Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with Samantha Lewis, Ian Epstein, and David Sutter

To wrap up Season 1, we're shaking our structure up. We’re releasing three Meet the Host episodes for you to get to know us beyond our hot takes on stablecoins, IPOs, and crypto markets. First up is our dynamite VC, Sam! Ian and Dave grill her for an hour on her path into venture, how she picks deals at Mercury Fund, and what separates the venture funds that survive a decade from the ones that don...

It flooded our newsfeeds. On Friday, June 12, SpaceX became the biggest IPO in history… $75B raised, ~$2T market cap, an instant top-ten US public company. On the same morning, crypto exchanges (Binance, Bybit, and others) had taken in roughly $557M in stablecoin orders from users who wanted exposure through tokenized SpaceX shares… and had to refund all of it, because their issuer couldn't get th...

The most crypto-friendly US administration in history is in place. Real use cases like stablecoins are scaling fast across the globe. The SEC has stopped trying to sue the industry out of existence… and yet crypto as an asset class is the lagging part of 2026's ripper market, with Bitcoin back to its August 2024 level (hovering below $63,000) and the major altcoins down a lot more. The week of the...

Three IPOs, $135 billion, and everything else The largest IPO in history was Alibaba in 2014 at $22 billion. SpaceX alone wants to raise more than three times that this Thursday at a target valuation of $1.77 trillion… which would make it the seventh-largest US public company on day one! OpenAI and Anthropic are queued up behind it. There is roughly $135 billion in combined fresh stock the market...

Sam sets it up as a role-swap, with Dave (the permissioned business operator) arguing permissionless and Ian (the libertarian of the two) arguing permissioned. Dave opens with Marc Andreessen's 2014 New York Times op-ed (the original "declare a truth over the internet" framing) and uses it to argue that the only real innovation in a blockchain is solving one specific cryptography problem. Most of...

Why is Circle, a public US company that just IPO'd, racing to launch its own blockchain six months later? Dave makes the case that the headline reason (gas fees, agentic commerce) is third-order, and the first-order reason lands in five words. Who else is going to muscle into the issuance layer in the next twelve months? Anchorage is already dropping native USDC support so it can launch its own st...

Two visions of tokenization (the practice of representing real-world assets) are competing in real time, and only one of them delivers on the $19 trillion forecast for the category. The walled-garden version, where every major bank tokenizes its own deposits inside its own four walls, mostly produces press releases because it dresses up an existing database with blockchain language. The permission...

In this episode of Money Moves, we delve into the complex world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its intersection with traditional finance (TradFi). We explore recent events, including a $300 million hack, that highlight the vulnerabilities and risks within DeFi. Our discussion covers the tension between the instantaneous, permissionless nature of DeFi and the structured, regulated environment...

The de-dollarization narrative is everywhere. BRICS alternatives, Gulf states rethinking their Treasury holdings, a digital yuan push from Beijing, sovereign gold-buying at multi-decade highs.  So, is the dollar in trouble? In Episode 3, Samantha, Ian, and Dave take the debate on directly. Ian lays out the framework he uses to test every de-dollarization claim he hears, and systematically works th...

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging it to a reserve asset, most commonly fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they provide price stability for transactions, trading, and remittances, often acting as a bridge between traditional money and digital assets. Stablecoins are being adopted at a rapid pace…...

Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinb...