The Crypto Tape

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...

Jamyn Edis has spent over 15 years teaching at NYU's Stern School of Business, led data science and AI practices at companies like Take-Two Interactive and Pearson, and is now finishing a book called The Fifth Horseman: AI and Humanity's Day of Judgment . His argument is that AI is a mirror of us, trained on the entire documented corpus of human knowledge, and reflecting our instincts, des...

Kaledora Fontana Kiernan-Linn co-founded Ostium in 2022 with a thesis that crypto-native traders would eventually want to trade traditional assets, on-chain, from their existing wallets. Three years later, the numbers are speaking for themselves. Ostium did nearly $6 billion in gold volume in the second half of 2025, with gold running at roughly ten times the volume of Bitcoin on the platform. In...

Alvin Hsia, co-founder and CEO of Ventuals, joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation about building perpetual markets for real-world assets and bringing on-chain leverage to a non-crypto audience. Alvin spent six years at Airbnb before going through DeFi summer in 2020 and eventually co-founding Ventuals, a Paradigm-backed perps exchange built on Hyperliquid. In two months, Ventuals has crossed $10...

Nick van Eck, co-founder of Agora, joins Frank Chaparro for a candid conversation about where stablecoins are headed Nick spent years backing crypto companies as a venture investor at General Catalyst before co-founding Agora two years ago. Agora issues AUSD and is building infrastructure to help businesses move their operations on-chain, positioning itself as the horizontally neutral alternative...

Mike Dudas, founding partner of Six Man Ventures, joins Frank Chaparro for an unfiltered look at crypto venture in 2026. Mike has been in crypto since 2013. He co-founded The Block, built payment infrastructure at Paxos and Venmo, and has now raised three funds focused exclusively on the application layer. He sat down with Frank fresh off closing Six Man's third fund in a market where raising...

Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at ICE, joins Frank Chaparro to discuss the NYSE's plan to launch a new venue for trading tokenized equities against stablecoins. Recorded inside the NYSE vault, a 1903 building originally equipped with air conditioning to protect paper stock certificates, the conversation explores how blockchain settlement will reshape equity markets. Michael wal...

Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly, joins Frank Chaparro to dissect why 2025 was one of the most value-destructive years in crypto history despite all the regulatory wins. They discuss the "why token?" era, the death of the middle in crypto VC, and how traditional investors are returning to the space with more discipline. This conversation provides a blunt analysis of crypto’s curr...

Sal Gilbertie has spent 17 years navigating the ETF approval process. As CEO of Teucrium, he built his reputation launching agricultural commodity products before filing one of the first Bitcoin ETF applications. When his firm launched XXRP, a double-leveraged XRP fund, it hit $550 million in AUM within 12 weeks. In this episode, Sal walks Frank Chaparro through how leveraged products actually wor...

Lord James Wharton joins Frank Chaparro to discuss how crypto policy actually gets made in the UK. Lord James Wharton served as MP for Stockton South and later as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State before joining the House of Lords. He previously chaired the board of the UK's higher education regulator, giving him direct experience with how regulatory thinking works in practice. This con...

VanEck’s Head of Digital Assets Research Matt Sigel  joins Frank Chaparro to discuss Bitcoin's Q4 correction, why miners are structural sellers, where value is actually accruing, and what could keep crypto range-bound through 2026. This episode provides a helpful breakdown to the true fundamentals driving crypto’s current price action.

Anton Katz, co-founder and CEO of Talos, joins Frank Chaparro to discuss the institutional infrastructure that's quietly transforming crypto markets. In this conversation, Anton and Frank cover: Asset managers moving into the industry Multi-asset trading in practice with real portfolios blending crypto, equities, and FX Major banks positioning to launch lending infrastructure If you want to un...