann, the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Magma Capital Funds. Gershie provides vision to the broader organization and implements strategic investment decisions in accordance with Magma’s investment approach and philosophy. Gershie has previous professional experience utilizing data analytics and process design. Gershie holds a BS in Finan...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Craig J. Lewis, the Founder and CEO of Gig Wage, a venture capital backed SaaS company that’s raised $16.45 million to-date to meet the demands of the future workforce and to build modern payment tools for it. Investors have included Steve Case (Founder of AOL) and his Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Venture Fund, Foundry Group, Green Dot Corp. (NYSE: GDOT)...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Brian Shniderman, CEO of Opy and Chief Strategy Officer of Openpay. With over 30 years focused on payments of every kind, between all types of parties, and in almost every major country, Brian has been a frequent contributor to banking journals, has published numerous white papers addressing trends, threats, and strategic opportunities in banking and paym...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Robert Materazzi, the CEO of Lukka. Prior to joining Lukka, he served as Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, specializing in large risk, regulatory, and cybersecurity-driven technology implementations for traditional financial institutions and foreign banking organizations. Robert also led the PwC Advisory Veterans Recruiting and Mentorship Initiative....

In this episode, Tegan Kline interviews James Simpson, the founder of  mStable, a stablecoin automated market maker on Ethereum and Polygon. Before founding mStable, James was the first employee at Australian crypto hedge fund Apollo Capital, worked as a management consultant at KPMG, Shanghai, and later as a data analyst at KPMG, Melbourne. James studied foreign policy and economics at the Univer...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Steven Xavier Chan, the senior director and regional head of government relations, Asia-Pacific, for Paypal Inc. Based in Singapore, he leads government advocacy, strategy, and outreach efforts in the region. Steven has more than 20 years of combined government and industry experience in international trade and public policy. Prior to joining Paypal in Au...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Arthur Breitman, Co-founder of Tezos. Arthur is an early architect of the Tezos protocol. Prior to becoming involved in Tezos full time, he worked at X and Waymo on self-driving cars. In his earlier career, he worked as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Thejo Kote, the Founder/CEO of Airbase. He was Co-Founder & CEO of Automatic, and of NextDrop. Prior to this, he worked as an Associate at Primera Capital. He served as Senior Engineer at Netcore Solutions and was the Software Engineer at Infosys Technologies Limited. He holds a Master’s degree from the School of Information at the University of Ca...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Raullen Chai, Founder & CEO of IoTeX. After stints in cybersecurity and blockchain at Uber and Google, Raullen is now CEO of IoTex. He leads a global team of cryptologists, blockchain experts, and IoT specialists in building the Trusted Internet of Things. Founded as an open-source project in 2017, IoTeX is building bridges across the Connected World,...

In this episode, Tegan Kline sits down with Hart Lambur, the co-founder of UMA, a decentralized financial contracts platform built to enable Universal Market Access. Hart studied computer science before working as an interest rate trader at Goldman Sachs through the financial crisis. In 2013 he co-founded Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform that was acquired in 2017 by a financial plan...

In this episode, Tegan Kline speaks with Brendan Asselstine, the co-founder of PoolTogether, a prize savings game built on Ethereum.  Prior to that, Brendan ran an Ethereum dev consultancy and has been building products for over ten years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Ricardo Pero, Chief Executive Officer of SellersFunding. Ricardo received an MBA in Finance from Columbia University and has 20+ years of experience in Corporate Treasury and Wealth and Asset Management. He has previously held positions at Citi, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and most recently served as an Executive Director at JPMorgan from 2010 to 2016....

In our latest episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Sergey Savastiouk, the CEO and founder of Tickeron, an artificial and human intelligence platform delivering unparalleled trading insights and analysis for market traders. Sergey is a thought leader in financial technology, specializing in artificial intelligence. Sergey was raised in Russia and entered the AI space when he earned his Ph. D. in appl...