The Crypto Conversation

Brave New Coin
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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. 4 days ago

    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.

    27 min

  2. 5 days ago

    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.

    24 min

  3. 16 June

    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/

    17 min

  4. 11 June

    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.

    29 min

  5. 7 June

    nGRND – The Gold That Pays You to Leave It in the Ground

    Professor Lisa Wilson is CEO and co-founder of nGRND, a gold protocol that turns verified but unmined "in-ground" gold into a fully backed, reward-bearing digital asset rather than digging it up. An Australian who holds a South African professorship and lives in France, Wilson is a genuine mining insider — she has written operational and hazard-standards systems for the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP — with a parallel career in blockchain, where she helped list the world's first actively managed certificates for investment-grade carbon assets. Why you should listen Wilson's pitch is a contrarian one: the best place to keep gold may be exactly where it already is. Billions of ounces of verified gold sit classified as resources that can't economically advance to production, with mine timelines now stretching toward two decades once permitting, First Nations consultation and environmental compliance are factored in. Gold, she argues, is unusual among metals — it has almost no industrial use, so above-ground stock is mostly worn or stored, which means an ounce in the ground is functionally the same store of value as an ounce in a vault. nGRND acquires long-term rights (30 to 100 years) to independently verified deposits, leaves the metal "in situ," and monetizes it without the environmental decimation of extraction. The mechanics are concrete: for every 35,000 tokens in circulation, at least one ounce of preserved gold is held in the protocol treasury, and every ounce left undisturbed avoids an estimated 792kg of CO2. The more interesting half of the model is what happens on the surface. Because the land above each deposit stays untouched, nGRND layers a second income stream on top of gold's own appreciation — what Wilson calls alternative land-use monetization. That can mean soil-carbon and avoided-mining carbon credits, ecotourism, data cables routed across otherwise off-limits ground, or wind and solar microgrids, with a single site capable of generating millions a year across a multi-decade rights agreement. Brownfield sites are their own opportunity: in Australia a decommissioned site can carry a reclamation bond north of $20 million, and nGRND positions itself as the party that cleans up tailings and restores biodiversity while still capturing the value sleeping below. The token itself is tokenized through a VARA-regulated issuer in Dubai and backed by resources verified to NI 43-101 standards — a structure aimed squarely at the institutional real-world-asset crowd having its moment right now. For all the heavy machinery of the model, nGRND's on-ramp is deliberately playful: its sponsored mobile games Dig It and Gold Fest have pulled in more than 855,000 players across 200-plus countries and accrued roughly $6 million in rewards ahead of the token launch, with TON Foundation backing and a Base expansion planned. Wilson is adamant the ecosystem isn't just for stakers and gamers — she describes participation streams spanning impact, learning and governance, including immersive digital twins of actual project sites. In the closing hot-take round she leans to the Bitcoin side of the spectrum as a self-described early mover, makes the case that crypto literacy should be embedded education for everyone, and sketches a ten-year future in which wealth migrates away from a USD-hedged system toward assets people actually control — before signing off with a charmingly vintage sci-fi pick in the British fantasy series Catweazle. Supporting links Stabull Finance nGRND nGRND 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

  6. 4 June

    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

  7. 1 June

    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

  8. 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
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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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