Talking Tokens

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Theo Golden, Head of Digital Assets at Baillie Gifford, to talk about BAGEY — the firm's newly launched tokenized bond fund on Solana and Ethereum that yields around 7% and settles in USDC. Theo breaks down why he sees tokenization as an operating system upgrade rather than a reinvention of finance, how pension funds and private banks are...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Zaheer Ebtikar, Chief Strategy Officer at Plasma, to talk about why the recent wave of DeFi exploits is forcing a necessary reset and Plasma’s decision behind building a stablecoin-optimized chain around USDT.  Zaheer also dives into the recent OpenUSD launch and how it can fit into an institutional stablecoin infrastructure world,, and why h...

On this edition of Strata Research, Jacquelyn sits down with institutional research analyst Alex Beaudry to dig into crypto cards, which many assumed were built for consumers but are actually seeing most traction from institutions.  Alex breaks down why the developed market consumer card is basically a feature in search of a need, what Visa is building that could change the equation, and why oncha...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Asheesh Birla, CEO of Evernorth, the Ripple-backed digital asset treasury firm holding roughly 473 million XRP tokens, to talk about why he thinks we've finally hit the inflection point that blockchain has been building toward for over a decade.  Asheesh breaks down why most digital assets sit idle the same way cash sits in a bank account, how Ev...

On today's Talking Tokens, we're sharing Jacquelyn’s Proof of Talk chat with Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Labs, to break down why Aave V4 moved away from a single monolithic protocol toward a hub and spoke model that works more like a central bank. Stani gets into why a lot of centralized lenders didn't hold up through both the FTX collapse and last October's market unwi...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with MoneyGram CEO Anthony Soohoo to talk about MGUSD, the company's new dollar-backed stablecoin built on Stellar with help from Bridge, Fireblocks, and M0. Anthony explores why launching MoneyGram decided to have its own stablecoin and breaks down how its 60 million active customers and nearly 500,000 retail locations across 200 countries pl...

On today's Talking Tokenization, Jacquelyn sits down with Kean Gilbert, Head of Institutional Relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, to talk about how liquid staking is finally breaking into traditional finance.  From the WisdomTree staked ETH ETP in Europe to VanEck's recently filed S-1 for a Lido staked ETF in the US, Kean breaks down why institutions are asking sharper questions th...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Gordon Liao, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Circle, to talk about why traditional financial plumbing is still the biggest bottleneck in money movement globally.  We discuss Arc, Circle's new institutional blockchain, which is being built from the ground up to handle everything from agentic nano payments to quantum-resistant encry...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Dakota Campbell, Head of Marketing at Collector Crypt, the platform that generated $165 million in volume in April alone by putting trading cards and physical collectibles onchain with Solana.  Dakota explains the resurgence of physical collecting is what's actually pulling people toward digital ownership, and why Solana's low fees were the thing...

On this episode of Strata Research, presented by Talking Tokens & Token Relations, Jacquelyn sits down with Institutional Research Analyst Alex Beaudry to dig into crypto neobanks. Apps are rebuilding what Chime and Revolut did a decade ago, but on stablecoin rails and Alex explains how founders can set themselves up for success. Alex’s insights cover why the float and yield model is both the...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Morgan Krupetsky, VP of Onchain Finance at Ava Labs, to break down where institutional adoption of blockchain actually stands right now.  They discuss why Morgan thinks the industry has officially crossed the chasm from experimental pilots to in-production deployments. Morgan deep dives into the embedded finance stack she's seeing resonat...

On today's Talking Tokenization, Jacquelyn sits down with Brett Redfearn, President of Securitize and former SEC Director of Trading and Markets, to trace how tokenization has evolved from floor-based trading rooms to onchain capital markets. Brett explains why he thinks we're entering the most transformative market structure shift in 20 years, why tokenized stocks might be the next major...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Torab Torabi, CEO of Move Industries, to discuss Movement’s strategic reorientation toward becoming a stablecoin settlement and yield layer for emerging markets.  Torab shares what he learned from sitting down with the Ethiopian president and Ministry of Finance, why governments in these markets don’t want an unchecked flight to dollars, and...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Bart Smith and Laine Litman, CEO and COO of AVAT, the Avalanche Treasury Company, two traditional finance veterans who both spent years watching institutions talk about crypto before finally deciding to go all in themselves.  Bart and Laine get into what makes AVAT different from the pile of treasury companies trying to copy the MicroStrategy...

On our first episode of Strata Research presented by Talking Tokens & Token Relations, Jacquelyn sits down with Institutional Research Analyst Alex Beaudry to breakdown agentic payments. Alex walks through why it isn't one market but three distinct payment flows, each with completely different infrastructure requirements, and why the machine-to-machine category is where stablecoins have a...

On today's Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn sits down with Lorenzo Romagnoli, co-founder of USDT0, a stablecoin protocol that has moved over $90 billion in USDT across 25+ blockchains since launching in January 2025. Lorenzo makes the case that stablecoins were not just built for Americans or Europeans but for people in emerging markets across Africa, Latin America, and Asia who needed a way out of c...

In this episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and creator of x402., They discuss why the internet struggled without a native payment protocol and why AI agents finally made the problem urgent enough to solve. Erik explains how x402 lets computers send money as easily as they send data, and why Visa, Mastercard, and...

In this episode of Talking Tokenization, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Jason Barraza, head of institutional business development at RedStone, about why blockchain oracles are evolving from simple price feeds into the institutional intelligence layer that tokenized finance still needs. Jason, who previously served as COO at Security Token Market where he helped track over 800 tokenized real world a...

In this episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Ben Reynolds, SVP and head of Big Business Banking at SoFi, about why the company launched its SoFi USD stablecoin on Solana and what it means for the firm’s broader vision to become a stablecoin liquidity hub. Ben, who joined Silvergate in 2016 and helped build the Silvergate Exchange Network before the bank shut down in 2023, expla...

In this episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Mike Silagadze, founder and CEO of EtherFi, and Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink, following SharpLink’s deployment ofed $200 million of its $2 billion ether treasury into EtherFi in January and what the due diligence process actually looked like from both sides. Mike explains why EtherFi is building a ‘DeFi bank,’ an end-to-end self-c...

In this special episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek sits down with eight crypto leaders at an event in Miami hosted by StrataMedia alongside GSR and Alpaca for a rapid-fire mini interview series. Each guest is asked a similar set of questions: what their company is working on, how they describe the state of the crypto market, whether bearish sentiment is overhyped, what they would tokeniz...

In this episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek does an exclusive interview with Kevin Beardsley, the new head of institutional growth at Jito Foundation, in his first interview since announcing the role. Kevin, who previously held senior positions at Kraken and Ctrl Wallet, explains why institutions want Solana exposure but still struggle to actually use the technology, and how the 18-month...

In this episode of Talking Tokenization, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Xin Song, CEO of GSR, about how the firm is evolving from a crypto market maker into a full-service digital asset investment bank. Xin, who started his career at BlackRock before later running his own crypto derivatives hedge fund and joining GSR in 2019, explains why tokenization will eat the capital markets world and why the...

In this episode of Talking Tokenization, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with Max Stein, a director on the digital assets team at BlackRock, about how the firm translates crypto and tokenization ideas into actual products, and why tokenized cash still has a long way to run. Max, who previously spent four years at ConsenSys and invested at Sino Global Capital before joining BlackRock, explains how the fir...

In this episode of Talking Tokens, Jacquelyn Melinek speaks with May Zabaneh, SVP and GM of Crypto at PayPal, about why today’s payment systems still suffer from hidden inefficiencies and how stablecoins are emerging as the next layer of financial infrastructure. May explains that while payments today work, they remain slow, costly, and fragmented especially across borders. She breaks down how sta...