The Crypto Tape

Bhaji Illuminati, CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge, joins Frank Chaparro in studio at RWA Summit in Brooklyn, the tokenization conference Centrifuge launched in 2023. Bhaji describes how the room flipped from mostly DeFi builders to mostly traditional finance, and why the tokenization playbook flipped with it: asset managers now start with real onchain demand and AUM, and treat operational efficie...

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of zerohash, joins Frank Chaparro and Slater Santer for episode five of The Desk to describe stablecoin adoption from a seat almost nobody else occupies: the infrastructure layer that banks, brokerages, and fintechs use to offer crypto trading, stablecoins, and tokenization. Stablecoins are now the majority of that business, which Interactive Brokers led a $104 mil...

Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate, returns to The Crypto Tape to join Frank Chaparro during the RWA Summit for a look at what has changed in tokenization since his last appearance on the podcast in February. Robert explains why the products gaining traction look retail native and even anti-institutional, why most tokenized stocks are wrappers on brokerage balances several steps removed from the is...

Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape, where Hayden lays out his core thesis that tokenization is the digitization of value, the same shift the internet brought to information. He explains why automated market makers win on cost of capital rather than raw efficiency, how "correlated pairs" decouple what traditional markets bundle together in dollars, a...

Chris Maurice, CEO of Yellow Card, joins Frank Chaparro to cut through the hype on stablecoins and explain where they genuinely change payments and where they don't. Yellow Card builds stablecoin payment infrastructure across more than 50 countries, giving Chris a ground-level view most of the industry lacks. He argues the "stablecoins fix international payments" story is oversimplif...

Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape for a clear-eyed read on the crypto policy journey.  Kristin explains why she thinks the CLARITY Act is far from dead, with a bipartisan Senate vote still live for September, and why the SEC and CFTC are building a parallel track using token-offering exemptions to a potential innovation exemption for t...

Laura Vidiella of VanEck joins Frank Chaparro to share what she's hearing from institutional allocators, and why their read on this market looks nothing like the panic in retail. Laura leads investor relations across VanEck's family of crypto funds, from early-stage venture to the liquid side, which puts her between founders and the largest allocators in the world. She explains why institu...

Ian de Bode, CEO and President of Ondo Finance, joins Frank Chaparro to explain what tokenization unlocks and where the space needs to improve. Ondo puts traditional financial assets on crypto rails, with roughly $4 billion in total value locked across tokenized treasuries, stocks, and ETFs. Ian believes that tokenized stocks are fundamentally about giving a global audience access to US capital ma...

Scott Melker, host of The Wolf of All Streets, joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation about where the crypto market currently stands. Scott breaks down the CLARITY Act at the finish line at what he calls coin-flip odds, why the fight has quietly narrowed to ethics and whether the president can participate in the crypto industry, and how Trump's meme coin reshaped the debate. Scott also discus...

Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink and a 20-year BlackRock veteran, joins Frank Chaparro to explain what separates a digital asset treasury that survives from one that blows up. Joseph makes the case that a productive, yield-bearing asset like ETH changes the entire treasury model, so the goal becomes growing ETH per share rather than accumulating at shareholders' expense. He argues the market...

Paul Erlanger, co-founder of FOMO, joins Frank Chaparro to talk about building a social trading app where every position, win or loss, is public.  Fresh off a $75 million Series B, Paul makes the case that retail now sits in the driver's seat of markets, that transparency changes what it means to follow the smart money, and that giving people access to everything onchain from day one beats the...

John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy at Coinbase, joins Frank Chaparro to unpack the next phase of market structure: tokenized equities, pre-IPO perpetuals, prediction markets, and the move toward a 24/7 "everything exchange." John argues the market is panicked, not apathetic, and that panic has historically been the buying signal. He shares the framework he developed with economist Nou...

GoQuant Founder and CEO Denis Dariotis joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape to unpack the plumbing behind crypto's markets. They cover why fragmentation costs institutions money, what cascading liquidations reveal about exchange risk engines, the difference between perpification and tokenization, and why Denis thinks privacy and dark pools are the most underrated opportunity in crypto.

Crypto is in the headlines almost every week, yet the price keeps going nowhere. GSR's Managing Director of Asset Management Andy Baehr joins Frank Chaparro to explain why. They unpack the divergence between crypto's slow money of institutional integration and the fast money of volume and leverage, and why nearly $20 billion in October liquidations still hangs over the market. Andy and Fra...

Asheesh Birla has been building in crypto since 2013, back when there were just a handful of blockchains and Vitalik was still working out of Ripple's offices. Now CEO of Evernorth, the largest actively managed digital asset treasury built around XRP, he joins Frank Chaparro to make the case that the technology is the easy 25% and the real work is connecting blockchains to the wider economy. T...

Michael Cahill, CEO of Pyth, joins Frank Chaparro to unpack one of finance's most valuable and least understood businesses: market data.  A former HFT insider, Michael explains how Pyth rallied over 125 of the world's top trading firms to build an alternative data source, why it found no buyers under Gensler, and how onchain venues are now discovering real-world prices when traditional mar...

Rebecca Rettig, Chief Legal Officer of Jito Labs, joins Frank Chaparro to talk through the policy fights that will define DeFi's next chapter. Rebecca argues that institutional DeFi cannot mean walled-garden DeFi, and that the existential threat to the space is the one-to-one mapping of crypto categories onto TradFi labels. She also reframes MEV as transaction ordering value, breaks down Jito&...

Ben Fielding, co-founder of Gensyn, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape fresh off Gensyn's mainnet launch and the debut of Delphi, its AI-settled information markets platform that headlined the release. Ben argues machine learning is hitting the same vertical-scaling wall that PageRank hit before MapReduce, and that the answer is rethinking ML from first principles for decentralized hardwa...

Azeem Khan, co-founder of Miden, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape to make the case that privacy is the next institutional unlock, and that without it, the institutions everyone keeps predicting will simply never arrive. They cover how zero-knowledge tech has matured into something deployable, why the old crypto token playbook has run its course, and what comes after the era of opaque govern...

Chronicle co-founder Nik Kunkel joins Frank Chaparro to break down the convergence of traditional finance and DeFi into what some are calling "neo finance," fresh off Chronicle's just-announced partnership with BlackRock on BUIDL. They get into what the Resolv USR exploit should have taught the industry about automated pauses and run risk, why most oracles are brittle by design, and...

Alpaca co-founder and CEO Yoshi Yokokawa joins Frank Chaparro to unpack the tokenized equity market that just crossed $1 billion in custody and tripled in six months, while remaining almost invisible to the average US investor. They discuss who actually buys tokenized US stocks, why national exchanges may lose their reason for existence once securities trade onchain in stablecoins, what tokenizati...

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov joins Frank Chaparro for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of DeFi credit, what Aave v4 unlocks, and how AI agents rewire finance from the backend. They cover the flip from a DeFi liquidity deficit to a surplus, why tokenization is the bottleneck for real-world credit, and why cost structure (not cheap capital) is what DeFi actually sells to fintechs. Sta...

Frank Chaparro sits down with Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Morgan Stanley, just after the firm went live with its bitcoin trust ETP. Amy has spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley, most recently running its global emerging market investing business, and now oversees digital assets across all three of the firm's major business lines. They discuss what it means for crypto to gradua...

Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana, sat down with Frank Chaparro following Katana's token generation event. Katana is a DeFi chain incubated by Polygon and GSR, built around concentrating liquidity at the base layer across lending, swapping, and leveraged trading. In this episode, Matthew breaks down the decision-making behind Katana's TGE timing, the state of the perps market and why Hyperliqu...

Mike Cagney is the Chairman of Figure, a company that has originated more than $25 billion of assets on-chain and built what may be the only liquid non-agency credit market in existence outside of Fannie and Freddie. Before Figure, he co-founded SoFi. In this episode of The Crypto Tape, Frank Chaparro sits down with Mike to work through the actual mechanics of bringing real-world credit onto block...