The Crypto Tape

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...

Robert Leshner, co- founder of Superstate and creator of Compound, joins Frank Chaparro to discuss why institutional interest in tokenization hasn't translated to token prices, how stablecoins changed everything, and where real-world assets are actually headed. In this conversation, Robert and Frank cover: Why 99% of crypto markets are driven by momentum and flows, not fundamentals How stablec...

Tom Warner from Double Zero joins Frank Chaparro to explain why blockchain protocols are being held back by the public internet and what it takes to build a private network specifically for crypto traffic. Tom and Frank discuss: Why the internet treats financial transactions like casual web browsing The coordination problem tokens solve for global infrastructure How validator location creates geog...

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee joins Frank Chaparro to dissect why crypto markets feel darker than fundamentals suggest, even as stablecoins, RWAs, and institutional adoption continue growing. Tom and Frank discuss: Federal Reserve policy uncertainty and its impact on crypto Why most DATs will fail and what that means for the asset class Ethereum's Layer-2 strategy and value accrual Static vs. dynamic th...

Frank Chaparro sits down with Chris Perkins, the President of CoinFund, to learn about his unique perspective on how crypto markets have evolved through crisis.  In this episode, Frank and Chris discuss: Why US futures markets are crypto's most critical missing infrastructure The five-element framework for evaluating Digital Asset Treasuries The regulatory mistakes of the previous administration a...

Frank Chaparro sits down with Kevin McCordic, the Director of Growth at Monad Foundation, to dive into building what might become crypto’s most developed ecosystem prior to mainnet launch. In this episode, Frank and Kevin discuss: Monad's ambitions to process 10,000 transactions per second  The dark forest of crypto capital markets Why the best founders spend years obsessed with ideas no one e...

In this episode of The Crypto Tape, Frank Chaparro sits down with three leaders shaping crypto’s policy future: Greg Xethalis, General Counsel, Multicoin Capital Kristin Smith, President, Solana Policy Institute Jonathan Jachym, Head of Global Policy, Kraken They discuss the evolution of crypto legislation, the Genius Act, and how the tone in Washington has shifted from politics to permanence. Ins...

Frank Chaparro sits down with Dmitry Tokarev — founder of Bron and former CEO of Copper — to explore how he’s bringing institutional-grade crypto security to everyday users. Topics include: Why seed phrases are an outdated model Lessons from institutional custody What North Korea’s Lazarus Group means for crypto safety The return to mathematical integrity in crypto 🎧 Tune in now to hear Dmitry’s...

Crypto’s institutional playbook is being rewritten. From Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) inspired by the MicroStrategy model to the explosive rise of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), a new wave of capital is flowing on-chain. Jeff Park, co-founder of Pro Cap, and Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, join The Crypto Tape to break down how these structures are reshaping markets, bridging TradFi and...

Crypto just went through a $19 billion liquidation blowout — but despite the chaos, Wall Street is starting to look more like crypto . Meltem Demirors, one of the most influential investors in digital assets and a defining voice of its culture, joins The Crypto Tape to explain why speculation isn’t a flaw — it’s human nature . Now the founding partner of Crucible , a new venture firm built to back...