Exponential: A Nexus Podcast

The most important milestone in crypto, argues Nic Roberts-Huntley, will be the one that goes completely unnoticed. In this episode of Exponential, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance sits down to discuss how his firm is building the infrastructure for institutional-grade DeFi yield — and why the endgame is a world where the underlying mechanics of onchain finance quietly power everything from savings accounts to credit card rewards without anyone realizing it.Blueprint Finance operates two protocols — Concrete and Glow — and positions itself as a counterweight to the degenerate, high-leverage yield strategies that proliferated during the last bull run. "We're kind of trying to be the next wave of institutional-grade yield with onchain finance," Roberts-Huntley explains. Read more on the Nexus blog.

Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin appeared on the Exponential podcast this week to address the company's decision to pull back from its March 17th milestone campaign and to lay out his views on AI, agentic finance, and what he sees as the defining infrastructure opportunity of the decade.The conversation covered ground ranging from how AI is reshaping startup competition to why Daniel believes blockchain infrastructure needs to be designed for autonomous agents — not just human users.

In this episode of Exponential, Laszlo Szabo, co-founder and CEO of Kiln, joins to talk about one of the most important developments quietly happening in crypto today: the evolution of yield in digital assets. As Laszlo explains, yield is becoming the bridge between traditional finance and the onchain economy, opening the door to new financial products and new participants.Kiln operates what Laszlo describes as an "onchain yield platform," providing the infrastructure that exchanges, custodians, wallets, and asset managers use to offer staking and other yield strategies to their users. "We provide them the technology, we provide them the infrastructure so that they can offer digital asset yields to their customers," he explains. What began with staking has expanded into lending, stablecoin strategies, and more advanced onchain asset management.

Jin Kwon, co-founder of Saga.xyz and former Tendermint team member who builds Cosmos-focused dev tooling. He explains Saga’s ‘chain to launch chains’ model and how it automates chain launches with AWS-style predictable costs. They discuss replacing gas-driven economics with app-layer revenue, hiding infrastructure complexity, and using Saga for gaming, AI, commerce, and simpler payments.

Joao Reginatto, Chief Strategy Officer at M0 — building an operating system for programmable, interoperable digital money. He explains how institutions can create tailored stablecoins, why money is plural and businesses need private digital money, and how shared base layers enable seamless transfer and customization while closing crypto’s interoperability gap.

Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO of Borderless and veteran stablecoin builder (helped launch TrueUSD), discusses creating a credibly neutral stablecoin payments network. He explains connecting stablecoins across 77+ countries, solving compliance with tech, and why open, permissionless rails and interoperability beat closed ecosystems.

In this episode of Exponential, Zohar Bronfman, co-founder and CEO of Pecan AI, unpacks the role of predictive AI in today’s business landscape — and why it’s quickly becoming indispensable.At its core, predictive AI estimates the likelihood of future events using massive amounts of data. Zohar explains: “In very general terms, it’s the ability to make some form of a statistical likelihood estimation of any type of future event.” He contrasts this with the limitations of human decision-making: “Our mind can take into consideration three or four pieces of information for a given task… Predictive AI would basically take 1500 data points.” Zohar draws a line between generative AI, which mimics human-like reasoning, and predictive AI, which is optimized for decision-making at scale. This capability makes predictive AI critical for business operations, particularly when it comes to modeling customer behavior, forecasting, and operational decisions. As Zohar puts it: “The most successful businesses… Amazon, Meta, Google… they all use predictive AI extensively.”  But predictive AI still faces major hurdles. One is data normalization — unlike standardized text used in language models, proprietary business data is highly idiosyncratic. “It’s like different languages… it’s extremely hard to transfer learning that happened on one business’s data.”Zohar also points to an under-discussed challenge: causality. “AI today… is correlational analysis, not causal analysis. The fact that something is going to happen doesn’t mean that you can affect it.”

In this episode of Exponential, Wucklace, a self-taught developer and creator of Exhibition DeFi, shares his path from fashion design to building onchain — and why he’s working a new kind of platform on Nexus.His journey started with crypto trading and quickly deepened. “I love the concept of total ownership,” he says, recalling his first experience with non-custodial wallets. “There is no restriction, no permission. I can do anything I like with the wallet. That got me curious.” That curiosity led him to question the way token launches work today. “Once a token dies, the project barely lives,” he says. “I believe the issue is in the way we launch tokens."His solution is Exhibition DeFi, a deterministic token launch platform built on Nexus. “If there is anything important, it must be defined before the launch,” he explains. That includes parameters like supply, liquidity, distribution, and funding targets — all enforced by the protocol.For Wucklace, Nexus was the natural fit. “Nexus does not treat verifiability as an option,” he says. “It is built into the execution layer.”  That alignment gave him the confidence to move beyond a demo and start building toward a production-ready protocol.His advice to other developers is to resist hype and focus on what matters. “A developer should define the rules before anything else,” he says. “Do your work based on what we really need — what will bring the mass adoption we’re looking for.” Looking ahead, he’s focused on refining Exhibition DeFi and prototyping additional utilities to help other builders with token distribution and onchain workflows. 

In this episode of Exponential, Oliwer Nastaziak, chief growth officer at Fren.One, shares what it’s like to build and moderate internet-native communities — and why those communities matter more than ever.Oliwer has been deep in the trenches of community operations for years, first as a Telegram moderator and now helping lead Fren.One, a firm he describes as “a community operating system.”  The FriendOne team works to manage everything from real-time support to scam prevention, all while fostering long-term relationships and infrastructure.

In this episode of Exponential, Joseph Zhang, co-founder and CEO of CatchBack, explains how a side hustle flipping Pokémon cards evolved into a full-stack collectibles trading platform. Combining lessons from crypto infrastructure with firsthand experience in collectibles, CatchBack introduces a new model for how real-world assets can trade online.“Crypto taught me about liquidity,” Joseph says. “In collectibles, things move slowly. Our goal was to bring the efficiency of crypto tooling to physical trading cards.”