Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Nelson Chu the founder and CEO of Percent, the platform powering the future of private markets. He is a 3x startup founder with several years of experience at leading investment management firms, including Bank of America and BlackRock. Prior to Percent, Nelson founded a strategy consulting firm specializing in helping companies build products and raise ca...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Stefan Rust, CEO and Founder of Truflation - an independent economic and financial data in real-time on-chain. From the early telecom and mobile industries to growing Bitcoin.com as its CEO, Stefan Rust is a recognized global leader in early-tech entrepreneurism. In recent years, Rust has focused on the blockchain industry, founding Laguna Labs and helpin...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Geoffrey Thompson, Chief Blockchain Officer at Roofstock onChain - Real-world homes on blockchain that you can buy with one click. Geoff built his career at top-tier law firms practicing in the areas of capital markets, banking and credit, structured finance, private equity, and cross-border transactions. Geoff’s prior role at Roofstock was as General Coun...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Zach Bradford, CEO and President of CleanSpark - a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company. Zach has acquired over five companies, doubled revenue and quadrupled CleanSpark’s workforce since becoming chief executive officer in 2019. He was CleanSpark’s chief financial officer from 2014 to 2019 before taking on his current role as chief executive officer. Si...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Kyle Ellicot who is a Partner at Stacks Ventures. Kyle is also a Co-Chair of Bitcoin Odyssey, a Partner at Intersect VC, and an active Blockchain & dApps analyst. He is also a noted TEDx and global keynote speaker, strategist, published author, & technologist with over 15 years of experience at the cornerstone of digital transformation between indu...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Vlad Panchenko, CEO and Founder at DMarket.com - a marketplace and infrastructure for Web3 companies to join a global metaverse. He is a video game and technology entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience. His cosmopolitan life views have formed his business approach of a world without borders through gaming and interactive entertainment companies. Lea...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sat down with Gab Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS - Fintech Open Source Foundation. Gab is an open source executive and technologist at heart, having spent over 15 years building developer ecosystems to deliver value through open source across Europe and the US. He thrives on driving innovation both contributing to open source communities and joining commercial...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Charles Rosenblatt, President of PayQuicker — the payments technology leader in global payouts. A seasoned innovator in the payments industry, Charles has held executive leadership positions at major global banks (Capital One and Chase) and prominent FinTech organizations. He has been on the management teams that led to the sale of Hyperwallet to PayPal an...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Max Kordek, Co-Founder and President of Lisk. Max is a globally recognized cryptocurrency entrepreneur who founded Lisk, a platform for blockchain applications written in JavaScript. Together with his co-founder, blockchain industry veteran Oliver Beddow, Max raised over 14,000 BTC for Lisk's ICO in 2016. Within the same year, Max founded Lightcurve,...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Bryan Gross who is the Steward at ICHI, a DAO which designs protocols that help other crypto projects to participate in DeFi more efficiently. ICHI’s core technology enables other crypto projects to create new, more sustainable liquidity programs called Vaults. ICHI works with leading DeFi projects including ShapeShift, Fuse and 1INCH. Prior to working wit...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Hany Rashwan the Co-founder and CEO of 21Shares and Amun. He is a serial entrepreneur and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum. He previously founded social commerce company, Ribbon, and enterprise fintech company, Payout. Hany was born and raised in Egypt and the United States and attended Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Elena Nadolinski, CEO at Iron Fish and Craig Timm, General Counsel at Iron Fish, a layer-1 project building ZKP-based privacy for many assets across many chains. Elena was previously an avid hackathoner and software engineer at Airbnb and Microsoft. Craig Timm is General Counsel at Iron Fish. Iron Fish is building a Layer 1 blockchain to become the univers...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Locke Brown, CEO and founder at NuID, who believes that the future of the internet belongs to the user, and NuID’s decentralized identity architecture was designed to support that future. Locke's passion has always been pursuing greater efficiency in a society's most elemental interaction: exchange. It's what drove him headfirst into mining...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Sandi Bitenc, CEO of 3air, the world's first blockchain platform that enables individuals and businesses to thrive on Web3 by providing broadband internet connectivity. Sandi is a serial entrepreneur and a computer geek. His professional computer career started already in his teens when he was part of a hosting and domain registrar startup company tha...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with John Lunn, the Founder and CEO of cloud payment orchestration platform Gr4vy. He is a technology and fintech entrepreneur with 21 years of experience working and investing in financial services, commerce enablement, e-payments, data, security, and infrastructure. In 2006, John joined PayPal as the fourth employee in the UK (now over 2,000), where he built...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Bruce Pon the Founder of Ocean Protocol, a blockchain startup focused on bringing data and AI together since 2013. Previously, Bruce co-founded Avantalion, a consulting firm that helped to build 20 banks around the globe for companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi & Jaguar LandRover. He has an Advanced Executive Certificate from MIT Slo...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Adam Dell, CEO of Domain Money. Adam is a serial entrepreneur, most recently a partner at Goldman Sachs where he served as Head of Product at Marcus by Goldman Sachs. There he built foundational products like Marcus Invest, Marcus Checking, and the market-leading mobile application Marcus Insights. Prior to Goldman, Adam founded four companies, including C...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Nick Baum who is a Co-founder and the CEO at Tremendous. He started Tremendous in 2010, turning it from a small gift card company into a service used by millions around the world. He's responsible for the overall direction of the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Domagoj Rozic, CEO of Minka, an open network that enables organizations to move money in real time. He is a technologist that had the chance to participate in the internet, the mobile, and the bitcoin revolution over the last 20 years. Dom co-founded his first startup at the age of 20 and worked on then more than 50 IT projects in 10 countries around the g...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Caleb Avery, CEO & Founder of Tilled. With experience in the payments industry for over a decade, Caleb Avery was often asked to help software companies who were looking to monetize their payments. Unable to find a solution that didn’t require his clients to compromise on either technology, user experience, or economics, he decided that he needed his...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Matt Medved, the co-founder, CEO and EIC of nft now, the premier web3 digital media platform for NFT coverage and curation. Under his leadership, nft now has become the most trusted source in NFT media and made history as the first-ever digital media publication to curate a major auction house sale with Christie’s. Prior to nft now, Medved founded Billboar...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews James West, the CEO of Globe, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. James is a technologist, digital assets pioneer, and former trader and investor. He led the quantitative team at a hedge fund for four years, growing it from a small family fund to $300m assets under management with incredible risk-adjusted returns. He earned his Ph. D. just across from D...

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Merit Valdsalu, CEO and Co-Founder of Single. Earth, building a nature-backed economy to save the world. She’s an early employee at the unicorn company Pipedrive, a passionate environmentalist, and an avid equal rights supporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama, a startup building homomorphic encryption solutions for web2 and web3 applications. Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and investor. Prior to Zama, Rand was the CEO of Snips, an AI company acquired by Sonos. He is an investor in over 50 startups, ranging from blockchain to semiconductors to psychedelics. He holds a degree in computer s...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Sean Bennett, co-founder of Stronghold, a leading financial infrastructure company that provides fast, secure, and accessible financial services through a simple API. Stronghold, recently named as Forbes Fintech 50 company, works with businesses like IBM and Lyft to make payments quicker and easier while maintaining regulatory compliance and interoperabili...