MoneyNeverSleeps

Elaine Deehan is back on MoneyNeverSleeps for her third appearance, and this one has been a long time coming. As Ireland Country Manager of Monzo Bank Europe, Elaine is doing what she's always done: building something that makes banking feel genuinely human, and genuinely Irish. Download the Monzo app and open your account at : https://monzo.com/ie Monzo went fully live in Ireland on April 14t...

Sheila Lynch has been in the room for three of the biggest financial shocks of the last five years — COVID at CQS, the Russian invasion of Ukraine at BlackRock with live Eastern European assets in the funds, and the SVB collapse. When systems go under stress, what's actually there gets revealed. Culture, training, processes — either they hold or they don't. This episode is about what found...

How can you use the world's most powerful AI models without ever exposing your sensitive data? Rami Akeela has spent twenty years building privacy and cryptographic infrastructure that most people didn't know they needed yet, and now, as founder of Nera Systems , he's solving the conundrum that's about to define enterprise AI — the more valuable your data, the less you can use it....

Citi Institute's "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street OnChain" puts a number on it: $5.5 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. Alejandro Gutierrez, who leads Solana Superteam Ireland and returns for another appearance on the show, joins me to stress-test that forecast — what Citi gets right with DTCC, NYSE and Nasdaq embedding tokenization into core infrastructure, and what we think it misses, includin...

Martin Watkins is CEO of Montis Group , which is building a blockchain-native central securities depository — the settlement and issuance layer that makes tokenized assets work as real financial products. With 30 years inside Euroclear, AtosEuronext and EY, Martin chose to build the infrastructure the market was missing rather than keep advising on the existing system. We get into what a digital C...

Pete Townsend is joined by Eric Ries, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, for a conversation about the invisible structural forces that corrupt even the most mission-driven companies, and what founders can do about it before it's too late. Eric's new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay...

Pete Townsend is joined by Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN and Managing Partner at A100x Ventures, for a conversation about how to tell the difference between a token that represents ownership of the value-creating thing and one that's an accelerant bolted onto something else. Sal has been underwriting these decisions at A100x at the pre-seed and seed stage. He walks through what's actually chan...

You Can't Code Your Way Out | Amor Sexton, Blockdaemon In the last few weeks, Drift and Kelp lost $577 million between them. Neither one was a code exploit. Both were operational and governance failures. Amor Sexton, Chief Operating Officer at Blockdaemon, was last on MoneyNeverSleeps in October 2022 (EP 193) talking about how institutional client expectations of resilient processes would drive bl...

Dan Gold is founder and CEO of Stratiphy, and as far as anyone knows, the only platform offering tax-efficient crypto exposure to UK retail investors right now. The path got narrow fast. The FCA lifted the retail crypto ETN ban in October 2025. HMRC then closed the stocks-and-shares ISA route at the start of this tax year, leaving crypto ETNs eligible only for Innovative Finance ISAs, which no mai...

Tokenization has a perception problem. The industry keeps selling it as an efficiency play — less friction, more transparency, better infrastructure. But if tokenization doesn't help you sell more of whatever you've tokenized, it's irrelevant. Alejandro Gutierrez leads Solana Superteam Ireland and has been building in this space since before most people knew what tokenization meant. Co-founder of...

Brian McNulty has been building toward this moment for a decade. When he co-founded the Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group with the London Stock Exchange back in 2015, he was helping the industry imagine what tokenized funds might one day look like. On April 21st 2026, he rings the bell at that same exchange to launch DVF — Lingfeng Capital's Digital Venture Fund — and the circle closes. In t...

Who's watching the agent? That's the question at the heart of this episode — and it's one that's going to define the next decade of finance. Rob Viglione spent his career figuring out how machines make decisions in high-stakes environments. From the US Air Force to Afghanistan, and now as Co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, he's building the cryptographic trust infrastructure f...

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not. John Hill, VP of Story at Whop, has spent his career watching founders in Cape Town, Lagos, and Medellín build something real — and then hit a wall the moment they try to get paid. Whop is an AI-backed platform where anyone can build a digital business in minutes, and in February 2026 it closed a $200 million investment from Tether to embed stable...

Markets don't close when the exchange does. They just move somewhere else. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Alex Pollak of 21Shares about why crypto ETPs are not just surviving the rise of onchain finance — they're about to become part of it. Alex Pollak is Managing Director and Head of UK and New Markets at 21Shares, which provides the largest suite of crypto...

DeFi transparency means every onchain trade is visible. Which means the moment a strategy works, the market can copy it. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Matteo Manzi , co-founder and CEO of Orion Finance , about a structural challenge emerging in onchain asset management: the same transparency that makes blockchain markets verifiable can also expose the intellectual...

Money doesn’t become digital overnight. It becomes digital when the rails of finance begin to change. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Emma Landriault of JPMorgan about why stablecoins and bank-issued deposit tokens may end up reinforcing, rather than replacing, each other. Emma Landriault is Executive Director at JPMorgan and global product lead for JPM Coin , a dep...

Money doesn’t become geopolitical overnight. It becomes geopolitical when the rails start to change. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend is joined by Sean Lee for a focused conversation on what China is really building with the digital yuan and why this moment is about infrastructure, not currency replacement. Drawing on recent meetings with the People’s Bank of China, Sean explains...

Scaling human expertise isn’t a technology problem — it’s a trust problem. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Joni Pirovich , founder of Crystal aOS , about where crypto and AI quietly hit their limits — and why human judgment remains the real constraint as systems scale. Joni explains how her background in legal and regulatory work exposed a simple truth early on: exp...

Surviving the hard days of startup life isn’t about working more - it’s about building the right support around you. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Ollie Walsh, founder of Pipit Global (exited to Qenta), about founder burnout, resilience, and what actually helps founders get through the hardest stretches. Ollie explains why cutting hours helped more than pushing har...

Crypto doesn’t win in 2026 by being louder - it wins by becoming boring. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend is joined by Alejandro Gutierrez for a sharp set of 2026 predictions on where crypto, onchain finance, and AI actually go next, as the hype keeps fading and the infrastructure takes over. This is Alejandro’s 11th appearance on the show, and the first in the new era of MoneyNe...

Why are stablecoins suddenly a geopolitical issue? Pete Townsend and Garrett Cassidy break down dollar dominance, EU pushback, AI’s role in digital money, and the future of global financial rails — in one fast 14-minute riff. We cover: • Why dollar-based stablecoins are spreading globally • Why European policymakers are pushing back • What Martin Wolf gets right (and wrong) in the FT • How AI coul...

Hey there, I’m Pete Townsend, and this is MoneyNeverSleeps - where we look inside the minds of entrepreneurs and at the crossover of startups, enterprise, finance, technology, and life as we know it. This one’s different. We’re live from The Podcast Studios at HeadStuff HQ in Dublin - the legendary former Westland Studios where artists like U2 and Hozier recorded in the past - for Episode 300 . Se...

Alejandro Gutierrez joins me to talk Solana in Ireland, stablecoins, and tokenized securities - plus I share the launch of Norio Ventures Fund I and what’s ahead for Episode 300. 🔹 Scaling Solana Superteam Ireland and building community across the island 🔹 Stablecoins moving mainstream + tokenized securities gaining momentum with Nasdaq 🔹 My launch of Norio Ventures Fund I and what’s next for M...

This week, we're doing something different on MoneyNeverSleeps. You're coming inside the room for the Techstars Web3 Demo Day 2025 , recorded live at Civic Hall in NYC during NY Tech Week, where we brought 5 incredible Web3 startups to the stage for a standing-room-only crowd of founders, investors, and builders. These aren’t founders chasing hype - they’re building with traction, with pur...

This week, I caught up with Jesse Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Trustware , and one of the most quietly determined founders I’ve ever backed. I invested in Jesse and his co-founder Jonathan Frazier through the Techstars Web3 accelerator in 2023, and since then, Trustware⁠ have done what most early-stage startups only dream of—shipping a real product, signing real customers, and generating real r...