The Crypto Conversation

Wael Rajab is the CMO of PerpTools and co-founder and director of DEXT Ventures, the capital arm of DEXTools — one of DeFi's original and most widely used on-chain trading and analytics platforms. With nearly a decade in crypto and a portfolio spanning over 100 investments across 150+ integrated blockchains, Wael has been at the centre of decentralised finance's growth from data dashboard to full trading stack. Why you should listen DEXTools built its reputation as the go-to platform for on-chain token analytics — the place traders head when they want to understand what's happening across chains without needing to be technically fluent. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. DEX volumes have grown nearly eightfold in two years, from $81 billion to roughly $740 billion, and perpetuals trading has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in DeFi. PerpTools is DEXTools' answer: a native perps vertical that gives millions of existing users the ability to trade derivatives without ever leaving the platform they already trust. What makes the PerpTools story compelling isn't just the product — it's the distribution. Most new perp DEXs face a brutal cold-start problem, spending heavily on user acquisition with uncertain results. PerpTools launched into an established audience and reached 40,000 users and over $150 million in traded volume within weeks of its beta. Built on Orderly's shared order book and liquidity layer, the platform is designed for speed and capital efficiency, with sub-200 millisecond latency and leverage up to 100x — all self-custodial and permissionless. The roadmap is where things get genuinely interesting. AI trading agents — back-tested to average 20% monthly returns — are being rolled out in tranches to top community members, with copy trading and vault-based strategies to follow. Prediction markets, a tap-to-earn trading game, and a token generation event targeted within six to eight months round out a product pipeline designed to make the platform as sticky as possible. Wael also opens up on competing in a space where Hyperliquid looms large, the strategic logic behind the Orderly partnership, and why DeFi's permissionless, borderless architecture represents a genuine levelling of the financial playing field. Supporting links DEXTools PerpTools Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a five-star review — it helps more people find the show.

Andy sits down with Donald Griswold, director of the new indie documentary feature Abundant, and Sheila Dohmann, Chief Marketing Officer at Stuff.io, the decentralized media platform bringing the film to audiences worldwide. Abundant examines generosity, scarcity and what drives the rarest altruists among us — non-directed kidney donors who give a kidney to a complete stranger — and it's being distributed exclusively via blockchain streaming starting March 26th. Why you should listen This conversation cuts to the heart of what's broken in independent film distribution. Donald explains how the traditional model leaves filmmakers at the mercy of major streamers who treat art as content consumption metrics, with barely-cracked doors for indie creators. His experience pitching Abundant to Hollywood as an original led to an unexpected revelation: a blockchain-native platform could offer something no subscription streamer could — true audience ownership, transparent economics and a real business plan filmmakers can take to investors. For any creator who's ever struggled to answer the question "what's your distribution plan?", this is essential listening. Sheila breaks down exactly how Stuff.io works under the hood, and for a crypto-savvy audience, the architecture is genuinely interesting. The platform shatters media files into millions of encrypted shards stored across IPFS, reassembled second-by-second only when an owner authenticates. It's a fundamentally anti-piracy design that also solves the ownership problem — unlike every major streaming licence that vanishes if the platform shuts down. She tells the cautionary tale of Stuff.io's origin: a successful e-book startup was sold to a VC who simply closed it, and eight million people lost their libraries overnight. That moment sparked the mission to put digital ownership on-chain permanently. The most compelling thread is where the technology meets the cause. Abundant isn't just a film about kidneys — it's a general audience exploration of generosity and scarcity with a twist ending that leaves audiences emotionally moved. Donald explains how blockchain portability enables a gifting strategy where medical practices, transplant centres and kidney community affiliates can buy copies and pass them on, just like a DVD. For a community where most people with kidney disease don't even know they have it, that frictionless sharing could literally save lives. Sheila extends the vision further into banned books on the blockchain, historical document preservation and IP protection for creators — a picture of Stuff.io as essential cultural infrastructure, not just another streaming app. Supporting links Stabull Finance Abundant Movie Stuff.io 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.

Jessica Ellerm and Kent Grogan are the co-founders of Themelia, a platform building the next infrastructure layer for crypto investment through custom indexing technology. Jessica comes from a fintech background — including a stint at ASX-listed payments platform Tyro and a superannuation startup she founded and sold — while Kent ran a hedge fund for years before moving into portfolio management and FinTech. Together, they're tackling one of the most underserved problems in digital assets: how do you get sensible, risk-adjusted exposure to a market of 52 million tokens without getting wrecked? Why you should listen Crypto has a reputation problem, and Kent and Jessica argue it's largely structural. Most tokens are created, pump briefly, and go to zero — which means a naive index that mirrors the full market is essentially a vehicle for buying failure at scale. The Themelia thesis is that an index needs to do better than that: not just collapse the market into something manageable, but actively filter for tokens with genuine staying power before they've already made their biggest moves. Kent draws a sharp analogy to equities — nobody in TradFi just buys one marquee stock and calls it a portfolio, yet that's essentially what most crypto investors do with Bitcoin. The pair make a compelling case that the infrastructure for smarter diversification is long overdue. The platform's most interesting innovation is the distinction between static and dynamic indexing. Jessica points out that most existing crypto index products — exchange bundles, early ETF attempts — don't move fast enough to keep pace with shifting narratives. Themelia's custom index builder lets users set their own filters, backtest against up to three years of historical data, then execute and auto-rebalance directly through connected exchange accounts like Coinbase, Binance, or Bybit. For those who don't want to build their own, the platform is evolving toward an "ensembling" model — aggregating the token picks of vetted crypto analysts into a curated house index that does the filtering work for you. The bigger picture is a genuine gap in the market. Jessica notes that index products now capture the majority of capital flows in traditional finance — from retail investors all the way to pension funds — yet less than 0.1% of the total crypto market is currently invested through indexes. That's not just an opportunity for Themelia; it's an argument for why the space needs this infrastructure to mature. If the house index can demonstrate better risk-adjusted returns than simply holding Bitcoin, it could become the entry point that brings cautious, sideline-sitting investors into the market for the first time. Supporting links Themelia Themelia on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X 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 us

Bisher Khudeira is the COO of Stormrake, a Melbourne-based digital asset brokerage offering best execution trading, institutional custody, and asset management across Bitcoin, digital assets, and tokenized real-world assets. Bisher joins Andy to explain why the brokerage model beats the exchange model for serious investors, what it takes to build a crypto business in one of the most hostile banking environments in the developed world, and why Stormrake is about to plant its flag in Dallas. Why you should listen Bisher has spent a decade in financial services, starting in foreign exchange brokering in 2015 and buying his first Bitcoin in a McDonald's car park in 2016 via peer-to-peer. He joined Stormrake in 2022, bought into the business, and has helped scale it from fewer than a hundred clients — mostly friends and family — to over 10,000 across Australia, with a US launch now weeks away. He walks through the core brokerage proposition: Stormrake faces around 20 exchanges and OTC desks simultaneously, aggregates client orders to access deeper liquidity and sharper pricing, and charges a flat commission with no spread markup. The result is what Bisher calls the Satoshi maximiser — clients walk away with more Bitcoin per transaction than they would going it alone on a single exchange. The conversation covers Stormrake's two wholesale funds: the Cumulus class, which targets picks-and-shovels digital assets like Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid, and Chainlink alongside select private equity plays; and the Stratus class, a Bitcoin and gold fund designed to smooth out Bitcoin's volatility while improving on gold's growth profile. Bisher also details the custody offering — fully institutional grade with insurance, separation of funds, and cold storage as default — while stressing that Stormrake fully supports self-custody for clients who want it. The US expansion into Dallas, two years in the making and launching end of April 2026, is built as a direct lift-and-shift of the Australian model into a jurisdiction where digital asset brokers are treated as normal participants in the economy rather than pariahs. Bisher doesn't hold back on the state of Australian banking, describing three personal debankings and ongoing hostility from the big four toward crypto businesses and their clients. He argues Australia is a decade behind the US on digital asset regulation, with an AFSL licensing regime for digital assets only coming into effect by mid-2026. Despite that, he frames the challenge as deeply rewarding — building a business from zero in a nascent industry with no playbook, bootstrapped the entire way, with the goal of becoming a digital-era complement to the likes of Charles Schwab or E-Trade. The episode closes with Bisher's market outlook: he sees Bitcoin within 10 to 20 percent of its bottom, expects three to four months of sideways chop, and is watching large institutional buyers accumulate aggressively at current levels ahead of what he believes will be a run toward $200,000 and beyond. Supporting links Stormrake Stabull Finance Andy on X Brave New Coin on X 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.

Joshua Sum is the Chief Product Officer at Solayer, a hardware accelerated network built to move money at the speed of metal. Joshua joins Andy Pickering to explain how dedicated chip-level infrastructure is pushing blockchain throughput into territory no software-only chain can reach — and why that matters as payments, AI agents, and real-world asset tokenization all converge on the same rails. Why you should listen Joshua's path to crypto ran through direct-to-consumer e-commerce, a founding quant role at Treehouse, and building CollegeDow into the largest university blockchain network in the world, spanning around 120 campuses globally. He joined Solayer as a founding engineer and has grown with the company over two years into his current role leading product across multiple lines. He walks through how Solayer evolved from pioneering restaking on Solana — using it as a tool to improve transaction reliability and throughput — into building a full hardware accelerated Layer 1 that uses the Solana Virtual Machine but separates consensus across dedicated machines connected by low-latency, high-bandwidth equipment. The result is battle-tested performance of 200,000 to 300,000 transactions per second using messy, real-world transaction types, not the synthetic benchmarks that get loosely thrown around in the space. The conversation covers Solayer's $35 million ecosystem fund and why the team deliberately avoided a grants model in favour of a venture approach, investing in founders building sustainable, revenue-generating businesses rather than handing out free money for narrative-driven experiments. Joshua walks through three early-stage portfolio projects: Docs Exchange, a full-suite DeFi trading platform; BuffTrade, an AI agent launchpad where bots trade on your behalf and back their tokens with actual strategy performance; and SpoutFi, which tokenizes equities and lets users borrow against them the way high-net-worth individuals already do — without selling, and without triggering a tax event. Each use case maps directly back to the throughput thesis: more agents, more users, more overlapping state means you need a chain that can actually handle the load. Joshua also breaks down Solayer's consumer-facing push through Solayer Pay, which includes a mobile app, rotating private addresses for peer-to-peer transfers, and the Emerald crypto card with built-in travel rewards and partner airdrops. He explains why the chain will launch with SOL as its gas token — removing the onboarding friction that kills adoption on new L1s — before introducing a dual-token model with LAYER as the ecosystem matures. The episode closes with Joshua's take on the current market: tough conditions are positive for the long term because they flush out narrative-driven projects and reward teams building real products with real revenue, which is exactly where Solayer wants to be. Supporting links Stabull Finance Solayer Solayer Explorer Solayer Docs Andy on X Brave New Coin on X 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.

Viktor Ihnatiuk is the co-founder and CEO of UTEXO, a Tether-backed global settlement network for native USDT and Bitcoin payments, powered by the Lightning Network and the RGB protocol. Viktor joins Andy Pickering to walk through a decade-long journey from Ukrainian fintech to the frontline of Bitcoin infrastructure — and to explain why the world's biggest stablecoin is finally coming back to the chain where it was born. Why you should listen Viktor traces his path from launching Ukraine's first peer-to-peer lending platform and first fintech conference — where he discovered Bitcoin in 2015 — through to building Boosty Labs, a 150-person dev shop that served Coinbase, Bitfinex, Ledger, MetaMask, and WalletConnect. That operation evolved into a venture studio, and a chance meeting with Tether at Bitcoin Prague in 2023 set the stage for what became UTEXO. Viktor explains how he helped push RGB to mainnet, and how a joint venture with Tether was rebranded into UTEXO, which has just closed a $7.5 million seed round co-led by Tether, Big Brain Holdings, and Plan B Ventures. The conversation digs into what UTEXO actually delivers: instant USDT and Bitcoin settlement at zero transaction cost, with client-side validation privacy baked in through RGB. Viktor breaks down why this isn't USDT arriving on Bitcoin for the first time — it originally launched on OmniLayer back in 2014 — but rather coming home, rebuilt on infrastructure that finally works. He makes the case that Lightning's scalability leaves every other chain behind, and walks through the key use cases UTEXO is targeting: native BTC-to-USDT swaps, new revenue models for wallets through transaction fee monetization, and cross-exchange high-frequency arbitrage. Viktor also lays out UTEXO's broader thesis on stablecoin adoption and payments. He argues that the biggest growth opportunity for stablecoins isn't in DeFi yield — it's in emerging markets where USDT already functions as everyday money for savings, remittances, and increasingly, point-of-sale payments. UTEXO is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for that shift, working alongside partners like WalletConnect and aligning closely with Tether's distribution strategy. The episode closes with Viktor's take on what blockchain is actually good for — payments, trading, and gambling — and why ten years in the trenches taught him to ignore everything else. Supporting links Stabull Finance UTEXO 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.