The Crypto Conversation

Brave New Coin

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. 23 hr ago

    Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3

    div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown"> Charlie Durkin is Principal Solutions Lead at Chainlink Labs, where he works with the world's largest banks, asset managers, and market infrastructures on bringing capital markets onchain. A decade at Citigroup – five years in investment banking and debt capital markets, then five more in product management building the actual rails – gives him a grounded view of the gap between TradFi reality and crypto's promises, and what it will take to close it. Why you should listen Charlie's path from Citi's product team to Chainlink is the perfect frame for this conversation. He's lived inside the legacy plumbing of capital markets and now spends his days helping institutions migrate workflows to blockchain rails without throwing out the existing infrastructure they're built on. His explanation of Chainlink itself is refreshingly concrete: not a competing L1, but the middleware connecting blockchains to each other and to the offchain world – an oracle network at its core, expanded into a full orchestration layer via the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). The "give us an API and we'll connect you securely to the blockchain ecosystem" framing is exactly how Chainlink keeps showing up in the headlines alongside DTCC, Swift, UBS, Euroclear, JPMorgan, BNY Mellon and Franklin Templeton. The tokenization discussion is where Charlie shines. The popular narrative is "tokenize everything"; his lived experience is that the interesting frontier is tokenizing cash. Stablecoins are becoming foundational market infrastructure because instant settlement is too compelling to ignore, but they don't work on a bank's balance sheet – under GENIUS Act rules, stablecoins must be backed one-for-one with HQLA, meaning banks lose the benefit of fractionalized reserves. That's why tokenized deposits are now the hottest conversation in institutional finance: same rails, same settlement story, but compatible with how banks actually run their balance sheets. Charlie also pushes back on the tokenized equities hype, arguing that "mirror tokenization" of stocks bolts complexity onto an already complex system (corporate actions, final settlement, CSD reconciliation), and that the real unlock comes only after cash is natively onchain. At that point native equity and debt issuance starts to make sense on its own terms. Andy and Charlie dig into the harder questions: where the institutional friction actually lives (legal, compliance, security, operational integration – not the business case, which everyone now buys), how procurement teams trained on on-prem-to-cloud transitions are now having to wrap their heads around decentralized infrastructure, and why Chainlink's defense-in-depth architecture – independent node operators, cryptographic consensus, geographic redundancy – is what lets GSIBs sign off on production deployments. Charlie pulls in the standards-and-scale argument with sharp historical analogies: rail gauges for industrialisation, standardised shipping containers for global trade, US GAAP for capital allocation, TCP/IP for the internet. Financial markets need standards before they can scale, and no institution wants to integrate ten different blockchains ten different ways. The hot take round delivers a multi-chain opportunist stance, a contrarian view on tokenised equity headlines, a 10-year vision in which blockchain rails disappear entirely from the user experience, and a callout to the recent DTCC Collateral AppChain announcement – built on Chainlink's CRE, slated for Q4 2026 – as the first glimpse of an onchain capital markets future that's already arriving. Supporting links Stabull Finance Chainlink Chainlink 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.

    26 min
  2. 3 days ago

    Sleepagotchi – The Intelligence Layer for the Wellness Economy

    Kenny Wood is the newly appointed CEO of Sleepagotchi, the Solana-based platform building what it calls the intelligence layer for the wellness economy. A two-decade veteran of the games industry, Wood cut his teeth as an artist on Mattel's Barbie titles before working on chart-topping franchises including Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, Transformers, Formula 1 and World Rally Championship, later moving into ship-simulation work at VSTEP in the Netherlands and serving as CTO of AI world-generation startup Moonlander prior to its acquisition by Alpha 3D. Why you should listen Sleep is the foundation almost every other health metric rests on, and that is precisely why Wood argues it is the right wedge into a much larger market. Fix sleep and mood, energy and recovery tend to follow; neglect it and the deficit cascades through everything else. Sleepagotchi began life as a gamified sleep-to-earn app, but under Wood the thesis has sharpened: the real prize is not the streak mechanic but the data exhaust it generates. The company reports that roughly three-quarters of users open the app within ten minutes of waking, and its Telegram-based Lite version has touched two million all-time users, the kind of daily habit loop most wellness startups never achieve. The question Wood keeps returning to is who should capture the value of all that biometric signal. The product architecture he describes is ambitious. Rather than a single sleep score, Sleepagotchi runs four cooperating AI agents: a sleep coach that explains causally why a night went the way it did, a wellness agent that checks in on mood, diet, caffeine and alcohol through the day, a meal planner that turns those insights into recipes, and a shopping agent that sources the ingredients or supplements and can have them delivered. If you are tired despite doing everything right, the system might infer low iron and nudge you toward leafy greens, then route that recommendation downstream into an actual basket. A built-in marketplace lets vendors offer supplements, courses and the like, knitting recommendation and commerce into one loop. It is a bold attempt to make wellness advice actionable rather than merely informational, and it leans on integrations with Whoop, Oura and Apple Watch to pull in the raw signal. The thornier and more interesting argument is about ownership. Wearable terms of service generally bar reselling raw device data, a constraint Wood acknowledges candidly, but he draws a line between that raw feed and the processed, AI-derived record of a person's life built on top of it, which he believes the user should own and, eventually, permission or monetize on their own terms via the platform's $SLEEP token. Wood inherits the company from founding CEO Anton Kraminkin, now a strategic advisor, and a cap table that includes Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Inception and others. In a relaxed closing stretch, he talks up the strength of the underlying game IP, its outsized following across Japan, the Philippines and Korea, and the new levels arriving in the months ahead, while staying refreshingly honest about the work still to do. The result is a conversation that doubles as a preview of where the AI agent economy and personal health data may be heading. Supporting links Stabull Finance Sleepagotchi Sleepagotchi 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.

    16 min
  3. 24 May

    Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral

    Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at Rootstock Labs, a core contributor to Rootstock, the Bitcoin sidechain that has been quietly running for eight years and now anchors a growing slice of institutional Bitcoin DeFi. Based in London, Green came to crypto through fifteen years in traditional finance — a decade at Bloomberg working with banks and high-frequency trading desks, followed by a stint at Circle building out the European stablecoin business — before going further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole when emerging-market clients made clear they wanted something more than a dollar wrapper. Why you should listen Green's central argument is that the digital gold narrative, while true, is incomplete and increasingly expensive to leave unchallenged. There is roughly $260 billion in Bitcoin sitting idle on corporate treasuries, ETF balance sheets and miner books, paying 10 to 50 basis points a year in custody fees and earning nothing. That, he says, is what pristine collateral looks like when it has nowhere productive to go. Rootstock's pitch is to change the denominator: keep the security model of Bitcoin, but give holders the ability to borrow against their stack, run it through tokenized real-world asset vaults, or deploy it into native yield strategies without selling a single satoshi. The first product out of the new institutional unit, launching in the next month, is a Bitcoin-collateralized loan aimed squarely at miners who are sitting on inventory but still need to pay the power bill. The proof points are no longer theoretical. Mercado Bitcoin recently deployed $20 million of tokenized private credit on Rootstock, with a $100 million target by April, giving Bitcoin holders Brazilian receivables and corporate debt exposure they would otherwise struggle to access. In Japan, where Green sees an unusually crypto-curious institutional base, Rootstock has partnered with Animoca Brands Japan to bring corporate treasury and BTCFi tooling to a market that historically follows rather than leads but is now reportedly seeing 80% of investors plan crypto allocations within the year. Midas, Hyperithm and other ecosystem builders are stacking institutional-grade vaults on top of the chain, with custody handled through the usual professional suspects — Fireblocks, Fordefi and Utila — and Green argues spreading risk across providers and protocols is the obvious lesson from a year of high-profile DeFi hacks. Where the conversation gets provocative is on what Bitcoin actually competes with. Green draws on Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan's framing of Bitcoin as an out-of-the-money call option on becoming a payment instrument, and argues that the real prize is the roughly half of global savings parked in fine art and real estate — illiquid stores of value that Bitcoin, once composable through chains like Rootstock, can simply do better. He is candid about the risks, too: concentration in a handful of ETFs and the dominance of Strategy as the largest non-Satoshi holder are not trivial, even if he thinks the diversification of providers is happening fast enough. His closing critique is one the institutional crowd will recognize — DeFi has an institutional-grade communications problem, and until protocols learn to handle incidents the way Circle handled its de-peg, the larger pools of capital will keep migrating to centralized custody. Stick around for his sketch of what a five-year transition to Bitcoin-backed mortgages and productive retail BTC actually requires. Supporting links Stabull Finance Rootstock Labs 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.

    23 min
  4. 17 May

    MyEtherWallet – The Next Decade of On-Chain Finance

    Kosala Hemachandra is the founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet (MEW), one of crypto's true OG products and a wallet that has been onboarding users to Ethereum since the network's mainnet launch. Eleven years, three million users, and a team of more than twenty later, MEW is positioning itself as a self-custodial home not just for crypto but for tokenized stocks, bonds, and the broader real-world asset economy now arriving on-chain. Why you should listen Kosala's origin story is a reminder of how far this industry has travelled. A computer engineering graduate who discovered Ethereum through Bitcoin, he built MEW because accessing the network at launch meant the command line and nothing else. The earliest MEW users were almost exclusively technical; today's users, by contrast, often have no idea which chain their assets are sitting on – and that is the point. Andy and Kosala dig into the decade-long tension at the heart of self-custody: balancing genuine user sovereignty with an onboarding experience that doesn't terrify newcomers. Mnemonic phrases have been "bread and butter" for ten years for a reason – any proprietary fix would lock users in and break the very portability that makes self-custody meaningful – but advances like account abstraction, social recovery, and smart contract wallets are finally pointing toward a more humane future. The conversation covers tokenized stocks and real-world assets, where Kosala sees the most profound shift of his career. TradFi went from hostile to crypto eight years ago to actively partnering with it today, and MEW is leaning into that convergence by offering tokenized equities alongside crypto assets in a single self-custodial wallet. Kosala uses his home country of Sri Lanka as an illustration: six months ago, a Sri Lankan investor wanting US stock exposure faced brokerage friction, 10–15% taxes, and layered commissions. Now they can simply hold tokenized Nvidia or Tesla in a MEW wallet. He also walks through the difference between USDC and yield-bearing stablecoins like Ondo's USDY (which is backed by government bonds), and why this category collapses the old workflow of "buy stablecoin → bridge to Aave or Compound → lend → harvest yield" into a single token you just hold. On regulation, Kosala is candid: US users are currently locked out of tokenized assets and there is no shortcut, but the trajectory of the last decade gives him real confidence the rules will catch up. The bigger bet is that MEW evolves into a global, full-service, self-custodial wealth platform – one login, one set of keys, exposure to crypto, fiat, RWAs, and traditional yield instruments without ever surrendering custody. The episode closes with details on MEW's live $100,000 Energy Campaign (points for swaps, transactions, and tweets convert into chances at $5–$10 of tokenized US equities) plus an hourly $5 swap reward for early users. The hot take round delivers Kosala's tidy framing of Bitcoin as gold and Ethereum as USD, a strong vote of confidence in AI-driven portfolio management as a future that's already here for the few, and a Christopher Nolan pick to close things out. Supporting links Stabull Finance MyEtherWallet MEW 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.

    30 min
  5. 12 May

    Gridmatic – AI-Powered Energy for Flexible Loads

    Kise Shannon is VP of Business Development at Gridmatic, an AI-first power company helping Bitcoin miners and other flexible loads turn energy market volatility into opportunity. Drawing on more than 20 years in the US energy industry – starting in Texas the moment the state deregulated – Kise has built her career across both global energy majors and startups, and now leads Gridmatic's push into the Bitcoin mining vertical from her base in Houston. Why you should listen Most retail electricity providers evolved out of legacy utilities, and it shows: slow innovation, rigid contracts, and pricing models that punish flexibility. Gridmatic was built differently. The company applies foundational AI models – the same forecasting and optimization engine that powers its wholesale trading desk and its battery storage business across ERCOT and CAISO – to the question every miner is trying to answer in real time: when do I run, when do I curtail, and what is my true effective rate? Kise walks Andy through how that AI layer ingests hundreds of thousands of data points to forecast prices down to specific nodal locations, automating the financial trading between day-ahead and real-time markets while the miner stays focused on operations. It's a clear-eyed look at what "AI-powered energy optimization" actually means once you strip away the buzzwords. The conversation then turns to one of the most underdiscussed problems in mining economics: collateral. New mining LLCs have no trade history, which means traditional retail suppliers demand large upfront deposits at exactly the moment a miner is bleeding cash on land, interconnect, containers, and ASICs. Gridmatic has solved this through partnerships with OBM, Synota, and Satoshi Energy's Bitcurrent platform, all of which enable daily settlement in place of monthly invoices. Layer in Strike for Bitcoin-to-USD conversion and miners can effectively pay their power bill in BTC each day without parking working capital as collateral. Kise also explains why contractual flexibility matters more than ever as miners blend ASIC and AI compute on the same site – two very different load profiles requiring very different energy strategies. Kise makes a strong case for why Texas remains the best home for flexible mining despite tightening competition for interconnects. Abundant land, a state government that has actively welcomed the industry, deep renewable penetration, and natural synergies with the oil and gas sector all combine to make ERCOT uniquely suited to flexible loads. More importantly, Bitcoin miners are not just consumers of Texas power – they are critical grid resources, capable of fully shutting down when supply tightens in a way AI data centers (which often demand five-nines uptime) simply cannot. On the AI-versus-Bitcoin debate, Kise sees coexistence rather than replacement: miners with land and interconnects are partnering with AI customers, and new flexible load is still arriving in Texas. The hot take round closes things out with thoughts on a 10-year vision of Gridmatic as "the power company of the future," why every professional should be using AI now rather than fearing it, and a fitting May the 4th nod to The Martian. Supporting links Stabull Finance Gridmatic 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.

    22 min
  6. 22 Apr

    Perceptron Network – A Thousand Eyes, One Vision for Decentralized AI Data

    Peter Anthony is the co-founder of Perceptron Network, a decentralised data infrastructure purpose-built for AI. A crypto native since 2019, Peter also runs The House of Crypto — one of the fastest-growing crypto YouTube channels — where years of speaking with founders convinced him that the next wave of blockchain projects would be defined by real revenues, real users, and real-world utility. Perceptron, which merged with the 700,000-node BlockMesh network in mid-2025, is his bet on what he sees as AI's biggest unsolved bottleneck: access to high-quality, affordable, real-time data. Why you should listen Data, not compute, is the real AI bottleneck. Peter opens by arguing that while the market has spent the last few years obsessing over GPUs and compute networks like Aethir and Akash, the harder problem sits upstream — the high-quality training data AI models actually need is locked behind paywalls. OpenAI reportedly pays Reddit around $70 million a year, with similar eye-watering cheques going to X, and that pay-to-play economy effectively freezes out smaller AI startups. Research groups like Epoch AI project the stock of public text data will be fully exhausted somewhere between 2026 and 2032, and even Sam Altman now concedes data — not compute — is the binding constraint. Perceptron's pitch is that a decentralised network can fix this by turning users' idle bandwidth into a globally distributed vantage point on the live web, at roughly a 90% cost advantage to traditional centralised data providers. A thousand eyes, one vision. Perceptron's architecture combines Perceptron Nodes — a software client that sits quietly in the background of a user's browser or Android device and lends out unused bandwidth — with Perceptron Agents embedded in Discord, Telegram and WeChat communities, plus a human-in-the-loop Questing app where contributors annotate datasets. The point isn't to harvest anyone's personal data; it's to aggregate geographically diverse viewpoints of the public web. Peter walks through the use cases this unlocks: an e-commerce operator seeing how their products rank simultaneously in New Zealand, the UK and the US; a quant desk arbitraging cross-border discrepancies in gold, oil or crypto prices in real time; a crypto trader spotting a sentiment shift across thousands of Telegram groups before it shows up on price. Perceptron is already supplying data to Everlyn AI, a text-to-image and text-to-video platform that would have been priced out through traditional suppliers. Freshness, sovereignty and a universal basic data income. Peter makes the case that data freshness is becoming the decisive edge for frontier models, because a ChatGPT or Claude answering questions about a fast-moving crypto market on four-month-old data is flying blind. He also makes a pointed argument about annotation bias — that when a narrow set of labellers with their own agendas decide what a dataset "means," the models downstream inherit those opinions — and contends that decentralised annotation is the counter. In the hot-take round Peter calls himself a multi-chain opportunist who still holds Bitcoin as the anchor, argues we're in a 2020-style bull market (not a 2022 bear), and reckons the real 10-year story of AI is that it will displace a lot of jobs but open up far more opportunity for anyone willing to pick up the tools now — pointing to Claude Code as a live example of a non-developer being able to ship working software in minutes. His sci-fi pick: Avatar — fittingly, recorded the day before a trip to Zhangjiajie, the real-world mountain range that inspired Pandora. Supporting links Stabull Finance Perceptron 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.

    28 min
  7. 20 Apr

    Coins.ph – Building the Stablecoin Economy

    Wei Zhou is the CEO of Coins.ph, the largest crypto-native fintech platform in the Philippines, which he acquired in 2022. A former CFO of Binance and long-time finance executive — Wei has been rebuilding Coins.ph as a fully regulated on-ramp between fiat, crypto and stablecoins for Filipino users and businesses, while extending the playbook globally through Coins.xyz. Why you should listen A real-world stablecoin case study: The Philippines pulls in close to $100 billion a year in foreign inflows — roughly $38 billion in retail remittances from nearly 10 million overseas Filipino workers, plus around $50 billion flowing into the country's huge business process outsourcing sector. Historically almost all of it moved over Swift banking rails at 5–6% in fees, which remittance pioneers like Remitly and MoneyGram dragged down to 2–4%. Wei walks through how stablecoin rails are collapsing those costs further still — Coins.ph has run USDC flows with Circle at just 20–30 basis points — and why, post-Covid, everyday Filipino families and businesses with overseas ties are pivoting into stablecoins on their own. A two-sided marketplace with a stablecoin flywheel: Wei thinks of Coins.ph less as an exchange and more as a stablecoin marketplace, with retail users as net buyers of digital dollars on one side, and businesses and institutions sending money into the country as net sellers on the other — a balance that drives liquidity, tightens pricing and fuels growth. The biggest friction, he argues, isn't crypto; it's fiat. Opening up cheap 24/7 deposits and withdrawals is what pulls users in, and weekend trading volumes on Coins already outstrip weekday volumes simply because traditional banks are closed. He also previews a B2B push launching before the end of May, enabling online and offline Coins merchants to accept USDC and USDT payments, alongside partnerships with Circle, HashKey and other licensed players to build out regional stablecoin corridors. Stablecoins as the new unit of account: Looking three to five years out, Wei sees a world where more and more assets — from Bitcoin pairs to tokenised securities and real-world assets — are denominated in stablecoins rather than fiat. The GENIUS Act in the US, along with parallel regimes in the EU, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the UAE, is the unlock: traditional financial institutions can finally engage with stablecoins directly, letting platforms like Coins.ph tap deeper pools of liquidity and bring more investment products to Filipino users. In the hot-take round, Wei calls Bitcoin to a million dollars ("and then sats become the new stablecoin"), argues the AI intelligence layer is already quietly embedded in everything we use, and names Asimov's Foundation and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem as his favourite sci-fi. Supporting links Stabull Finance Coins 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.

    26 min
  8. 14 Apr

    Tok-Edge - The Crypto Hedge Fund with a Token

    Raees Chowdhury is the co-founder and chief investment officer of Tok-Edge, a London-based regulated DeFi hedge fund built around a novel cryptoasset structure called the Redemption Token. With a career spanning senior roles at BCG and Bain Capital, a managing partner position at Revolt Ventures — a fund sitting beneath a $10 billion AUM vehicle — and deep roots in on-chain markets dating back to the ICO era of 2016–17, Raees brings rare dual fluency in institutional finance and DeFi to one of crypto's most ambitious new fund structures. Why you should listen Tok-Edge emerged from stealth on the day of this recording, and the timing is deliberate. Raees argues that the current drawdown — with Bitcoin sitting roughly 50% off all-time highs and many altcoins down 90% or more — is precisely the moment to be allocating capital to DeFi. The fund is built on a contrarian but rigorous thesis: that crypto is a genuinely new liquid asset class, that existing token models are structurally flawed, and that the teams best positioned to capture the next cycle are those who can hold TradFi infrastructure and DeFi-native thinking in the same hand. The centrepiece of what Tok-Edge is building is the Redemption Token — a new category of cryptoasset designed to solve what Raees calls the duality problem that has undermined most token models to date. Unlike governance tokens, which trend towards zero, or utility tokens, which are constrained to their native blockchain, the Redemption Token is permissionless and composable in DeFi while carrying a genuine defined function: the ability for fund investors to redeem underlying fund shares at net asset value. The model Raees reaches for by analogy is MicroStrategy — a structure designed first, then deployed as a product. Tok-Edge is doing the same, with the Redemption Token as the architecture and the Tok-Edge Fund as its first application. The fund itself is built to institutional standard — custodians, regulated directors, and governance structures you'd expect from any tier-one equities vehicle — but applied entirely to crypto and DeFi strategies. Raees walks through the team's approach to on-chain yield generation, active capital allocation between strategies, and why sitting in stablecoins and earning on-chain yield is a feature rather than a concession. He also shares his conviction that DeFi yields are far from dead, why on-chain flows will identify the winners of the next cycle before most people see them coming, and how the Berkshire Hathaway model — long-only, actively managed, comfortable holding cash — translates surprisingly well to liquid crypto asset management. With a TGE capped at $21 million targeting a $100 million first close later in 2026, this is a conversation worth hearing early. Supporting links Stabull Finance Tok-Edge 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.

    26 min

Ratings & Reviews

3.4
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

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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