MoneyNeverSleeps

Evan Miyazono is founder and CEO of Atlas Computing , a non-profit formed late last year to help scale human control over risky AI capabilities.  I seem to be falling into a number of serendipitous situations recently where I find myself at the intersection of AI and blockchain. This week’s chat with Evan took place at that same intersection, but more at the conceptual level rather than at the har...

Blockchain ecosystem advisor and researcher Simon Brown from Consensys joins me as guest co-host this week. Consensys is a leading blockchain and web3 software company whose products like MetaMask and Infura are well known to the blockchain and crypto community. While overjoyed that spot Bitcoin ETFs finally launched, I felt like something was not quite right about it, and I wanted to go deeper. ...

Alejandro Gutierrez and I recorded this episode 10 hours before the SEC finally approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs, so we start with a quick update on what happened over the last few days.  We then get into the meat of this episode, which is a roundup of Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2024. We riffed on our respective Top 5 out of the 100 or so predictions from Messari CEO Ryan Selkis’s 194-page super-insigh...

I’m joined this week by two of the wonderful people I met at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam last month, Amira Valliani who is the Head of Policy at the Solana Foundation , and Nick Ducoff who is the Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation.   Before my trip to Amsterdam in November for the Solana Breakpoint conference, my engagement with the Solana community over the ye...

Paul Smyth joins me as guest co-host this week, and he is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a founder of two startups, Paul has a unique view on the startup ecosystem. Paul and I met back in 2017 shortly before I photo-bombed his stand at a fintech event in Dublin, and we’ve collaborated quite a bit since then.  He and his business partner and li...

This week I’m joined by guest co-host Mai Santamaria, who is the Head of the Financial Advisory Unit for the Department of Finance in Ireland. Mai and I met in February 2018 at a meeting of the Irish Blockchain Expert Group which later became the industry group now referred to as Blockchain Ireland.   She’s one of the most helpful people I know and always has a uniquely incisive insight or two on...

This week’s episode is from a session Pete Townsend hosted with Alex Tapscott, author of ‘ Web3: Charting the Internet's Next Economic and Cultural Frontier’ (Harper Collins) . Alex and Pete were joined by venture investors Justin Swart from BITKRAFT Ventures and Sterling Campbell from Blockchain Capital.  In this chat, Pete asked Alex to share his thoughts on what to expect next from those bu...

Pete Townsend introduces an insightful line-up of entrepreneurs and investors who share their thoughts on web3. Opinions are gathered around what aspects they hope to see web3 founders solve, focusing on topics such as user experience, digital identity, decentralized finance, AI, regulatory issues, and real-world applications. The diverse panel includes John Hallahan from Fireblocks, Arry Yu from...

Sean Lee is the senior advisor at the Crypto Council for Innovation, which is a global alliance of crypto industry leaders advocating for responsible and healthy regulations in the digital asset industry. Sean has conducted business in over 20+ countries and two continents across his career, and networked with extraordinary professionals across many industries. As a technology enthusiast, his care...

Lou Kerner is the founder of the Crypto Oracle Collective , a decentralized web3 advisory firm, and also the DAO for Crypto Mondays , which is the largest crypto meetup in the world with active chapters in 54 cities. In addition to Lou’s roles as founder of Crypto Oracle Collective and Crypto Mondays, he’s also a partner at Blockchain Coinvestors, a venture capital fund of funds focused on investi...

My discussion with Somi Arian is a deep dive into the entrepreneur's dilemma of solving problems vs. fulfilling desires, customer discovery, product building and pivots, all baked into a live startup mentoring session. Somi is the founder and CEO of InPeak, an innovative platform enabling creators and businesses to build and monetize communities.  Somi is also an award-winning filmmaker, tech...

Arry Yu is a 23+ year emerging technology industry veteran, serial founder and strategic operator with expertise in scaling business from "zero to one" with a consistent track record building high-performing teams. In this episode, Arry shares her story on her path into crypto and blockchain from the roots of her early corporate career into becoming a startup founder, investor and Execut...

Joining Pete as guest co-host this week is Pet Berisha from Sporting Crypto , the number one Web3 Sports business exploring the intersection alongside 3000+ subscribers from the biggest sports and crypto brands in the world. In this episode, Pet and Pete dive into whether or not the Sam Bankman-Fried trial actually matters, without digging into all of the gory details, and they also look at the st...

We’ve got a special crossover episode this week courtesy of our friends at the Irish VC podcast, with a big shout-out to Finn Hatherell for producing the initial episode on the Irish VC podcast channel over the summer.  The Irish VC podcast is produced by BVP , an Ireland-based venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Elliott Griffin. In this episode, Elliott and Pete Townsend share a few stories o...

Eva Lawrence is the Head of EMEA for Figment, the leading provider of blockchain infrastructure, providing staking solutions for institutions. In this episode, we get into Eva’s evolution from a legal mind into institutional trading, and her slow-burn crypto awakening before jumping from the institutional world into the great wide open of crypto back in 2018.  We also step through her role at Figm...

Alejandro Gutierrez joins the show as guest co-host in this Money Talks segment. Alejandro is the CEO of Defactor Labs , providing all the required technological and financial tools for traditional companies to tap into alternative sources of financing using tokenized Real World Assets as collateral. Congratulations to Defactor Labs for taking home the gong at the inaugural National Fintech Awards...

Asad J. Malik is an augmented reality pioneer and the founder and CEO of Jadu , a next-gen multiplayer augmented reality fighting game for your phone launching this month.  In Jadu, players can settle or start rivalries with friends or compete against strangers for fame and glory in this combat game from the future.  Malik’s critically acclaimed and globally exhibited narrative storytelling projec...

After intersecting stories of meeting Vitalik Buterin and Bono, Pete Townsend and guest co-host Laura Walsh take a look at the recent SEC ruling in favor of Grayscale that many expect will open up the floodgates for the trillions of institutional capital currently on the sidelines of crypto. We also look at the positioning of NFTs or ‘dynamic digital assets’ as the core technology to drive more ex...

Joining Pete this week are Liang Wu and Dan Herrera from Eleven26 Capital, an early-stage VC firm investing in diverse founders on the evolving Internet across web2 and web3. In this episode, we get into how Liang and Dan originally got together and stayed close through the years, their Evolving Internet thesis across web2 and web3, building a platform for investing through content creation and co...

We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus this summer, as we took a break to recharge after a few mad months, as sometimes, you need to go away for a while and dream it all up again.  In this episode we recorded on the Fourth of July, we pull the curtain off our upcoming plans, with a big announcement from longtime co-host Eoin Fitzgerald that brings him and Pete Townsend to a fork in the road with MoneyNev...

Neal Peters is co-founder and CEO of JR Studio , a frictionless web3 gaming platform that gives game creators the superpowers to build, host, launch, manage, and grow their games and communities. JR Studio is also one of the 12 founding teams forming the Techstars Web3 accelerator class of 2023 . After launching his first business as a 14-year-old gamer building websites, Neal spent 18 years as an...

Federico Panisi is a co-founder and CEO of Loki.code , enabling simplified and intuitive co-creation of smart contracts with a collaborative web app for smart contract designers and developers. Loki.code is also one of the 12 founding teams forming the https://www.techstars.com/newsroom/announcing-the-techstars-web3-class-of-2023. Before founding Loki.code in July 2022 with Pedro Wilson, Fabio Man...

Tatiana Botskina is the founder and CEO of Mintycode , a decentralized IP marketplace for software creators, bringing together software creators, software buyers, and software contributors. By building communities around software creators’ source code and enabling shared ownership, Mintycode helps software creators monetize their work and incentivize and reward contributors. Mintycode is also one...

Terence Reilly is the co-founder and CEO of OLTA , one of the 12 founding teams forming the Techstars Web3 accelerator class of 2023 . OLTA is a protocol for creators and studios to create dynamic media, pushing the boundaries from generative art into interactive art and story. OLTA brings this all to life through dynamic NFTs which enable collectors to determine the outcome of the artwork over ti...

Javier Tamashiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ospree , a comprehensive anti-money laundering compliance solution for Virtual Asset Service Providers that seamlessly integrates customer onboarding, blockchain monitoring, and the Travel Rule. Javier and his Ospree co-founders Anne Winston and Jukka Pellinen are one of the 12 founding teams forming the Techstars Web3 accelerator class of 2023.  By co...