Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with Samantha Lewis, Ian Epstein, and David Sutter

Samantha Lewis

Eighteen months ago, crypto companies in the United States could not reliably open a bank account. Today, they're entering the S&P 500, printing billion-dollar IPOs, and getting acquired by the incumbents that once wanted them regulated out of existence. That is not a gradual shift. That is a pivot, and it is the subject of the first-ever episode of Money Moves. Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinbase + Circle joint venture that governs USDC, and now co-founder and CEO of OpenTrade. The thesis of the show, and of this first episode: the global financial system is getting an upgrade, and the converging worlds of traditional finance and Web3 have finally reached the stage where capital markets, regulators, and institutions are all leaning in at the same time. If you want a short and punchy analysis of the space, ask Claude to summarize. If you’re looking for the thoughts, nuances, and contradictions and to go deep on financial subjects… This podcast is for you. 

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Episode 7: Permissioned vs. Permissionless: The debate every onchain dollar is making

    Sam sets it up as a role-swap, with Dave (the permissioned business operator) arguing permissionless and Ian (the libertarian of the two) arguing permissioned. Dave opens with Marc Andreessen's 2014 New York Times op-ed (the original "declare a truth over the internet" framing) and uses it to argue that the only real innovation in a blockchain is solving one specific cryptography problem. Most of what gets called a blockchain today, he says, is doing nothing of the kind: ❝ A permissioned network of ten banks is going to go nowhere. ❞ Ian counters with what he calls "importing trustlessness." The pricing argument under it is sharper than the philosophy, because public blockchains cost cents in gas and carry billions in brand trust, which makes them a wildly mispriced utility for anyone building new market infrastructure. Sam brings the debate back to the news. SEC Chair Paul Atkins and Commissioner Hester Peirce are advancing a tokenized stock innovation exemption that lets equities be tokenized (potentially without the issuer's consent) and traded on DeFi (decentralized finance) applications. The regulator is drawing the first formal map of where the permissioned and permissionless worlds meet. Both hosts argue their way out of the positions they started with, and Ian's closing line is the one neither of them set out to deliver. Tune into Episode 07 for where the debate actually lands, the SEC ruling that just bent the line, and Ian's closer.

    1h 2m

  2. May 18

    Episode 6: Stablecoin Business Models: Who Captures the Yield?

    Why is Circle, a public US company that just IPO'd, racing to launch its own blockchain six months later? Dave makes the case that the headline reason (gas fees, agentic commerce) is third-order, and the first-order reason lands in five words. Who else is going to muscle into the issuance layer in the next twelve months? Anchorage is already dropping native USDC support so it can launch its own stablecoin. Coinbase is incentivizing non-USDC tokens despite being Circle's largest distribution partner. JP Morgan and Bank of America have not entered yet, and the moment they do, Web3 native issuers lose the only moat they had. Is BlackRock's new tokenized treasury reserve fund a niche infrastructure filing, or the start of a $30 trillion fixed income stack on chain? Ian thinks the next stop is mortgages, then investment grade credit, then structured credit, then leverage on top of all of it. The base layer is finally here. Tune into Episode 06 for the five-word answer to question one, the twelve-month timeline on question two, and how fast the rest of the credit curve follows.

    1h 6m

  3. May 8

    Episode 5: To Tokenize or Not to Tokenize?

    Two visions of tokenization (the practice of representing real-world assets) are competing in real time, and only one of them delivers on the $19 trillion forecast for the category. The walled-garden version, where every major bank tokenizes its own deposits inside its own four walls, mostly produces press releases because it dresses up an existing database with blockchain language. The permissionless version is the one where BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund (BUIDL) just landed on Uniswap, where someone in Argentina can hold Nvidia stock from a wallet, and where private credit finally gets a marketplace it has never had — and it is the only one that actually rewires market structure. Episode 05 of Money Moves is about how to tell those two apart… and why the answer is mostly a legal rewiring, not a technical one.

    1h 22m

  4. Apr 27

    Episode 4: DeFi - The Laboratory for the Future of Finance

    In this episode of Money Moves, we delve into the complex world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its intersection with traditional finance (TradFi). We explore recent events, including a $300 million hack, that highlight the vulnerabilities and risks within DeFi. Our discussion covers the tension between the instantaneous, permissionless nature of DeFi and the structured, regulated environment of TradFi. We examine how institutions like BlackRock are beginning to adopt blockchain technologies and the implications of this convergence. The episode also addresses the ethical and security challenges posed by DeFi's reliance on bridges and centralized control, questioning whether DeFi is truly ready for mainstream adoption.

    1h 8m

  5. Apr 23

    Episode 3: The Power Shift - How Stablecoins Are Shaping US Dollar Dominance

    The de-dollarization narrative is everywhere. BRICS alternatives, Gulf states rethinking their Treasury holdings, a digital yuan push from Beijing, sovereign gold-buying at multi-decade highs.  So, is the dollar in trouble? In Episode 3, Samantha, Ian, and Dave take the debate on directly. Ian lays out the framework he uses to test every de-dollarization claim he hears, and systematically works through why the usual candidates don’t yet hold up. But the bigger surprise in this episode is the hidden risk to the dollar almost nobody is talking about. It’s not monetary policy. It’s not sanctions overreach. It’s something far more physical, and the U.S. is, by Ian’s own assessment, “literally nowhere” on it.

    1h 21m

  6. Apr 23

    Episode 2: From Crypto to Mainstream - How Stablecoins Are Transforming Global Finance

    A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging it to a reserve asset, most commonly fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they provide price stability for transactions, trading, and remittances, often acting as a bridge between traditional money and digital assets. Stablecoins are being adopted at a rapid pace… globally. They routinely surpass Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Venmo in transaction volume, and now move roughly $10 trillion a month. As Dave points out in this week’s episode on Money Moves, it took the card networks 75 years to get to those numbers. Stablecoins did it in five. Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether are now among the largest holders of U.S. government debt in the world. Tether alone made more money last year than Goldman Sachs. In Episode 02, Samantha, Ian, and Dave dig into how we actually got here from the GENIUS Act finally passing on a bipartisan basis, to the White House Council of Economic Advisers openly calling out the banking lobby, to Western Union quietly launching its own stablecoin. If you spent the last cycle assuming stablecoins were a crypto sideshow, this is the episode that recalibrates.

    1h 5m

  7. Apr 23

    Episode 1: The Global Financial System is Getting an Upgrade

    Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinbase + Circle joint venture that governs USDC, and now co-founder and CEO of OpenTrade. Eighteen months ago, crypto companies in the United States could not reliably open a bank account. Today, they're entering the S&P 500, printing billion-dollar IPOs, and getting acquired by the incumbents that once wanted them regulated out of existence. That is not a gradual shift. That is a pivot, and it is the subject of the first-ever episode of Money Moves. In our one-hour, twenty-minute launch episode, you'll get to know our digital asset experts and why the M&A flywheel, IPO window, and mainstream adoption of tokenization make this conversation so timely.

    1h 1m
  • 7 Episodes

About

Eighteen months ago, crypto companies in the United States could not reliably open a bank account. Today, they're entering the S&P 500, printing billion-dollar IPOs, and getting acquired by the incumbents that once wanted them regulated out of existence. That is not a gradual shift. That is a pivot, and it is the subject of the first-ever episode of Money Moves. Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinbase + Circle joint venture that governs USDC, and now co-founder and CEO of OpenTrade. The thesis of the show, and of this first episode: the global financial system is getting an upgrade, and the converging worlds of traditional finance and Web3 have finally reached the stage where capital markets, regulators, and institutions are all leaning in at the same time. If you want a short and punchy analysis of the space, ask Claude to summarize. If you’re looking for the thoughts, nuances, and contradictions and to go deep on financial subjects… This podcast is for you. 

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