Exponential: A Nexus Podcast

A conversation with Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi , about six years of building one of crypto's largest education communities. The idea for SheFi arrived on a run in 2019. Love had been at ConsenSys long enough to live through the 2018 bear market, and as the first DeFi teams began to form she noticed two things at once: people were earning twenty percent on their tokens through MakerDAO...

Hank Korth has watched a lot of distributed systems cycles come and go.  A professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University — with an appointment in the business college and as the lead at Lehigh Blockchain — he has been thinking about networked systems since the late 1980s, when his database research examined how independently administered systems could transac...

Mrudul Gole, Head of Business Development at NodeOps, joined Exponential to trace the arc of a company that started as a blockchain validator and is now building the infrastructure layer for the AI era.  The conversation covered the evolution of decentralized compute, the unlikely synergies between blockchain and AI, and a bold prediction about what dev teams will look like in six months.

The most important milestone in crypto, argues Nic Roberts-Huntley, will be the one that goes completely unnoticed. In this episode of Exponential, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance sits down to discuss how his firm is building the infrastructure for institutional-grade DeFi yield — and why the endgame is a world where the underlying mechanics of onchain finance quietly power everything fro...

Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin appeared on the Exponential podcast this week to address the company's decision to pull back from its March 17th milestone campaign and to lay out his views on AI, agentic finance, and what he sees as the defining infrastructure opportunity of the decade. The conversation covered ground ranging from how AI is reshaping startup competition to why Daniel belie...

In this episode of Exponential, Laszlo Szabo, co-founder and CEO of Kiln, joins to talk about one of the most important developments quietly happening in crypto today: the evolution of yield in digital assets.  As Laszlo explains, yield is becoming the bridge between traditional finance and the onchain economy, opening the door to new financial products and new participants. Kiln operates what Las...

In this episode of Exponential , Jin Kwon, co-founder of saga.xyz, explains how blockchain infrastructure will disappear into the background. Saga began as what Jin calls “a chain to launch chains.” The original thesis was simple: make block space more accessible for builders. But while the early bottleneck in crypto was scarce block space, today the challenge is different. There is more capacity...

In this episode of Exponential , Joao Reginatto joins to discuss the future of digital money and the role M0 is playing in making stablecoins more customizable, composable, and interoperable. As Reginatto explains, M0 is building “an operating system for digital money” — a platform that allows institutions and application developers to create their own tailored forms of stablecoins, all while inhe...

In this episode of Exponential , Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO of Borderless, shares how his team is building a new kind of financial network — one where stablecoins move across global corridors just as easily as traditional money, but with far less friction. Lehtiniitty brings deep experience to the problem. He helped launch TrueUSD, one of the earliest U.S.-based fully reserved stablecoins, and now lea...

In this episode of Exponential , Zohar Bronfman, co-founder and CEO of Pecan AI , unpacks the role of predictive AI in today’s business landscape — and why it’s quickly becoming indispensable. At its core, predictive AI estimates the likelihood of future events using massive amounts of data. Zohar explains: “In very general terms, it’s the ability to make some form of a statistical likelihood esti...

In this episode of Exponential , Wucklace, a self-taught developer and creator of Exhibition DeFi, shares his path from fashion design to building onchain — and why he’s working a new kind of platform on Nexus. His journey started with crypto trading and quickly deepened. “I love the concept of total ownership,” he says, recalling his first experience with non-custodial wallets. “There is no restr...

In this episode of Exponential, Oliwer Nastaziak, chief growth officer at Fren. One, shares what it’s like to build and moderate internet-native communities — and why those communities matter more than ever. Oliwer has been deep in the trenches of community operations for years, first as a Telegram moderator and now helping lead Fren. One, a firm he describes as “a community operating system.”  Th...

In this episode of Exponential , Joseph Zhang, co-founder and CEO of CatchBack, explains how a side hustle flipping Pokémon cards evolved into a full-stack collectibles trading platform. Combining lessons from crypto infrastructure with firsthand experience in collectibles, CatchBack introduces a new model for how real-world assets can trade online. “Crypto taught me about liquidity,” Joseph says....

In this episode of Exponential , Aisling Connolly, Chief Strategy Officer at TACEO , joins the show to unpack the deeper technical and philosophical motivations behind verifiable finance. With a background in mathematics, economics, and cryptography, Ais has long been drawn to using rigorous math to solve real-world problems — a mindset that eventually brought her from traditional payments to priv...

In a world where AI can generate realistic images in seconds, Faust founder and CEO, Kosuke July Hata, who goes by July, is building a new kind of camera — one that proves a photo was actually taken by a human, on a specific device, at a specific time and place. Roc Camera is a compact, point-and-shoot–style device that embeds cryptographic proofs into every image it captures. “It’s a camera that...

In Episode 16 of Exponential , Alec James from the Nexus product team introduces a major new release: the Nexus DEX Alpha, a core protocol component designed to deliver deep liquidity and high-performance trading from the ground up. The Nexus DEX Alpha is the testnet version of a product that will operate as an enshrined order book exchange built directly into the layer one. This architectural cho...

In this episode of Exponential , Dylan Kawalec, Head of Developer Relations at Phala Network, breaks down how Phala is building verifiable compute infrastructure using trusted hardware and open-source tooling.  The goal: privacy-preserving execution environments that don’t rely on centralized cloud services or blind trust. In the episode, we mention a podcast that Dylan recorded with Nexus Chief S...

In this episode of Exponential , Genzio Media co-founder and CEO Zack shares his perspective on the maturing Web3 landscape — and why the next wave will look very different from the last. A crypto native since 2011, Zack launched Genzio in 2022 to fill a gap he encountered firsthand while working at Ripple and OKX: Web3 companies needed partners who actually understood crypto.  “People are going t...

In episode 13 of Exponential , Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin outlines near-term roadmap and long-term ambitions. With Testnet III reaching more than three million participants, Nexus is preparing for its most significant milestone yet: mainnet launch in Q1 2026.

For Dynamic co-founder and CEO Itai Turbahn, the future of crypto is in infrastructure . His company, Dynamic, builds wallet tooling designed to disappear behind the apps we already use. In this episode of Exponential , Itai lays out a compelling thesis: the next wave of crypto adoption won’t look like crypto at all. “The next billion users are already here. We’re not bringing them to crypto — we’...

In a digital world saturated with manipulated media and synthetic imagery, trust is no longer a given. Photojournalist David Butow has spent his career documenting real events — from the war in Iraq to protests in Washington — and he’s now at the forefront of a growing movement: making digital images verifiable at the source. In episode 11 of Exponential , we explore the promise and friction of C2...

In Episode 10 of Exponential , AI Seer founder and CEO Dennis Yap and AI Seer CTO Shahruj Rashid join to discuss their mission: building AI systems that can detect and dismantle misinformation at internet scale. You can find more info about this podcast on blog.nexus.xyz/podcast .

In Episode 9 of Exponential , Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer, joins us to tackle one of the most broken but vital systems in modern life: healthcare data. His story starts where many do — with a personal experience that revealed just how fragmented and opaque medical data really is. But unlike most, he decided to build something better. Acoer is a software company rethinking health infrastructure from the...

In a space that moves at the speed of Twitter and trades on memes, launching a print magazine about crypto feels almost radical. But for veteran journalists Zack Seward and Joon Ian Wong, that’s exactly the point. Their new project, Use Case , is a quarterly publication designed to document the parts of crypto that actually matter — the systems that work, the ideas that endure, and the people buil...

In Episode 7 of Exponential , Grigore Roșu — professor, computer scientist, and founder of Pi Squared — joins the show to explore a bold thesis: blockchains as we know them are only a first step. The future of web3, Grigore argues, lies in universal computation, massively parallel verification, and an evolution beyond the bottlenecks of ordered chains. Pi Squared, a Nexus partner , is building tow...