The Crypto Conversation

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Brave New Coin's Crypto Conversation talks to the key people creating the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency future. Hosted by Andy Pickering, learn how this rapidly evolving industry is reshaping the world as we move towards decentralized finance, NFTs and Web3.

  1. 1 day ago

    Greenlane – Why Chain Revenue Is Mostly a Meme

    Jason Hitchcock is CEO of Greenlane Holdings (Nasdaq: GNLN), the only US-listed vehicle purpose-built to hold BERA, the native token of the Berachain network, and to put that treasury to work inside the chain's Proof of Liquidity economy. Before taking the job in February he spent fifteen years on the business side of technology startups — a venture studio that sold an app to Amazon, a stint at Twitch, then a liquid token fund launched off the back of a DeFi Summer obsession — and most recently ran business development at thirdweb, where he built out chain infrastructure partnerships across more than 150 networks. Why you should listen Greenlane's origin story was as a cannabis accessories distributor that rode the boom and the bust of that industry before the Berachain Foundation went looking for a public-market proxy for a token with no ETF and no ETP. A $110.7 million private placement led by Polychain Capital — half cash and stablecoins, half BERA — brought in a new board, new management and eventually Jason himself. The legacy business survives as an asset-light drop-shipping operation that helps cover overhead. Everything else points at one asset. Greenlane held roughly 77.7 million BERA at the end of the first quarter, close to a third of circulating supply, and grew BERA-per-share about 44 percent over three months while booking an $18.4 million net loss on fair-value markdowns. That combination — accumulating fast while the mark-to-market bleeds — is the whole digital asset treasury trade in miniature. The argument underneath is more interesting than the balance sheet. Jason's view is that "chain revenue" as the industry reports it is largely a fiction: what those league tables measure is gas burned, money that is destroyed rather than routed to anyone. Berachain inverts the model. Rather than paying the security budget entirely to validators, a large share of emissions is directed to the businesses building on the chain, which use it for customer acquisition and financing, and which bid for those emissions in a validator marketplace — fifty or seventy cents on the dollar for incentives that will grow their protocol. That bid is the revenue, and it flows back to token holders with a claim on it. Protocols like Kodiak, the dominant DEX on the network, and lending market Dolomite are the practical expression of it. Greenlane doesn't just hold the asset; it runs validators, stakes into Proof of Liquidity, and lends its stablecoins into DeFi and onto stable pairs to earn trading fees. Jason frames the company as a signal to the market that there is a buyer in size, permanently. He is candid that this is a rough season to be doing any of it. Equities and precious metals have run while crypto has languished, and he catalogues the disconnect with a certain incredulity: DTCC tokenizing assets, Nasdaq experimenting with blockchain settlement, Stripe with its own chain, Druckenmiller predicting all money becomes stablecoins, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton shipping tokenized funds. Headlines that would have detonated the 2021 market barely register now. His read on what breaks the drought is not a narrative but an invisibility: crypto disappearing into the back end of ordinary products, users earning yield or settling in stablecoins without ever knowing it, and several more zeros of participants arriving without wallets. The CLARITY Act sits in the background as the regulatory unlock, still stalled in the Senate. In the hot take round he lands firmly as a multi-chain opportunist, argues that blockchains are a generic public database technology that will proliferate along distribution lines, and picks Curve Finance as his example of the future already being here — narrow, well-defined DAO governance operating at genuine scale, which he thinks is the model everyone else got wrong.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Greenlane Holdings Greenlane on Twitter Jason on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin

  2. 23 Jul

    Seasons – DeFi Yield 3.0

    Andrey Didovskiy is the CEO of Seasons, a Solana DeFi protocol built around a Yield 3.0 mechanism which pays holders real assets, gold, Bitcoin and dollars, funded by trading activity. A near-decade crypto veteran who broke into the industry writing white papers before running Atleta Network and co-founding the consultancy SYSDK, Andrey brings an operator's eye to a key problem in decentralized finance: yield that vanishes when prices turn. Why you should listen Most DeFi headline rates are a bull-market illusion. A "100% APY" advertised on a token that then falls eighty percent is worth almost nothing, because the yield was tied to price all along. Seasons flips that dependency. As Andrey explains, the protocol harvests a ten percent Transactional Transfer Tax on every $SEAS trade and converts it into a basket of hard assets paid directly to holders — no staking, no lock-ups, nothing to claim. Hold enough $SEAS in a self-custody wallet and you become a "node," and gold, Bitcoin and dollars simply arrive twice a week. Because the engine runs on volume and velocity rather than sentiment, it keeps working whether the market is climbing or bleeding — a design Andrey frames as turning your wallet into something closer to a savings account. Crypto has always moved in seasons, and so does Seasons the protocol, packaging its evolution into discrete chapters. Season one paid out in memecoins, and Andrey is candid that the community verdict was swift: the people who actually want yield do not want meme yield. Season two corrected course to what the team calls "perfect order" — a basket of Tether Gold, Wormhole-wrapped Bitcoin and Jupiter Lend USDC — assets a saver might happily hold for years. Under the hood, the roadmap layers three compounding engines: the live TTT, a Stakeholder Stablecoin Yield Module that puts queued distributions to work in transit, and Yield Asset Vaults, the first of which is slated to deploy on Kamino. Recent distributions have hovered around ten percent, with the team steering toward a sustainable double-digit band rather than the fleeting ninety-percent spikes that briefly followed launch. Solana is the foundation by conviction, not accident — Andrey sees it as one of a handful of settlement layers where the coming agentic economy will actually live, though he's careful not to write off Ethereum's next act. The bigger bet is that the winning move is to hide the blockchain entirely: strip out the jargon, and let a "put your idle assets to work" button sit quietly inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account. That thesis runs all the way to machines, with Seasons' first AI agent, Gaia, now public and a ten-year vision of a million autonomous "agent loans" and on-chain credit that finally functions. In the hot-take round he lands as a mild Bitcoin-leaning multichain pragmatist, argues that blockchain becomes the priceless trust-and-security layer beneath AI, flags longevity as the most unevenly distributed piece of the future. His closing pitch is the one that sticks: treat a node as infinite dollar-cost averaging, spend only the yield, and you keep stacking Bitcoin for as long as you hold. Supporting links Stabull Finance Seasons Seasons on X Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

  3. 15 Jul

    Shufti – Fighting AI Fraud With AI

    Tom Gadsden is Vice President of Product at Shufti, the London-based identity-verification and fraud-prevention platform built to let businesses onboard and screen users across borders in seconds rather than days. Gadsden has spent more than a decade building identity and financial-crime products, with earlier roles at credit bureau Experian and in card payments, giving him a close view of how fraud has scaled from a cottage problem into an industry. Why you should listen Shufti sits at an awkward and revealing intersection of the crypto economy. Bitcoin was designed to strip out gatekeepers; Shufti, and the compliance layer it represents, exists to put a version of them back. Gadsden doesn't pretend that tension away. He accepts that know-your-customer checks are anathema to part of the crypto community, and that self-hosted wallets will always let people move funds outside the system. But where crypto collides with fiat on- and off-ramps, governments have decided they want to see where money comes from and where it goes, and firms like Shufti, alongside chain-analytics players such as Chainalysis and Elliptic, are how businesses meet that expectation. He reaches for a useful historical parallel: the card-payments crackdown that arrived with Europe's PSD2 rules, when regulators decided the fraud losses banks had quietly tolerated were grey money the wider economy shouldn't have to absorb. Stablecoin growth, he argues, makes that scrutiny more likely, not less. The most gripping stretch of the conversation is on deepfakes, where Gadsden describes an arms race that has already run through several generations. Shufti is on the third iteration of its detection models, having moved past early metadata tells to techniques that examine how synthetic images blend, how their frequency signatures break down, and what shows up outside the visible spectrum where the generators stop trying. What has really changed, he says, is economics: AI dragged the cost of a convincing fake from tens of dollars to cents, turning fraud into something closer to a production line, with the same operator filing attempt after attempt from bed. The surge is real, with Shufti warning of a many-fold jump in deepfaked-document attacks year over year. The counterintuitive twist is that as detection has caught up, the pendulum has swung back toward human beings: real faces recruited down the pub, and money mules who sail through the initial check and only later start moving other people's money. Catching those cases, Gadsden explains, means watching for behavioral tells, funds fanning in and straight back out, high velocity and low retention, the classic setup where someone keeps fifty pounds for passing thousands through their account. Gadsden is also sharp on where the regulatory map is heading. He reads Tether's retreat from Europe, its USDT effectively pulled from regulated EU exchanges under MiCA, and Binance's withdrawn licensing bid in Greece, as a live test of whether hard rules end up pushing offshore the very firms regulators most want to supervise. On the perennial privacy question he's bracingly unsentimental: anyone uneasy about sharing their face should be far more wary of handing over an iris, a pointed nod to Sam Altman's World project, and even the privacy-forward EU Digital Identity Wallet will still ask for your name, date of birth and a biometric. His honest expectation is that a genuinely high-privacy identity system isn't coming for a decade or two. He closes on a contrarian note for his own industry: the physical passport and plastic driver's license that products like Shufti are built to read will, he suspects, erode faster than most insiders think as digital IDs become the default. It's a clear-eyed, occasionally unsettling tour of the machinery now standing between you and the fraudsters. Supporting links Stabull Finance Shufti Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

  4. 1 Jul

    Margin Trade – One Account, Every Market

    Margie Feng is marketing lead at Solayer, the Solana-compatible layer-one and the team behind Margin Trade, a non-custodial perpetuals platform that lets traders hold crypto, commodities and equities in a single cross-margin account. Feng came to Web3 from Bitmain, the world's largest crypto-mining hardware maker, and before that ran PR and marketing in the automotive industry for luxury marques including BMW and Genesis, an unusual path that informs her core pitch: she markets as the non-technical user she is, translating complicated machinery into something an ordinary trader actually wants. Why you should listen Solayer began life as a Solana restaking protocol before building out InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated chain that already clocks around 330,000 transactions per second on the way to a million-plus, alongside Solayer Pay, a card that lets users spend stablecoins anywhere. Its new flagship is Margin Trade, which reached mainnet in June. Feng's framing of the product is refreshingly concrete. Rather than scatter your collateral across five different positions, one pool backs everything, so a trader can express a view on rates, a chip stock, gold and a token from the same account, with funding, margin and liquidations all settling onchain. The platform was built by contributors from Solayer Labs alongside former traders out of Citadel and Kraken, and that market-structure DNA shows up in details like its auto-deleveraging design, which she argues spreads the pain across many positions instead of bluntly punishing whoever happens to be winning. The conversation's sharpest thread is Feng's view of what "bringing TradFi onchain" should actually mean. The lazy version, she says, is to copy whatever Wall Street is listing. The point instead is to hand anyone the same toolkit without the gatekeeping, collapsing what historically required three separate accounts into one venue. Her clearest proof of concept is Pearl Research (PRL), the GPU-mined token tied to the AI-compute narrative that no other venue, Hyperliquid included, had listed. Margin Trade became the first platform to offer a liquid, leveraged perp on it. The marketing logic follows the same instinct: instead of announcing a listing like everyone else, tell a PRL miner they are already long the token whether they like it or not, then show them how to stop being forced long. The pitch starts from the pain, not the product, and she is candid that in a saturated perps market the only winning move is to play a different game entirely. She situates all of this in a wider migration of equities and real-world assets onchain, and in the demand that platforms like Hyperliquid have proven exists for trading everything in one place. On the mood in Solana's community she is measured rather than hyped, describing a builder base that keeps shipping through the bear market, with payments an especially active corner. The hot-take round lands her as a Bitcoin-leaning holder who keeps most of her stack in cold storage, convinced crypto will reshape the financial system, and genuinely unsure what ten years holds beyond a strong hunch that everyone ends up with a personal AI agent managing their portfolio. Fittingly for someone who thinks the future is already arriving faster than anyone can narrate it, she signs off on Black Mirror and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem as the fiction that keeps feeling less like fiction. Supporting links Stabull Finance Margin Trade Margin Trade on Twitter Solayer on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

  5. 22 Jun

    Ouinex – Getting Retail Out of the Shark Tank

    Ilies Larbi is the founder and CEO of Ouinex, a multi-asset trading platform built to fuse crypto and traditional markets in a single account while shielding retail traders from the structural disadvantages of conventional order books. A nearly fifteen-year veteran of New York-based forex broker FXCM, where he climbed from sales associate to Managing Director for Europe and a seat on the executive committee, the Paris-based Larbi stepped into crypto in 2022 — late by bull-run standards, as he admits, but with a clear view of the gap he wanted to fill. Why you should listen Larbi's central argument lands with a memorable image: most crypto exchanges drop retail traders into a tank full of sharks. His culprit is the central limit order book, which works beautifully in regulated venues like the NYSE where institutions compete against each other, but breaks down in crypto, where a trader tapping orders from their phone over café Wi-Fi sits on the same book as a high-frequency desk running millions in low-latency infrastructure around the clock. That asymmetry, he argues, is why retail traders so often see stop losses picked off and price action that feels suspiciously erratic. Ouinex's answer is a no-CLOB execution model: institutions are still welcome to provide liquidity, but they're allowed only to make markets, never to take them, and they get zero visibility into where retail orders are resting since those sit on Ouinex's own servers. The result is a kind of Chinese wall, with liquidity providers forced to compete purely on the best bid and ask while an aggregator passes only the sharpest prices through to traders. Ouinex lets users trade spot crypto and perpetuals alongside forex, gold, indices and equities, using their crypto as collateral rather than cashing out to fiat — and crucially, it routes the TradFi side through hundred-year-old market infrastructure rather than rebuilding it as a thin perpetual. Larbi makes the case with hard numbers, contrasting a euro-dollar or gold trade on Ouinex against the same instrument as a perp on a venue like Hyperliquid, where he claims spreads run several times wider, commissions stack on top, and the order book is far shallower. He also points to early evidence that the multi-asset thesis is working: as geopolitics roiled markets, his traders moved record volume into oil and gold while waiting for crypto to get interesting again, exactly the cross-market hedge the platform was designed to enable. Larbi raised nine million dollars entirely from his own trading community — much of it the French-speaking InteractivTrading community — with no venture capital on the cap table, which he argues leaves the platform answerable to its users rather than to investors holding a bag of future tokens. That native token, OUIX, is heading to an ICO via the company's launchpad, pitched as a low-sell-pressure utility play with fee discounts and trading cashback. He's candid that the product is still maturing, urging listeners to test it on a demo account with virtual funds and lean on Ouinex's human (not chatbot) support. The closing hot-take round rounds him out nicely: a self-described multi-chain pragmatist with unshakeable conviction in blockchain's staying power, convinced AI agents will reshape how — and whether — we trade at all, and unashamedly nostalgic for the original Avatar. Supporting links Stabull Finance Ouinex Ouinex on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

  6. 21 Jun

    oneBanking – The AI App For Finance

    Sebastian Salomon is the CGO and co-founder of oneBanking, a Malta-registered fintech building an all-in-one app that fuses everyday banking, crypto, and an AI assistant designed to save users money. A 31-year-old German serial entrepreneur, Sebastian started his first company, an e-commerce sports-nutrition business, straight out of his studies in 2016, then co-founded a business-coaching venture that he says has worked with thousands of founders and small companies, giving him a broad read on where technology and money are heading next. Why you should listen Sebastian's starting point is a gap that European crypto users will recognize. In the wake of the EU's MiCA regime, a number of global platforms pulled back or reshaped their European offerings, leaving Europeans with fewer clean, regulated ways to buy, hold, and cash out of crypto. oneBanking pitches itself as a fully regulated bridge across that divide: a single app where fiat and digital assets sit side by side, where conversions are meant to be near-instant and cheap, and where users can move coins out to self-custody, including via a hardware-wallet integration with Switzerland's Tangem. Layered on top is the project's own oneToken, positioned as the engine of the ecosystem and partly funded by its community. The framing throughout the conversation is that the old, app-by-app model of personal finance is about to be collapsed into one place. The more distinctive idea is what Sebastian means by AI banking. Rather than bolting a chatbot onto a banking app, oneBanking is building what he describes as an AI assistant with the trappings of an actual employee: its own phone number, email, and messaging accounts, hooked into your finances and into thousands of comparison platforms such as Germany's Check24. The promise is that the assistant doesn't just flag that you're overpaying; it acts, switching providers in your name, hunting discounts on insurance, energy, and mobile plans, and even timing a flight booking to a cheaper day. He argues the real payoff is on the business side, where an AI combing through a company's stack can surface duplicate software seats and overpriced contracts, then negotiate them down. He frames small monthly savings as genuinely life-changing for ordinary households, which is the emotional core of the pitch. On timing, Sebastian says the app launches at the end of June, rolling out in stages: IBAN accounts and cards first, then crypto and the AI assistant a few weeks later, with EU passporting and a oneToken offering slated for later in the summer, and a longer-term ambition to extend into sports and real-estate tokenization and well beyond Europe. The conversation closes with the hot take round, where he plants his flag as a Bitcoin guy who has broadened into a wider portfolio through his Web3 work, predicts the legacy banking system will essentially disappear within a decade as AI banking matures and regulation catches up, points to his daily phone calls with oneBanking's own AI as a glimpse of a future that's already here, and lands on Star Wars as his sci-fi pick. Supporting links Stabull Finance oneBanking oneBanking on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

  7. 16 Jun

    Cherry Servers – Building Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure

    Lili Hellriegel is head of enterprise solutions at Cherry Servers, a Lithuania-based bare metal cloud provider that pitches itself as a sovereign, Web3-friendly alternative to the US hyperscalers. Before joining Cherry, Lili was head of infrastructure at staking firm Blockdaemon, where she built out data center partnerships, network architecture and the server specs behind validation workloads — work that left her unusually fluent in what crypto teams actually need from their infrastructure. Why you should listen The pitch for European infrastructure has rarely been louder, and Lili makes the case with the confidence of someone who has lived on both sides of it. Every major hyperscaler — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, even Oracle — is a US company, and for a growing cohort of Web3 teams that is no longer a neutral fact. Cherry Servers sits under European jurisdiction, runs its own facility in Lithuania, and operates data centers across Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Chicago, Singapore and a newly opened site in Tokyo. Some of Cherry's customers come for hard compliance reasons; others, Lili says, come for ideological ones, wanting the chains they help secure to live beyond the reach of any single government. The conversation lands at a moment when data sovereignty and distrust of concentrated American cloud power have moved from fringe concern to boardroom agenda. The sharper argument is about economics, and here Lili thinks the industry is approaching an inflection point. She describes a shift from "cloud-first" to "workload-first" thinking: instead of defaulting to a hyperscaler and accepting whatever T-shirt-sized instance you're sold, teams running archival nodes, validators or other niche workloads are discovering they pay more and perform worse than they would on dedicated hardware tuned to the job. Cherry's answer is granular customization — choose your disks, your storage, your RAM, and pay only for what the workload demands — backed by account managers who architect the build rather than just sell a box, with human support that answers in well under a minute. For staking-heavy customers, the model is almost self-funding: a large share pay in crypto, drawing on staking rewards to cover their infrastructure across some thirty different chains. Her forecast for the next eighteen to twenty-four months is the part worth sitting with. Lili argues the era of free cloud credits is ending — she doubts AWS will keep handing startups six-figure credit grants for signing up to an accelerator — and that founders, newly disciplined about runway, will increasingly treat optimized bare metal as a way to extend it. In the closing hot-take round she plants her flag as a multi-chain "Solana maxi," names Bitcoin as the enduring store of value while backing the smaller chains' upside, and offers a builder's creed: the market ultimately rewards people who make useful things on-chain, not those treating tokens purely as speculation — which, she adds, is also why she thinks people should run nodes with smaller providers. The desert-island sci-fi pick, naturally, is Star Wars. https://www.cherryservers.com/

  8. 11 Jun

    Mitrade – Trading the Great Convergence

    Cam Darlington is Global Strategy Expert at Mitrade, the Australian-founded CFD trading platform regulated by ASIC in Australia and CySEC in Europe, offering forex, commodities, indices, shares, and crypto from a single account. A Nova Scotia native based in Hong Kong for the past eight years, Cam brings a dual perspective: a traditional finance background working with brokers expanding across Asia, and recent experience as co-founder and COO of easy.fun, a social trading app built on Solana and Hyperliquid. Why you should listen Cam has a name for the phenomenon most people inside traditional brokerages never see from the trenches: the convergence. TradFi and crypto are collapsing into a single market structure, and the pivot point, he argues, is Washington. With the CLARITY Act working through the Senate and President Trump signing the Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks executive order in May, digital asset brokers are being ushered toward the core plumbing of the US financial system, including direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails. Add growing regulatory comfort with tokenized stocks trading at parity with their underlying assets, and the discount problem that dogged early real-world-asset experiments like Robinhood's tokenized equities starts to disappear. Tokenized RWAs, Cam says, just became viable. The second-order effects are reshaping market infrastructure itself. When a broker like Robinhood can mint tokenized stocks on its own proprietary chain and handle execution and settlement in-house, it stops feeding liquidity to the public exchanges. Cam frames the exchange's recent moves, including its tokenization partnership with Kraken built on the xStocks framework, as a defensive response to exactly this threat. He speaks from experience here: his team at easy.fun integrated the xStocks API and saw firsthand how thin liquidity gets once you trade beyond Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla. Cam says players most at risk are the centralized crypto exchanges, squeezed between newly crypto-enabled traditional brokerages on one side and purpose-built DeFi venues like Hyperliquid on the other. For traders, Cam's message is about survival. The first year determines whether someone becomes a trader or a statistic, and he is scathing about platforms offering 1,000x leverage to beginners, which he likens to handing a brand-new driver a Ferrari and pointing at the motorway. He makes the case for starting on a regulated platform with guardrails, modest leverage, built-in TradingView charting, and daily strategy feeds, which is precisely the gap Mitrade aims to fill as a companion to a traditional brokerage account.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Mitrade Sign up to Mitrade Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

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Brave New Coin's Crypto Conversation talks to the key people creating the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency future. Hosted by Andy Pickering, learn how this rapidly evolving industry is reshaping the world as we move towards decentralized finance, NFTs and Web3.

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