On The Margin | Boaz Sobrado & Ivan Patriki

He applied for the wrong regulatory license and had to redo the entire application from scratch. Now his company moves billions of dollars a day between fiat and crypto. Sami Start co-founded Transak in 2019 to solve a simple problem: making it easy to convert between fiat currency and crypto or stablecoins directly inside third-party apps like MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Phantom. The company has...

He turned 37 ETH into a Shiba Inu position that peaked at $5.7 billion, then walked away from his early Bitcoin rather than hand over his identity to a KYC form. Shibtoshi is the masked crypto billionaire behind Squid Grow and Silent Swap. He first heard about Bitcoin in 2010, bought his first coins in a Vegas OTC deal to fund an online poker game (and got wiped out), and was buying Litecoin and N...

He made a crypto movie called $Positions, and while it premiered at South By Southwest, scammers were busy launching meme coins in its name and rug pulling his fans. Brandon Daley is an independent filmmaker who spent 14 years selling power tools on the internet while self funding short films for $5,000 each. No Hollywood connections, no nepotism, no family money. He stayed in the Midwest, ground...

Private jets are paying for fuel mid-flight in stablecoins. Watch dealers are settling five-figure deals the same way. And credit cards can't keep up with either. Will Harborne joined crypto in 2016, working at Tether back when the word "stablecoin" barely existed yet. He co-founded Ethfinex in 2017, one of the earliest Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges, which evolved through several rebrands...

He nearly hit a trillion dollars in trades and never turned a profit on purpose. Sergej Kunz built 1inch out of a hackathon where he won just $300, enough to buy a plane ticket home to Germany. Two weeks later the site had real volume, and today 1inch has settled over $809 billion in trades across DeFi, powering partners like Coinbase along the way. In this episode, Sergej and Ivan Patriki dig int...

Buying Bitcoin with a card used to cost 17% in fees. This is the founder who thought that was insane, bootstrapped a fix on 365% annual loans, and built it into a $5B company. Ivan Soto-Wright is the co-founder and CEO of MoonPay, the on-ramp plugged into MetaMask, Phantom, and just about every major crypto wallet you have used. Over 35 million people have run crypto through it. He started with ze...

Miami’s mayor, police chief, and city manager all sat down separately with Ivan Patriki and between them: a $450 million bond, a police force that (probably) didn’t chase aliens, and what it actually takes to run one of the fastest-growing cities in America. The Mayor, Eileen Higgins spent almost 20 years as an engineer in the private sector before a corporate retreat exercise, writing her own obi...

A JP Morgan quant trader walked away from Wall Street to build the trust layer that lets AI agents spend your money. Chandler Fung went from the JP Morgan trading floor to Onyx, the bank's blockchain and AI payments team, to years at Ripple building cross border stablecoin rails. In early 2025 he founded T54, a company solving one problem almost nobody is: how do you trust an AI agent to touch you...

A tax lawyer quit his big-law job to bet everything on an idea Wall Street had buried for 50 years, and now he moves $7 billion for clients who invest their retirement money in Bitcoin, real estate, and private deals instead of index funds. Adam Bergman is the founder of IRA Financial. He started with zero clients, zero assets, and one phone line in his apartment, bootstrapped it on Google Ads, to...

He slept three to four hours a night for two years straight, and he says he'd do it again for the payoff. Marc Boiron went from a self described "accidental lawyer" to running roughly 70 to 80% of all DeFi legal work, to becoming CEO of Polygon, the blockchain that has moved over 2.5 trillion dollars. In this episode Marc and Ivan Patriki get into how he actually got the job, why Polygon bet every...

He was alone in the Oval Office with JFK at fifteen years old, and that was just the beginning. Lee Caplin has lived several lives: Justice Department lawyer protecting free speech, co-founder of the company that became Penske Media (Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Billboard), arts administrator, and now the architect of the journalism and media school at Florida International University. He sat down...

What if AI ran the government, and a private company built the digital money and IDs to make it possible? Xin Yan is doing exactly that, for over a dozen countries. Xin Yan started as a crypto mining engineer and built Token Table into 40% market share of token distribution before pivoting his company into something almost no one else in crypto is doing: building sovereign digital infrastructure (...

The number that roulette wheel lands on isn't random, it's the one you didn't bet on. Ismail Vali runs YieldSec and GCI, the intelligence platforms that map how illegal online gambling actually operates. He calls it the third largest economic flow on earth, and most of it is controlled by transnational criminal organizations that didn't come to give you good odds. They came to steal from you. In t...

How a company from a country of 3 million built a brand everybody knows, and paid Mr Beast seven figures to do it. Regimantas Urbanas is one of the first employees and now CMO of Surfshark, the Lithuanian cybersecurity company that launched into a saturated VPN market in 2018 and turned into part of a $3 billion group. He joined three months after the product went live, gave the brand its meaning,...

Your Social Security number, credit card, and passport can be bought online for about 19 dollars. The CTO of NordVPN explains how. Marijus Briedis has spent nearly 10 years at Nord Security, starting as a DevOps engineer and rising to CTO of a company with over 2,000 employees and a whole suite of cybersecurity products behind the flagship VPN. In this episode, Marijus and Ivan Patriki go deep on...

Ben Goertzel coined the term "AGI" in a 2005 book, founded the field's first annual conference, and led the AI team that built Sophia, the humanoid robot granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia. He now runs an open-source AGI project and SingularityNET, a blockchain network built on the bet that artificial general intelligence should never be owned by a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Goertzel and Boa...

Bhutan is going all-in on crypto, the city is called the Geluphy Mindfulness City. They mined their first Bitcoin in 2018, using clean hydropower, years before most governments knew what a blockchain was. Now the Himalayan kingdom of under a million people is building something no other country has attempted: a special administrative region roughly seven times the size of Singapore, with its own r...

There’s a company processing over to $350 million in transactions that spends less on AI all year than most startups spend on it in a single month. Anton Lobintsev, co-founder of the stablecoin-based financial platform SquareFi, built it that way on purpose. His company didn’t start as a fintech at all. It started as a platform to tokenize real estate in Georgia and Indonesia, until Anton and his...

Nigel and Boaz Sobrado explore how AI is set to transform gaming—and why virtual dealers could become one of the first AI experiences millions of people interact with every day. Nigel explains why his company believes AI dealers can outperform human dealers, how crypto and stablecoins are reshaping the online casino industry, and why AI isn’t simply replacing jobs but evolving into a social layer...

Koceila Cougar and Ivan Patriki speak about some crazy secrets here...Koceila is a Paris-based artist, musician, and cultural strategist who's sold paintings for $100,000, exhibited at Art Basel Miami, and moved through the same circles as billionaires, royalty, and people he won't name on camera. He describes himself as a "cultural spy" - someone who sees what others can't, moves between worlds m...

Yoon Auh spent a decade building trading systems before landing on the program trading desk at Credit Suisse, becoming head trader, then VP at Goldman Sachs, then head trader at Magnetar Capital — where he accidentally invented what became an entire sub-industry on Wall Street. Then he walked away from institutional finance to solve a problem nobody else would touch: your data is Big Tech's produc...

No way Ilies Larbi actually told me this.. the crypto industry has a dirty secret and guy behind a HUGE brokerage, Ivan Patriki learns the truth about it. He said he's building a brokerage to fix it.. I'm interviewing about it and seeing if it's actually true. I sat down with the 20-year traditional finance veteran and founder of Ouinex, to pull back the curtain on what actually happens when you t...

Reeve Collins co-founded Tether, the world's largest stablecoin powering a $180+ billion financial network. But he didn't start in crypto. He was there at the birth of the internet with a startup that went public for $6.6 billion in 1999. Then he did it again in blockchain. In this conversation, he breaks down why stablecoins are reshaping global finance, why the government won't kill Bitcoin, and...

From Soviet Refugee into GoMining CEO: Mark Zalan on GoMining, Crypto Fraud & the FUTURE of Bitcoin. GoMining is one of the top 10 Bitcoin miners in the world by hash power, and the CEO Mark Zalan sat down with me to share the unfiltered story behind his rise from Soviet Union refugee to leading a company with 5 million users. We cover:How his family fled the Soviet Union in 1989 with $360 and ref...

Backed by the same investors who funded SpaceX, I sat down with Tanner, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Counterpart, to get an honest look at what it actually takes to build something real fraom scratch. From cold-calling 40 people about a job offer in Malaysia and only trusting the two who said yes, to raising $50M to fix an industry everyone hates, to why working 14-hour days is his version of go...